Page - 11 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

Editorial | 11www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 9–14 the question of who we really are, an approach that avoids that stereotypical duality of perpetrator and victim. There remains, however, a tension in how, what and why atrocities are remem- bered in a specific context, whether in films, literature or political, academic or religious discourse. Victims’ memories of cruelty in contexts where this cruelty is not recognized as such but instead profiled as necessary or even glorified as heroic are often silenced or supressed; they may deform memory and/or lead to traumatic disorders, as was the case for victims of the Cultural Revolution in the Chinese context, victims of the communist hunt in Indonesia during the reign of Suharto, and victims of the expulsion of Germans from the East in post-war Eu- rope. Perpetrators’ memories of cruelty in contexts where these perpetrators are deemed to have been on the wrong side of history can also lead to suppression, silencing and traumatic disorders. Being a victim in a context where narratives of victimization are dominant brings acknowledgment, and being a perpetrator in a context where narratives of heroism frame past atrocities can similarly gener- ate social acknowledgement. Being a victim in a context where victimhood is not acknowledged or where victims are seen as having brought the persecution upon themselves can lead to silencing and to the suppression of memories. But in all cases, the context stipulates how victims and perpetrators remember what hap- pened. What there is to tell depends on what has been told, believed and framed as part of cultural, political and religious representations and discursive traditions. This tension between what is remembered and how the past is represented in political and cultural discourses comes strongly to the fore in S21, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. These movies can be understood as attempts to articulate certain trajectories of what Assmann calls “cultural memory”. Ass- mann distinguishes between collective memory and cultural memory: where collective memory is related to the dominant view of a group on a past that it claims as its own past, cultural memory contains a chaotic archive of documents that are not necessarily so well remembered, with material that might be dis- carded, neglected or contested at the point where the group “remembers”, as for example in the case of Dutch colonial history in Indonesia or conquest by settlers in North America. Assmann understands collective memory as bond- ing and cultural memory as containing also the non-instrumentizable, heretical, subversive and disowned.11 Cultural memory involves, so to say, at the same time the uncanny of the past and the familiar, yet incongruous with the group’s self-understanding. An interesting example of the difference between collec- tive memory, as stipulation, and cultural memory is found in how the atrocities of 1965 and 1966 are “remembered” in Indonesia and how they are screened in Oppenheimer’s movies The Globalization Tapes, The Act of Killing and The 11 Assmann 2006, 27.