Page - 19 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

The Banality of Ghosts | 19www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 15–34 (Treachery of G30S/PKI, Arifin C. Noer, ID 1984) was screened in Indonesian cinemas. The movie was a docudrama that became obligatorily educational material for primary and secondary schools and was understood as the central bonding narrative of New Order Indonesia. A clear effort to establish a collec- tive memory, the movie contained ghastly portrayals of the communists as evil, sadistic and sexist torturers, while Suharto was depicted as a calm and strong leader. In The Act of Killing, Congo recalls that the movie was indeed obliga- tory viewing and was traumatic for younger children. Yet although he realises the movie was made to demonise the communists, he makes clear that it felt somehow good to have killed the horrid people in the movie.12 Even for a killer like Congo, the movie seems to have distorted memories of the atrocities. The regime was very successful in its efforts to construct a collective memory about the G30S. A few years into the post–New Order era (Suharto “stepped down” in May 1998), Tempo Magazine conducted a poll of 1,101 sec- ondary school students in Indonesia’s bigger cities. To the question of where they had learned about the G30S, 90 per cent responded “film”.13 For many, the film had been the primal gate to knowledge about the G30S. The movie shows blood flowing from the heroic generals. Oppenheimer and Michael Uwemedimo analysed the film in an article in which they explored the mean- ing of the extreme violence: “The film graphically demonstrates the way in which New Order history at once conjures the PKI as a spectral power and condenses that power in spectacular images of violence, so as to claim that power for the shadowy techniques of state terror. The spectral subsists in the spectacle.”14 Indeed, the generals depicted as victims in Pengkhianatan G30S/ PKI mimic the alleged communist victims of the G30S. Congo remembers his killings in light of the film, and claims that he went much further with his vic- tims than is shown in the movie.15 There is, however, no hint at the mass kill- ings, which makes the blood in the film a twisted reference to the killing ma- chines. The victims of G30S remain unnamed, but – as Oppenheimer and Uwe- medimo rightfully observe – the massacres haunt the movie. The film, they assert, “exists almost wholly to justify the massacres and the regime founded upon them”.16 With collective memory intended as bonding memory, the narrative of the communist threat linked Indonesians to their past. General Suharto and his re- sponse to the imminent threat became the foundational myth of the nation. Being anti-communist meant being a good Muslim or good Christian, with the 12 Cf. scene 00:37:25 in The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, GB/DK/NO/ 2012, dir. cut). 13 Heryanto 2012, 225. 14 Oppenheimer/Uwemedimo 2012, 290. 15 Cf. scene 00:37:30 in The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, GB/DK/NO/ 2012, dir. cut). 16 Oppenheimer/Uwemedimo 2012, 290.