Page - 23 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

The Banality of Ghosts | 23www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 15–34 digging into discursive memories and revealing a past hidden in the present. Archaeological performance assumes that memories have historical layers. Op- penheimer wants to “work down” through these layers by “working up” what he calls “histrionic stagings”. This method of working down and up at the same time can lead to the deconstruction of “scripts, clichés and generic codes that inflect the historical performances being excavated”.29 Everyday language is in- sufficient to express this movement up and down, to reveal the subject’s link to the past. With the killers still in power, victims, survivors and killers speak about what happened in a fashioned language that reveals the modalities of the dominant power structures. In footage on the killings near Snake River in North Sumatra, two former killers speak about the murders as routine. In an article on this material published in 2012, Oppenheimer and Uwemedimo observe sharply that these killers, Amir Hasan Nasution and Inong Syah, explained the routine of the killings, not particular killings: “Even the performances that seem most graphic appear not to be rendered as singular explications of specific events, but rather … as rehearsal of genres whose register is the graphic”.30 It is as if the many victims have imploded into a single ritual routine. Oppenheimer’s work wants to break through this routine. By “deconstructing” gestures and language, this “method” breaks through this singular mode of talking about the killings by making them more visible. Filmmaking is thus a method of research while at the same time an object of research. THE IDIOM OF GHOSTS Oppenheimer walks a speculative path in adapting a language of spectres, ghosts and powers. This is, he claims, the language with which the participants in the movie articulate the archaeological performance of their history in the interviews: In the villages of Serdang-Bedagai Regency where the films are being made, exter- mination and the dead are inevitably thought through the idiom of ghosts, and ex- plored through spirit possession (kemasukkan) and the calling of ghosts through a spirit medium (panggil roh). The prominence of spectrality and ghosts, as discursive register, evidences the hold exerted by the dead on the speech of the living. The lan- guage of ghosts figures the spectral not merely as a discursive construction but as a populated realm, and it is precisely this fact that allows us, in this writing, to trace the interaction between the massacres as spectre, on the one hand, and the quotidian, on the other; between spectral forces and actual force.31 29 Oppenheimer 2004, 244. 30 Oppenheimer/Uwemedimo 2012, 293 [italicized in original text]. 31 Oppenheimer 2004, 46.