The Act of Video: Reflections on Video Vortex #7 and Contemporary Video Practices in Indonesia

Introduction

The late 1990s was a period of social, political and economic upheaval in Indonesia, with the toppling of General Soeharto’s New Order Regime in 1998 marking the onset of political reform and democratization, a process known as reformasi, in the midst of regional financial crisis. Since then, the country’s public sphere has widened considerably. The medium of video has played an important role, in step with global trends and spurred by the advent of affordable, digital means of production and distribution. Video has proven a pivotal channel not simply for contesting the historical record, but for addressing the past through imaginative, performative and other kinds of creative intervention. In Indonesia, the rapid expansion of video practices and networks ranges from personal and amateur users to communities of activists, artists and filmmakers developing new kinds of video organization and collaboration. This has been in response to a changing global media landscape, but also to changing national horizons for public expression in general, and historical discourse in particular.

This essay explores the historiographic and ethnographic valence of video in Indonesia since 1998, against the backdrop of transition from an authoritarian to a neoliberal regime, and the concurrent renewal of the country’s public sphere. The first section takes Joshua Oppenheimer’s controversial film The Act of Killing (2012) as exemplary of the moving image’s purchase on national trauma, emphasizing its role in the production (and perversion) of official history. The second section concerns the state of video discourse in Indonesia as reflected in a conference held in Yogyakarta in 2011, addressing the diversity of contemporary video practices and situating them in local art and media histories. In a third and final section, we return to the epistemological quandaries raised by Oppenheimer’s film, mooting video’s capacity as a means of reconciliation with the past – a reconciliation that would seem to require both the documentary and a ‘revelatory’ function of the image.

In The Act of Killing, American-born filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer collaborates with perpetrators of the 1965–6 pogroms that inaugurated the ‘New Order’ regime of General Soeharto, who ruled Indonesia thereafter (with US backing) as the country’s second president for more than three decades. Across the archipelago, gangs of soldiers and paramilitary thugs, known as preman or ‘free men’, slaughtered as many as a million of their fellow citizens, most alleged communists and ethnic Chinese Indonesians. Working closely with ‘unrepentant death squad leaders’ in the city of Medan in northeast Sumatra, Oppenheimer becomes the catalyst for a remarkable series of reenactments conceived and co-directed by the perpetrators themselves, who in staggeringly unguarded fashion recollect and reimagine their roles in this long-suppressed national trauma. ¹

The film activates memory, but without memorializing. Oppenheimer walks an ethical tightrope: engaging living perpetrators, he breaks with an entrenched, humanist historical paradigm centered around empathy for victims; the victors themselves, the agents of atrocity, are empowered to perform the historicization. For them, the recording is at once a pretext for reminiscing, an ideological bandstand, and a space for fantasy and sublimation. But detailed rehearsal of their bloody deeds leaves the wrongs of the past unchecked, unsanctioned, and largely unrepented. Rather than consigning them to the past, it lays bare the very contemporaneity of an ideological opposition that has been cynically and tragically exploited for authoritarian national cohesion. These testimonies, with all their delusions, hauntings, and unexpected moments of insight and clarity, attest to the entrenchment of history’s winners, to their monstrous mutation of nationalism, and to its all too current effects on Indonesian politics and society.

If the forgetting of Indonesia’s troubled past is often effected by covering it up with images of the country’s growing wealth and confidence, then the achievement of The Act of Killing was to collapse this past and this present into one unforgettable, contemporary image. ² Some 14 years after Soeharto’s fall, a progressive culture led by a generation of anti-New Order activists had cemented its claim on a new public sphere; the latter had begun to accommodate a less politicized bourgeois culture too, and video was a favoured vehicle for both (Hujatnikajennong, 2011). But Oppenheimer’s x-ray of the present brought any liberal teleology to a grinding halt: it derailed the smooth flow of the present into the past, revealing the special potency of the moving image, and of fantasy, in this national context. For not only had cinema been at the front line of the ideological conflict – the thugs in question were not trained killers but bouncers from the local movie theatre in Medan, their income threatened by anti-US sentiment – it was also powerfully formative of a certain homicidal imaginary, Hollywood providing seductive models of masculinity, autonomy, violence and impunity. Their authorial purchase on the moving image further emboldens their auto-mythography. In this sense the film they make with Oppenheimer deviates little from a certain generic axis of 20th-century cinema, whose exemplary filmmakers (mostly male) have been the incubuses that consummate patriarchal histories, that curb and mould desires, that shape and censor public and private memory. Nevertheless, The Act is sure to be a watershed in Indonesia’s cultural history, and radically revises the historiographical capacities of video there. It forces on its viewers a painful remembrance, but at the same time tears them away from a whole ‘epistemology of history’, that which privileged the photographic image for its affinities with the real; that of the record, of truth, of evidence (Strassler, 2010: 4).

