The Cold War, the social contract, encountering political pasts
This and the following chapter of film analysis bring the exploration of how cinema depicts the transnational histories of colonial modernity up to date, to the late Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries. This chapter examines two contrasting documentaries, The Act of Killing (Denmark/Norway/UK, 2012) and Al pie del á rbol blanco/At the Foot of the White Tree (Uruguay, 2007). The dominant time-image in each case is the crystal of time, which encapsulates the perpetual splitting of time into (virtual, preserved) past and (actual, passing) present. This recurring image re-imagines, or re-aestheticises, the lost pasts of the Cold War, a seventy-year period of world history (sometimes referred to as a Pax Americana), which impacted transnationally. Ostensibly a standoff between superpowers, the Cold War covered a geopolitical terrain which crossed national borders. It also included, however, myriad wars fought in the ‘margins’ between the Soviets and the US (and their respective allies), as ideological battles traversed borders within the so-called ‘third world’. In this historical period, the line which had previously demarcated colonial modernity’s beneficiaries from its underside during its colonial phases, a ‘colour’ line indicative of the racial contract (see Chapter 4), shifted to an ideological one. Thus the Cold War is understood to be a global civil war, which some consider to be ongoing or only now decomposing (hence this is a seventy-year history, bleeding into globalisation today, this latter being the subject of Chapter 6).
Like many recent documentaries from around the world, the two chosen films explore what can be known of the history of brutal eradication of political opposition by authoritarian rule. The time-images show that there was another facet or virtual pathway to the past – since forgotten, obliterated, murdered, censored, disappeared. They respectively indicate either the supposed legitimacy of its eradication with repetitious certainty (The Act of Killing) or its virtual potential to re-inform a different understanding of the present (At the Foot). This is the chapter, then, in which the notion of a crystal history is clearest.
Both films provide encounters with political pasts, requiring viewers to hesitate with respect to their knowledge of how contemporary world history was formed during the Cold War: of how complete it can be (how much of the past has been lost?), and how aware we are of the alternative histories which might have occurred instead. It is the role of the social contract suspended during a state of exception which is at stake in each case. The existing social contract, designed under colonial modernity to perpetuate inequality, was threatened during the Cold War by the rise of communism. The Act of Killing celebrates the eradication of another possible past (communism) at that time. For its part, At the Foot offers a glimpse of an otherwise lost alternative past (of resistance to military rule, which included communism) of this period.
In The Act of Killing, the time-image’s potential to explore the indiscernibility between past and present is evident in carnivalesque recreations of the past (recreated through the filter of Hollywood genres), which demonstrate how state-employed killers remember their own murderous past: the virtual past of their memories literally blurs with the virtual cinematic past of the movies they enjoyed during their time as killers. In At the Foot, time-images are constructed from old photographs of the period (some of the only remaining traces of this alternative past, belonging to a communist newspaper) in order to restore an absent layer of history able to inform the present. This kind of patchy archival retrieval, and recreation in locations resonant with past political actions, is a recurring strategy in many such documentaries. In both instances, it is not that we learn about the history of the Cold War per se, but that we encounter the awareness that it denied coevalness to those who might have politically opposed the continuation of colonial modernity – at least in its capitalist guise – during this moment in its history.
Hence, The Act of Killing is analysed differently than it typically is, not as exemplary, but as the exception to a broader trend. At the Foot, rather, is exemplary of the broader re-aestheticisation of lost or disappeared pasts of the Cold War in contemporary documentary. Contrary to Slavoj Ž iž ek’s position on The Act of Killing (that it depicts how public space has been privatised under globalisation), I argue that in both films what is considered through the time-image is the role of private pasts in informing memory in the public sphere, the importance of individual recollections in informing world memory when state violence eradicates oppositional political histories. Both films, in fact, despite their huge differences in emphasis, are involved in remediating traumatic pasts, as virtual museums of memory.
Time-images: Political pasts
Many documentaries produced in the 2000s use time-images to rediscover, reimagine, or recreate lost Cold War pasts, including: Los rubios/The Blonds (Argentina/USA, 2003), Al pie del á rbol blanco/At the Foot of the White Tree (Uruguay, 2007), Wo sui siqu/Though I Am Gone (People’s Republic of China, 2006), The Act of Killing (Denmark/Norway/UK, 2012), S-21, la machine de mort Khmè re rouge/S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (Cambodia/France, 2003) and L’image manquante/The Missing Picture (Cambodia/France, 2013). This is perhaps unsurprising. During the Cold War, documentaries offered ways of raising political consciousness in politically contested moments, significantly in the Latin American films La hora de los hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (Argentina, 1968) and La Batalla de Chile/Battle of Chile (Venezuela/France/Cube, 1975). Documentaries continue to offer an affordable mode of production, including in contexts where national industries may not have developed or where state control may render uncensored cinematic exploration of the past challenging. The crystal image appears in such films due to its capacity to hold open, even if only momentarily, the possibility of the coexistence of an alternative political past which might inform the present differently.
As noted in Chapters 3 and 4, in the crystal we see the splitting of time at the heart of duration, with virtual past and actual present appearing as though two facets of a crystal. The crystal is ‘a bit of time in the pure state’ (Deleuze 1985, 79). As David Deamer clarifies, the crystal image ‘must necessarily link the actual image to a virtual correlate’ (2016, 149). Thus the crystal image creates the links needed between disconnected actual images (e.g. an opsign) and virtual correlates (e.g. a sheet of the past which corresponds to the present), so as to ensure that there is still a form of narration possible in the time-image: ‘crystalline narration’ (Deleuze 1985, 124).
There is thus a story of history being told in crystal images: a crystal history (see Chapter 2). Crystal images show how actual history is always mirrored by a virtual past which offers the potential for a re-engagement (of this alternative labyrinthine pathway through history) in the present, via a new re-aestheticisation of the past in the time-image. In these documentaries the past is, precisely, re-aestheticised in the crystal of time. Either the past which is preserved is maintained as singularly linear – in an Orwellian manner – once again reactualised in the same form so as to re-affirm the unquestionable veracity of the actual present that passes (The Act of Killing), or it is recreated as the glimpse of a virtual alternative that can potentially newly inform the actual present that passes (by falsifying the existing view of history which exists in the absence of any evidence to the contrary (At the Foot)). Both instances provide an opportunity for hesitation with respect to the centrality of the actual history which we know, by indicating the virtual remnant of the (in this case, political) past which was eradicated in the establishing of what is known as history. Both cases? Yes. Even when watching the fictional, and fantastical, recreation of the supposedly one ‘true’ past in The Act of Killing, the haunting possibility of the virtual labyrinth of possible pasts which could have existed threaten the (in this case, gangster) storytellers of history.1 The crystal thus shows the contingency of history which comes to the fore during armed struggles in which one side of history is forcibly eradicated. The right to tell the story of history in another way is here denied, ideally (ideally as understood by those creating the state of exception (see further below)) by silencing – whether through imprisonment, exile, torture or murder – all those whose existence might demonstrate the existence of an alternative history to that of the status quo: doublethink. What these documentaries show, then, is not solely the eradication of alternative pasts during the Cold War, but also (in the crystal, by keeping alive an alternative past, in its scattered fragments) the impossibility that the so-called ‘end of history’ followed in the wake of the Cold War: an alternative to capitalism does still exist, these films show, or rather it virtually subsists as alternative (lost) past in (and to) the present.
Transnational history: The Cold War
The Cold War is typically understood as a stalemate over nuclear superiority between the USA and the USSR. John Lewis Gaddis (1992) famously called it a ‘Long Peace’ between the two empires. It is typical for Film Studies to mirror this historical consensus. In Cinematic Cold War (2010), Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood examine, as their book’s subtitle states, ‘the American and Soviet struggle for hearts and minds’ in an ‘intensive, multidimensional battle of images between the Soviet and American film industries that lasted well into the 1980s’ (4). Here the usual historical and geopolitical structuring focus is evident in the two chosen film industries, albeit Shaw and Youngblood do acknowledge the broader geopolitics of the global conflict fought in the margins between these two superpowers. Even so, a book about that ‘other’ Cold War (which would have to include a great many more cinemas of the world) would look remarkably different in terms of the aesthetics explored. How, then, can the impact of the Cold War’s struggle for the supremacy of (ultimately) the global free market, a transnational history still ongoing in many places which emerges as a later phase in colonial modernity, be understood differently?
Anthropologist Heonik Kwon (2010) outlines an alternative view of the conflict, arguing that the Cold War did not end for all the nations of the world with an outright ‘victory’ for capitalism over communism. Contrary to the ‘end of history’ thesis which followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Kwon racks focus from the broader geopolitical standoff to a question of social order, and explores nations at the ‘periphery’ of the conflict between the superpowers, such as Korea, Vietnam, and Indonesia.2 Kwon sees the Cold War as still in a state of ‘decomposition’ (8) taking place at different rates in different places.
