Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture

In an extraordinary essay about how poetry written out of the experience of atrocity bears witness to that experience, Carolyn Forché describes the aftermath of atrocity as “a temporal debris field […] where that-which-happened remains present, including the consciousness in which such events arose and transpired.”¹ That consciousness of atrocity can take many forms, from the psychic and physical scars survivors bear to the political effects that atrocity produced. Forché details how the poet’s use of language that had itself “passed through” atrocity functions in two ways to convey its consciousness. First, the language is evidentiary rather than representational, bearing not just a recounting of experience, but also its ongoing presence, into the poem. Language “bears wounds,” she writes, “legible in line-breaks, in constellations of imagery, in ruptures of utterance, in silences and fissures of written speech.”² Second, it calls out to the reader to enjoin the work of witnessing that the poem undertakes. The poem itself becomes witness to atrocity as much through the poet’s formal choices as her subject matter, initiating a process of witnessing that can only be completed through the reader’s engagement. This process does not reconfirm a fixed consciousness that previously existed, in an ahistorical return, but reflects the creative negotiation of atrocity and its aftermaths across different sites of meaning. Forché’s definition of the aftermath of atrocity as more than simply what comes “after” it, as instead a dense temporal field where past and present converge, characterizes many post conflict scenarios, and has particular resonance in sites where impunity for atrocity continues to shape contemporary lives. Contemporary Indonesia, where filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer has worked to illuminate the ongoing and contemporary effects of the 1965–66 mass murders that brought former President Suharto’s New Order government to power, is one such example.

With a largely Indonesian film crew who still maintain a protective anonymity, Oppenheimer spent a decade filming survivors and perpetrators of the murder campaign against hundreds of thousands of Indonesians accused of being communists, including Communist Party members, ethnic Chinese, students, unionists, and landless farmers. The death toll is estimated at 500,000 to 1.5 million people (although some put the number as high as two million dead), in addition to one million people imprisoned, many without trial ³; and the discrepancy between these figures provides just one indication of the lack of accounting—enumerating, verifying, reckoning, answering for—that has occurred within Indonesia and among its allies (including the US government). Throughout Suharto’s thirty-three-year rule, and even since his removal from office in 1998, the mass murders, although not celebrated, have been scripted as essential to a strong, sovereign, Indonesian national identity and its neoliberal policies. Survivors and their families are thus subject to an ongoing fear, as they live in the knowledge that their precaritization is a necessary component of the government’s self-legitimization. Precaritization of certain segments of the population has become normalized in order to enable what Isabell Lorey terms “governing through insecurity”⁴: the manipulation of rhetoric of endangerment to rationalize the state’s military securitization against designated internal threats. With a keen sense of the individual and political costs of living in the aftermath, where perpetrators flourish with impunity and survivors persist in fear among them, Oppenheimer made two films: the first, The Act of Killing⁵ or Jagal (2012; co-directed by Anonymous and Christine Cynn), portrays three perpetrators—Anwar Congo, Herman Koto, and Adi Zulkadry—from North Sumatra who accept Oppenheimer’s invitation to re-dramatize their atrocities in the cinematic styles of the movies they love; and the second, The Look of Silence or Senyap (2014), focuses on a survivor, Adi Rukun, who confronts the perpetrators of his brother, Ramli’s, torture and murder in hopes of finding a way to escape the fear which has crippled his family for almost fifty years and, just possibly, to create a community capable of “co-flourishing” for the future.⁶

This chapter presses on Forché’s theorization of witnessing in the aftermath in order to analyze how Oppenheimer’s films construct and construe a visual field through which the political subjectivization of those readily sacrificed in the name of national security might take place. Whereas Forché emphasizes the ethico-aesthetic work of witness poetry, I consider how Oppenheimer’s films challenge familiar formal categories and, in doing so, re-shape political as well as aesthetic terrain—the social imaginary and political discourse of the purge and the generic conventions of documentary film. This shift in the contours of Forché’s argument is made possible in part by the shift in media. According to Jacques Rancière, literature provides a “means of constructing the very world in which stories can occur, events link with one another in sequence, appearances arise.”⁷ In his view, film works differently and contradictorily: “one [feature] is intensification of the visual aspect of the word, of the bodies that carry it and the things they speak of; the other is intensification of the visible as something that disclaims the word or shows the absence of what it speaks of.”⁸ These powers of intensification illuminate the tension between what film shows (and does not show) and how it shows, both of which only have meaning in reference to a shared and dynamic social imaginary. Among the six functions Rancière identifies for film is as “an ideological apparatus producing images that circulate in society and in which society recognizes its modern stereotypes.” These images, however, are never entirely beholden to the ideological apparatus from which they arise because of the tensions between content and form, presence and absence, as well as film’s deep affective capacity. The affects it generates are themselves mutable, leaving “the residue of those presences that accumulate and settle in us as their reality fades and alters over time.”⁹ Film potentially plays a crucial role, in other words, in visualizing the social imaginary across temporalities, but also in drawing attention to the slippages among its images, their construction, and their effects in the “temporal debris field” that Forché describes.

Nicholas Mirzoeff rightly insists on the need to locate Rancière’s approach in historical context in order to demonstrate how a political terrain is constituted, subject to scrutiny, and available for “countervisual” interpretation, rather than to assert an abstraction about art and politics. Mirzoeff explains visuality as “discursive practice that has material effects” and is located in the work of social imagination, as opposed to any individual perception. Visuality provides an optic that corresponds to and confirms the perspective of authority. Locating his study of visuality in the context of European colonialism and US (neo)imperialism, he understands visuality’s operations to include the constitution and aestheticization of distinct social groups, operations that objectify persons according to identity categories and simultaneously delimit their political agency. Visuality and the visualizations it produced “supplemented the violence of authority and its separations, forming a complex that came to seem natural by virtue of its investment in ‘history.’”¹⁰ Visuality enhances the work of governmentality by naturalizing its operations according to visual schema of recognizable categories of the disenfranchised. To interrupt the power of visuality and visualization to define the terms of the social imaginary within which embodied existence takes place, Mirzoeff develops a theory of countervisuality as the “dissensus within visuality” that he terms “the right to look.”¹¹ Countervisuality is not wholly distinct from but is instead bound up with visuality, continually impinging on its panoptical illusions. Most importantly, countervisuality’s assertion of the right to look denotes the political subjectivity that attends it, and thus, contra Agamben, insists that “bare life itself is political.”¹²

In response to a pervasive culture of impunity, the director formulated a filmmaking process in The Act of Killing to understand “the imaginative procedures by which human beings persecute each other, and how we then go on to build (and live in) societies founded on systemic and enduring violence.”¹⁴ In the film, Oppenheimer took perpetrators up on their seemingly enthusiastic willingness to dramatize their actions and invited them to write, direct, and act in their own film (with the assistance of both Oppenheimer’s film crew and one provided by the state) about their roles during the genocide, while Oppenheimer would simultaneously film and facilitate their process. Oppenheimer’s non-fiction film, then, is a cinematic narrative that contains scenes of making the perpetrator’s film within it, and viewers continually confront the difference between the perpetrators’ and Oppenheimer’s storytelling, as well as between their stories. By engaging perpetrators’ performance of the operations of visuality, The Act of Killing denaturalizes those operations and renders visuality at once phantasmatic and, in its effects, all too real.

By re-enacting the roles they imagine and then re-viewing those roles through the lens Oppenheimer provides (a process mirrored by viewers of the film who watch the three character-subjects screening their scenes), lead characters Anwar, Adi, and Herman face fractures in ideological coherence caused by the forty-year interval from the original events, perhaps by their own consciences, and certainly by the self-alienating effects of seeing themselves through the eyes of the filmmaker or a spectator. These fractures manifest in the cinematic fantasies the men construct, as well as in the larger frame of Oppenheimer’s film, producing vertigo among both the actors as well as the film’s viewers, albeit for different reasons.

Mirzoeff points out that the “ability to assemble a visualization manifests the authority of the visualizer. In turn, the authorizing of authority requires permanent renewal in order to win consent as the ‘normal,’ or everyday, because it is always already contested.”¹⁵ By staging the performative compulsion of the operations of visuality, their necessary iterability becomes at once paramount and increasingly fraught. Each performance attempts to extend prevailing norms into a new present; however each performance also carries with it the possibility of miscue, unintelligibility, or other failures that reveal cracks in visuality’s ideological foundations. These cracks manifest in the shifts of the camera’s gaze that always seeks to ratify the performance at hand, but does not always succeed, in part because the gaze is constantly revealed to be partial, contingent, and changing. The authority behind each performance is similarly unstable, also shifting continuously amongt the film’s character-subjects and between them and the director. Finally, The Act of Killing makes visible multiple meanings of performativity, in addition to performativity as an attempt to reassert particular positions tied to sovereign subjectivity. Performativity also describes the film’s production of affect and of spectacle, its heterotemporal irruptions, its political engagement, and, as the film’s title suggests, its meditation on what the performance of atrocity reveals about the stage upon which it occurs. By layering these forms of performativity in phantasmatic and realist aesthetic registers, the film generates among both participants and viewers a sense of vertigo that undermines the stable authority of visuality.

Whereas vertigo in The Act of Killing ultimately discloses the failure of sovereign subjectivity through the revelation of the performativity (as opposed to naturalization) of specific identities in which authority is recognizable, vertigo in The Look of Silence emerges from the film’s layered, often harrowing renderings of vulnerability and precarity. These include the vulnerabilities of embodied existence, social relations, and biopolitical governance (the three forms of precariousness that Lorey defines) as well as its protagonist, Adi Rukun’s radical self-precaritization in his confrontations with perpetrators of his brother’s murder. Although select scenes in The Look of Silence were filmed prior to The Act of Killing, when Oppenheimer was conducting the interviews with perpetrators that included Anwar Congo, The Act of Killing had been completed but not released when Adi Rukun asked Oppenheimer to engage the second project. Adi made this request after screening many of Oppenheimer’s earlier interviews, including ones with perpetrators of his brother’s prolonged mutilations and brutal murder. Perpetrators who knew of the first film, and, therefore, of Oppenheimer’s links with national leaders of the genocidal campaigns, were willing to be filmed with Adi, who often came with his optician equipment and offered free eye exams and services as an entry into conversation. Carrying the ethical, affective, and political weight of the film, Adi’s performances are dramatic in both their cinematic effects and their staging of his own claim to political subjectivity in relation to those who would deny or simply refuse to recognize it.

