Page - 24 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

24 | Lucien van Liere www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 15–34 In a contradictory sense, because they were killed the dead are not dead. In Op- penheimer’s view, the ghosts create relationships, not entities, that pop up in the discursive registers of the killers. But while for Oppenheimer these ghosts haunt through these discursive registers, for many Indonesians these ghosts are as real as the space they inhabit and they cause fear. “Haunted grounds” related to the G30S can be found all over Java, Bali and parts of Sumatra. People still consider these places haunted. In a collection of victim and perpetrator narratives, Sukanta writes, “Many people do not dare to plant things on these grounds. Sometimes people living nearby hear screams in the middle of the night in these places”.32 The link between past and present is mediated by the relationship with ghosts. In The Act of Killing, Zulkadry does not doubt the ghostly existence of the murdered communists (sekarang yang tinggal roh – what is left of them are ghosts).33 Oppenheimer takes up this language about ghosts as revelatory and as related to the missing community. He notes that dukuns are afraid of communicating with the ghosts of the 1965/66 victims.34 These ghosts have be- come hungry as a result of the attitude of Suharto’s New Order regime that re- quires that the dead are not mentioned and not given names, that no reference is made to the killings and that the children of communists are not allowed to learn to read and write. Hence the deep fear, even among the younger genera- tion, of a resurgence by the communists.35 While Oppenheimer was working on his PhD project, in April 2004 world me- dia covered the Abu Ghraib affair. In the “Director’s Statement” of The Act of Killing, he reports being confronted by the photos of Abu Ghraib. He was struck by pictures of American soldiers smiling at the photographer while posing before their humiliated victims, with smiles on their faces and giving a thumbs-up, as if expecting approval from the (American?) public. Oppenheimer writes that the most unsettling thing about these pictures is “not the violence they document, but rather what they suggest to us about how their participants wanted, in that moment, to be seen. And how they thought, in that moment, they would want to remember”.36 In an interview with Henry Barnes on the impact of The Act of Killing in the United States, Oppenheimer notes about Abu Ghraib: “I made this film in pace with this evolving nightmare in the US in which torture was being not just condoned, but celebrated.”37 What Oppenheimer wants to show using the metaphor of ghosts is not limited to the Indonesian context but draws upon social and political consequences of indifference towards acts of violence. 32 Sukanta 2014, 24. 33 Cf. scene 00:48:22 in The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, GB/DK/NO/ 2012, dir. cut). 34 Oppenheimer 2004, 119. 35 Heryanto 2012, 225. 36 Oppenheimer, Director’s Statement. 37 Barnes 2013b.