Like most media in Indonesia today, the moving image bears an unmistakable imprint of the New Order. Even to mention this new landmark in Indonesian historiography is to invoke an older, celluloid film about the same conflict, a film to which The Act responds implicitly and explicitly, and to which it will ever be compared. In retrospect and to an outsider’s eye, Arifin C. Noer’s The Betrayal of The 30 September Movement by PKI – made at Soeharto’s behest in 1982 – is camp and overblown, verging on farce. But one would be hard-pressed to find a more successful propaganda film. Scholars are unanimous on its dramatic impact. This staple of nationalist cinema was a blunt pedagogical weapon, brandished annually at the Republic’s schoolchildren and on national television. It validated the regime’s campaign of terror by demonizing loosely defined ‘communist’ elements as savage, bloodthirsty psychopaths. The Betrayal exemplified the efficient displacement and projection of state terror onto its scapegoat. ³

Now both Noer’s fiction and Oppenheimer’s ethno-fiction would stretch our inherited notions of documentary as record, yet those definitions have never quite immunized the genre against the fictive. From Grierson’s (1966) ‘creative treatment of actuality’ to Baudrillard’s (1995) critique of a war that ‘did not take place’, the ontological footings of the moving image have proven unstable at best. For filmmaker and theorist Dai Vaughn (1999: 58), documentary is more a way of seeing than a mode of production. It names a ‘response’ that sees the image as ‘signifying what it appears to record’, a documentary being any film that entreats this kind of response, by whatever means. By this looser definition, both films qualify as documentaries, with the important proviso that what they record is not the truth of killing but the act of killing. Documentaries they may be but, taken together, what they assert above all is the enduring primacy of fiction in this national historiographic space.

The Spirit of Execution: Video and Its Spectres

Amongst the seams of Southeast Asia’s Cold War, visual culture has only recently been mined for its ideological and psycho-historical riches (Day and Liem, 2010). Indonesia is not the only place in the region where that period’s oppositions have begun to surface in independent filmmaking. Rithy Panh’s arousal of the ghosts of Khmer Rouge genocide have been no less confronting (Thompson, 2012). Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s groundbreaking Primitive project (2009), and his film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), effect a more subtle decompression of tightly zipped national history in Thailand where, 30 years after an amnesty allowed communists to return from the forests, the official record remains drastically one-sided. In Malaysia, a counter-history emerged in Amir Muhammad’s video essays on the remnants of the Malayan communist movement, The Last Communist (2006) and Village People Radio Show (2007). While Apichatpong and Muhammad lean towards the underdogs’ side of these stories, both also displace filmic and historiographic conventions. The former eschews formal history in favour of psycho-geography, as the unquiet spirits of the 1960s and ’70 s ‘farmer communists’ are channelled through the acting of their teenaged descendants. The latter restores an untold chapter of national history, but at the same time qualifies the moving image’s evidentiary claims through formal and generic play. Both exploit video’s affinity with oral transmission; recollection of the past appeals to the imagination, more than to any authoritative record, while history itself is volatilized by spontaneity and improvisation.