Historical and Cinematic Contexts of Visuality

The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence grew out of the Oppenheimer’s extensive work with a community of survivors of the 1965–66 genocide in Indonesia. Initially commissioned by the International Union of Food and Agricultural Workers to make what became The Globalization Tapes (2002) with a group of oil palm plantation workers who wanted to unionize, Oppenheimer came to realize that survivors and victims’ families from the murder campaign still lived in fear among the perpetrators. Perpetrators, in turn, seemed to bear no shame, guilt, or punishment for the atrocities they committed and, indeed, continued to wield power to suppress contemporary unionization efforts. Deploying the fear of a reprised campaign of violence, those in power continued to cement their privilege decades after the violence that brought Suharto to power and even after protests against his administration’s corruption and nepotism, combined with political pressure from the US, brought his rule to an end. The 1965–66 episode in Indonesian history, perhaps most familiar to US film viewers through The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) with Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, and Linda Hunt (as Billy Kwan), ignited when disaffected junior military officers staged a failed coup by assassinating six army generals. Although the regime of the anti-colonial and independence hero Sukarno was not in serious jeopardy, the threat provided a rationale for a purge of “leftists” as well as the transfer of presidential powers to General Suharto, who ruled Indonesia for the ensuing thirty-three years.¹⁸

The “pretext for mass murder,” in historian John Roosa’s words, emerged from a struggle within the Indonesian armed forces for political power in the face of President Sukarno’s failing health and his alliance with the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI). After the coup attempt, Army General Suharto declared his intention to “restore order.” He centralized power in the military (after purging it of those connected to the PKI) and orchestrated a campaign with both tacit and active US support to decimate what was then the world’s largest non-bloc Communist party, thereby denying Sukarno one of his main constituencies. Suharto completed this transfer of power in 1967 when he assumed the presidency, inaugurating thirty-one more years of New Order government as well as a lasting culture of impunity for the perpetrators and beneficiaries of the mass murder and intimidation campaign. Although the failed coup was less a threat to the security of the nation than an excuse for its military securitization, “[t]he claim that the PKI organized the movement was, for the Suharto regime, not any ordinary fact; it was the supreme fact of history from which the very legitimacy of the regime was derived.”¹⁹ That this “supreme fact” was fiction did not limit its catalytic force in dictating the operations of visuality that secured Suharto’s rule.

Three aspects of this brief history have crucial bearing on Oppenheimer’s films and the operations of visuality they disclose. First, not only have the crimes of political genocide, mass murder, political intimidation, and imprisonment without trial never been prosecuted within Indonesia, but the perpetrators are also recognized locally as protectors of the state by a ruling class that has maintained the rhetoric of anti-Communism to legitimate its own power. Even on a national level, where official discourse has been less overtly celebratory and more euphemistic, the rhetoric of “freedom and insecurity form the new couple of neoliberal governmentality,” as Lorey accurately describes.²⁰ The mobilization of fear insists on the continued urgency of this visualization of national strength and security. Oppenheimer discovered in filming survivors and perpetrators that, for the latter, “words that would have genocidal connotations—[kill, stab,] exterminate—had heroic connotations;”²¹ whereas survivors and bystanders, as one Indonesian commentator writes, had “tacitly come to accept human rights abuses as the implicit political price for unity and the rule of the mob as an ugly but ordinary part of life.”²² Oppenheimer attributes these strategies to the internalization of state terror and a “colossal failure of the imagination,” which Suharto engineered through media control and the manipulation of anti-Communism into “the state religion, complete with sacred sites, rituals, and dates.”²³

Second, in keeping with Cold War alliances, post-Vietnam fears of Communist incursions, and neo-liberal economic policies, the US supported Suharto’s long regime, and Oppenheimer and his film crew were initially presumed to be contemporary allies by those living with impunity. This presumption is understandable, given the history of US-Indonesia relations. Bradley R. Simpson demonstrates, for example, that even during the administration of US President Jimmy Carter, which championed rights rhetoric, human rights violations were narrowly defined and subject to trade for economic and military alliances. Simpson illustrates how, in concert with the rise of Amnesty International and its focus on prisoners of conscience, “political prisoners and torture bec[a]me the lingua franca of human rights politics” for both Indonesian and international human rights groups. Although US political pressure led to the release of 30,000 political prisoners, that release came at the expense of other human rights campaigns, including efforts in response to the mass murders of 1965–66 as well as to Indonesia’s invasion of and atrocities within East Timor beginning in 1975.²⁴ In presuming that Oppenheimer shared their perspective, perpetrators in The Act of Killing also presumed that their performances for the camera would inevitably re-authorize authority, as Mirzoeff describes.

For the street-level perpetrators who carried out the state’s violence yet only partially reaped its rewards, participation in The Act of Killing seemed to promise a vehicle to solidify and burnish their reputations. It would allow them to glorify actions that they were willing to believe were essential, yet which had been insufficiently commended nationally.²⁵ The film’s focal point, Anwar Congo, initially envisions a “beautiful family movie” of his “heroic memories” that would feature humor and “wonderful scenery.” Screening his work, Anwar adds that, “It really shows what’s special about our country.” Moreover, Anwar anticipates that the performative reproduction of visuality, his re-dramatization of atrocity as a movie star, will transform him from authority’s instrument to its hero; thus he can state, “I’m now projecting myself into history on a bigger scale than I have before.”²⁶ “Projecting” in this statement references film’s crucial role in the production of the social imaginary, as well as Anwar’s individual desire to distribute a heroic view of himself to a larger audience—and, more specifically, to be recognized as an historical agent. In psychoanalytic terms, projection has another meaning, however, that intimates the fissures to come in his sense of himself. For Freud, projection is a defensive operation that attributes “to another (person or thing) […] qualities, feelings or wishes that the subject repudiates or refuses to recognise in himself.”²⁷ When Anwar and his friends and associates spectacularize their actions as well as play the role of victims, these complex operations of projection come to the surface and disturb the ideological consistency of their initial visions. The Look of Silence is similarly made possible by perpetrators’ familiarity with Oppenheimer from The Act of Killing and because governing officials whose power is rooted in those founding atrocities cooperated with the making of that earlier film. In addition, Oppenheimer and his crew’s presence offers some measure of personal protection for Adi as he asks neighbors, relatives, and local officials about their roles during the genocide.

Third, in Medan, North Sumatra, where The Act of Killing takes place, the government had and has a particularly close relationship with the gangster and paramilitary organizations that conducted the army-directed atrocities and remain tacitly employed to enforce political control over an unusually diverse population.²⁸ The un-ironic alliance between the government and gangsters or preman is couched in neoliberal rhetoric of freedom and entrepreneurial subjectivity, both of which are instrumentalized by the security state. Building upon Foucault’s work, Erinn Gilson defines two key features of entrepreneurial subjectivity: its aversion to vulnerability, “regarding it not just as a condition to avoid but also as a bad character trait to possess,” and, correspondingly, its belief that responsibility for risk should be privatized.²⁹ In a context of 1965 Indonesia, Suharto’s bid for power in the name of national security against the ostensible threat of Communists mobilized fear alongside the rhetoric of the spontaneous uprisings of the populace against those that threatened the state. Violence that was manufactured by the state was instead attributed to the entrepreneurial, sovereign subject who distributes “injurability onto an other by doing violence to that other in order to secure its own impermeability, invulnerability, and defense against violence.”³⁰ Through the doubling of persecution and sovereignty—in which the threat of persecution provides a rationale for violence whose effects, in turn, confirm the deserved injurability of an other—the entrepreneurial subject valorized by the state can maintain a cycle of violent privilege in the name of both the subject and the state’s defense. Entrepreneurial subjects in the film—e.g., the newspaper publisher, land developer, leader of the Pancasila Youth—clearly reap the rewards of the neoliberal policies of the state that they helped to advance.

The Act of Killing demonstrates how entrepreneurial subjectivity lies at the heart of what Paul Amar terms the logic of paramilitary securitization, which “enforces territorially anchored and highly masculinist notions of security that proliferate in the context of deregulated, privatized, or entrepreneurial coercive interventions.”³¹ For instance, the film lingers at a rally of the Pancasila Youth, a paramilitary organization with three million members, where its leaders celebrate their combined roles as preman and “free men.” Claiming the state of exception for themselves and in the nation’s interests, the Pancasila leaders publicly proclaim themselves outside the law and not subject to its limitations, even though they remain protected by it. This condition of at once exemption and protection is manifest as the rally’s special guest, the vice president of Indonesia, receives an honorary uniform and a raucous reception when he tells the crowd that the government “need[s] gangsters to get things done.”

That the discourse of privatized security and individual freedom is directed toward capital accumulation and the consolidation of different social classes as opposed to broadly shared social and economic rights is made clear in the many sequences of both paramilitaries and elites at the golf club or in lavish offices or homes. In one memorable scene in The Act of Killing, a local businessman proudly displays his crystal figurine collection for the camera. It is a documentary moment; however, the disjunctions between this life of rare privilege and the atrocities upon which it is founded transform the real into the surreal. The alliance between the paramilitaries and gangsters and the government echoes in other scenes that link past and present, such as the complicity of local journalists in justifying the genocide, contemporary shakedowns of ethnic Chinese merchants, and Herman Koto’s bald attempts to buy votes in an upcoming election in hopes of securing for himself a steady source of graft. At the same time, The Act of Killing in particular underscores the separation between the street-level gangsters and paramilitaries who enforce a regime built upon fear and the political office holders and business elites who benefit most from that regime.

These three features—the lasting impunity of direct perpetrators and their superiors, the perception of continued American support for the murder campaign, and the privatization of the violence that sustains authority in conjunction with the unequal distribution of its rewards—shape the contours of both films by defining a political problem and how the filmmakers gained access to it. The countervisual work of the films, then, depends on the specific codes of visuality that connect these different features. Linking the flamboyant fantasy of The Act of Killing and the quiet realism of The Look of Silence is the propaganda that undergirded the New Order government. One of its recurring elements is the film The Treachery of the September 30th Movement of the Indonesian Communist Party, or Pengkhianatan G30S PKI (G30S), which, Oppenheimer has written, “marks the generic imperatives, stylistic tendencies and performative routines and effects of New Order history.”³² The four-hour film was mandatory viewing for Indonesians every September 30th from 1984 to 1998, and it annually re-certified Suharto’s claim to power in the name of national security. G30S’s gory depiction of the failed coup attempt consistently reminded viewers of the ongoing need for Suharto’s emergency decree of 3 October 1965 to restore order, and it prohibited questioning the mass murders undertaken at the same time. In a style Oppenheimer and Michael Uwemedimo have described as a “curious blend of documentary exposé, political thriller, and slasher movie,” the film climaxed in “the graphic murder of the six generals at the hands of a communist mob, their genitals mutilated in a sadomasochistic orgy perpetrated by members of the PKI-affiliated Gerwani (Women’s Movement), burnt with cigarettes, slashed with razor blades, stabbed with bayonets, beaten with rifle butts, all to the accompaniment of wild chanting and drums.”³³ This depiction of a feminized, unruly, violent, sadistic, and sexualized threat provided an enemy against which the hyper-masculine, entrepreneurial and securitized subject must prevail. As the description of its aesthetics makes clear, G30S’s visual codes represent Suharto’s New Order authority in binary gendered terms. These codes “presuppose[e] a mind/body dualism” in the “pursuit of invulnerability,” in Gilson’s words,³⁴ such that the hyper-masculine control by the entrepreneurial subject appears necessary to contain the embodied excess of leftist, feminized perversion.

Although G30S does not of course provide the complete visualization of the past that sustains the present, the film and its fifteen-year run raise key questions about how Oppenheimer engages visuality in order to subvert it. To begin, given that the power of G30S is rooted in its historical inaccuracy, how do The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence make the past available for scrutiny? Both films have been critiqued for their failure to link the violence that initiated Suharto’s political rule to Indonesia’s history of colonization and decolonization, Sukarno’s role as independence leader, as well as the international corporate influence over key industries. Aside from a brief mention of “direct aid of western governments” in a historical paragraph about 1965–66 that opens the film, The Act of Killing reports neither American characterization of the murder campaign as a necessary evil in the fight against Communism nor decades of American support for Suharto’s government, which included supplying names of 5,000 suspected Communists during the murder campaign as well as the Carter administration’s suppression of human rights reporting on Indonesia’s atrocities in East Timor a decade later.³⁵ Although the film does not address US complicity directly, viewers are prompted to question Oppenheimer’s access to perpetrators, particularly when that access takes place against the backdrop of scenes of private accumulation, such as in the shopping mall, the private museum of dead animals, or one man’s crystal collection.