Kwon reconsiders the Cold War as a conflict illustrative of the ‘hierarchical dimension of the global bipolar order’ (4), that is, effectively, colonial modernity:
The ‘contest-of-power’ dimension of the cold war has been an explicit and central element in cold war historiography; in contrast the ‘relation-of-domination’ aspect has been a relatively marginal, implicit element. [… ] [T]he history of the cold war is increasingly about a particular power structure of domination, invented and realised along the bipolarization of modernity, rather than singularly about the contest of power waged between opposing versions and visions of modernity.
(2–4)
Considering the Cold War as a history of domination focuses us on the ‘decomposing’ histories illustrative of Dussel’s underside of modernity and affirms Dussel’s view that the Cold War was a conflict for the ‘leadership of capitalism’, which began in earnest around a decade after World War Two, and saw the end of state capitalism and the rise of multinational corporate capitalism (2003a, 137). During the Cold War, the demarcation of societies via the racial contract – which accompanied the imperialism of European nations after 1492 (see Chapter 4) – gave way to a new division along ideological lines: capitalism/communism.3
Crucial to this discussion is Kwon’s exploration of the state of exception, and how it relates to the social contract. Kwon effectively argues that there was not one Cold War, but many, as different societies experienced political bifurcation differently (2010, 7):
[F]or many new postcolonial nations [… ] the onset of the cold war meant entering an epoch of ‘unbridled reality’ characterized by vicious civil wars and other exceptional forms of political violence. [… ] [T]he cold war [… ] engendered a perpetual condition akin to what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘the state of exception’ – the suspension of the rule of law as a rule of the political order. In certain parts of the world, the beginning of the cold war coincided with the end of imperial and colonial rule, whereas in other parts these two epochal political forms were disturbingly entangled and became practically inseparable.
(6)
In addition to the millions who died in the preceding centuries due to colonisation and imperialism, the much briefer Cold War produces another ‘forty million human casualties of war’ (8) (the vast majority of them in the Southern Hemisphere (McMahon 2013, 7)), giving the lie to the notion of this era as one of a long peace. It was, rather, one of ‘total war’ which drew into the underside of colonial modernity those now ideologically excluded from history (Kwon 2010, 8). In this new order of empire, the racial inequality of what W. E. B. Du Bois calls ‘the colour line’ becomes entangled with ideological conflict: the colour line of the Cold War was ‘Red’/‘Not Red’ (Kwon 2010, 38). Although in some cases ‘state violence against individuals who were believed to harbour subversive political ideas took on and was justified by the idioms of biological or racial difference’ (39), in others the new colour line encompassed societies previously on different sides of the older colonial line (42). This is no longer a transnational history marked by the racial contract, then, but by the (suspension of the) social contract in a state of exception designed to counter the spread of communism.
With this in mind, let us return to the question of how to consider the cinematic Cold War differently. In line with scholarship which addresses the documentary’s transnational potential to enable the democratic ideal of ‘intervention in public debate’ (Chanan 2007, 16), this chapter finds that documentaries from these zones of perpetual war use time-images to deal with the ‘mass destruction of human lives and political displacement of the victims’ memories of this destruction’ (Kwon 2010, 11) in similar ways aesthetically – using crystal images to create virtual museums of memory. This is the case in spite of their unique cultural and social backdrops. Thus these time-image documentaries demonstrate the complexity of each national experience of the Cold War’s decomposition, as part of a still emerging transnational history.
Encountering the (eradicated) political past: The (suspended) social contract
What is encountered in the crystal of time is the moment in which the social contract is suspended, or in many cases eradicated, in the state of exception. The idea of the social contract in political philosophy is traced back to different historical starting points, its current manifestation emerging in Enlightenment Europe in the works of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Of these thinkers, it is with Rousseau that the idea of popular sovereignty emerges (Boucher and Kelly 1994, 16). In The Social Contract (1750), Rousseau attempts to explain why individuals enter into a social contract, giving up ‘natural freedom’ (60) in exchange for the ‘social freedom’ offered by the collective, the state (61).
Rousseau critically uncovered the (as it were, invisible) contract through which society is structured via economic inequality. His A Discourse on Inequality (1755), indicating the correlation between private property and inequality, is exemplary in this respect (Mills 1997, 5). Here Rousseau outlines how the social contract is designed to maintain the elevated status of the rich over the poor, noting ‘the equality which nature established amongst men and the inequality which they have instituted amongst themselves’ (1755, 57). During the Cold War (when the theology and philosophy of liberation as we know them today were forming), the spread of communism across the third world threatened the inequality fostered by the social contract under capitalism. In many places, the resulting ‘state of siege’ which suspended the social contract, excused as a bulwark against the spread of communism, ensured that large sections of the population – typically left wing citizens – could be eliminated, along with their potential to alter the inequality built into the system.
This is perhaps unsurprising. The Social Contract, a text most famous for the observation, ‘Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains’ (49), has also been blamed for inspiring a manifestation of popular sovereignty which led to the worst excesses of France’s revolutionary Reign of Terror: ‘Robespierre was Rousseau in action’ (Jennings 1994, 121). This is because, towards its conclusion, Rousseau draws on examples from antiquity to indicate that under certain circumstances the social contract may be suspended, and either an extension of the power of law or a dictatorship (‘with the power to silence all the laws’ (Rousseau 1750, 171)), imposed. Rousseau qualifies that this measure should be undertaken ‘only in the greatest emergency’, ‘when the safety of the fatherland is at stake’ (171), and limited to one term in duration (173). Even so, this clause is indicative of the difficulty inherent to the social contract that is based upon the need for a certain section of the population to decide against the possibility of change offered by another. What is evident in Rousseau’s caveat is that the legitimacy of the social contract is only ever based upon its relationship to another state – a seemingly less desirable alternative, or a (mythical) origin from which the social contract departs – a ‘state of nature’ (Cranston 1984, 42; Lessnoff 1990, 7).
In fact, the state of exception only really makes extremely clear that the social contract excludes by definition: it is structured by, and fosters, inequality. To suspend the existing social contract via the imposition of a state of exception is, as Giorgio Agamben argues, effectively to return to the supposed state of nature which pre-exists the social contract (‘the state of nature is in truth a state of exception’ (1995, 109)) and establish a new exclusive contract by eradicating its potential opposition. As Hannah Arendt explains, this juxtaposition of a supposed state of nature, which is followed by a social contract, is not a literal ‘historical fact’ (1963, 9–10). Rather, the notion of a state of nature indicates the need for an idea that society has a starting point. This imaginary of a former state of nature thus gives impetus, Arendt argues, to the notion that a revolution can return a society to this ‘year zero’ and rebuild it.4 The social contract, understood in this manner, rests on the need to perpetually repeat its normativity in order to suture over the lack at its heart, to thus obscure that its beginning is as arbitrary as its inequalities. There is always the possibility of its repetition in difference, always the possibility that another social contract could be written should enough people wish to, as Arendt has it, turn the clock back to ‘year zero’. Understanding this is crucial to the analysis of the films which follows, because what is true for the social contract is also true for the way the story of history is told, and it is this which the crystal of time illuminates.
This potential of ungrounding, or rather the condition of ungrounding, which lies at the heart of the social contract, is the subject of Agamben’s State of Exception (2003), on which Kwon draws. Agamben theorises the state of exception as existing in a grey area between law and politics, noting its close relationship with ‘civil war, insurrection and resistance’ (2). He discusses how the state of exception can be considered a ‘legal civil war’ in which the state controls the majority of the resources necessary to eradicate its political opposition, and any sectors of the population which it cannot integrate into its political system (2). The state of exception (or ‘state of siege’ or ‘martial law’) is the moment of the suspension of the rule of law, and thereby the ‘threshold’ or ‘limit concept’ of the law (4).5
Although most of Agamben’s examples of the state of exception are drawn from Twentieth Century European history, his intention is to indicate the emergence of a state of exception in US policies drawn up after the 9/11 attacks, such as The Patriot Act (2003, 3–7). Yet his early references to Arendt’s On Revolution indicate that Agamben considers the state of exception to be the feature of an ongoing ‘global civil war’ (2003, 3), progressing since World War One, which has now reached its ‘maximum worldwide deployment’ (86–87). There is, however, a Eurocentric myopia in Agamben’s thinking with respect to modernity’s place in world history. In Homo Sacer (1995), he posits the origins of the extending of the state of exception to all of society in the European colonial powers’ concentration camps of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century (166). Although Agamben does not align with the European tradition critiqued in Chapter 1, of considering the Twentieth Century Holocaust to be an exceptional event, nevertheless, his argument that Nazi concentration camps exemplify ‘the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity’ (123) is not entirely accurate.
