Notes
1 Kaja Silverman, too, notes that “the repetition through which psychic mastery is established exists in [...] an intimate relation with the repetition through which it is jeopardized” (1992, p.
61).2 The index, as part of the semiotics developed by Charles Sander Peirce, constitutes a sign that is linked to reality by causality or proximity (Hongisto, 2015). This means that the photographic image, or moving image in the case of film, contains an imprint of reality, presumably without (human) interference. This understanding of the “indexical quality” of the moving image is what gives it its “evidentiary status” and what has lent documentary its “truth status” (Nichols, 2010, pp. 35-36).
3 Bill Nichols offers a similar view when he claims that “the very syntax of reenactments affirms the having-been-thereness of what can never, quite, be here again. Facts remain facts, their verification possible, but the iterative effort of going through the motions of reenacting them imbues such facts with the lived stuff of immediate and situated experience” (2008, p. 80).
4 Waltz with Bashir was nominated for both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, winning the latter. As Raya Morag notes, the film was released in Israel, France, Germany, the United States, Finland, Switzerland, Belgium, and Australia (2012, p. 94), signaling its international presence and intended audience.
5 As Ruth Leys (2000) shows in her in-depth discussion of the western intellectual history of psychic trauma, the issue of the veridical or literal nature of the traumatic dream or flashback has been contested ever since the conceptualization of trauma. Leys critically discusses an increasingly dominant tradition (in literary studies and psychiatry alike) that takes the traumatic image as an unassimilated shard of the distressing event itself, an element that essentially defies the mediation and sense-making of narrative and that is relived or reexperienced by trauma patients in pristine form.
6 Michael Figueroa (2020) arrives at similar conclusions about the lopsided treatment of trauma in his detailed analysis of the auditory make-up of the film.
He notices that the highly diverse musical soundtrack, composed by Max Richter, occasionally works to aestheticize the process of memory recovery but more often accentuates the dissonance between diegetic events on the one hand and extra-diegetic, retroactive attempts at sense-making on the other. Through such dissonance, the soundtrack conveys a generalized notion of the senselessness and absurdity of warfare while also retaining the specific focus on Folman’s perpetrator trauma. According to Figueroa, the film’s almost exclusive preoccupation with the experience of the protagonist “sublates the victim’s trauma within [Folman’s] own sublimation of trauma” (p. 138).7 As Anderson (2013, pp. 281-282) explains, official accounts of the 1965 events tended to cling to euphemistic language, according to which the communists had been “secured,” a discourse that left no space for celebrations of the killers’ (self-declared) heroism.
8 The Indonesian term for “gangster” that the perpetrators use to describe themselves derives from the Dutch vrijman (literally “free man”), a term used during the Dutch colonial period to designate entrepreneurial urban gangsters who often performed auxiliary services to the colonial authorities.
9 In her analysis of the documentary, Saira Mohammed goes so far as to describe the entire film-within-the-film as “a manifestation of Anwar’s ‘repetitioncompulsion’” (2015, p. 1196).
10 Some reviewers are more cynical about the sincerity of Anwar’s emotions in this scene. Jonathan Lamb helpfully offers two possible readings of this moment in the film: “The first is that the emotion caused by the reenactment must be utterly excessive, as excessive as the limitless cruelty it mourns and the inexpiable guilt it confesses. [...] The second is that Anwar has finally figured out what Oppenheimer was after and is faking it” (2020a, p. 96). Errol Morris adheres to the second stance, describing Anwar’s behavior as “one more performance for himself and for us” (Morris, 2013).
Oppenheimer only partly agrees, saying in the interview with Morris that while Anwar may be well aware of the camera, “he allows the past to hit him with an unexpected force in that moment” (Morris, 2013). Others have criticized The Act of Killing’s apparent insistence on the power of redemption, a message that is allegedly imposed through Oppenheimer’s editing choices: presenting the footage of Anwar’s retching at the rooftop as the film’s culmination, Oppenheimer constructs (rather than documents) a story about the ultimately “unavoidable implications of [Anwar’s] crimes against others” (Crichlow, 2013, p. 41).11 Dominick LaCapra, writing about the role of trauma and affect in historiography, proposes “empathic unsettlement” as a desired attitude when relating to the traumas of others. This unsettlement is not to be confused with a straightforward identification with victims. Rather, it is a mode of understanding that “poses a barrier to closure in discourse and places in jeopardy harmonizing or spiritually uplifting accounts of extreme events from which we attempt to derive reassurance or a benefit” (LaCapra, 2001, pp. 41-42). The phantasmagoric afterlife scene in The Act of Killing presents a bizarre and extreme variant of such a “spiritually uplifting account.” Immediately after this spectacle, however, Oppenheimer shows Anwar’s unsettlement in watching the interrogation scene. Here, the reassurance created through self-staged redemption is decisively undone.
12 As Michael Meyer aptly remarks: “While [Anwar] Congo never comes across as likeable, there’s something disturbingly relatable about his vanity and delusion” (2013).
13 We would like to express our gratitude to Stephanie Benzaquen-Gautier for her helpful comments on an earlier version of the analysis in this section.
14 The identity of the victimized groups remains a contentious issue today. The hybrid U.N./Cambodian War Crimes Tribunal, officially called the “Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia,” only refers to the ethnic genocide of the Muslim Cham and the Vietnamese (see https://www.eccc.gov.kh/ en/case/topic/119).
However, as Cathy J. Schlund-Vials notes, “the sick, the starving, the weak, and the elderly” were also targeted, as were the Khmer Khrom and “those who carried the most pre-revolutionary memory: teachers, lawyers, judges, civil servants, doctors, court dancers, royal musicians, artists, and returning Cambodian expatriates” (2016, p. 288).15 For a closer analysis of the Khmer Rouge’s (visual) propaganda strategies, see Stephanie Benzaquen-Gautier (2016, pp. 18-30).
16 In 1979 Panh fled to Thailand, from where he continued to France to settle as a refugee. He received his cinematic training there. It should thus not be surprising that he filters his approach to the Cambodian atrocities through (French) Holocaust-based discussions and aesthetic strategies. For more on Panh as a transnational filmmaker, see Jennifer Cazenave (2018).
17 In one of Panh’s most recent films, Graves without a Name (2018), mourning is at the center as he takes part in a variety of rituals to communicate with his family beyond the grave and to locate their remains.