With the exception of one short sequence of a NBC report in The Look of Silence that clearly demonstrates US political and corporate complicity (in footage of the use of forced labor in a Goodyear plant and an appallingly blasé exchange about the murder of “communists”), the films eschew historical footage and the talking heads who would typically provide larger context concerning Indonesia’s Dutch colonial past, the role of US and other international oil and rubber interests, and US political support for the massacres, asking instead for viewers to understand more broadly the violence upon which the growth of neoliberalism and the security state is predicated and sustained. Jill Godmilow, among others, has criticized The Act of Killing for its failure to “educate” viewers, writing forcefully, “Don’t Make History without Facts.”³⁶ Within her larger argument about how the film constructs Indonesians for a western audience, using spectacle to produce Indonesians as other and, ultimately, as entertainment, Godmilow’s critique depends upon understanding the function of documentary film to cultivate and educate particular audiences and, in doing so, to keep the public and private worlds of the perpetrators rigorously separated. Of the perpetrators’ admission of their crimes before the camera, she writes that “Confessions are private matters unless part of a reconciliation process.”³⁷

Oppenheimer arguably understands both his audience (Indonesian and international) and the role of “non-fictional” film³⁸ in relation to normative human rights processes differently, whereby the film’s narrative and aesthetic elements purposefully transgress the boundaries between public and private in order to question the interests that are served by that boundary. The Act of Killing’s evidentiary function, to return to Forché’s formulation of it, is not juridical but rather manifests in its proliferation of performances around the mass murders. These performances destabilize the boundary between public and private that should sustain sovereign subjectivity by rationalizing atrocity as a legitimate function of governmentality, while they simultaneously draw attention to their own constructions. The film, therefore, reveals how performativity potentially loosens the layers of ideology that are knotted, according to Kaja Silverman, by the libidinal investments in the “reservoir of sounds, images, and narratives” that works alongside the law to maintain the political order.³⁹ The separation of the juridical and political orders in this case also underscores that not all politics need to be juridical to be effective, and that human rights remain just one approach to justice.

The question of genre here is crucial both to how Oppenheimer’s films are understood and to the tropes around which they are organized. In terms of their own categorization, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence reformulate the familiar components of documentary film—archival historical material, the interview, and the historical re-creation—in order to blow open its generic conventions and to emphasize the heterotemporality of atrocity that still bears on the present rather than the exposure of the past. In place of an investigation into the archives, in The Act of Killing Oppenheimer reveals the political offices that beneficiaries of the genocide still hold and the benefits they accrue. And in place of the filmmaker’s interviews with an array of experts and survivors, The Look of Silence creates the conditions for Adi Rukun’s confrontations with the perpetrators in which he slowly reveals himself as a survivor. These interviews are not fact-finding missions grounded in professionalized knowledge and expertise; instead they provide the foundation for a socio-political relationship to take place, and then they document its process. And as opposed to historical re-creation, Oppenheimer describes the perpetrators’ dramatic re-imagination of their crimes in The Act of Killing, for instance, as “counter-performances” that, in attempting to rehearse New Order historiography of the purge as the spontaneous uprising of the people against Communism, unwittingly betray that historiography as scripted and performative.⁴⁰ In each of these ways, the films deploy visual intensity to denaturalize the surface upon which intensification takes place, revealing the layers of performativity and vulnerability beneath it. His cinematic language seems to have “passed through” atrocity in Forché’s terms in that it is creating what it witnesses: the composition of arresting images, whose layered meanings trouble easy divisions between past and present and what is imagined and real; long, slow shots to convey the haunting presence of the dead and of the survivors’ suffering; careful soundtracks that often provide a counternarrative to the perpetrators’ perspectives; and, the framing of perpetrators’ vertiginous imaginations.

Both films have received extensive critical acclaim, although The Act of Killing in particular ignited global media attention and debate over its attention to perpetrators as opposed to victims and survivors, its often phantasmagorical images, and its intervention into Indonesian political discourse. An Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature increased attention to the film and the stakes of its portrayal of mass murderers as somehow at once bizarre and ordinary, with film critic Nick Fraser calling it a “snuff movie” in The Guardian (London) while others praised it effusively.⁴¹ Kenneth Turan, for example, described The Act of Killing in the Los Angeles Times as “A mind-bending film, devastating and disorienting, that disturbs us in ways we’re not used to being disturbed, raising questions about the nature of documentary, the persistence of evil, and the intertwined ways movies function in our culture and in our minds.”⁴² The Look of Silence is a quieter, though still deeply disturbing film that has been admired for its elegant aesthetic and moral force in charting Adi’s confrontations with perpetrators who still hold power. Although critics note that the film works more conventionally than The Act of Killing to allow viewers’ identification with its survivor protagonist, that identification fails to secure the normative human rights narrative of atrocity, suffering, testimony, and redress. Indeed, Adi’s confrontations are not part of a larger human rights campaign; rather the film provides a context in which Adi can stage a personal and political claim in the void of a larger effort.

John Roosa has written powerfully that “[e]ach mass grave in the archipelago marks an arbitrary, unavowed, secretive exercise of state power and mocks the Suharto-era social imaginary in which only civilians commit atrocities and only the military holds the country together.”⁴³ The remainder of this chapter examines how Oppenheimer’s films probe the operations of this social imaginary and the political power it authorizes. Demonstrating that “in order to make invisible stories visible, you also have to make the storytelling process visible,”⁴⁴ Oppenheimer dramatizes the problematics of storytelling through the portrayal of performativity and its vertiginous effects. In The Act of Killing, performativity that seeks to sustain the visual field produces a contradictory array of affects, identifications, and projections that undermine its coherence and that of the entrepreneurial subject to which it is tied. The Look of Silence enters into a space made possible by the first film in order to claim a right to look that is founded on vulnerability, relationality, and responsivity as opposed to inviolable sovereignty.

On Vertigo

Oppenheimer’s Indonesia films extend the spectrum of responses typically associated with the cultural imaginary of human rights—such as sympathy, objectification, recognition, identification and mis-identification, denial, response-ability, or condemnation—and the so-called human rights cycle of violation, testimony, redress, and justice or healing. In their place, Oppenheimer generates a sense of vertigo: “this emotional pendulum where you do feel empathy but you also feel repulsion, enchantment, and horror, absurdity and something extremely serious.”⁴⁵ As a theoretical concept, vertigo comprises the affective and emotional pendulum that Oppenheimer describes; however, it also has material political effects in reorienting political subjects in a given context. Vertigo destabilizes existing narratives of (or silences around) atrocity by revealing their constructions in the operations of visuality, thus making possible new political claims. Moreover, vertigo locates agency in both the active work of imagination that destabilization demands, and in the subsequent political choices it generates.

In medical terms, vertigo, most often caused by an inner ear or vestibular disorder, results from disequilibrium among the senses that together otherwise produce the feeling of balance. When the inner ear, eyes, skin, and other sensors incorrectly send signals of motion instead of stasis, and the body is unable to make the fine adjustments necessary for balance, orientation, and stabilization, the result can be dizziness (either the sensation that one’s surroundings are spinning or that the self is spinning), unsteadiness, nausea, and vomiting. Its treatments include various exercises to retrain sensory perception and processing. These exercises can train the brain to recalibrate the information it receives, so that it compensates for the lack of equilibrium the senses convey. Alternatively, patients can learn to compensate psychologically to some extent by anchoring the gaze and consciously refocusing on the stability they know (cognitively) exists despite the (incorrect) sensory evidence to the contrary.

Whereas the medical definition of vertigo depends upon disruptions to spatial awareness, those definitions drawn from the humanities and social sciences also integrate a temporal component to describe the disarticulation of perspective with the historical moment, although vertigo remains a condition of vulnerability, danger, and misapprehension that needs treating. According to psychoanalysis and trauma theory, a psychological sense of vertigo often results from the experience of atrocity. Psychoanalytic definitions of trauma as a breach of the psychic shield that protects the subject (and thereby ensures the subject’s sense of coherence) infer that trauma can produce a radically destabilized, dislocated sense of self—often described by victims as a loss of self or a loss of trust in the bond between the self and the world—and, with it, uneven, nonlinear, or aporetic witnessing and testimonial narratives.

Contemporary postcolonial trauma theorists such as Stef Craps argue against a universalizing approach to recognizing and treating trauma within fixed narrative frames of illness, healing, and health. Reading trauma as universal across cultures and histories ignores its local causes, discourses, and practices of healing or resilience, or subordinates those roots and attributes to a largely western, medicalized discourse. Although the vertigo produced through The Act of Killing stems from the trauma that victims of the 1965–66 atrocities experienced, the film focuses primarily on the perpetrators’ as opposed to victims’ perspectives as well as on the longue durée, extending into the present, of its eventness, to borrow again from Peter Hitchcock. The temporal frames in the film are multiplied and conjoined through the use of historical recreation, present tense documentation, and fantasy. These temporal frames also shape the relationality of different psychic, individual, communal, national, and international spaces that the film constructs. It is also worth noting that although the film does portray the ordinariness of the perpetrators and their attempt to come to terms with their actions, its purpose is not their individual suffering so much as the larger (national) political and psychic toll of the murders and their legacy: the neoliberal policies that the national government pursues and that impunity-inspired fear facilitates. At the same time, by focusing on one perpetrator, Anwar Congo of Medan, North Sumatra, and his closest associates, the film has been critiqued for its lack of explicit attention to the victims and survivors’ stories as well as to the government’s role in outsourcing and then profiting from both the murder campaign and the social fear that followed. I develop Oppenheimer’s description of vertigo in the film not in order to expand discussion of the destabilization Anwar personally experiences, but to consider how that destabilization provides a window onto the wider operations of the social imaginary.

When vertigo has been used in other studies to describe specific historical frameworks, it also bears a sense of illness and crisis. In The Vertigo of Late Modernity, for instance, Jock Young defines vertigo as “the malaise of late modernity: a sense of insecurity[,] of insubstantiality, and of uncertainty, a whiff of chaos and a fear of falling.”⁴⁶ Similarly, in Apartheid Vertigo, David M. Matsinhe refers to the “dizzying sensation of tilting and spinning that convolutes our surroundings, disorients and distorts our reality perception” to describe the post-Apartheid distortions of race, power and identity in South Africa that, despite political change, continue to produce a hierarchical, racialized ideology and society.⁴⁷ From another angle, James Dawes defines something akin to vertigo as an essential first step in the process of transforming ordinary people into perpetrators, by removing them from their familiar contexts, undermining established parameters of moral behavior, and rewarding behaviors that would previously have been condemned. In Dawes’s discussion, however, destabilization is merely a means to establishing other, firmly enforced behavioral patterns. “In war,” he writes, “everything is weird. The landscape is foreign, seemingly unreal; we are separated from all the reference groups we have come to rely upon for moral judgment; nothing is familiar; there are no reality checks. War confuses us. In that confusion we begin to create new moral realities.”⁴⁸ What is remarkable about The Act of Killing is that it does not work to convey a sense of vertigo that the perpetrators experienced, thereby explaining their actions; rather, it produces vertigo as an effect of performativity. As a result, perpetrator-actors and viewers are caught in the vortex of those performances, such that it becomes necessary to reassess their/our relationships to a stabilizing narrative of national identity constructed in terms of freedom and security.