While it rudely disrupts the silence of Indonesia’s official record on the massacres, The Act is at best agnostic on art’s own historiographic capacities. Oppenheimer’s film interrogates not just a national history, but also the moving image’s complicity as an instrument of such history. ⁴ Amongst several macabre refrains is the act of strangulation, a violent occlusion of voice and of breath, exemplified by the film’s charismatic antihero Anwar Congo, and dramatized by his gang’s flights into song and dance and storytelling. But for all its theatrics, the film is sure to have a lasting impact on documentary aesthetics in the region. Some may be tempted to read it as a non-fictional response to Noer’s epic crime of fiction – it is the first film since to have confronted this incendiary history as directly. ⁵ But in donning neither the cloak of pure fiction nor the putative ‘objectivity’ of a record, The Act frustrates long-standing debates around documentary film. It attends and attests to the past not by bearing witness but by way of an altogether more reflexive and contemporary strategy.

What the filmmakers instead engage is the practice of acting, an artifice that permeates both art and life, spheres whose distinction the film erodes at every turn. It is hardly contentious to observe that political action and make-believe are closely intertwined; one struggles to think of a place where this is not the case. What differs from one place to another, however, is the extent to which one may hope to disentangle them for historical purposes, and in this respect the study of Indonesian polity has thrown up some intriguing lessons (Geertz, 1980; Pemberton, 1994; Siegel, 1997). In The Act, the play of contemporary power relations does not merely represent social realities but stages a re-presentation and re-mediation of historical events by performing historical acts as theatrical ones (van Heeren, 2012). Such a strategy draws together all the dimensions of the word ‘act’, theatrical and historical, juridical and ethical, the momentous and the everyday. Cinematic reenactment – the performance of ‘acts of killing’ – thus complicates historiographical and documentary modalities, and suspends the delivery of history. Historicity itself, as dispositif for the production of authenticity, is exposed as a current, active and creative process, and contemporary in the most direct sense of a contemporaneous (synchronous) state of being; of reliving and living with the past.

Documentary film has long since abandoned the phantasm of an objective camera – one recalls the Parisians instinctively dodging Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s crew in Chronicle of a Summer (1960) – but whatever objectivity it may have lost, it has gained the force of an active catalyst. And as indebted as Oppenheimer may be to a genealogy of genocide films, his methods owe more to Rouch’s ethno-fictions. By the 1990s, documentary theory shared in the general disaffection with a representational mode that seemed to dampen the image’s capacity for communicating ‘relational’ knowledge and for getting at what anthropological filmmaker David MacDougall (1998: 62) called the ‘intricate texture of experience’.

Filmmakers were not alone in this frustration. In retrospect, we discern a striking convergence across quite disparate fields of intellectual activity. In art it registered as a turn from the image towards experience and performance – the live encounter – of which the preponderance of video in today’s galleries seems a sustained side-effect. The ‘relational’ mode announced by Nicholas Bourriaud in 1996 was exemplary both of this vitalist inclination and of the privilege of the moving image, albeit less for its documentary valence than for its popular appeal and as pretext for convivial gatherings. ⁶ Meanwhile Hal Foster (1996) had noted in 1995 the pitfalls of a certain ‘ethnographic turn’, prompting artists intent on picturing those around them to avow and underscore their own presence, rather than conceal it. Beyond the realm of art, an intellectual preoccupation with ‘performativity’, associated most readily with the work of Judith Butler, did not always imply the psycho-symbolic drama of identity. For others it applied as well to objects, as in a raft of ‘post-humanist’ studies of science. A central plank of the Actor-Network Theory espoused by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, also styled ‘relational’, was a new reckoning with non-human or ‘material’ agency. To this end, Andrew Pickering (1995: 5–20) argued persuasively in 1995 for a shift from the ‘representational’ account of science to what he calls a ‘performative idiom’.

Such theories have been slow to wash over Southeast Asia, certainly in academia where a received but mottled humanism – still more attentive to acts than to ‘machinic discourses’ – broadly prevails. Responding to The Act, Benedict Anderson (2013) invites us to historicize the characterization of Medan’s ‘organized gangsters’ more thoroughly. He shifts emphasis from the national-universal theatre that frames their aspirations in the film to the local vicissitudes that furnished their extraordinary impunity. Providing counter-historical context to official accounts of the violence, Anderson would reinforce a representational episteme secured by ‘historical explanation’ and disrupt the mythography of the victor in which perpetrators and filmmaker are complicit (see also Anderson, 1998). But this complicit image compromises more than just historiography: it implicates a whole regime of the image and of viewing, the very literacy of a viewer for whom this image might signify that which it appears to record. For those who would right history’s wrongs by way of images, a little fiction may be less of an impediment than this fictive gaze. Indeed, it may be part of the solution.

