Page - 26 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

26 | Lucien van Liere www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 15–34 dered communists in the hereafter. While victims are present in silence or as the haunting frame, in Scene One, discussed below, a victim speaks and appears in the midst of the boastful killers. I will not discuss the plot of the film but instead have selected three scenes in which the ghosts become tensely sensible. SCENE 1: SURYONO’S STORY When the killers are asked to “show” how they interrogated, martyred and mur- dered communist suspects, they discuss how they are going to perform those acts. “It must be exactly as we have done it”, one person says. Then comes Suryono’s story (00:49:11–00:52:45).43 Suryono is one of the “neighbours” help- ing on the film and earlier we saw him playing a harsh interrogator. Suryono’s narrative is interesting because it is a clear effort to break through the routine of abstract killing and demonstrates how artefacts of memory are reburied once they have gone “up” through performance and gesture. Suryono tells about a time when he was 11 or 12 years old. He woke to a knock on the door in the middle of the night, which his stepfather answered. The only thing Suryono remembers is hearing his stepfather screaming for help (tolong!). His terrified family did not dare to go to the door. The next morning he found his stepfather killed and cut up, crammed in an oil drum. Together with his grandfa- ther, the boy took the man’s body to the roadside and buried him “like a goat” (seperti kambing). “Nobody dared to help us”, Suryono recalls. He goes on to tell how his family was forced to move to a slum because of their communist “contagion” and how he never was allowed to learn to read and write. Suryono tells this story to people who had murdered hundreds of individuals like his stepfather without legal consequence. Hearing him narrate the events 43 See van Liere 2015, 116–117. Fig. 1: Suryono telling his story. The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, GB/DK/NO 2012), 00:55:28 director’s cut.