In The Look of Silence, vertigo is linked more explicitly to the experience of atrocity and stems from the multiple forms of precariousness the film renders. Viewers witness the corporeal and psychological effects of pervasive fear in intimate scenes with Adi’s parents, in the social reproduction of historical fiction in his children’s classroom, and in the power former perpetrators still hold and threaten constantly to violently wield. Functioning on affective, emotional, corporeal, social, and political levels, these displays of precarious existence delineate the scope of fear and silence and in doing so make them available for scrutiny. Vertigo arises first from the interplay of these different forms of precariousness and the radical destabilization of existence that they make visible. The film also functions vertiginously by exploiting the gap between imagination and perception, a gap that Mirzoeff defines as crucial to understanding visuality as the work of the social imaginary. The synesthesia of perceiving silence through visuality offers one example. In addition, this gap is evidenced by the heterogeneous temporalities referenced by the different forms of precariousness and vulnerability and made visible in the film. It is not just that the past, present, and Adi’s hope for an imagined future co-exist in the film, although that too is happening, but that the film unveils the different temporal modes or entanglements within which its storytelling takes place: a human lifespan, a nation’s history, the vicissitudes of memory, and the way film makes the past available to the present (e.g., when viewers see Adi screening earlier interviews Oppenheimer conducted with perpetrators in which they proudly recount their actions). Finally, whereas typically vertigo increases one’s vulnerability to disorientation, injury, and harm and, therefore, requires treatment, The Look of Silence reverses these terms. I read Adi’s encounters with perpetrators as a form of self-precaritization (made possible by the film) that produces vertigo among viewers and his interviewees precisely to destabilize and then re-orient the existing visual and verbal discursive field.

In meditating on the difficult task of scholarly work in human rights and on perpetrators in particular, Dawes describes its effects on the viewer or the receiver of testimony. Interviewing the Japanese men, now frail and elderly, who had committed rape, torture, and murder during the invasion of Nanjing in the Second Sino-Japanese War, he writes, “I sometimes felt like I was receiving a guided tour of hell. It was a feeling of intimacy and vertigo at the same time, of being directed and, simultaneously, being lost.”⁴⁹ This sense of spatial and temporal dislocation, while discomfiting in and of itself, demands new forms of framing: of narrativization, contextualization, and visualization. Whereas Dawes responds to the challenge in scholarly terms through an approach that is, at once, episodic, self-reflective, analytical and meditative, Oppenheimer pursues its productive potential through the right to look and the countervisualizations that right generates. The right to look, then, takes two different forms in the two films: in The Act of Killing it comes from the investigation into the performativity of violence, which de-couples the performances from the ideology that sought to naturalize those performances; in The Look of Silence, it comes from the subject’s purposeful endangerment in an atrocity whose most egregious effects he did not experience directly, yet that remains powerfully present. Vertigo in both films and in the sense of both spatial and temporal dislocation demands attention to the balance that has been lost or might be gained as well as to the strategies for achieving it, attributes with specific cultural, historical, and political referents. The films thus prompt a reassessment of the genre of human rights documentary. If genre is “a loose affectual contract that predicts the form that an aesthetic transaction will take,”⁵⁰ in Lauren Berlant’s definition, then the vertigo produced in and by the films through the performativity of both sovereignty and vulnerability also rewrites the contract between documentary and viewer by upending expectations and expanding the genre.

Performativity and Vertigo in The Act of Killing

Oppenheimer has described The Act of Killing as “a documentary of the imagination” rather than of an occurrence or “everyday life,”⁵¹ noting that he and his partners “developed a filmmaking method […] to understand why extreme violence, that we would hope would be unimaginable, is not only the exact opposite, but also routinely performed.”⁵² This filmmaking method resists conventional readerly or viewer desires: it does not cultivate sympathy for victims, demonize perpetrators, or reward viewers for their engagement (financial or otherwise). The film employs an aesthetic of excess and of blurred spaces and times to generate audience responses to both the atrocities and the project of reenactment that incorporate empathy, disgust, horror, and condemnation, while resisting the closure any one of these responses might offer on its own.

On the one hand, empathy, disgust, horror, and condemnation may each function separately to reify fixed identities by securing the distance between the judger and judged, ascribing agency solely to the former and upon the latter. And, the sanction of moral reprobation or humanitarian concern may derive some of its force by de-historicizing its own judgment so that it appears timeless and everlasting. In The Act of Killing, however, those spatial and temporal foundations that support normative identifications are confounded through the workings of performativity. Rather than a conventional historical documentary approach, the film takes as its point of departure the cinema-inspired memories and fantasies of a group of perpetrators. The Act of Killing at once facilitates and documents their re-imagination of their crimes, which have been heretofore commended as acts of heroic nationalism. In doing so, the film, in conjunction with a contemporaneous human rights campaign, creates a political and ethical space within Indonesia, which was previously foreclosed, through a re-enactment and ultimately an unmasking of the violent foundations of official nationalism.

Throughout Indonesia, the government designated local groups to carry out the violence, depending on their authority within those regions. In North Sumatra, the outsourcing of the genocide to gangsters and the still active Pancasila Youth organization played upon the gangsters’ close identification with Hollywood films and lucrative black market in movie tickets, both of which were threatened by leftists who organized boycotts in the 1960s of American film imports. Forty-plus years later in their own film, the aging gangsters anticipate the fulfillment of their own fantasies: they will get to approximate the famous characters whom they imitated in styling murder; stardom will transport them from the social margins closer to the center of socio-economic power of those who benefitted more lavishly from the gangsters’ direct crimes; and the bright light of their filmic and national acclaim will banish any shadows of the imagination where ethical qualms might linger.

This petty narcissism also illuminates what Dawes calls the paradox of evil, of perpetrators as at once exceptional and all too human. Despite the “moral affront” it might occasion, “[i]f we allow ourselves to imagine that evil is somehow extraordinary, somehow beyond the human,” Dawes argues, “then we can never identify and address the very ordinary situational and organizational features that regularly produce it.”⁵³ The power of The Act of Killing comes from its strange blend of the quotidian and the bizarre, excessive, or phantasmagorical. Rather than draw attention away from the banal and toward the fantastical, Oppenheimer and his crew highlight the role of performativity in identities the character-subjects inhabit and enact across that spectrum. Performativity in the film erases distinctions between what is taken for granted and what is extraordinary as well as between daily life and film acting; it spotlights the performativity of what has been normalized through the very operations of visuality. The blended modes of fantasy and documentary, each with their own performative codes, not only traverse a plethora of spatial scales (e.g., the psychic spaces of nightmares and desires, the protagonist’s bedroom, the movie set, the national media studio, the murder roof deck, the city, the nation, the spaces occupied by international audiences and human rights norms); those modes also disrupt the temporal unity that sustains official nationalism predicated on a progressive narrative of masculinized national strength and capital accumulation.

The perpetrators’ ignorance of documentary film as a genre freed their vision from its norms and conventions. The scenes within The Act of Killing are constructed with reference to Hollywood war movies as well as the perpetrators’ collective imagination of what is majestic, beautiful, and powerful. Oppenheimer frames those reenactments with a more extensive trailing of and interviews with his three main subjects, always unmasking his own presence behind the camera in the process. Although Anwar Congo, the film’s focus, and Oppenheimer are pursuing different personal and professional goals throughout the endeavor, at times the difference between the two films (the one the perpetrators pursue and the one Oppenheimer completes) blurs in terms of their performances and their aesthetics. In some scenes, the perpetrators have their own film crew, and showing the crew in action allows Oppenheimer to frame the perpetrators’ negotiatory process over the construction of their visualization. In other cases, Oppenheimer notes that Anwar “was incapable of acting well when there was a script.” Thus, in particularly difficult emotional scenes, Oppenheimer’s crew would replace Anwar’s—to “make it quieter [… for him … and to] create spaces in which he could design a scene, call action, act the scene, call cut, and reflect on the scene, all in the same take, where he and his friends were free to improvise.”⁵⁴ Such moments underscore the extent to which Oppenheimer’s crew do not so much document something that exists as document the process of bringing the imaginative work of the perpetrators to filmic fruition. Through that process, roles of victim, perpetrator, director, actor, subject, and viewer often leak into one another, or exist in simultaneous contradiction, making it difficult to ascribe a moral perspective to a specific positionality or identity. In place of fixed historical and dramatic roles, Oppenheimer presents the distant viewer with layers of performativity that continually refract and reflect back on one another.

Although The Act of Killing includes just a brief scene from G30S, its gory aesthetic and gendered logic influence some of Anwar and his friends’ formal choices, often producing incoherent results. The ostensibly easy identification of national heroes and villains, of the generals and the Communists, in the purges as the propaganda dictated is undone cinematically when Anwar and his friends re-enact the September 30th event. In this attempt, the gendered logic of the propaganda unravels, and the repercussions of that unraveling echo throughout the film. In a scene modeled after G30S, Anwar and Adi are made-up to look like the generals who were killed, such that they place themselves as the victims of the crime (the coup attempt) that would turn them into perpetrators (Fig. 5.1). Oppenheimer includes footage of Anwar remembering the annual, mandatory school screenings of G30S and his pride “because I killed the Communists who looked so cruel in the film.” However, what should be a clear, gendered distinction between the grotesque threat the Communist women’s group ostensibly poses on the one hand and rational, entrepreneurial subjectivity on the other becomes difficult to read because of the actors’ own performances.

Figure 5.1 Adi Zulkadry and Anwar Congo. Photo by Anonymous. Still from The Act of Killing (2012). Reprinted by permission of Final Cut for Real.

Despite participation in the mass murders that G30S implicitly condones as necessary to save the nation from the sadistic predations of a feminized Communism, Anwar never received the kinds of financial rewards for his crimes that accrued to the elite, and he consistently has trouble performing the hyper-masculinized roles of those elites who profit from the neoliberal re-scripting of laws and freedom. This difficulty seems compounded by a scene that would require him to play the victim of the Communists, a role that admits to the vulnerability of the ostensibly sovereign subject. While Anwar seems out of place in the scene (Oppenheimer shows him, for instance, still in make-up and directing behind the camera), his younger side-kick, Herman, offers a performance as a gleeful, grotesque, flamboyantly transgendered assassin who relishes her task. Herman’s campy performance as a member of the Gerwani exposes the gap between imagination and reality and undermines the gendered binary logic that sustains the need for egregiously masculine, extra-legal securitization. His performance makes it possible to recognize that third meaning of projection implicit in Anwar’s earlier statement about projecting himself into history. As Oppenheimer has noted, “this kind of cannibalistic orgy of violence, which is depicted in G30S, is to project a fantasy of the victims in the image of the perpetrators and thereby to justify retrospectively, retroactively what the perpetrators have done.”⁵⁵

Whereas most discussions of The Act of Killing understandably focus on Anwar, I find Herman to be crucial to the disruption of visuality that the film engenders (Fig. 5.2). Herman’s physical excesses (evident in his rotundity as well as in such quotidian yet grotesque actions as toothpaste foam dripping down his bare belly while he brushes), love of acting, and penchant for cross-dressing that often seems borrowed from the drag queens in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) create moments of radical incongruity with the hyper-masculine codes of the paramilitaries and government officials. The film depicts repeatedly the ways in which egregious masculine norms in the available personae of the gangster and the paramilitary are predatory rather than protective. Paramilitary and government leaders unabashedly make lewd and obscene comments to the coterie of young women who surround them, and that flagrant objectification seems easily transferrable to other persons. In a particularly notable example, one of the local Pancasila members who also performs in Anwar’s film boasts of raping young girls while he lounges during a break in filming a village burning re-enactment—a scene populated by Pancasila family members and neighbors who play the victims. Such moments expose the rationale for the purges as fictions, even though their violence is both real and seemingly imminent.