Oppenheimer’s relationship with his protagonists – at once complicit and critical – aligns the film with topical debates around contemporary art, attempts to articulate for it a new, progressive agency and new ethical frameworks for participation and collaboration (Bourriaud, 2002; Bishop, 2012; Misiano et al., 2010). Access to video authoring has turned consumers into producers and brought the medium to the centre of these debates. Video has become a new kind of extroverted drawing, rooted no longer in the artist’s studio but in an expanded social field. If an earlier phase of video art had been fundamentally ‘narcissistic’ (Krauss, 1976), then contemporary video seems fundamentally ethnographic. While the former revolved around now canonical experiments in Europe and the United States, the latter phase is global and decentred. And if medium specificity was paradigmatic in that earlier stage, video aesthetics today is more about context and remediation. Insofar as the historicization in The Act might be specific to video, it would thus also be contingent upon local video cultures.

In Southeast Asia, Indonesia stands out as a hotbed of video’s new, more active stance. Take the inaugural call for entries of a documentary and experimental film festival in Jakarta called ARKIPEL: ‘Documentary is like fiction’ it announces. The experimental ‘parent of cinema’ has newly broadened horizons and a renewed calling not only to ‘record events’ but also to be the ‘executant of the incident’ (Hafiz et al., 2013). It seems that a certain spirit of execution haunts the Indonesian moving image. The Act of Killing thus appears at a fraught historical crossroads, suggesting that the political potency of those enriched by decades of New Order cronyism, long unchallenged, has begun to wane. It intimates new possibilities of remembrance, and reconciliation, in the interests – if not the name – of Indonesia’s burgeoning middle class and the economic context of neoliberal global capital. And it alludes to a wider political and technological enfranchisement, to the dilation of the public sphere since the fall of Soeharto and the democratizing potential of media, telecommunications and moving images.

Though it may not have been clear at the time, this is the national media history we were trying to illuminate when we gathered for Video Vortex #7 in Yogyakarta (Jogja) in July 2011. What follows is a sketch of that meeting’s salient themes and pivotal disagreements. The proceedings have been published online in video form, so rather than a detailed summary we offer an editorial reflection, to introduce the ambitions of the conference and its contexts, and to identify key historical and discursive fault lines. Such an exercise also invokes wider, global debates around video by situating Indonesia’s ‘video networking’ in dialogue with the broader ascendancy of ‘networked video’.

Video-active: Reflections on Video Vortex #7

The plans for Video Vortex #7 emerged from very specific conditions. Southeast Asia sits at the fulcrum of a global shift in power, a reality manifest in territorial tensions around the South China Sea, in strategic repositioning by waning Pacific powers (the US and Australia), and in fast-tracked infrastructural investment in Myanmar and the Mekong catchment. Lingering Cold War divisions are being swept aside in the rush to market liberalization, and with this comes a paradigm shift in the media-scape and its geographies of access.

Indonesia’s size and situation made it both exemplary and extraordinary as a case study. Its new public culture had secured sound footings, in a context of improving governance and growing media diversity, a promising model for other emerging democracies nearby. But the challenges, too, made it conversant with regional and global patterns of rapid development: the disillusionments of an incomplete modernity; a rising consciousness of its multicultural make-up; and the desire for secular bulwarks against a resurgent religious zeal and the politics that profits by it. Since the upheaval of 1998 and the reform that followed, there has been a surge in independent video production. Video had played a prominent role in marking and making sense of these events, a key channel of the violence and the hope that energized a generation of activists, artists, filmmakers, pundits and ordinary citizens, many finding their voice in the public sphere for the first time.