What Agamben is observing is but a recent manifestation symptomatic of coloniality’s perpetual marking out of the boundaries which police its exclusion of modernity’s underside. The origins of the Twentieth Century’s Holocaust do lie in colonial aggression, it is true, but, as Charles W. Mills indicates (in uncovering the racial contract which emerges after 1492 (see Chapter 4)), the apartheid which first exemplifies the subsistence of coloniality along with modernity (modernity’s real ‘hidden paradigm’) was the genocide of fifty million indigenous Americans, and the enslavement of millions more Africans. If the ‘truth’ of the supposedly egalitarian social contract is the inequality fostered by the racial contract (ongoing since 1492), then – as Kwon indicates – all that changes with the Cold War is that the line of demarcation shifts from solely racial to (primarily) ideological distinctions. It is less that the Twentieth Century’s concentration camps in Europe exemplify the pervasive and seeming without-origin violence of contemporary life, as Agamben argues, than that the violent exclusion of some from the benefits of colonial modernity (over the last five hundred years) found its Twentieth Century European expression in the camp (see Chapter 1).
The above notwithstanding, what Kwon’s recuperation of Agamben indicates is the incisiveness of the idea of the state of exception (as suspension of the social contract) for the current critique of Cold War histories on screen. This is because the state of exception, functioning as though the return to a (mythical) state of nature, is in fact ‘continually operative in the civil state in the form of the sovereign decision’ (Agamben 1998, 109). This explains the seeming paradox in Rousseau’s formulation of the social contract, namely that it may, at times, need to be suspended and replaced by dictatorship, in order to survive. Agamben discusses the state of exception as a ‘non-place’ (2003, 51) or ‘zone of anomie’6 in which the usual ethical standards of society are suspended, stating:
The state of exception is not a dictatorship (whether constitutional or unconstitutional, commissarial or sovereign) but a space devoid of law, a zone of anomie in which all legal determinations – and above all the very distinction between public and private – are deactivated.
(2003, 51)
The ‘non-place’ of the state of exception is a ‘fictitious lacuna’, one which ultimately upholds the norm which is claimed to be at threat. For Agamben, this suspension of the law does not make for unlawful acts (as they ‘escape all legal definition’ (51)), but only for acts necessary to maintain the law, and the norm which it legislates, against the potential threat of revolution. Thus the state of exception ‘traces a threshold’ which creates the ‘complex topological relations’ that inside and outside enter into, when sovereignty suspends the rights of some in order to ensure its continuation against the threat that they pose (1998, 19). In a zone of anomie it is the collective identity of political opposition that is under attack, a collective perceived to be a danger to the law (a revolutionary collective, or the possibility that a collective may become revolutionary) and – the key point for the documentaries under discussion – it is their ability to remember themselves as such that must be eradicated.
The two chosen documentaries thus return to events at the height of the Cold War (in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, coinciding with the US war in Vietnam), when it most infused third world struggles (Parker 2013, 132). The Act of Killing focuses on the infamous violence of 1965–1966 in Indonesia, in which hundreds of thousands were massacred, particularly communists and their families, along with other organised political opposition groups (Oppenheimer and Uwemedimo 2012, 287). At the Foot attempts to resurrect footage of events from the period leading up to the Uruguayan coup d’é tat in 1973, the culmination of political disturbances going back a decade, in particular involving the Marxist guerrilla force, The Tupamaros. From a time when the collective was deligitimised, criminalised, and often ‘disappeared’ by means of violent repression, these documentaries attempt to recreate this virtual layer of the public past, whether to fantastically re-assert the veracity of the official history in a carnivalesque celebration of the origin of contemporary history (The Act of Killing), or by drawing on what, by definition, can only be left behind after the eradication of opposition (the scraps of evidence which relate to the personal, and its interaction with the public), to provide a glimpse of the lost alternative political past (At the Foot).
The Act of Killing
Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn and the director known as Anonymous’s The Act of Killing focuses on the murderous history upon which General Suharto’s (President from 1967–1998) Indonesia was founded. It targets Anwar Congo, a former gangster turned death squad member from Medan (North Sumatra), current associates, and some friends with whom he committed multiple murders during the infamous political crisis of 1965–1966. These gangsters are now celebrities – at least they are hailed as heroes by the Pemuda Pancasila paramilitary organisation and its three million members, and welcomed by the governor of North Sumatra.
Congo and his former comrades re-enact events of the time, including massacres and executions, in the style of their favourite genre movies (see Figure 5.1). The visual strategy is to reflect the psychology, or mental state (whether imagined, remembered, or ‘real’) of the killers (Oppenheimer refers to it as a ‘documentary of the imagination’). They describe committing murders, routinely, after watching Hollywood movies at a nearby cinema. They were ‘killing happily’, Congo remembers, whilst still in the mood created by, say, the latest Elvis musical. At points, the ageing gangsters debate, sometimes somewhat nervously, the veracity of the version of history which sees them as saviours of the nation. Nevertheless, they want their version of this story of history to be told.
FIGURE 5.1 The carnivalesque past gets the Hollywood treatment, in The Act of Killing ( Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn, Anonymous, 2012).
The film ends with a contentious scene in which Congo, revisiting a location where he committed many executions, begins to retch uncontrollably. The camera films his physical difficulties in long take. It is unclear whether Congo’s physical tribulations occurred towards the close of the film’s shooting. The scene’s placement at the film’s end creates the suggestion of a narrative arc in which Congo, after working through his past, feels empathy for his victims (or at least feels guilt), and demonstrates contrition physically. It is impossible to tell, though, whether this is just another act, ‘an act of contrition’ (Hoskins and Lasmana 2015, 263). After all, we also see movie-lover Congo dancing in the same space, hence undercutting the implication that such a redemptive conversion took place.7
The historical events recreated in The Act of Killing, whilst undeniably traumatic for the people of Indonesia, indicate the transnational nature of the Cold War history negotiated on screen. This tumultuous year, during which Suharto gradually seized power from Sukarno in ‘a creeping coup d’é tat [… ] disguised as an effort to prevent a coup’ (Roosa 2006, 4), saw the elimination of what was then ‘the largest nonbloc Communist Party’ in the world, the Partai Komunis Indonesia/Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), who were erroneously blamed for an aborted coup (Simpson 2014, 53). As Bradley R. Simpson notes, since 1964 the PKI had been ‘tilting openly towards China’ (53) and intensifying rural class struggle. This was partly due to, Chen Jian also reminds us, the influence of Chinese foreign policy, emphasising revolution in the world’s rural areas as a prelude to revolution in the cities (Simpson 2014, 57; Chen 2014, 91–92). In a climate of economic decline and inflation (Booth 1999, 110), with the PKI at three million members and perhaps a further eighteen million followers taking part in mass organisations (Anderson 2012, 271), an anti-Communist military terror campaign was conducted in 1965–1966 (predominantly October 1965 until April 1966), with the covert support of Britain and the USA (Simpson 2014, 52; Westad 2007, 186). It claimed the lives of an estimated half-million to million alleged communists or sympathisers at the hands of the military, anti-Communist militia and civilians incited to violence by Special Forces against a demonized PKI (Kwon 2010, 39–40; Roosa 2006, 26–29). Many disappeared, their bodies still to be exhumed from mass graves, whilst others were imprisoned without charge or trial.8 As a result, Indonesia under Suharto’s dictatorship was a country in a ‘constant state of emergency’ (Roosa 2006, 13), ever alert to the threat of communism.
The Act of Killing, then, is a film which explicitly deals with the manner in which this period of Cold War history is remembered from the perspective of the side which ‘won’ after perpetrating wide-scale disappearances and clandestine massacres ‘meant to be forgotten’ (Roosa 2006, 30). Indeed, The Act of Killing is one of several recent documentaries to investigate this troubled period in Indonesian history, a few of which have received international attention, including the more conventional 40 Years of Silence (USA, 2009) and Oppenheimer’s sequel (actually shot prior to the release of The Act of Killing), The Look of Silence (2014). Such works offer an alternative to Pengkhianatan 30 September PKI/The Treachery of the September 30 th Movement of the Indonesian Communist Party (1984), a widely viewed four-hour state propaganda film of the Suharto years, mandatory viewing for school children, which was for decades the only visual representation (the official history) of the murderous social turmoil.