Figure 5.2 Herman Koto. Still from The Act of Killing (2012). Reprinted by permission of Final Cut for Real.

Although acting within the perpetrators’ scripts of their crimes, Herman (who was too young to participate in the mass murders) distances himself from the egregious masculinity (represented most obviously by Pancasila leader Yapto Soerjosoemarno) through his flamboyant performances as women and in his moments of tenderness, such as wiping his daughter’s nose when she cries or attending to Anwar. Although Herman is eager to capitalize upon the potential for graft and extortion that masculinized positions of authority represent, these performances repeatedly fail. A memorable sequence shows Herman during his unsuccessful campaign for parliament. He can’t remember his lines (the first of which is: “I am Herman”); he is more adept at frightening than listening to constituents; and he does not know how to answer their demands. Oppenheimer documents Herman’s electoral loss via a process already revealed to be farcical, in a shot from above, looking down at Herman as he lies exposed on his bed and tells his daughter to be brave no matter what challenges she faces.

The Herman that re-emerges in front of the camera after the loss of the election foregoes restraint and embraces all the liberties possible in his dramatic roles in Anwar’s film. Herman’s often feminized, campy performativity underscores the limits of social positions otherwise available to him and enables him to claim a marginalized space from which, finally, to speak and to act, albeit in ways that are only acceptable within the confines of the film. Out of his elaborate costumes, when barely clothed or dressed casually, Herman is regularly contradicted and denigrated by his companions as fat, ugly, and smelly, especially next to Anwar’s fastidiousness and vanity. In drag, however, Herman always steals the scene, and his embodiment of spectacular excess gives corporeal, moral, and aesthetic expression to the horror that conventional narratives cannot contain. This expression comprises both visually striking compositions and the complicated aesthetics of disgust—as when he grotesquely parodies the government propaganda film, portraying a Communist woman eating a victim’s organs and smearing herself with blood, a performance which makes Anwar (who portrays the victim)—and perhaps some viewers—audibly gag. In an early interview about the film, Oppenheimer expressed his desire to “create an experience which overflows the boundaries […] to create a toxic mess which is hard to clean up.”⁵⁶ Herman’s corporeal and dramatic excesses overflow the boundaries of gendered norms to reveal the toxicity of those norms as opposed to his performances. He shows sovereign, securitized subjectivity to be a violent expression of economic and political privilege, rather than gendered naturalism.

Given that Herman’s most successful performances can only take place on screen, the film implicitly asks whether alternative subject positions exist for people like Herman. A final scene (from the Director’s Cut of the film) of Herman suggests this is unlikely. Closely shot from directly opposite his large head and belly, Oppenheimer shows Herman bare-chested, drumming, and screaming at full volume. Unlike the self-pitying monologue when he lost his political campaign, or, by contrast, his theatrical, campy performances as a threat to the nation, Herman in the drumming scene conveys a sense of horror that is linked visually and audibly with the body. This display of humanness in its bare corporeal, sensory expression is no less performance than previous scenes; however, it underscores the baseness, contradictions, and hollowness of existing narrative frames around the mass murders and the culture of impunity that followed. And although Herman cannot represent the victims or translate their experiences, his scream invokes recognition of all those throats choked, eyes unclosed, blood spilled, and bodies thrown over the bridge. Like the earlier shot of him exposed on his bed, this scene calls for new roles, new actors, and new stories.

The substitution of phantasmagorical for documentary aesthetics provides another source of perspectival vertigo. An early, decontextualized scene shows dancing showgirls perched before a waterfall on a mountainous slope, while a voice off camera coaches them, “Smile. More teeth […] And natural beauty. This isn’t fake.” Oppenheimer returns to this moment later in the film, and it becomes a climactic moment in the perpetrators’ imagination of their own moral absolution. With music replacing the coaching, the perpetrators portray themselves being awarded medals (by their victims!) in heaven for their good deeds on earth. The redemption promised the characters-actors is foreclosed by the film’s aesthetics. As Oppenheimer describes, “It’s tacky—the characters are glowing ever so slightly—but it’s also undeniably majestic. This comes in a moment in the film when we’re all very vulnerable, and so it has force.”⁵⁷ The film creates a delicate balance between expressing the perpetrators’ highly stylized imaginations and warning against their pernicious effects. In such moments, the ability of aesthetic seduction to interpellate the viewer into the fantasies it construes is undone by Oppenheimer’s editing, which consistently frames such scenes within the larger project, distancing the viewer from the fantasy itself. Similarly, the scene mentioned earlier of an attack on a village—shot from a distance through fire, with women and children screaming and crying, to model a Hollywood war film—separates the sound from the image and ends with scene director’s shout: “Cut, cut, cut!”

Editing in The Act of Killing at once emphasizes and destabilizes the boundaries between the perpetrators’ imaginative reenactments and their present-day performance of life, not off-camera (Oppenheimer is still filming them), but off set. One example places the men’s actions in their international legal context and concludes when Adi, who remains unapologetic about his participation in the mass murders, tells Oppenheimer, “I’d be famous […] Please. Get me called to the Hague!” The film cuts to a shot of Herman in hot pink drag, sitting before a natural landscape, as he watches the show girls emerge from the mouth of a giant sculptural fish, as they are directed in their choreographed dance routine (Fig. 5.2). Which image is the most incongruous, phantasmagorical, unbelievable, the film implicitly asks. Although the cut separates Oppenheimer and the perpetrators’ film projects, the juxtaposition also emphasizes how the fantasies that subtend the perpetrators’ imaginations connect the two works. In this way, The Act of Killing continually manifests its own process.

Although the fantasies appear on one level to be idiosyncratically individualized, as when Anwar films the harlequinesque figure who haunts his nightmares, The Act of Killing reminds viewers that the perpetrators featured are representative of a larger cultural imaginary and political system. This is evident in the borrowings from G30S, as discussed above, and in the easy familiarity between the main characters and members of the ruling class whose luxuries and authority the mass murders secured, as well as in the filmmaking process that documents its dependence on communal engagement. In recruiting other actors, including children, for their dramas, asking that they share in a fantastical re-imagination of those events, perpetrators not only script these actors into their fantasies, they also necessarily remind their family, friends, and neighbors of the violent underbelly of the current regime. Auditions of the paramilitaries’ family members and neighbors who act in the film seek those who can cry and shriek on demand, who—among genocide’s beneficiaries, bystanders, or those who were not yet born—are willing to play a victim or another perpetrator. The filmmaking process, in other words, not only charts the spectacularized imagination of its three main subjects; it also demands imagination within the perpetrators’ closest community of different subject positions available or imposed during genocide.⁵⁸

In its focus on three different men, The Act of Killing explores three distinct outcomes to the destabilization of prevailing visuality. Herman, as noted previously, breaks down the gendered logic intrinsic to the dominant history; however, he is left with no viable alternative to the social position his membership in the Pancasila Youth guarantees. Adi Zulkadry, the most intellectual and apparently financially successful of the group, is introduced last in the film, wearing a t-shirt bearing the slogan “Apathetic” and obviously reluctant to revisit the past. He understands quickly that their performances will not project their heroism into the present in Grand Marquee style, and calls the propaganda film G30S they all cling to for absolution “a lie,” reminding the others that the Communist Party was not even illegal before 1965 and that the government has never issued a formal apology for the killings; yet he remains bound to the film by his loyalty to his friends and his stake in the status quo. With comments such as “‘War crimes’ are defined by the winners. I’m a winner. So I can make my own definition. I needn’t follow the international definitions,” he simultaneously invokes and rejects an international standard, admits and refuses responsibility, and finally replaces responsibility with increasing hostility toward the director. Despite his recalcitrance, Adi insists on crucial points in the film: that gangsters, paramilitaries, and intellectuals cooperated in the genocide; that genocide resulted from political opportunism (that the film they are making is “not a problem for us[;] [i]t’s a problem for history”); that bystanders’ claims of ignorance of the torture and murders were and are untenable; that perpetrators, perhaps with the assistance of “nerve doctors” and “nerve vitamins,” can carry on without nightmares, even when they recognize their own actions were indefensible. Through these statements, Adi clearly indicates that those empowered by Suharto’s New Order government can choose visuality or the right to look, and, therefore, that The Act of Killing is not revealing something new so much as bringing the operations of visuality to the cinematic surface.

The third outcome for perpetrators is represented by Anwar Congo, the film’s focus, who undergoes a transformation during the years of filming. An early interview shows him on a neighborhood rooftop, where he had committed hundreds of murders, usually by strangling his victims with a wire. After proudly demonstrating his method, Anwar dances a few steps of the cha-cha for the camera. Anwar’s dance steps may read as a “mechanism to try to forget” or to mask,⁵⁹ as a metaphor for impunity, or as at once a deflection and a failed search for a language to respond to his past—it resists a single reading, though it is resolutely horrifying. The horror here is a combination of fear (not of his personal capacity for murder but the conditions that normalized murder as a function of legitimate government) and disgust that has “no distancing or evasive strategies” available “that are not in themselves utterly contaminating.”⁶⁰ Horror becomes palpable in the cinematography, when Oppenheimer seems to overcome his desire to recoil from this scene, to stop filming, and instead holds fast so as not to foreclose the sequence. The Act of Killing concludes on that same rooftop, at the end of the filmmaking process, and this time Anwar retches in a seemingly cathartic moment of ethical recognition and responsibility. In this sense, Anwar, as the viewer’s main point of identification, appears to be on the cusp of moral re-grounding.

This conclusion has been critiqued for the way it seemingly posits Anwar’s private, moral development—confirmed by his retching as a somatic response to a deeper realization of his actions—to provide a sense of closure for the film and proof of its efforts. In these readings, Anwar’s self-disgust implies that The Act of Killing has done its work in forcing a perpetrator to recognize his culpability; moreover, that work asks little of viewers except to congratulate themselves on their own moral standing. In this way, Anwar’s final retching reconfirms a shame or disgust that one should feel. Disgust as both a by-product and cause of nausea and vomiting here registers to confirm “moral and social community,” along the lines argued by William Ian Miller.⁶¹ Viewers’ revulsion at the first scene on the rooftop spreads during the course of the film to the regime that promoted the genocide; however, it does so in conjunction with necessary acceptance of Anwar’s ordinariness. The film juxtaposes, for instance, the seemingly gentle Anwar playing with his young grandsons with his petty vanity in choosing his clothes and fixing his teeth, days spent hanging out with little to do, desire for approval from the more successful gangsters and government officials he visits, and seemingly lonely moments in his cramped room. Benedict Anderson describes the three men as “nobodies”: “Elderly men, with decaying muscles and petty bourgeois clothes and homes, few visible signs of prestige, no medals, only local fear.”⁶² The film portrays the distance between their flimsy heroics and their role as the “moral menials,” in Miller’s words, who “have to get morally dirty to do what the polity needs them to do.”⁶³ Ibrahim Sinik, the newspaper publisher and communist interrogator, confirms this position when he boasts that as a torturer and “as a newspaper man, my job was to make the public hate [Communists],” and adds proudly that he did not ever need to murder or dispose of bodies directly, because he could delegate the manual labor of murder to Anwar and his friends. In this sense, Anwar’s evident disgust with himself reconfirms the viewer’s sense of abhorrence at the killings, an abhorrence that men such as Sinik or Adi (who advises Anwar to “find the right excuses” for his crimes) do not share. Anwar’s disgust concludes the film by transforming turpitude into the reassurance of moral foundation and thereby rewarding the viewer’s identification with him.