Digital video production and distribution had mushroomed. Small scale was the norm, on low or no budget; DIY was the catch-cry, or else DIWO (‘do it with others’); both production and dissemination tended towards the informal rather than the institutional, with little standardization. As Alexandra Crosby (2013) finds in her research on activist art festivals, video was quickly absorbed by a culture of jalan jalan, a kind of Javanese flânerie. Cheap, inclusive and mobile, the medium gelled easily with an itinerant, seasonal cultural logic in which improvisation was a norm and collective enunciation was paramount. Indeed, after the media controls of the authoritarian New Order regime that lasted for 32 years, it is tempting to see here the revivification of a screen-world which, like the traditional wayang kulit (puppet theatre), was live and permeable, at once popular and political, serious and entertaining, sacred and profane.

Secondly, affordable technology had expanded the horizons of video-makers with goals artistic, journalistic, and everything in between. Unlike most of its neighbours, however – and thanks to reformasi – Indonesia had the benefit of motivated and well-organized video agencies, a network of collectives, grass-roots initiatives and NGOs dedicated to the propagation of the medium and the cultivation of video literacy (Thajib and Juliastuti, 2009). They gathered frequently, around events like the biennial OK Video Festival in Jakarta, House of Natural Fiber’s (HONF) annual ‘video-work’ festival and Filem Festival Dokumenter (FFD) in Jogja, or independent nodes such as the Bandung New Media Art Center. Set up by the reformasi generation, these networks had a staunch collectivist ethos. But ten years on, as Indonesia became the pin-up of regional neoliberalization, video was increasingly being put to more individualistic purposes. Outstanding work had found curious audiences in the West through film festivals, galleries and museums. An incipient market for video art had even emerged in Java, with younger collectors taking an interest in the form. Nevertheless, researchers still faced a dearth of critical reflection on video, especially those confined to English language sources. Short but crucial essays had appeared in local journals like Karbon and Jurnal Footage, published by Jakarta collectives ruangrupa and Forum Lenteng respectively. But beyond these, apart from a few journalistic efforts, the written record was largely confined to mapping exercises (Jurriens, 2010; Thajib and Juliastuti, 2009; Murti, 2009; Lim, 2011).

All this made Indonesia a fascinating destination, yet also a detour, for Video Vortex, a migratory network for critique and experimentation with networked video. Two contributions from this region appeared in the network’s second reader in 2011, but the event was still eccentric in that context (Thajib et al., 2011; Teh, 2011). Video Vortex was focused on studies of online video, rather than video practice writ large, and while contributions came from many directions under a post-national paradigm, it had yet to venture beyond Europe and North America. So it is testament to the vision and flexibility of this network that the platform could be adapted for a nationally framed study in which network-native content held a relatively minor place. The subject was apt, we believed, because although there was little networked video to speak of – if that implies network-specific logics or aesthetics – Indonesia was nevertheless crisscrossed by, and being transformed by, hyperactive video networks.

Video Vortex #7 was staged in collaboration with HONF’s cellsbutton new media festival and featured screenings, lectures, workshops and performances held in partnership with local collectives. The conference component took place at independent art space Kedai Kebun Forum, its agenda designed in dialogue with Indonesian researcher Veronika Kusumaryati, the event’s tireless organizer. Contributors were sought on the basis of their proximity to key nodes of video production and exhibition, and their capacity for critical reflection. Our first objective was to assess what Indonesia’s video networks had achieved in the decade since the mass dissemination of DV had coincided with the dilation of its public sphere. A second objective was to reify – in a discursive form – reflections that could be the basis of future scholarship. We were looking for historically informed analysis of video activity, hoping to identify works and projects deserving of deeper research. Third, we were determined to keep the terms of engagement open enough to accommodate diverse practices, from video and installation art to documentary video, from media theory to pragmatic, activist deployments of the medium, since the period was marked by crossovers between these modes and the aesthetics they favoured.

