Page - 21 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

The Banality of Ghosts | 21www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 15–34 people opining about the G30S.21 Heryanto notes that the movie was produced by Syarikat, a Yogyakarta-based NGO related to the Nahdlatul Ulama. Because Nahdlatul Ulama organisations participated in the killings, this production can be seen as “one of the first initiatives by the Muslim communities with culpa- bility in the 1965–66 killings to foster reconciliation”, Heryanto writes.22 Mass Grave is one of the first documentary movies on the G30S to include original material and footage of strong anti-communist sentiments.23 The movie con- tains interviews with victims, survivors and witnesses and shows how the re- burial of relatives killed during the purge meets resistance from local Muslim or- ganisations in Temanggung. Most of these movies challenge the violence itself, but not the powers that drove the purges nor the people that took up, in some regions so enthusiastically, the acts of killing. WORKING TOWARDS THE FILM With a large anonymous Indonesian crew and docu-masters Werner Herzog24 and Errol Morris25 as its executive producers, The Act of Killing is an effort to make suffering visible through the boastful memories of killers who were active during the Indonesian genocide of 1965/66 in Medan. The film shows former kill- ers challenged to make a movie about how they killed their victims. With the re- enactment set in a context of impunity the movie shows how the gentle-going protagonist Anwar Congo is confronted by his memory through role-play. Two years later, Oppenheimer made a follow-up film, The Look of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer, ID/DK 2014), about victims confronting the killers of their families while these killers are still in power. For this later movie, Oppenheimer followed Adi Rukun, an optometrist who confronts the men who killed his brother. Both films provoke their audiences with the uncanny or, using Oppenheimer’s term, with the “ghosts” of history. The Act of Killing is not Oppenheimer’s first project on the Indonesian gen- ocide of 1965/66. In 2003 together with Christine Cynn he produced The Glo- balization Tapes (ID 2003), directed with a large local crew. Part of the film was shot at a plantation on Sumatra by the plantation workers themselves. The movie portrays the lines between world capital on the one hand and inhuman sacrifices made by workers on the other, but a second interpretative trajectory considers the local history of the G30S and its aftermath, with former killer Shar- 21 Heryanto 2014, 96. 22 Heryanto 2012, 229. 23 Heryanto 2014, 102–103. 24 Cf. From One Second to the Next (Werner Herzog, USA 2016); Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Con- nected World (Werner Herzog, USA 2013). 25 Cf. The Fog of War (Errol Morris, USA 2003).