Page - 27 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

The Banality of Ghosts | 27www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 15–34 surrounding his stepfather’s murder and watching the gestures of his body, it seems as if he is telling a good joke. He makes fun of the strange looking limbs of his tortured and murdered stepfather, laughing continually. Suryono wants his story to be told, even played, and hastens to add, “This is no critique”. The killers listen patiently and after he has finished his story, they argue that the movie cannot contain every story: “Everything is planned already, there is no room for all the stories, the movie would take an eternity” (00:51:43). The only way for Suryono to tell his story is not by claiming victimhood, but – on the contrary – by making fun of the victims, by telling the suppressed narrative of violence in the modus of a joke. The ghost who has been conjured up is swiftly expelled. When Suryono participates in a role-play a few minutes later, in which he plays a communist who is to be strangled by an iron wire, he can no longer speak. The discursive routine is broken, not even the language of the joke re- mains, and Suryono seems to be overcome by an intense grief. SCENE 2: KILLING A DOLL The ghosts seem to jump out of the screen in a scene where Anwar Congo is shown stabbing a doll. The doll represents a baby offered to him in his role as killer by Herman Koto (02:12:20), one of his accomplices in 1965, who plays a mother begging for her life. The doll is nonchalantly but effectively cut by Con- go, who routinely puts his knife several times into the doll while calmly smok- ing a cigarette. The scene, published as a director’s cut and not shown in the cinema version, is harsh. The doll is “just” a doll, but for Oppenheimer the doll is possessed. Now the ghosts disturb not the killers, but the director himself. He refers to this scene as “filthy, tainted, a tsunami of shit”44 and recalls having a terrible evening after shooting it and the nightmares that followed over the 44 Louisiana Channel. Fig. 2: Anwar Congo “killing” the doll. The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, GB/DK/ NO 2012), 02:12:20 director’s cut.