The conference mustered diverse reflections on video’s amplitude as a medium in Indonesia. There were four panel sessions, followed by discussions steered by members of a local cultural studies think-tank. The first announced a desire for art historical reflection. Curator and art historian Agung Hujatnikajennong periodized video’s rise in Indonesian modern art, from its emergence in installation and cross-media practice in the late New Order to the more individualistic, ‘affirmative’ engagement with TV and web culture in recent years. This was followed by the ‘embedded’ account of Ade Darmawan, a key artist and organizer of the reformasi era, as a founding member and director of ruangrupa. Darmawan highlighted video art’s uncertain boundaries: for many of its producers, its status as art mattered less than its critical and creative engagements with other types of public culture. He called for scrutiny of the prevailing framing of video art, both discursive and organizational – in particular the festival form, far and away the dominant site of its production and dissemination.

A second session sought theorization of the medium alive to such local contingencies and histories, to stimulate a sharper vocabulary for Indonesian video aesthetics. In a contribution calculated to rain on the parade of video culture’s festive mainstream, Bandung-based curator Aminuddin TH Siregar argued that a lack of theoretical knowledge fostered weak video art. The steady cycle of festivals saw artists exploiting video’s currency and a vogue for ‘slapstick’ content, the results often indulgent and lightweight, lacking the technical rigour or aesthetic distinction of art. Thomas Berghuis situated Indonesian video within wider debates in the philosophy of art, with reference to Jacques Rancière’s (2008) genealogy of ‘aesthetic regimes’. Formal criteria may indeed need to be emphasized, but how to constitute a theory of video without falling into the traps of the ‘autonomous’ art form or ‘medium specificity’? Berghuis invited reflection on video’s archival function, underscoring the need for an expanded notion of the medium that encompasses its integration with performance and installation, but also reaches beyond the confines of art to socially engaged filmmaking and activism.

Our third session did just that, addressing the research and practice of Jakarta collective Forum Lenteng, founded in 2003, and their Akumassa (‘I am the mass’) platform for ‘education and community empowerment through media’, initiated in 2008. The collective is a hive of experimental and socially engaged video-making in Indonesia’s sprawling capital. Its members co-present the OK Video Festival (with ruangrupa), and their ongoing ‘videobase’ research is the most methodical historicization video has yet to receive in the country (Hafiz et al., 2009). The group contextualized the medium’s development against a national socio-political backdrop, a story shaped by popular cultures of use (including wedding videos and video gaming), industrial and commercial prerogatives, and the countervailing force of state policy and control. A second presentation surveyed the Akumassa network, whose workshops bring technical and intellectual support to people outside cosmopolitan centres, on the periphery of civil society and beyond the reach of contemporary art. The project enables communities to tell local stories, distributing micro-histories that would otherwise never appear in the public sphere. More than anywhere else in the proceedings, it was here that video’s special valence with respect to oral cultures was apparent.

The final session mooted the capacities of online video for effecting social change, in light of structural, cultural and legal constraints. Since his early essays in ruangrupa’s journal Karbon, Ronny Agustinus has been an articulate commentator on video and its place in a wider visual culture. He noted how online video is subject to a larger attention economy – an ‘economy of hits’ – highlighting the enduring sway of bigger, older media powers in directing internet traffic. Andrew Lowenthal of EngageMedia proffered controversial case studies that dramatized both the viral potential and the legal ineffectiveness of online video. The first featured grisly footage of a Muslim mob in West Java, bludgeoning to death members of the persecuted Ahmadiyah sect as police looked on. A second showed the torture of a West Papuan separatist at the hands of Indonesian soldiers. Cautioning against the quantitative logic of an economy of hits, Lowenthal emphasized the medium’s failure to attain legal weight, showing how even the most incriminating imagery could be worthless as evidence. Video’s efficacy is context-dependent, he argued, underscoring the importance of translation and subtitling in an archipelago where more than 700 languages are spoken.

This final panel underscored tensions that animated the entire conference, tensions that would resurface with extraordinary clarity in The Act of Killing. For all the medium’s potency as an ethnographic tool, its democratic potential and amplitude as a channel of social intercourse, for all its immediacy and its ability to access all areas of society, how and why has it remained inadmissible for the purposes of the official record (Strassler, 2010: 16–17)? Why is it that artful and fictional productions can challenge the national conscience, while ‘real’ video documents apparently do not? And if the historical act has somehow been subordinated by the theatrical one, how and why has video become the latter’s accomplice?

