"Indonesia, Rubber, and Modern Techniques: Goodyear's *Conquering the Jungle* (1939)"

In the late nineteenth century, rubber became a precious commodity. Many companies were looking for opportunities to satisfy the market demand by investing in rubber plantations established mainly in colonized lands. In 1916, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, headquartered in the US in Akron, Ohio, acquired 20,000 acres in Dolok Merangir, Deli area, East Sumatra, Dutch East Indies (the region is now part of North Sumatra province, Indonesia), by concession of the Dutch East Indies and the local ruler of the Deli Sultanate. In 1929, Goodyear developed another plantation called Wingfoot, south of the original site, which would soon become the largest rubber plantation in the world. Competing with other companies, Goodyear invested in making their plantation prosperous and profitable. They established a rubber laboratory to explore the latest techniques to cultivate the best crop, extract the finest latex, vulcanize top-quality rubber sheets, and efficiently ship the crude material to their main factory in the United States. The corporation shaped local communities and environments to sustain their economic interests in extracting rubber. Goodyear’s initiatives were recorded in _Conquering the Jungle_, a ten-minute educational ethnographic documentary produced in 1920, and subsequently remade in 1939, as a joint venture between the company’s motion pictures division and the Educational and Industrial departments of Universal Films. The two films document the land’s transformation into an industrial and extractive zone. My paper draws on archival research related to Goodyear's operations, the Dutch East Indies colony, and modern Indonesia. Through a close comparison of both versions of the film separated by nearly two decades, I explore how the techniques of rubbering, extracting latex, and vulcanizing raw materials transformed a tropical rainforest into a space of profitable extraction for the U.S.-based corporation. In so doing, I trace cinema’s role in the long legacy of reconstructing a tropical forest as a space of extraction that continues to blight Indonesia’s present.