Yet, of all these, The Act of Killing’s provision of a platform upon which the murderers can tell their story of history is exceptional. Indeed, it stands out both within this recent documentary reconsideration of the period in Indonesia, and in the broader trend outlined above of documentaries exploring Cold War pasts. Even so, there is really nothing exceptional about its view of history. Although the viewing experience may be challenging, there is little that is shocking about the revelation that this murderous history underpins the present-day state. The Act of Killing only addresses head-on the way in which the contemporary world is the product of the global ravages of colonial modernity, and how the world history that many hold to be true is based on just such ruthless endeavours. After all, as Mills observes with respect of science fiction stories and novels based on the premise that Germany and her allies won the Second World War, the many acts of genocide upon which colonial modernity established the global centrality of Europe mean that ‘we live in an actual, nonalternative world where the victors of racial killing really did win and have reconstructed and falsified the record accordingly’ (1997, 104–105).
Tellingly, when questioned about the morality of their actions, the gangsters answer by querying with, amongst other examples, the fact that the genocide of indigenous Americans was something that no one has ever answered for. In so doing, they identify a period in history in which European state powers which identified as Christian were prepared to suspend their religious beliefs to murder and enslave during what was the defining state of exception of colonial modernity. There is little difference, the gangsters are indirectly indicating, between the way they prefer to remember their story of history, and how a US western inverts history to portray colonists as embattled heroes saving the nation from supposed indigenous savagery (Shohat and Stam 1994, 114–121). This equation goes to the very heart of the killers’ recreation of their murders as though in the style of Hollywood films. Why would they not think it legitimising, after all, to tell their story of national history exactly as the most powerful nation on the planet does its own, through genre movies?
Due to its complex engagement with history and ethics, the scholarly interest in The Act of Killing has been widespread, including special issues of Film Quarterly and Critical Asian Studies (Anderson 2012; Chaudhuri 2014; Sinnerbrink 2016; Nagib 2016a).9 Most famous of these reactions is undoubtedly Slavoj Ž iž ek’s (2013) argument that the film illuminates how, under contemporary capitalism, we inhabit a privatised form of public space. This conclusion is in large part determined by the role that the movies played in the killings during the 1960s, and again during their enactment in Oppenheimer’s documentary. As well as ‘killing happily’ in the style of the movies they watched, the gangsters also incorporated ways of killing taken from movies. Thus Ž iž ek notes: ‘The protective screen that prevented a deeper moral crisis was the cinematic screen: as in their real killings and torture, the men experienced their role play as a re-enactment of cinematic models: they experienced reality itself as a fiction’ (2013). Accordingly, Ž iž ek concludes that the actions of the killers are a result of ‘the dislocating effects of capitalist globalisation which, by undermining the “symbolic efficacy” of traditional ethical structures, creates such a moral vacuum’ (2013).
Drawing on a dizzying variety of examples from across history and geography,10 Ž iž ek concludes that the actions of Congo and his friends are illustrative of the behaviour encouraged by the privatisation of public space under market capitalism:
The animality with which we are dealing here – the ruthless egotism of each of the individuals pursuing his or her private interest – is the paradoxical result of the most complex network of social relations (market exchange, social mediation of production). That individuals are blinded to this network points towards its ideal (‘spiritual’) character: in the civil society structured by market [sic], abstraction rules more than ever. [… ] It is often said that today, with our exposure to the media, culture of public confessions and instruments of digital control, private space is disappearing. One should counter this: it is the public space proper that is disappearing. The person who displays on the web his or her naked images or intimate data is not an exhibitionist: exhibitionists intrude into the public space, while those who post their naked images on the web remain in their private space and are just expanding it to include others. The same goes for Anwar and his colleagues in The Act of Killing: they are privatising the public space in a sense that is far more threatening than economic privatisation.
(2013)11
For Ž iž ek, the implication is that the Cold War killings which Congo and his friends re-enact were responsible for constructing the contemporary society in which their invasion of the public space continues to this day in their celebrity. Indeed, once Suharto had consolidated power, the New Order did turn to neoliberal policies (following advice from several US-educated economists (Booth 1999, 111; Klein 2007, 68–69)), which increased foreign investment, export sales of natural resources, and increased manufacturing for export to Western markets (Elson 2008, 271–273; Roosa 2006, 197). This was a dramatic about-face for a country which had been experiencing workers’ seizures of US-owned plantations and oil wells and which seemed to be moving towards increased nationalisation (Roosa 2006, 13–14, 194). The killings eradicated opposition to the free entrance of global capital, the ideological motivation provided by Hollywood gangster films being, presumably, the aspirational fantasy of wealth accumulation that includes even the commodification of public space. Ž iž ek’s conclusion suggests that Arendt’s prophesy of a ‘century of revolutions’, won by those ‘who understand revolution’ (1963, 8), has been borne out by the victory of the global counter-revolution – that same force which (as noted in Chapter 2) Hardt and Negri identified as emerging with the discovery of the Americas.
Yet a very different conclusion can be drawn with respect to The Act of Killing, and indeed, the global cycle of films under discussion. If we follow Kwon, it is too simple to conclude that market capitalism ‘won’ the Cold War. This, in spite of the effectiveness of the suppression of communist opposition during this time, which provided the springboard for the global spread of neoliberalism. All the films in question, even The Act of Killing, actually demonstrate that the Cold War is only decomposing, its battles still being fought in the vestiges of their contested remembrance.
To begin with, it is worth stating an obvious, but rarely mentioned point. What the killers express in their recreations of the year of ‘killing happily’ is a degree of nostalgia for an exciting time in their lives. It is worth remembering, after all, that even from the opposite end of the political spectrum such times are very often enjoyable for some. The Chinese Cultural Revolution is a case in point. During such times of murderous turmoil, for some there emerges a chance at advancement which did not exist otherwise (White 1991, 94–96). This would seem true regardless of the ideology propelling the state of exception. This excitement would go some way towards explaining the incredibly surreal feel to the film, as the gangsters recreate their murders as though enjoyably recounting a wild party, one which continued for many years and culminated in hero status for the executioners. Their recreation, then, is of the state of exception as carnival.
In formulating the concept of the state of exception, Agamben draws on Karl Meuli’s description of the charivari or the carnival of the medieval and modern world. These periodic festivals invert the normal social order for a limited period of time, fools becoming kings and vice versa. The carnival, seen as an accepted transgression by commentators like Mikhail Bakhtin (ultimately functioning to shore up the established order in the longer term (1965, 1–58)), when understood after Agamben’s evocation of Meuli on the carnival or charivari, does not provide as positive or optimistic a formulation as Bakhtin’s (1965, 18–24). Rather, after Meuli, Agamben draws a parallel between the supposedly temporary situations designed to uphold the norm (carnival/charivari and the state of exception) noting that during the carnival ‘criminal behaviour is considered licit or, in any case, not punishable’ (2003, 71). The carnival or charivari, then, is a time of legalised anarchy when popular justice is given free reign, potentially including acts of expulsion or eradication of certain sections of the community deemed to have wronged the collective (72).
To continue with the obvious but rarely stated, the carnival is clearly evident in The Act of Killing – for instance, in the scenes where the former gangsters prepare for their acting scenes, getting made up and reflecting on their acting styles. The entire documentary may be considered a string of carnivalesque set pieces, including brightly coloured and glitzy costumes, feather-festooned headdresses, drinking and dancing, songs accompanied by dancing girls, TV chat show appearances, and so on: ghoulish as I appreciate this kind of interpretation may sound. The gangsters’ way of remembering and memorialising the historical moment of the exceptional ‘non-place’ is by recreating a time when their movie fantasies could be lived out, and when they became heroes for it. Their world turned upside-down, as per the inversion one expects during the carnival, and low-life ticket tout gangsters were transformed into celebrities credited with saving the nation from communism. Hence, Congo’s musical fantasy includes the ghosts of those he murdered, thanking him for sending them to heaven (even handing Congo a medal), precisely echoing colonial modernity’s excusing of the genocide and enslavement of indigenous and African Americans via the Christian argument that those who died actually benefitted by having their souls saved. The gangsters’ sick movies, then, The Act of Killing illuminates, are not necessarily dissimilar to many from Hollywood in this respect.
The gangsters ask us to ‘remember’ with them how they inhabited a surreal world of legitimised murder, akin, it seems, to living in a film for a period of your youth. By becoming film stars in Oppenheimer’s documentary, Congo and his colleagues attempt to relive the moment when they first acted as such, during their murderous spree. Where else, but in the state of exception, can you ‘imagine’ being given free licence to kill without censure and consequently be considered the hero of a national story, just as a character can be in a gangster film, musical, horror movie, or western? As is evident in the horrifying aesthetic of the film, as death squad members in movie star make-up discuss their murderous deeds, this is precisely as one would expect of the world-inverting carnival.