Reenactment and Reconciliation

These questions must weigh heavily on activists and socially engaged artists. Could it be that the priority the moving image supposedly gave to a ‘real’ is here reversed, such that remembrance is somehow contingent upon fiction and improvisation? Might the ontological privilege of photo-media, their supposed affinity with what is or was – Roland Barthes’ ça a été – instead be a matter of what images do, or what viewers wish to see? According to Karen Strassler (2010: 252–6), Indonesian modernity is characterized by precisely these dual ‘epistemologies of history’, exemplified by what she calls the ‘documentary’ and ‘revelatory’ capacities of the photographic image.

At the Video Vortex #7 conference, filmmaker and theorist Andreas Treske seized upon a detail in one Akumassa video (Foto Buya Pariaman, 2009; dir. Komunitas Sarueh), concerning the iconicity of a particular, local form of photography. The video centered on portraits of Tuanku Buya Saliah (1887–1974), a Muslim mystic from a small but renowned trading town in West Sumatra. Commonly displayed in homes, shops and restaurants, the photos act as amulets, conferring affiliation with the town and its cuisine, protection against political and epidemiological threats, and prosperity for merchants. As legend has it, just before the conflagrations of 1965, Saliah had a premonition that a local river would run red. The district was home to many communist activists, and while it saw its share of the bloodshed, areas around the river were said to have been spared the worst of it, thanks to the charmed photos. After Saliah’s death, the portraits took on new powers, becoming enmeshed in the processes of commodity exchange.

The irrational charms of the photograph are well established, and by no means limited to developing or semi-industrialized places. Yet such propitious displays, bridging mundane and spiritual worlds, are especially common in Southeast Asia. These animate images perform as hinges between quotidian, domestic kinds of affiliation and a wider, communal and properly political form of visibility, rooted in local conceptions of power and charisma. Strassler (2010: 252–70) finds such images in the shrine-like home of an aging revolutionary, who sees in lens flares proof of his divine election as defender of Sukarno’s republican legacy, usurped by Soeharto (see also Barker, 2005). Rosalind Morris notes the ambivalent power of portraits of Thailand’s monarchs, displayed unfailingly in all the kingdom’s shops and offices (Morris, 2009: 136–9). These are channels of a not simply visual but also magical association, marks or entreaties of patronage. And even as the over-arching narrative of modernity as disenchantment rolls on, modernity and digitalization seem not to have diminished the powers of the region’s animate images. ⁷ Should we not expect that video too will come to channel intensities both worldly and magical, visible and invisible, as it becomes ubiquitous in everyday life and culture? What will Indonesian video look like, asks Treske, when this kind of animate, multi-channel image – this hinge between mundane and symbolic imaginaries – is a video image, rather than a photograph?

Such a query admits both the naturalization of video and the possibility of its sacralization. It underlines the high stakes of investments by groups like Forum Lenteng in a media literacy with DV at its centre. And it anticipates an Indonesia in which video recording may have as much purchase on the future as it has on the past. A video reenactment could yet be more than a ‘ritual of remembrance [serving] to lay the dead to rest and allay the nightmares of survivors’; as Ashley Thompson (2012: 228) suggests, it could also function as part of ‘an arduous struggle against forgetting’. This sort of record does not put the past behind us but engineers active encounters with it, in a present truth consisting as much in the image’s revelatory as in its documentary register. The poignancy of The Act of Killing, or of video art, may ultimately lie not in the sublation of New Order media culture through reformasi, nor in some surpassing of analogue-era controls by a digital democracy, but in the broaching of reconciliation with a past that still animates and regulates the behaviours of the present. Video reenactment proves capable of triggering saturations, both spatial and temporal, that precipitate acts of subjective but, for all that, historical and historiographical truth-making. Doors may thus be opened to a reconciliation that belongs not to the perpetrators of history’s wrongs, or to the filmmaker, but to those collaborators who made the film possible but still cannot be named for fear of retribution.