Page - 8 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

8 | Freek L. Bakker and Lucien van Liere www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 9–14 ies on atrocities is whether these artistic representations perhaps guide the public away from what “really happened”. There certainly is a huge gap be- tween, on the one hand, the immediate experience of the event that lies behind the interpretative screening and, on the other hand, watching the director’s material while neither part nor ever having been part of the event. Yet often filmic representations are not intended to show what happened; instead they present case studies to be explored in the present. Rity Panh, director of S21, argued in an interview with Joshua Oppenheimer, that if we can’t distinguish between perpetrator and victim, it becomes impossible to mourn.1 For Panh, his film is more than historic interpretation or a perspective on memory; it poses the broad question of how we think about perpetrators and victims in multiple contexts. In S21 Panh shows how in post-genocide Cambodia perpetrators are confronted by one of their victims. The question of why they acted as they did is swiftly transformed into a question of how they did so. The confrontation is set in Tuol Sleng, a former high school in Pnhom Penh where torture was carried out during the Khmer Rouge regime. In films like S21, Das radikal Böse and The Act of Killing, one question continually resounds for the audience: Is this what we are as human beings? What appears on the screen therefore challenges the audience with a moral question: what would you do? It is this question, heard in the present, that makes movies like S21, Das radikal Böse and The Act of Killing so immediate. In a way they look to confront a public that might already know the language of human rights. Breaking through established idioms by portraying perpetrators in specific situations, sometimes with the perpetrators playing themselves as in S21 and The Act of Killing, seems a missionary purpose for these directors. Indeed, their movies are hardly about a past; they establish a critical link between past and present and break through the dichotomic sim- plicity of good guys and bad guys. But the questions raised by the movies are hardly open questions. Often the movies contain an inherent critique of genocidal violence and present humanis- tic perspectives on obedience. Mostly, these movies underline the humanity of the victims, seeking to give names, faces and biographies so that they are much more than just numbers. According to historian Richard Bessel, since the Second World War remem- bering violence has largely been about remembering the victims of violence. Central to the commemoration of acts of violence, he continues, is a sense of empathy, of identification with the victims.2 This framing emphasizes a duality of innocent victim and evil, or at least ignorant, perpetrator. A new perspective has also unfolded, especially since Vietnam War veterans in the United States 1 Oppenheimer 2012, 255. 2 Bessel 2015, 244.