The past that the film provides us with an encounter with is thus not one of the privatisation of public space, as Ž iž ek argues, but the suspension of the laws that normally govern such a space. This does lead to the becoming-actual of the private dreams of the gangsters in the public sphere, it is true. But this is because of the mechanics of the state of exception as it eradicates the memory of the other pasts that it occludes. Ž iž ek may be right in arguing that the consequence of the killings was the space they created for the economic shift which followed – as is evident in the film’s repeated shots of Medan’s commercial streets and the shops which now exist where murders were previously committed. However, what we see in the film is an older idea of the state of exception, that of the carnival.
Ž iž ek’s focus on globalisation actually risks depoliticising what the filmic references indicate in The Act of Killing. The projection of the gangsters’ (cinematic) fantasies into public space is not a vision of privatisation so much as it is of the licence given to the lords of misrule during the carnival. After all, the black-market ticket tout gangsters acted to boost their business interests by eradicating the threat of communism to the market (communists who had boycotted Hollywood films, harming the gangsters’ profits (Brink and Oppenheimer 2012, 2)), during a time which they memorialise through their present-day carnivalesque performances. This is the way in which a particular story of history is maintained as a straight line through time. And it is this maintenance of official history which the film investigates with its crystalline structure.
Crystalline carnival: Encountering the state of exception
The past is forever haunting the present in The Act of Killing, as is most obviously apparent when Congo confesses that he struggles to sleep, fifty years on, due to the insistence of memories of this period. By recreating the past in the present, in the form of movie-like re-enactments, The Act of Killing foregrounds this crystalline nature of time. What it shows in this way is the perpetual struggle that is required to ensure that only one facet of the crystal is visible, only one story of history is told. Congo’s stated desire, to record his role in history for posterity, is assailed by the perpetual threat of the ungrounding of his view of history by the memories of forgotten pasts upon which its contemporary dominance is predicated.
There are numerous moments when this becomes evident. The most apparent is the tipping point in Congo’s seeming journey of self-discovery. Earlier in the film, Congo, who boasts about the many murders he committed using a garrotte, falters during the shooting of an execution scene in the style of a gangster movie, when a garrotte is placed around his own neck. He is unable to go on after seemingly realising the fear that his victims felt at the point of death. Towards the end of the film, Congo watches the footage again, at his own request, and professes to know how fearful his victims felt at that moment: to which the off-screen Oppenheimer responds that his victims felt far worse than he did, as he was only acting in a film whereas they faced certain and imminent death. Congo, glancing uneasily at the camera as tears begin to well up in his eyes, says: ‘Is it all coming back to me? [… ] I don’t want it to.’ Congo, quite literally, is hesitating with respect to his previous belief as to the veracity of the story of history in which his whole life is embroiled. The following scene is of the violent retching on the rooftop where many murders were committed, in which his sensory-motor continuity is interrupted by his physical spasms, as though the ghosts on the rooftop were attempting to re-emerge in the present.
Both scenes are crystalline, and make evident the coexistence of virtual past with actual present. Firstly, there is the footage – on the television – of the re-enacted killings, the past rendered virtual, which creates an emotion-inducing circuit with the present for Congo. The past rather literally is coming back to haunt Congo in the present. Secondly, in the much-discussed rooftop sequence, the verso is given. This time the virtual past is absent from the screen, but present in Congo’s physical actions, due to the haunting nature of this murderous space from his past.
Yet, in spite of these moments, the film is best considered a ‘flawed crystal’, as per Deleuze’s taxonomy. In the flawed crystal, the attempt to replicate the truth of history in the actual present (such that it is perpetually stored and re-stored as affirming of the present when it becomes virtual past, as seen in the cinematic recreations of the carnivalesque state of exception) suddenly reveals a crack. In formulating this very specific crystalline image, Deleuze discusses how, in Jean Renoir’s classic French movies, class hierarchies are shown to perpetuate historically until a flaw or crack appears in the societal structure, completely shattering the crystal (1985, 82–85). In The Act of Killing, similarly, the gangsters take pains to ensure that the two sides of the crystal should be always truth-affirming and match completely. The past is an epoch during which alternative pathways through time were eradicated, therefore the present needs to be the exact mirror of the truth of history which was established then. Only this exact mirroring can retain the singular, linear truth of this history. Thus by focusing on the perpetrators of the murders, the documentary rarely if ever shows a glimpse of the disappeared pasts which haunt them. Instead, we see the state of exception (the past) relived in the carnivalesque cinematic formats through which it was experienced by the killers (the present matching the past). Even when Congo has his seeming revelation when taking part in one such re-enactment, the crystal does not crack: past and present remain in synch even then. As Congo states, he does not want the past to return, or at least not in any other form than the reincarnation he is comfortable with – the memory which matches that of the official story of history. Thus the film’s investigation of the past considers how the state of exception, as carnival, eradicates the virtual past which might have been so as to maintain the veracity of a single pathway through time. A crack does finally appear in the crystal, though, in the much-discussed sequence in which the step-son of one of their victims, Suryono, a neighbour of Congo, is integrated into a torture scene.12
Suryono takes the place of one of the gangsters’ victims in a torture scene, and as he begs for mercy (for a chance to speak to his family one last time), he breaks down. His grief at what seems an imagined version of what his step-father’s last moments alive might have been like seems entirely genuine in a film in which emotions at times seem anything but. Suryono is bound as his step-father seemingly was, and has previously (or at least, we understand from the editing that it took place prior to his acting in the scene) explained his step-father’s abduction: how he found his body unceremoniously dumped under half a barrel by the side of the road, how only he and his grandfather were willing to be involved in its unofficial burial, and how his family was forcibly relocated to a shantytown, ensuring that he was excluded from formal education and had to teach himself to read and write. Whether any of this scene is genuine or not, we have literally no way of knowing. Yet as the gangsters discuss the reality of history which their story obscures (that it was they who were cruel and not the communists, as was claimed at the time), Suryono sits dressed as their prisoner in the film-within-a-film, his face contorting as he quietly weeps.
In Suryono’s grief we see the crack in the crystal. In this crack we glimpse the co-presence of the eradicated past with the present, as his lost legacy is momentarily evident – as though Suryono’s step-father speaks through him in the re-enactment – before this haunting presence is silenced once again by the (fictional) garrotting scene which follows. In this flawed crystalline moment, it becomes evident that the persistence of a dominant story of history is predicated upon the perpetual eradication of the virtual past. The repetition of the same is required to confirm, in the present, the veracity of the past as a series of actual moments. Yet even within this obsessively reiterated historical narrative, just the very glimpse of an eradicated past reveals the flaw in the crystal, and shatters it. Suryono’s emotional collapse during the fake garrotting, noticeably, prefigures that of Congo, whose own personal demons from the past will not leave him alone either.
As a flawed crystal of time in which we see the persistence of the re-emergence of the virtual past (such that its suppression needs perpetual repetition in the present), The Act of Killing illustrates how the state of exception is, in fact, a constant (and constantly failing) process of eradicating other times. The carnivalesque mise-en-abyme does not just illustrate the constructed nature of history and the fact that the winners always write the record of the past. It also shows the resurgence of lost pasts which undermine this history, most evidently in the harrowing re-enactment by a son of his step-father’s torture and death in the past, at the hands of the very killers he faces in the present. The crystal history on display here is one in which attempts to perpetually ensure correct alignment of past with the present create virtual images which, unwittingly, illuminate the impossibility of maintaining history in this way. The crack in the crystal, ultimately, is that of Suryono’s personal memories, the unexpected return from the past of something other than the official story of history in which the gangsters were and are national saviours. This underside of Indonesian history is only retained in personal memories (contra the official story of history which dominates public space), but its resurgence is what ensures that we see how, in Indonesia as in many places, the Cold War is not over, but only in a process of decomposition.
The Act of Killing, as noted, is the exception to the rule in this respect. The importance of this personal archiving of the past as primary focus is what is investigated in Oppenheimer’s accompanying documentary The Look of Silence, as it is in the trend for time-image documentaries, globally, of which At the Foot is taken as a prime example for analysis here.
At the Foot of the White Tree
The Uruguayan documentary At the Foot of the White Tree concerns the recent recovery of photographs, considered lost since the dictatorship, belonging to the communist newspaper El Popular (1957–1973). Aurelio Gonzá lez Sacedo, a photographer with the paper during the onset of military rule, hid the paper’s archive of negatives (seventy-nine cans covering the period of the paper’s existence, including many of Gonzá lez’s own shots) in the Palacio Lapido/Lapido Building in Montevideo. The paper occupied several floors of the building before it was closed by the military in 1973. Gonzá lez escaped into exile in the late 1970s, spending time in Mexico, the Netherlands, and Spain before returning to Uruguay in 1985. The recovery of the lost negatives, hidden away for thirty-three years, in 2006 is an ‘against-the-odds’ recapturing of the past, rendered all the more unlikely by the physical transformation undergone by the Lapido Building in the interim. The negatives were discovered in an underground garage, where they were walled in at some point in the past. This was not their original hiding place. Gonzá lez stashed the negatives in a duct between the interior walls in 1973, and the mystery that the documentary uncovers is the reason for their reappearance in the building’s basement. This is not, however, a story of the newspaper’s past, or its archive, but of Gonzá lez’s extremely personal relationship to the archive – its creation, hiding, and recovery – and how it now informs the official record of Uruguayan Cold War history.
