Page - 75 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

Intercultural Perspectives | 75www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 63–77 terpretation is full of imperceptible beings that are very real to the Indonesians and will certainly want revenge. Anwar Congo moreover fears the power of God, who will not leave his sins unpunished – he speaks of dosa, which means sin. This concept is missing in Das radikal Böse. There the view of the cosmos is much more secularised. Perhaps age is an explanation for this difference: the Germans are young, while the perpetrators speaking in The Act of Killing are much older. Those who know Indonesia will be well aware that the social imagi- nary is much more religious than the social imaginary in Western Europe. Large parts of Germany were Protestant, and the souls of the dead play only a small part in the Lutheran and Reformed traditions. The dead do not remain among the living; they go to heaven, to God, or to hell, so to a place somewhere outside this earth, although there are exceptions. As a result, in the German context evil is more closely related to guilt. It was wrong to kill helpless women and children. The perpetrators knew the argu- mentation that justified these actions, but such justification was insufficient. The images haunted them. Nightmares and severe mental illness followed. In Indonesia the perpetrators respond in terms of spirits of the dead who haunt them in combination with knowledge that they have sinned and that God will not leave their wrongdoings unpunished. But the Indonesian perpetrators are most tormented by the weeping, crying, pain and sorrow of the women and children. They are likewise haunted by nightmares. The outcome in the two instances is therefore the same. Oppenheimer’s next film, The Look of Silence (ID 2015), reveals that in Indonesia many perpetrators also subsequently suf- fered severe mental illness. We learn in this movie that drinking the blood of the dead was one method used to counter such mental torment. We can usefully draw here on ideas of Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas as formulated and summarised by the Dutch philosopher Ad Peperzak: I possessed and enjoyed my world as my home. Full of joy about the good things of the earth; without any notion that I made other people poor, deprived them of their rights or even killed them by appropriating all these things. … Then someone else rises in face of me. … The Other presents himself. He looks at me. Even before he has said one word to me, his face speaks to me. … His face, his eyes, totally uncovered, nude.15 For Levinas, the Other stands for God. With this in mind, what he says in the following quotation, cited from Peperzak, is very remarkable, for it is almost a direct response to Bauman’s analysis. “If the Other [God] is really in the centre of one’s thinking and doing, one has come to a movement that forces a break- through of the world and its orderliness but exactly because of this points to 15 Peperzak 1984, 9, cf. Levinas 1979, 194–204.