Although I, too, am wary of how a conclusion based upon Anwar’s moral development would only further foreclose the stories of victims and survivors, I understand his retching differently. Whereas closure and moral re-grounding could indicate the restoration of liberal subjectivity after the vertiginous experience of confronting his own past, I read his retching as an indication of the failure of that model and, thus, the impossibility of closure, stability, and re-grounding. If, as Gilson has argued, invulnerability is predicated on a mind/body split that distributes corporeal vulnerability and injurability outside itself as a sign of its own inviolability, then Anwar’s retching demonstrates the failure of that model. Even as it produces moral satisfaction and closure, the “idiom of disgust”⁶⁴ unravels them. As Miller explains, disgust is profoundly linked to corporeality, so that Anwar’s vomiting serves as “proof” of his moral growth: Anwar’s retching is “real” and cathartic for both him and the viewer. At the same time, as Oppenheimer recounts, “I don’t think he’s simulating nausea or retching, but I think that he’s also acting. By this time we’d been filming together for four years. He knows how to be in front of the camera. He knows how to move for the camera. It’s not something that he’s doing willfully. He is in a state of performance [… just as] at the time of the killings Anwar was also performing”⁶⁵ by imitating the film characters he loved best. Identification with the victim and performance come also together at this moment in the most corporeal way. Oppenheimer notes “the [choking] sounds Anwar makes in this scene imitate the sounds his victims made as he killed them, expressing in phantom ways how it might have felt to have your neck garroted with a wire and pulled tight until it cuts into your windpipe. The choking that Anwar experiences is exactly that, and it is a terrible sound indeed.”⁶⁶ As opposed to a pre-ideological or phenomenological reading of embodied suffering⁶⁷ or a reassertion of coherent, moral, and rational subjectivity—either of which would take Anwar outside of performance to something “real,” his retching stands as yet another layer of performance with material effects.

Although Anwar’s final performance evinces disgust with his role as perpetrator, that conclusion also stems from his decision to play victims in many of the scenes and thus his newfound ability to identify with them. Referring to these earlier scenes, Oppenheimer poses the question: “Why does he act that role instead of the killer’s? Because what he sees when he kills is the victim’s face, what he knows is how the victim’s face looks [… T]here’s this double-ness that is totally disarming. You want to empathize with him because you want to believe he’s empathizing with his victim. But you’re not sure. And then it dawns on you that it’s the killer re-enacting his own crimes.”⁶⁸ This double-ness produces a nauseating, physical vertigo for Anwar when he reflects back on it; and, it produces a moral vertigo for viewers whose point of identification has been so radically destabilized. In this way, Anwar’s physical reaction on the rooftop only further destabilizes the visualization within which he was initially legible. What matters, in other words, is less the possible growth of Anwar as a character, than the shifting operations of visuality which enable his transformation from proud to self-disgusted, along with the recognition of vulnerability that transformation entails.

Vertigo ultimately cannot offer moral closure for either Anwar or the viewer. Anwar’s retching, for instance, does not end his nightmares, where he is faced with the ghosts of his victims and haunted by “those eyes I didn’t close,” much as the baby’s face in Abani’s Song for Night keeps My Luck from rest. Attempting to subdue haunting by re-enacting it similarly fails. In recreating a scene of his nightmare, Anwar has trouble speaking his lines, and the film crew and his colleagues are disappointed with his performance. Worsening Anwar’s situation, the harlequin ghost is played by the newspaper reporter, who consistently denies having known about the killings that were orchestrated by his boss and committed in his office. In the context of these unbelievable denials, Anwar’s failure in this scene is caused less by guilt over his individual actions than the realization that the political system in which he operated was and remains violently corrupt.

Again and again “the film brings to the surface a trauma that is always already there.”⁶⁹ In the scene of the Pancasila Youth burning down a village, for example, the haunting of the past manifests on the set as well as in the organization’s futile attempts to frame the image as brutal and decisive, but not cruel and excessive. Whereas the paramilitary actors, playing themselves, display fervor in an attempt to impress the Deputy Minister of Youth and Sport who has come to see the day’s filming, he shrewdly recognizes the incompatibility of that mob fervor, with its chants of murder and extermination, with legitimate government. That footage, he suggests, should be used to demonstrate how brutal they “could” be, not how they acted: “[T]hink of it as a simulation of our rage.” Note, too, his choice of pronouns. His inability to reconcile the past with a legitimate history demonstrates the haunting effects of the ruling class’s legacy of violence. For the participants who play the villagers, the experience is equally difficult to contain. Some of the children appear terrorized by their participation; the actor Suryono (discussed further below) who has been playing a victim, nervously shakes the hand of a perpetrator (apparently for a job well done, or was it for sparing his life?); and one woman who appears dazed after the shoot has an exorcism performed to rid her of ghosts from a mass grave that was discovered nearby during the filming and had been making the actors uneasy.⁷⁰ Each of these reactions bespeaks the haunting presence of a past that has been improperly acknowledged and of victims who have not been publicly mourned.

For the viewer, one of the most emotionally troubling moments of the film, and the only one that deals directly with survivor testimony, also works through this collapsing of different roles and temporalities into one another and the comingling of disgust and empathy in corporeal representation. While Anwar and Adi are directing a scene (yet, strangely, still in make-up and costume), Oppenheimer introduces one of its actors, Suryono, simply as “Anwar’s neighbor.” During a break in the shooting, though still on the set, Suryono begins to narrate his Chinese stepfather’s abduction and murder during the purge. The camera tracks Herman, Adi, Anwar, and other participants’ discomfort while Suryono recounts how, when he was eleven or twelve years old, his stepfather was taken at 3:00 a.m., how the family found his body in an oil drum, how “we buried him like a goat” when neighbors were afraid to help, and how the family was sent to a camp at the edge of the jungle where Suryono had to teach himself to read and write. The perpetrators’ reactions are not surprising: “Look, everything’s been planned.” “We can’t include every story or the film will never end.” “And your story is too complicated. It would take days to shoot.” In the context of the story The Act of Killing wants to tell, by including Suryono’s testimony, Oppenheimer counters the perpetrators’ desire to excise it; however, that narrative balance came later, when Oppenheimer came upon the scene while he was reviewing extra footage. At the time of filming, another cameraman captured this conversation without being aware of its content, and Oppenheimer was not aware that Suryono had shared his personal story before resuming his acting in an interrogation scene.⁷¹ In that scene, Suryono plays the victim while various actors ask Anwar who is standing by to “teach us how to torture.” As Suryono breaks down while re-enacting something akin to what may have been his stepfather’s experience, the actors, too, seem barely able to distinguish whether their actions are dramatizations or might really cause harm. Their language slides in and out of commentary and performance in ways that are obviously terrifying to Suryono, now blindfolded, gagged, and sputtering, and potentially profoundly disturbing to viewers.

This single moment of survivor testimony emerges in the gap between the film’s process and its subject, and in the shifts in gaze that attend to each. At first glance, Suryono’s testimony seems to interrupt the fantasies, re-enactments, and dramatizations that ostensibly separate the social imaginary from victims and survivors’ material reality. From this perspective, his testimony is disturbing precisely because it introduces the “real” upon the set. Even if Anwar and his friends refuse to incorporate Suryono’s story into their own, the circumstances require them to acknowledge his experience. On another level, however, his testimony is disturbing not solely for its content but more profoundly for the way it reveals what Rancière calls the “fault” between film’s intensification of its object and of its own gaze. In his analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Rancière focuses on a moment of “inversion which is to transform the gaze of the detective investigating an obsession into a gaze itself obsessed with its object.”⁷² When these gazes align, “the deployment of images in the film seems to coincide exactly with the logic of the story.”⁷³ This alignment occurs in The Act of Killing when viewers see the juxtaposition of Suryono’s testimony and the torture scene that follows it: the editing initially appears to privilege Oppenheimer’s story over his subject’s and allows viewers to share the director’s ostensible moral satisfaction of recognizing the testimony that perpetrators wish to ignore; however, this moral comfort dissolves with the added knowledge that Suryono’s testimony was filmed by a different cameraman (neither Oppenheimer nor Anwar), who did not understand its content and thus presumably attended to the mise-en-scène as opposed to the “real.” That knowledge of the unwitting cameraman introduces a third gaze and, therefore, three different angles on what must figure as Suryono’s performance. Rather than confirm moral authority, Suryono’s breakdown now disturbs it. Not only is it unclear where his acting ends and his own fear, grief, and rage take over, it is also unclear which gaze frames the scene and, therefore, the authority to which it is tethered. This dizziness only increases when viewers recognize Suryono as an actor in so many other scenes that Anwar films. How do viewers understand his compulsion to dramatize and re-dramatize these horrific events, often in fantastical styles?

Unlike a humanitarian appeal or an advocacy film that produces and employs the emotional registers of sympathy or outrage, or even irony, The Act of Killing continually shifts the foundations upon which a stable relationship between viewer and viewed might rest. This is not because there is ambiguity about the atrocities that were committed or their legacy of fear and impunity, but because the film refuses the closure and moral satisfaction that comes from exposure of as opposed to engagement with the operations of visuality. By emphasizing the destabilizing effects of performativity in its various registers (affective, emotional, identitarian, and historical), the film denaturalizes the visual terrain upon which they occur. What the film’s executive producers Werner Herzog and Errol Morris call the “limbo land between fantasy and reality” pushes at the limits of documentary aesthetics and the forms of political subjectivity they represent.⁷⁴

Vertigo and Vulnerability in The Look of Silence

Oppenheimer has described The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence as companion films that “mutually illuminate each other” and stem from the same incident.⁷⁵ During the filming of perpetrators that led Oppenheimer to Anwar Congo (who was the forty-first perpetrator interviewed), Oppenheimer learned of Adi Rukun’s brother Ramli’s death and discovered the leaders of Ramli’s death squad among his interviewees. Ramli’s death served as a touchstone for survivors because it was witnessed and the victim was named, one out of the 10,500 murders that took place during the same period by the Snake River. Although the discovery that he had interviewed Ramli’s torturers and murderers occurred before he made The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer only revisited these men with Adi Rukun approximately a decade later in the interval between The Act of Killing’s completion and its release.

This complicated chronology of the films’ composition enfolds another chronology of their effects. First, Oppenheimer recognized the need to film the remainder of the material that would become The Look of Silence in the space between perpetrators’ cooperation in the first project and the counter-visualization The Act of Killing would make possible upon its release, at which point Oppenheimer knew, too, it would be unsafe for him to return to Indonesia. Second, in his confrontations with his brother’s attackers, Adi stages a claim to the right to look that is roughly synchronous to the disclosure of the operations of visuality that The Act of Killing offers. The two films differ aesthetically, affectively, and emotionally in their focus, respectively, on perpetrators versus survivors, on what is phantasmagorical versus material, and in styles that are flamboyant and spectacular versus quiet and subdued. However, the radical potential of The Look of Silence and Adi’s claim is more clearly realizable after The Act of Killing. On its own, The Look of Silence is a generous and moving film that functions more conventionally in its depiction of a survivor’s journey and its realist aesthetics. In the aftermath of The Act of Killing’s release and its disturbance of the visual field, however, Adi’s political subjectivization (in Rancière and Mirzoeff’s sense) can emerge. The filmmaking process at once reveals and construes the operations of visuality that Adi wishes to disrupt, and it offers the necessary physical protection for him to do so. The signature image of the film (Fig. 5.3) serves as a synecdoche of this process in its depiction of a perpetrator who is having his eyes checked by Adi in what will become a confrontation. What does this man want to see or not to see? And how can the film proffer different lenses on the aftermath of mass murder? In terms of its work as a documentary, the film offers what may be the first cinematic portrayal of survivors confronting perpetrators who are still in power.⁷⁶ That this is a political claim to the right to look manifests in relation to the lack of complementary human rights action that would posit Adi as a victim.