Military rule in Uruguay lasted from 1973 to 1985. This is a country which, for much of the Twentieth Century, saw relative stability under democracy, a welfare state, and economic prosperity which only began to decline from the mid-1950s. The situation in Uruguay in the years prior to the dictatorship was one of increasing guerrilla activities, especially on the part of the Movimiento de Liberació n Nacional/Movement for National Liberation, ‘The Tupamaros’ (from 1967 onwards). The Tupermaros took their popular name from the rebellious indigenous leader of the Eighteenth Century (in what is now Peru), Tú pac Amaru. Their activities included assassinations of torturers, bank robberies, prison breaks, but most notoriously, the kidnapping and murder of US advisor Dan Mitrione, the subject of the Costa-Gavras film É tat de siè ge/State of Siege (France/Italy/West Germany, 1972). Mitrione’s suspicious presence in Uruguay (it is alleged that he was a CIA operative, teaching torture methods to the national security forces) is likely indicative of the USA’s involvement in backing totalitarian governments across Latin America during the Cold War, albeit the military intervention in Uruguay – as elsewhere in Latin America – was also due to the desire of established national interests (on the right of the political spectrum) to quash movements for social justice and wealth redistribution.
The intensifying civil unrest in the preceding years, intermittent but ongoing since 1968 – including the closure of leftist newspapers, increasing state spending on the military and use of torture by representatives of the state – culminated in a four-month long coup (the state of siege) in 1973, and the implementation of military rule (Weinstein 1992, 84–89). During its ‘dirty war’, Uruguay had the largest number of political prisoners of any Latin American country, amongst whom torture was widespread. In addition, over 300,000 people (then 20% of its population) went into exile (Kohut, Vilella and Julian 2003, 1). This small country, then, provides a clear example of the Cold War political situation described by Kwon, after Agamben, as a local-level indicator of more global forces. As Eduardo Galeano summarises, the military government functioned as
the armed wing of the International Monetary Fund and the system of privileges that agency embodies and sustains. With the guerrilla threat as a pretext, state terrorism set its gears in motion to cut real wages by half, dismantle the trade unions, and eliminate critical awareness. [… ] Every home became a prison cell and every factory, office, and institution of higher education a concentration camp.
(1986, 103–104)
Most importantly for the analysis which follows: ‘A general obliteration of collective memory was decreed’ (104). Uruguay’s post-Cold War history, then, indicates the continued importance of this period for the nation’s collective memory of the past. For example, resonating with Kwon’s idea of a decomposing Cold War, Uruguayan President José ‘Pepe’ Mujica (2010–2015) was a former Tupamaro guerrilla who endured over a decade in captivity under the military regime. It is this consequence of the state of exception which At the Foot addresses in its crystal images.
At the Foot uses time-images to create a very particular engagement with place, thereby to examine Uruguay’s various lost histories of lives influenced by the dictatorship.13 As in the global trend of documentaries, in At the Foot there is a deliberate focus on recreating history from the perspective of those whose past was disappeared. Crystal images purposefully recreate glimpses of another past that might have been, a re-aestheticisation of the past from the archive. This is possible in At the Foot due to the recovered archive of photographs at its heart, but even in the films where this is not possible, re-enactment is used in instances where the archive has disappeared (for instance, using surviving prison guards in S21, or through toys and models in The Blonds and The Missing Picture). At the Foot, then, is paradigmatic of the global trend for films which create the opposite effect to The Act of Killing. In these films we see a conscious attempt to reclaim public space not from privatisation, but with respect to the private memories of events that took place in such spaces, and their capacity to beat back the history constructed during the state of exception: to offer instead a crystal history. In an era in which the establishment of museums of memory has become of increasing importance in reclaiming the forgotten pasts of the Cold War, these films offer virtual museums of memory designed to provide glimpses of memories of an alternative imagining of the public sphere. This must emerge from the private sphere, of necessity, as the potential collectives that might have held public spaces were defeated in the state of exception. Thus At the Foot, like the other documentaries from a world of cinemas, memorialises a past which, officially, never happened. Denied official recognition at the time, this is a past that has been disappeared, a glimpse of which requires a hesitation with respect to the veracity of official history.
This interpretation is in line with the existing scholarly view as to the potential that documentary now has, having shifted its emphasis from the objective to the subjective since the Cold War, to ‘resonate with wider social change’, inviting ‘the embodiment through the camera-eye of the personal as political’ (Chanan 2007, 243–246). Rather than dissolving its capacity for effecting meaningful political change, this objective to subjective shift fuels different types of engagement emerging from the personal to influence the public sphere. As Michael Renov observes, in relation to gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, ‘a grounding in the personal and the experiential fuelled the engine of political action’ (1995, 4), such that contemporary documentary constructs or ‘enacts’ individual, personal identities ‘while remaining fully embroiled with public discourse’ (5). Thus joining a longer tradition of documentaries attempting to document a history that was designed to disappear (Rabinowitz 1993, 129), At the Foot uses the time-image to illustrate how the intricate linkages between personal and public can provide a glimpse of a lost Cold War past. This is not to privatise the public sphere, as per Ž iž ek on The Act of Killing, but to re-engage the public from the private.
Crystalline Montevideo: Encountering a glimpse of a lost political past
The time-images in At the Foot are created by shooting in present-day locations associated with the dictatorship in the recent past. Rather than editing in archival footage of these places, the film creates crystal images which reconstruct links between the virtual past and the actual present. In particular, by filming in locations that had an impact on the life of Gonzá lez, it creates a personal, virtual (in the sense of cinematic rather than physical) ‘museum of memory’.
There are three such standout moments which establish a direct link between images retrieved from Gonzá lez’s recovered archive of negatives and present-day spaces. In each of these mannered moments, Gonzá lez is depicted in a place of great significance in relation to the events surrounding the transition to military rule in the 1970s holding enlarged photographs taken in these spaces at that time. In each we encounter Gonzá lez, regarding us along with his personal/public archive of the past (see Figure 5.2).
FIGURE 5.2 Personal/public archive of the (eradicated) past, in Al pie del á rbol blanco/At the Foot of the White Tree (Juan Á lvarez Neme, 2007).
In the first, Gonzá lez revisits the ruins of the Nervió n metalworks, where he worked as a younger man and which he visited again in 1973 to show his photographs to the assembled workers during the general strike organised by the Convenció n Nacional de Trabajadores/National Convention of Workers. He recounts his elation at that time as he used his photos of similar seizures of premises elsewhere to inform the workers that they were not alone in their occupation of the factory. The second takes place outside the Trocadero Theater, a former cinema on the corner of Avenida 18 de Julio and Calle Yaguaró n in Montevideo, where Gonzá lez witnessed the Republican Guard, on horseback, sabre-charging protesters prior to the coup d’é tat of 1973. The third is on Avenida 18 de Julio, where on July 9, 1973, there was a demonstration at five in the afternoon (the time influenced by a line from a poem by Federico Garcí a Lorca), in which a peaceful crowd supporting the general strike was broken up by the military using horses, water cannons and tear gas.
In each instance, in a location in which his personal history intersected with that of the nation’s history, Gonzá lez holds up an enlarged photograph of the same place that he took as a young photographer in the 1970s. These are the only surviving images of these events, now recovered from the lost archive. In this way, virtual past and actual present are seen to coexist in the moment, clearly defined as different by their contrasting existence as stasis (past) and movement (present), and black-and-white (past) and colour (present). Each time, the image created marks the return of a lost moment from the past to the particular place, thereby providing a potentially informative history for the present. The return of the photographs fills in for the absent official history of events, otherwise (until now) erased from the official record and surviving only in witness testimony, of which the recovered photographs now stand as visual proof. These moments, then, provide the singularities, the events, which constitute a crystal history (see Chapter 2), offering an alternative to the teleology of the official story.
This is not the end of the process. In each instance, as Gonzá lez stands still with the enlarged photograph in his hands, for several seconds the image is transformed into black-and-white. This has a curious effect, as though the present day were being shown in the process of being transformed into an image that suggests a new ‘photograph’, an archival document akin to the one Gonzá lez is holding. Accordingly, the documentary’s narrative flow is momentarily stalled, an effect that is compounded when each such instance is followed by a montage of other photos from the event in question, all of them recovered along with the photographic archive in the Lapido Building. In this way, the film foregrounds its strategy of creating a new virtual archive through cinematography, around Gonzá lez’s experiences in present-day spaces associated with the turbulent national past. Each moment crystallizes the process of construction of a virtual museum of memory wherein past and present can coexist and through which a personal history opens up a previously lost public past. Thus the crystals in this film indicate that another past subsists along with the present, and that in time’s perpetual splitting there lies the potential of its return.
