Page - 30 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

30 | Lucien van Liere www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 15–34 killers filmed by Oppenheimer on Sumatra are only one such example. The Act of Killing is about how people live with themselves in the face of atrocities, how they deal with their pasts in the present and how they tell themselves stories about who, how and what they are. In this sense The Act of Killing explores memory, seeking access not to the atrocities themselves but to how people relate to a violent past in a present that will not hear accusations based on moral condemnation. The film searches for an existential framework that al- lows mass killings to be condemned even in a political context that denies moral or legal evaluation. This search by the movie prompts a religious-humanistic, anti-nihilistic, almost Messianic approach. The traces of humanity Oppenheimer looks for tie together European historical and collective memory with Indone- sian collective memory, and at the same time this approach looks for “human- ity” beyond acts of European or Indonesian mass killing. Oppenheimer’s urge to understand what happened in Indonesia is strongly coloured by Europe’s Nazi history, for the events in Indonesia suggest what might have happened in Europe had the Nazis remained in power and por- trayed the Holocaust as necessary. The Nazi ghosts exorcised by human-rights advocacy and moral condemnation reappear when Oppenheimer gives us the killers playing themselves and their victims. Penelope Poulou quotes Oppenhe- imer saying, “My God! It’s like I’ve wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust if the Nazis have never been removed from power and if the rest of the world had celebrated the Holocaust and participated in it while it took place.”51 The persistent effort to expel the Nazi ghosts links the Western world to the Indonesian context, and then on to other contexts and even, more gen- erally, to what human beings are capable of. This makes Oppenheimer’s project a mission-like search for humanity in the radical circumstances of political for- getting. Indeed, his film project has a mission throughout: “I was trying to ex- pose a regime of impunity on behalf of a community of survivors”52 That the sto- ries sicken the public is evidence of the movie’s engagement of a fundamental question about “the self” in relation to its ghostly others. This nausea discloses a (physical) link that makes Congo in the end recognisable and acceptable. In this sense, Congo’s repulsion conflates with the public’s nausea. For a Western public, the response that Congo provides to the issue of the “banality of evil” is filtered through the Nazi past. In the end, evil cannot be ignored for it strikes back at the perpetrator. But Oppenheimer’s project is not only about genocide. He wants his work to be a mirror, encouraging a link between killer and audience. In a sense, the audience becomes a bystander. If “those stories are powerful, if they really are 51 Poulou 2016. 52 Barnes 2013a