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Figure 5.3 Inong with glasses. Still from The Look of Silence (2014). Reprinted by permission of Final Cut for Real.

To state my argument slightly differently, perpetrators’ performances in The Act of Killing impart that impunity is founded frighteningly and at once on the predatory manipulation of the social imaginary in support of entrepreneurial sovereign subjectivity and neoliberal economics; as well as through performances rooted in bodily memory (as when Anwar demonstrates his murder technique with a garroting wire or when he retches), the spectacularization of violence, and willful ignorance. Adi’s performances in The Look of Silence are no less dramatic for being anchored in layers of vulnerability—he and his family’s corporeal and emotional suffering in conjunction with his self-precaritization enacted as the right to look. Whereas in The Act of Killing, performativity and spectacularization work together to produce the vertigo that destabilizes the dominant social imaginary, in The Look of Silence it is the unexpected, multi-faceted portrayal of vulnerability that yields those same effects—in addition to Adi’s insistence on his own political standing.

Two key terms frame my analysis of how The Look of Silence is at once disruptive and productive on aesthetic and political grounds. First, its cinematic discourse is evocative both in the conventional sense of the word, to characterize its affective pull, and in its heterotemporal meanings. To evoke, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means to call forth, to call into being, to call up from the past, and to summon—it describes ways that meaning can be newly created as well as how the past can be made present and propelled into the future. Thus, the film as an evocatory and evocative text (generating memories and feelings) invokes the second key term, responsivity, which I borrow from Wendy Hesford’s essay, “The Malala Effect.” In contradistinction to the “responsive state” that Martha Albertson Fineman calls for on behalf of the vulnerable subject, responsivity (to be responsive), located among viewers, listeners, and interlocutors, is “to acknowledge the disruptive rhetorical work that others do.”⁷⁷ In the context of the film, the responsivity the film occasions through Adi’s confrontations provides a foundation for the communal, cultural, legal, and political work that should follow. In other words, in the film, responsivity between vulnerable subjects calls out its failure in larger social institutions. Responsivity also opens an important avenue for the pursuit of justice that is too often foreclosed in both normative human rights and vulnerability theory. For the liberal subject of rights, claims are understood (and critiqued) as bids to restore sovereign subjectivity. Given that sovereignty is all too clearly not intrinsic to the subject, as human rights discourses proclaim, but results from the distributed effects of biopolitical and geopolitical authority, including the authority that human rights bear, restoration depends upon the same logic of liberal subjectivity as do so many violations themselves. Vulnerability theory, however, is not immune to political danger. As Berlant has pointed out, vulnerability often invites a shift from “an idiom of power to an idiom of care” that objectifies vulnerability as victimhood precisely at the moment the subject’s political subjectivization might occur.⁷⁸ The concept of responsivity restores the subject to the political realm even as it reactivates that realm as a site of active negotiation, rather than the domain in which fixed goals may be achieved. Thus, responsivity belongs to the process Wendy Brown describes in which post-foundationalist thought “is forced to yield its insights about power to normative values generated by a deliberative democratic process itself attuned to the unmasterable dimensions of power.”⁷⁹ In other words, responsivity keeps both the process of subjectivization and its pursuit of justice non-teleological.

How does the film interrupt survivor’s silence and the historical narrative of national progress that demands and condones it? How does the film reimagine personhood in terms of an embodied and embedded vulnerable subject? And how does it evoke responsivity among its participants and viewers? The Look of Silence posits Adi as the viewer’s point of identification, and there is both tension and emotional release in each confrontation. Moreover, the camera lingers over Adi’s family, emphasizing the material, affective dimensions of daily life in scenes of water running down his father’s body during his daily bath or his daughter’s playful giggles. Those scenes are never simply present tense, however, as Ramli’s absence haunts their lives—in his parents’ emotional suffering, the family’s position in their village, the lessons in national history Adi’s children learn in school, and the undercurrent of fear that accompanies Adi on each of his optician visits. In the film, this intersubjective groundwork of the deliberative process that responsivity inaugurates is rooted in representations of differentially distributed, embodied vulnerability and imposed precarity: of the body’s capacity for injury, debilitation, and failing; the subject’s capacity for love, care, violence, communication, and compassion; the village and region’s structures of privilege and precarity; the geopolitical forces that contributed to the New Order government and condoned and supported its violence; and the contemporary expression of those forces that ironically provided access for the filmmaking project.

These forms of vulnerability are represented in the images of the film as well as through its process. In one heartbreaking scene, Adi’s nearly blind and senile father, Rukun, crawls around a small bare room, seeking an escape. As representation, the scene reflects Rukun’s mental state: he is trapped in a debilitating fear, even though he has long forgotten why he is afraid or even, tragically, that he ever had a son named Ramli. In this sense, the scene dramatizes through one man’s pain the physical and psychological damage that the exclusions of visuality distribute socially. The scene is discomfiting because Rukun is so clearly the object of the camera’s gaze, such that to watch is to trespass on this intimate moment. Oppenheimer has described elsewhere, however, that this is the one scene in the film captured by Adi (Oppenheimer had given him a camera in order to record anything he found compelling for the film), who after trying unsuccessfully to comfort his father decided that the most honorable action he could take would be to document it. Here, too, Adi chooses the strategic deployment of vulnerability in order to insist on the right to look. Whereas Rukun is physically and emotionally trapped within a fear that knows no object, and thus cannot be met and assuaged, Adi mobilizes strategic vulnerability in order to negotiate its alternatives.

In its evocative and evocatory capacities, the film calls forth memories of the past and their material and affective imprints on the present in order to call out the crimes and failures of the juridico-political order. In that way, it invokes what Constable calls the law’s particular and “peculiar temporality”: the future perfect (in grammatical, not ethical terms). As Constable argues, “[t]he present articulation of a legal speech act is necessarily incomplete in that it awaits a future to become what it is or will have been.”⁸⁰ Whereas conventional human rights films gain affective purchase from human rights’ aspirational discourse (if only the law would have been and will be applied), The Look of Silence conveys a more unsettling message: that the organized, state-sponsored murders of Ramli and others were carried out in the name of securitization and with lasting impunity, such that networks of juridico-political governmentality have produced the “legal incapacity and nonrecognition” Colin Dayan calls “negative personhood.”⁸¹ Only a reinvention of the social imaginary in which survivors’ political subjectivity is manifest can initiate a turn toward justice. Justice, too, remains bound by the conditions of heterotemporality from which it is invoked. As Brown writes, “Justice demands that we locate our political identity between what we have inherited and what is not yet born, between what we can only imagine and the histories that constrain and shape that imagination.”⁸²

The perpetrators’ performances in The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence remind the viewer of how dangerous the process of imagining a different future might be. (Fig. 5.4) In one scene in The Look of Silence, for example, the subjunctive past and present converge when Adi asks a perpetrator, “If I came to you like this during the dictatorship, what would you have done to me?” The man replies, quietly and threateningly, intimating the violent power he still could choose to wield, “You can’t imagine what would have happened.” “You can’t imagine” is, of course, precisely the kind of silencing imperative that the larger work of the film seeks to interrupt. It does so by drawing attention to the ways in which survivors and perpetrators are constantly asked to reimagine the possible expressions violence might have taken in order to sustain the status quo, as well as by dramatizing an alternative to that status quo in the very conversation Adi has at this moment. In other words, the film produces conditions for countervisuality along with the political subjectivity that attends it. Survivors have had no foundation upon which to make a claim in the context of the neoliberal economic order that securitization is designed to protect and that favors the disembodied, rational, market-driven liberal subject. The deliberate mobilization of precarity in the film, therefore, provides a new subject position from which to imagine and to speak.

Figure 5.4 Adi Rukun and Amir Siahaan. Still from The Look of Silence (2014). Reprinted by permission of Final Cut for Real.

Scenes such as the confrontation described above are evocative not only because of the display of Adi’s moral fortitude in his willingness to confront authority, but also because that willingness is so firmly entrenched in embodied vulnerability; and in these instances, too, the film is most compelling when its methods of intensification reveal the relation Rancière describes “between what is seen in public and the precise detailed practice behind it.” The relationship appears in “the specific strategy of an artistic approach: a way of accelerating or slowing time, shrinking or expanding space, harmonizing or de-harmonizing gaze and action, making or breaking the sequence of before and after, inside and outside.”⁸³ Oppenheimer’s close attention to the film’s “policy,” as Rancière calls it in this same passage, disrupts singular narratives of history and the subject that a conventional visualization seeks to convey.

The meticulousness of craft renders more complicated what may simply appear as a victim-survivor’s search for justice. A one-minute sequence that shows Adi’s mother, Rohani, chopping vegetables in her yard, overlaid with a conversation about what it is like to live amongst her son’s murderers, illustrates Oppenheimer’s approach. What is striking about this sequence is that it is emphatically ordinary, yet strangely disorienting. On the visual surface, viewers see an elderly woman alone, chopping vegetables—a shot that appears as though it could have been taken on almost any day of her adult life. In the accompanying soundtrack, however, Rohani expresses how the crimes of 1965–66 persist in her daily life, shaping her relationships with her community and kindling her perpetual grief for a son she cannot publicly mourn. When asked how she feels about living among perpetrators, she responds, “I hate them.” Whereas at first it seems as though the verbal elements—Rohani’s simple articulation of cause and effect—infuse the visual image with pathos, this interpretation falters with recognition that the sound and image of the scene do not correspond. Rohani’s voiceover is initially hard to place—is it a man or a woman’s voice, the woman in the image or someone talking about her? It initially appears as the latter, only to be revealed to be her own as the conversation continues, so that her voice becomes at once particular and representative. In addition, certain moments in this scene, when the camera changes angles and distance from the subject, reinforce the message that her social and physical vitality have been lastingly constricted by her son’s death. Just how constricted is difficult to pinpoint. A close-up shot of Rohani’s sandy foot next to piece of torn plastic invokes at once the imagined presence and material absence of Ramli’s mutilated corpse on the riverbank. When the camera moves out again to a longer shot of Rohani with her home behind her, it paradoxically shortens the time between 1966 and the present, between Ramli’s physical death and social death Rohani barely avoids: both the living and the dead appear to inhabit the space of negative personhood, and the line between them blurs. Moreover, Adi and his mother’s conversation and verbal proximity runs counter to the depiction of Adi’s mother alone, such that the scene has two competing soundtracks: the sound of the knife cutting through vegetables that corresponds to the image and the conversation between mother and son. The difference signifies a traumatic break in time and space caused by Ramli’s murder, and it invokes the film’s title. The look of silence—whether it is the silencing impunity of perpetrators in the market or a silence borne of survivors’ fear—is coded through Rohani’s statement of hate. At the same time, throughout the film, both Adi and Oppenheimer treat Rohani with tenderness, humor, respect, and understanding, such that in the logic of the film her expression of hate motivates Adi’s search for an alternative future that might suture divides between the family and the community and the present and the past, one that the film’s aesthetic strategy makes visible.