The present-day ‘photograph’ that the documentary creates in each of these standout moments is part of the new virtual archive of national history, each new black-and-white image containing shots of the same space in both the past and the present. Although these are themselves images that become ‘past’ in their very emergence as pseudo-‘photographs’, in each instance the documentary reconnects the present with its previously occluded past.
Moreover, these three standout crystalline moments, in which spaces are virtually archived, are not the documentary’s only temporal anomalies. The narrative of the rediscovery of the archive is itself recounted out of chronological sequence. The film opens and closes with a press conference marking the public exhibition of the archive, in 2006, at the Centro Municipal de Fotografí a/Municipal Center of Photography. In between, it includes visits to several of the locations in which Gonzá lez photographed events during the transition to military rule (including public protests and military and police violence), the story of the military raid on the offices of El Popular, Gonzá lez’s efforts to hide the photos of the general strike during the raid, and his escape. All of this is interspersed with the story of the recovery of the archive, also told out of sequence, beginning with a glimpse of Enrique Lista (the young man who contacted Gonzá lez about the archive’s whereabouts), Lista’s recounting of the story of his childhood encounter with the photos, and footage of Operation White Hair, a comical raid to recover the negatives, perpetrated by Gonzá lez and his ageing friends from the Communist Party (an account of which is given by Gonzá lez prior to our seeing hidden-camera footage of the event itself). The jumbled chronology that arises from this structure stresses the manner in which personal histories enable a disorienting but revealing virtual archive of the past. Gonzá lez’s story and, to a lesser extent, Lista’s (which is also a personal story of his relationship with the Lapido Building), are histories reconstructed in the present as, temporally speaking, rambling autobiographies. Thus the intertwining personal stories are experienced by the documentary’s viewer as personal, oral documents that segue between past and present (mirroring the digressive nature of human recollection and, indeed, storytelling) and are here recorded in this virtual, documentary, museum of memory.
This is not to say that the national significance of Gonzá lez’s story is eradicated because it engages with the transnational history of the Cold War. In fact, the story of the nationally important archive that arises out of Gonzá lez’s personal history is the point of the film. The title of the documentary, At the Foot, suggests that the white tree in question is the Lapido Building, in front of which Gonzá lez is pictured standing just before the opening titles and prior to the closing credits. To follow the metaphor, then, the archive is recovered from among the subterranean roots of the white tree, the footage of the retrieval of the negatives being telling in this respect, in that the camera angle used (an aerial view from a camera positioned to give a perspective looking down into the wall cavity where the archive is interred) suggests the discovery of a grave containing virtual evidence of a disappeared (perspective on the) past. This image resonates with the ongoing search for the graves of those killed by the military, whilst the film’s metaphor of the tree renders the virtual archive that is uncovered from the Lapido Building’s basement suggestive of the physical remains of the disappeared that still await excavation. After all, ‘Lapido’, the surname of one of the founders of the newspaper, is similar to the word lá pida (gravestone), and when describing the hiding of the archive (which was originally not underground, but within the building proper), Gonzá lez states that the negatives were ‘buried’, suggesting a direct correlation between the lost bodies and this newly exposed lost history.
The secrecy surrounding the negatives, then, at once resonates with Uruguay’s ongoing search for the bodies of the disappeared, and maintains hope that the ordinary people of the nation are complicit in resisting the eradication of evidence of this military violence. Eventually, it is revealed that it was most likely builders who, rather than disposing of the negatives, saved the archive by simply building the basement’s new interior walls around it. In this way, the film indicates the existence of a collective will to resist the destruction of the proof of a past that existed prior to the transformation of Uruguayan society and history under military rule.
Hence, the national import of the recovered archive is repeatedly stressed by the film. For instance, when Gonzá lez was initially unable to locate the archive on his return, he adopted the tactic of telling its story whenever he had an opportunity. The oral history of its existence became public property in this way and ultimately led to its recovery when news of the search reached Lista. Moreover, the national significance of the photos is foregrounded in the opening and closing scenes, which depict Gonzá lez addressing an appreciative crowd and the television crews that have gathered for the public exhibition of the photographs. At the start of the film, as he is applauded and cheered, Gonzá lez modestly (but significantly) responds: ‘It’s yours, it’s yours.’ In the closing scene, the camera lingers on individual faces in the crowd as Gonzá lez gives an impassioned speech about the heroism of individuals standing up against military repression. In these bookending moments, triumphal in tone, the mood is set for the documentary – which charts the recovery of a virtual archive belonging to a communist newspaper that is of great national relevance for its placement in the transnational history of the decomposing Cold War. This is the case even if the archive’s re-emergence is rendered through the virtual museum of memory created around one man, Gonzá lez, his photographs, and his relationship with the physical space of the Lapido Building in both the past and the present: past/present, personal/public, national/transnational, are all intertwined.
It is undoubtedly for this reason that the documentary begins with a scene in Gonzá lez’s home in which old photographs and newspapers strewn across his bed suggest the correlation of his personal life with public history. As Gonzá lez introduces us to the photos on his wall, we see shots of him as a baby side-by-side with pictures of him as an adult attending a mass rally of the Frente Amplio/Broad Front (a left-wing political party). Gonzá lez’s role as photographer of images intended for the public sphere has become, with history, a personal quest for his lost archive of a paper now closed. What the archive ultimately reveals is as much Gonzá lez’s personal political convictions as it is the paper’s communist stance. Moving beyond the national, it is not a coincidence that Gonzá lez’s own personal story is not that of a native-born Uruguayan, as he arrived as a stowaway on a ship from Morocco at twenty-two in 1952, his life impacting irrevocably on the preservation of the history of Uruguay in the time he lived there prior to his exile. Thus his photographs preserve a national history, yes, but the manner of their recovery equally indicates the importance of transnational flows of people who are personally invested in a political past – which was itself part of a much broader transnational Cold War history. At the Foot is thus akin to Annette Kuhn’s findings with respect of the use of family photographs in memory work, that the patching together of history as ‘reconstructions out of fragments of evidence’ can be facilitated by exploring ‘connections between “public” historical events, structures of feeling, family dramas, relations of class, national identity and gender, and “personal” memories’ (1995, 4). Personal and public histories are shown as interlocked through Gonzá lez’s wall’s photographs just as they are in At the Foot. Personal histories can and do return collective memory, can and do (re)inform public space, due to their function as virtual museums of memory.
The way in which At the Foot uses time-images to recover glimpses of the lost past is part of a larger process of memory reconstruction and retrieval in the public sphere taking place across the decomposing Cold War world. Recent historical developments in the public sphere in South America have seen countries with histories of military rule transforming specific places (for example, former detention centres such as the Escuela Superior de Mecá nicade la Armada [Army Mechanics School – ESMA] in Buenos Aires) into public museums of memory (Jelin 2003, 39). A particularly pertinent example is the Museo de la Memoria/Museum of Memory, which opened in Montevideo in 2007. Uruguay’s national museum of memory recreates and reconstructs the social turmoil of the state of siege by assembling fragments and scraps of the past (banned books and newspapers, photographs, a printing press, banners from protest marches, prison doors, objects made by prisoners, placards of the disappeared) that, whilst unable to generate a totalising image of the period, indicate the existence of a history of organised social activism, protest, and resistance. Noticeably, the museum prominently features Gonzá lez’s photographs, as little else of such relevance exists. Together these scattered fragments of the past evoke as much the impossibility of memorialising a lost collective past as they do that past itself. In both the actual and the cinematic (or virtual) instances (museum and virtual museum), a focus on an individual experience of a significant moment in the national past is deployed in order to reclaim the (private) archived past, so as to rejuvenate the public sphere.
Whilst The Act of Killing celebrates the licence given to murder during the state of exception, At the Foot, by contrast, and like the other films noted at the start, uses the time-image to remember the state of exception as a moment of historical elimination. It was during this state of siege, after all, that the disappearance of sections of the population coincided with the disappearance from the national archive of the public history of which they were a part. Whereas in The Act of Killing the crystal illustrates the difficulty of forever recreating the past in the image of the present, in At the Foot the search for a glimpse of a lost virtual past (which can oscillate anew with the present to remind us of an alternative history) occupies the time-image. Both enable a historical understanding of how the social contract was suspended during the Cold War. Both create a glimpse of a time of transformation when the collective nature of public space was radically altered by political forces indicative of the broader Cold War. Indeed, in both instances, a state of exception ensured the maintenance of the inequality inherent to the existing social contract (which communism threatened to equalise, thereby offering an alternative form of modernity), and in so doing, the Cold War dictatorships laid the way open for the even more radical dismantling of the social contract by neoliberalism (the subject of the final chapter). Thus both documentaries, in slightly different ways, deploy a crystal image to, as Kuan-Hsing Chen has it, ‘de-Cold War’ national histories (‘to mark out a space in which unspoken stories and histories may be told’ (2010, 120)). In so doing they contribute, by turns, to the way in which a world of cinemas tells the story of this transnational history. This is not a matter of illustrating how the now privatised nature of public space emerged at that time, necessarily, but of the way in which private and public intertwine in the creation of world history.
To recap this chapter: a traumatised man breaks down emotionally whilst re-enacting the murder of his beloved step-father, creating unease amongst the gangsters who typically write national history by eradicating this perspective on the past, just as they did by killing the political opposition during a murderous state of exception in the 1960s. A photographer for a now-abolished communist newspaper stands facing the camera, holding enlargements of the photographs he took in the same locations during a Cold War state of siege, bringing back this forgotten (virtual) past to inform the present. This chapter has explored these crystalline cinematic encounters with the transnational history of the Cold War, as lost political pasts are recreated from personal archives of memory to (re)inform the public sphere. These are key examples from a trend of documentaries about the Cold War’s reformulation of the social contract, which laid the ground for our seemingly one-sided contemporary political situation. In the next and final chapter I bring this exploration of the world history of colonial modernity across a world of cinemas up to date by focusing on the transnational history of neoliberalism and its fostering of individual contracts.
Notes
1. The term ‘haunting’ is not intended in the Derridean sense, although the resonance is not coincidental. Although rarely mentioned, Deleuze’s (earlier) Cinema 2 haunts Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (993), and not only in Derrida’s same use of Hamlet’s line regarding time being ‘out of joint’. 1) Derrida’s ‘past as to come’ (993, xix) and the future as memory (45) echo Deleuze’s Nietzschean formulation of cinema’s ability to falsify the past and create the memory of the future (985, 50, 122–150). 2) Derrida’s imagined ‘New International’, a collective able to struggle against the global hegemony of capital (993, 62) ‘without status, without title, and without name … without contract, “out of joint”, without coordination, without party, without country, without national community … ’ (106–107) (critiqued by Terry Eagleton for its vagueness (999, 87), but rather like the Occupy or Anonymous movements) is extremely reminiscent of Deleuze’s ‘people yet to come’ of modern political or minor cinema (985, 207–15). Moreover, Derrida’s ghosts who silently ask for justice (‘victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism’ (1993, xviii)) are but belatedly realised spectres of Enrique Dussel’s excluded others of modernity (see Chapter 2).
2. Kwon’s position would not be a revelation for decolonial or postcolonial scholars. It evokes Hannah Arendt’s prediction that the Twentieth Century would be ‘a century of revolutions’ (1963, 8), and Noam Chomsky’s writings in the wake of the US war in Vietnam (1980). Kwon’s position builds upon Katherine Verdery’s recommendation that a ‘post-Cold War’ study of the empire of the former Soviet Union can integrate with existing postcolonial studies of the third world, thereby enhancing the global picture of both the Cold War and colonialism (2002, 18). Kwon’s decentred view of the global Cold War (Kwon 2010, 53–54) thus brings his work in line with Odd Arne Westad’s (007), which Kwon references regarding the importance of revolutionary and decolonial movements in the Cold War order (Kwon 2010, 7, 24). However, Kwon’s aim, which sets it apart, is to dissect ‘the whole of the global cold war into different constituent parts … for the purpose of creating a new image of the whole’ (010, 148). Resonances with Kwon’s work are increasingly found in works in History and International Relations (e.g. Lawson, Armbruster and Cox 010; McMahon 2014), whilst previous works in Modern Languages/Film Studies have analysed, for example, the decomposing Cold War in movies from post-reunification Germany (Cooke 2005, 1–26).
3. Following Jason C. Parker (2013, 125), we can view this as the emergence of the post-Columbian era, a time during which the postcolonial independence movements throughout the third world (predominantly national in orientation and support) became embroiled in the Cold War: ‘decolonization served as the main conduit by which the Cold War reached – and in a sense created – the “Third World”’ (125).
4. Revolution, for Arendt, is historically a product of Europeans witnessing for the first time the ‘abundance’ of the Americas and realising that scarcity, want, poverty, and inequality are a social not a natural condition (1963, 13). Despite this, there is a seeming invisibility of indigenous and African Americans in Arendt’s argument (potentially aligning it with the myth of Manifest Destiny), which illustrates its unawareness of the racial contract undermining the social contract (even if Arendt acknowledges the importance of slavery for the prosperity of the USA (1963, 61)). The idea of indigeneity in the Americas evoking a state of nature, after all, ignores the extensive shaping of the environment by the indigenous (see the Introduction), and is redolent of the myth that the populations of the Americas lived somehow outside of historical progression. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat provide more nuance on the influence of the European colonisation of the Americas on Europe: ‘The concept of the free Indian living in a society without coercion helped spark revolutionary ideas in Europe. Jean-Jacques Rousseau deployed the notion of the “natural goodness of human beings” and “societies without coercion” as a means of undermining European authoritarianism’ (2012, 8). Ironically, of course, it may be that the continent whose people prompted such utopian ideas of this supposed state of nature was home to some of the oldest recorded forms of societal government in human history prior to the arrival of Europeans and smallpox (Mann 2005, 185 and 333).
5. Agamben argues that an ‘essential practice’ of contemporary politics, indeed the ‘dominant paradigm of government’, is to promote the voluntary acceptance of a state of exception amongst the general populace (2003, 2) (see Chapter 6).
6. Anomie being, for É mile Durkheim in On Suicide (1897), an influential text for Agamben, when ‘society’s influence is lacking in the basically individual passions, thus leaving them without a check-rein’ (209).
7. This, in addition to the ethical difficulty created by a film shot from the perspective of the perpetrators of mass murder: whether to be suspicious of a real-life complicity between filmmakers and subjects (Fraser 2013); or to question the manipulation of the subjects by ‘treacherous ally’ Oppenheimer to convince them to collaborate in making a film exposing their crimes (Nagib 2016b, 227) (Congo is clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)); or to emphasise the risk the filmmakers took with their lives over eight years to expose the psychologies of killers (Nagib 2016b).
8. The ideological divide targeted in this state of exception was entangled with a racial one, as the victims of the violence included many ethnic Chinese and the state violence ‘often targeted the collective social units where individuals belonged’ (Kwon 2010, 39–40).
9. Benedict Anderson explores the film’s exposé of how the repetition of the performance of barbarous acts is instrumental in the perpetuation of impunity amongst criminal perpetrators (2012); Shohini Chaudhuri critiques the film for taking a moralistic position on the gangsters, which may prevent viewers from realising that they belong to the same global capitalist order, and that there is a corresponding need for ‘ethical reflection on how atrocities happen’ (2014, 180). Robert Sinnerbrink sees the film as ‘a confronting ethical experiment in imaginative “psychotherapy”’ (2016, 171), arguing that through its cinematic references the film offers a ‘subtle allegorical evocation of the “cultural imperialist” background to the state-sanctioned killings’ as it investigates the ‘ideological economy of images’ that sustained the murders (175, 178). Lú cia Nagib, drawing on Viveiros de Castro (see Chapter 4) discusses the film’s political aim, of ‘forcing the perpetrators into the skin of their victims so as to give them a physical sense of the plights they have caused’ (2016a, 146).
10. A Hegelian view of self-interested modern civil society, a murder in the USA, a Bertolt Brecht play, an item in a Chinese newspaper, hardcore pornography, etc.
11. Ž iž ek’s argument regarding The Act of Killing replicates his previously stated position on contemporary society and withdrawal into privacy (2003, 38).
12. As the focus of much analysis on this scene suggests, this may be the most important scene in the film (Hearman 2014; McGregor 2014; Sinnerbrink 2016).
13. At the Foot is part of an emerging trend in Uruguayan documentary that explores the recent past, focusing on the period under or following the dictatorship. This includes: Memorias de mujeres (Virginia Martí nez, 2005), Siete instantes (Diana Cardozo, 2007), El cí rculo (José Pedro Charlo and Aldo Garay, 2008), Es esa foto (Á lvaro Peralta, 2008), Vacuum (Marí a Teresa Curzio, 2008), and Decile a Mario que no vuelva (Mario Handler, 2008) (Ruffinelli 2013; Martin-Jones and Montañ ez 2013a).