Adi’s confrontations with perpetrators that follow this scene make clear the distinction between responsivity, which acknowledges a claim and potentially opens a fraught discursive field, and recognition and responsibility, which acknowledge an identity. As also occurs in The Act of Killing, the process of revisiting the past makes clear that although the events of 1965–66 have been fictionalized in the propaganda to legitimate the very real violence that took place, it is also through a determined effort of willful ignorance or that “failure of imagination” Oppenheimer describes that these fictions and their effects are maintained. In The Look of Silence, when Adi confronts his uncle who guarded Ramli in jail before he was murdered, or the family of a perpetrator who denies knowledge of their father and husband’s crimes, Oppenheimer provides the necessary context for viewers to understand that these denials of recognition and responsibility are clearly false. Thus, Adi’s work is disturbing not because he presents those he meets with a revelation—I am Ramli’s brother—but because he renders the continued denials impossible.

Whereas most of Adi’s meetings end unsuccessfully in threats, denial, and anger, in a late scene he meets with an elderly perpetrator and his caretaker daughter (Fig. 5.5). During that meeting, she learns about some of her father’s atrocities for the first time and asks Adi to forgive her father and to think of them as family. Although there are other moments in the film when Adi’s and Oppenheimer’s projects diverge, here they coalesce: Adi receives not just an acknowledgment but also acceptance of his “disruptive rhetorical work,” and Adi and the daughter’s ability to found civil discourse on responsivity—a situation that the film has made possible—also models for viewers one kind of ethically-motivated negotiation that might allow co-flourishing to take root. In this sense, the daughter’s responsivity anticipates the need for a larger truth and reconciliation process in Indonesia and it does so in the language of co-flourishing and affective, communal bonds, as opposed to humanitarian care.

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Figure 5.5 Samsir and his daughter. Still from The Look of Silence (2014). Reprinted by permission of Final Cut for Real.

However, what appears to offer closure to the film is still, I maintain, radically vertiginous. First, the success of the scene as well as of Adi’s project more generally, depends on self-precaritization: Adi’s determination at once to expose and to compound his own vulnerability and that of his family. It is a dangerous political strategy for reconciliation that could easily fail. Oppenheimer has described the physical danger of making this film. Although no immediate harm came during the filming and, remarkably, the film premiered in two sold-out screenings in Jakarta, Adi and his family had to relocate to a safer community in another region of the country after the release. Second, the daughter’s responsivity—her willingness to hear, acknowledge, and respond to Adi’s story—dismantles the exclusions that sustained negative personhood; however, it does so through the redistribution of precariousness from Adi to her, in that her understanding of herself, her father, and her country must become unmoored in her responsivity.

The significance of this redistribution is underscored by the horrific actions of perpetrators that the film recounts. The recurrent perpetrator testimony that blows apart the quiet realism of The Look of Silence is that members of the death squads would slit their victims’ throats and drink their blood in the belief that doing so would protect the killers from going crazy. Here that “limbo land” Herzog and Morris describe between what is unbelievable and what is real reasserts itself to make closure all but impossible. What might it do to the daughter’s understanding of her world to learn her father had done such a thing in order to stay “sane”? In what grotesque and ethically complex ways does this knowledge (revealed at home, in a meeting with a victim’s brother) make visualizations of family and of reconciliation nearly unimaginable? To its credit, the film does not attempt to answer those questions. Rather, it discloses the political potential and important limits of mobilized precarity and vulnerability.

Notes

1. Forché, “Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art,” 137.

2. Forché, “Reading the Living Archives,” 137, original emphasis.

3. Simpson, “Denying the ‘First Right’: The United States, Indonesia, and the Ranking of Human Rights by the Carter Administration, 1976–1980,” 802.

4. Lorey, “Governmental Precarization.”

5. I am profoundly grateful to Joshua Oppenheimer for giving me access to the Director’s Cut (159 min.) of The Act of Killing and to The Look of Silence before their general releases. The discussion of The Act of Killing is based on that long version.

6. Grear, “Vulnerability, Advanced Global Capitalism and Co-Symptomatic Injustice: Locating the Vulnerable Subject,” 57.

7. Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, 12.

8. Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, 108.

9. Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, 5–6.

10. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 3.

11. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 24. His model of countervisuality, or Visuality 2, draws on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s theories of History 1 and History 2. In chapter one, I discuss the potential of History 1 and 2 to reify the very categories Chakrabarty seeks to disrupt, by tying History 2 too closely to romanticized tropes of cultural difference.

12. Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, 60, quoted in Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 25.

13. Oppenheimer uses the term “genocide” to describe the mass murders, based on the definition of political and ideological genocide offered by Helen Fein. See, for instance, Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective and “Revolutionary and Antirevolutionary Genocides: A Comparison of State Murders in Democratic Kampuchea (1975–79) and Indonesia (1965–66).”

14. Oppenheimer, “Director’s Statement,” www.theactofkilling.com.

15. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 2.

16. Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics.”

17. Rancière, “Introducing Disagreement,” 7.

18. For a much more extensive historical context, see Anderson, “Impunity and Reenactment: Reflections on the 1965 Massacre and Its Legacy” as well as Anderson, “Impunity.” Two monographs focus respectively on the political context within Indonesia and US involvement in Suharto’s assumption of the presidency: Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder and Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and US-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968.

19. Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder, 7.

20. Lorey, “Governmental Precarization.”

21. Oppenheimer, “Joshua Oppenheimer: ‘The Act of Killing’: Q & A at Lincoln Center Part I.”

22. Helmi, “Indonesia: The Act of Glossing.”

23. Oppenheimer, “Historical Context.”

24. Simpson, “Denying the ‘First Right’: The United States, Indonesia, and the Ranking of Human Rights by the Carter Administration, 1976–1980,” 799–800.

25. Anderson describes how perpetrators in Medan had erected “their own monument to themselves, a 30 foot high chrome ‘66’ next to the city’s railway station” to compensate for their perceived lack of formal recognition from the government (Anderson, “Impunity and Reenactment”).

26. Oppenheimer, “Act of Killing Q & A – TIFF12.”

27. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, 352.

28. Anderson’s “Impunity and Reenactment” traces this alliance from its colonial roots up through the revolution and independence eras.

29. Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice, 98.

30. Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability, 57.

31. Amar, The Security Archipelago: Human–Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism, 176.

32. Oppenheimer and Uwemedimo, “Show of Force: A Cinema-Séance of Power and Violence in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt,” 289.

33. Oppenheimer and Uwemedimo, “Show of Force,” 289.

34. Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability, 83.

35. For an example of these critiques, see “Examining Violence: The critical potentials of superiourity and mockery in The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Cynthia Cynn, & Anonymous, 2012).” Film Antidote (blog). 1 September 2014. www.filmantidote.com/the-act-of-killing.

36. Godmilow, “Killing the Documentary: An Oscar-Nominated Filmmaker Takes Issue With ‘The Act of Killing.’”

37. Godmilow, “Killing the Documentary.”

38. Bradshaw, “Build My Gallows High.”

39. Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 48.

40. Oppenheimer and Uwemedimo, “Show of Force,” 291, 290, 304.

41. Fraser, “The Act of Killing: don’t give an Oscar to this snuff movie,” The Guardian, 22 February 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/23/act-of-killing-dont-give-oscar-snuff-movie-indonesia.

42. Kenneth Turan, “Review: ‘The Act of Killing’ re-creates Indonesian Slaughters,” The Los Angeles Times, 25 July 2013. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/25/entertainment/la-et-act-of-killing-review-20130726.

43. Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder, 225.

44. Behlil, “The Act of Killing: An Interview with Joshua Oppenheimer,” 28.

45. Pamela Cohn, “Joshua Oppenheimer.” Interview with Joshua Oppenheimer. BOMBlog. 18 December 2012. http://bombsite.com/1000/articles/6992.

46. Young, The Vertigo of Late Modernity (Los Angeles: Sage Publication, 2007), 12.

47. Matsinhe, Apartheid Vertigo, xi.

48. Dawes, Evil Men, 56.

49. Dawes, Evil Men, 4.

50. Berlant, “Intuitionists: History of the Affective Event,” 847.

51. Cohn, “Joshua Oppenheimer.”

52. Oppenheimer, “Director’s Statement.”

53. Dawes, Evil Men, 34.

54. Oppenheimer, “Joshua Oppenheimer, Zagreb Dox, 27.02.2013.”

55. Moore, “Film After Atrocity: An Interview with Joshua Oppenheimer,” 482.

56. Geoffroy, “Joshua Oppenheimer.talk/‘The Role of the Artist.’”

57. Cohn, “Joshua Oppenheimer.”

58. Oppenheimer, “TIFF 2012 The Act of Killing Intro and Q&A.”

59. Oppenheimer, “Joshua Oppenheimer, Zagreb Dox, 27.02.2013.”

60. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 26.

61. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 194.

62. Anderson, “Impunity and Reenactment.”

63. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 184.

64. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 180.

65. Oppenheimer, “Act of Killing Q & A – TIFF12.”

66. Cohn, “Joshua Oppenheimer.”

67. See Anker, Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature.

68. Cohn, “Joshua Oppenheimer.”

69. Oppenheimer, “TIFF 2012 The Act of Killing Intro and Q&A.”

70. Oppenheimer discusses this exorcism in Oppenheimer, “TIFF 2012 The Act of Killing Intro and Q&A.”

71. Melvin, “Review: When Perpetrators Speak.”

72. Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, 21.

73. Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, 20.

74. Herzog and Morris, “Werner Herzog and Errol Morris Talk About ‘The Act of Killing.’”

75. Moore, “Film After Atrocity: An Interview with Joshua Oppenheimer,” 481.

76. Oppenheimer has discussed Rithy Panh’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (2003) as a film that comes close. The difference lies in the fact that those imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge were able to compel their former guards to participate, which indicates the guards’ power had dissipated (Personal Interview, 9 November 2014).

77. Hesford, “The Malala Effect,” 143.

78. Berlant in Puar, “Precarity Talk,” 166.

79. Brown, Politics Out of History, 90.

80. Constable, Our Word is Our Bond, 75.

81. Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog, 140.

82. Brown, Politics Out of History, 147.

83. Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, 103.

84. Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism, 51.

85. Taylor, “Performance and/as History,” 68.

86. Statement by Komnas HAM (National Commission for Human Rights) on the Results of Its Investigations into the Grave Violation of Human Rights During the Events of 1965–1966.

87. Statement by Komnas HAM.

88. As reported in the same article, one politician commented that “the government had done the right thing by restoring the political rights of the family members of former PKI members and that any further gesture of humanitarian action would be overkill.” Rangga Prakoso, et al. “AGO Rejects Komnas HAM Report on 1965 Massacres,” The Jakarta Globe, 12 November 2012. http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/archive/ago-rejects-komnas-ham-report-on-1965-massacres/.

89. Quoted on the film’s website, www.theactofkilling.com. The quote is taken from a letter on 27 June 2011 from Yosep Adi Prasetyo on behalf of the National Human Rights Commission, Komnas HAM, to the filmmakers.

90. The BRITDOC Foundation, “The Act of Killing.”

91. “Leadership to Look at Past Long Overdue.” The Jakarta Globe, 13 November 2014. http://thejakartaglobe.beritatsu.com/opinion/editorial-leadership-look-at-past-long-overdue/.

92. Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, 126.

5 In the Aftermath of Mass Murder

Historical and Cinematic Contexts of Visuality

On Vertigo

Performativity and Vertigo in The Act of Killing

Vertigo and Vulnerability in The Look of Silence

Conclusion: Cinematic Effects

Notes