Documentary imaginary: Production and audience research of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence

Designing production and audience documentary research

Before moving to the core of the research on documentary and the imaginary, this section reflects on the design and analysis of the empirical research, a complex process involving both production and audience studies over a 2-year fieldwork period. In previous work (Hill et al., 2019), the empirical data was analysed in relation to the concept of provocative engagement, in particular how intense engagement with the documentaries is context dependent on the time and place of watching and experiencing the films. In this article, the empirical data is analysed afresh in relation to negative affects arising from the performances, storytelling and context of the documentary films. In particular, the focus is on narrative endings, and how the producer and audiences in this study shape and reshape the endings of both films as critical spaces for reflection.

In this section, there is a brief introduction to the two films; in the next section, there follows a discussion of the narratives of both films as reflected upon by the director. The Act of Killing highlights how the perpetrators took inspiration from crime films or action movies they watched at the time of the genocide, depicting themselves as heroes in Indonesia’s political history, feted by society for the part they played in the genocide (Anderson, 2012). Their performances involved enactments of their crimes; the perpetrators became directors and performers in the restaging of their actions in the genocide (Walker, 2013). The enactments allow us to see the reactions of the performers as perpetrators and victims, with some key persons, such as Anwar, reflecting on their reactions when they watch the film footage at home. The visualisation of violence is contentious, and in relation to the narrative ending, the film leaves viewers to make up their own minds about the moral responsibility of the perpetrators, and their real, or ostensible, regret for past actions. The film has three different running times; audiences in this study watched either the theatrical release of the film (122 minutes), or in some cases, the director’s cut of the film on DVD (159 minutes).

In The Look of Silence, the long-term impact of trauma across generations is explored through one family’s story where the horrific murder of their son is remembered and celebrated by the perpetrators. This film is based on footage filmed by the central character Adi in his family home, showing memories of trauma across generations; and also interviews conducted by Oppenheimer and Adi with the perpetrators of the violence and surviving victims of the massacre at a particular place, Snake River. The perpetrators justify their violent actions and appear to feel little remorse. This film narratively connects to the earlier film The Act of Killing and the perpetrators’ performance of impunity. In this film, the narrative ending to the documentary invites audiences into the final part of Adi’s journey as he confronts the surviving family members of the perpetrators who killed his brother at Snake River and we witness his family’s struggle for victim recognition.

The interview data involved two in-depth production interviews with the filmmaker, conducted by the author. These reflexive interviews were designed with an open guide that contained questions arising from each film. The first interview of 1 hour took place after The Act of Killing had been distributed worldwide in 2014, and the questions related to performance in the genre as a whole, for example, fly on the wall and performance documentary, the influence of other filmmakers such as Jean Rouch on the enactments in this film, or the editing and sound design in the film. Questions about the companion film were designed for a separate interview in 2015 (Oppenheimer, interview with Annette Hill, 12 October 2015, Lund). In the second interview (also around an hour in length), questions were flexibly designed in relation to the different editing and sound design of Adi’s journey compared with the first film, the footage of the river walk by perpetrators of violence in the genocide and the presence of the filmmaker during Adi’s encounters with the perpetrators and their families. The two interviews were thematically coded and analysed, identifying patterns and themes across the data (see Bazely, 2013).

The production interviews enabled the researcher to respond flexibly to the coding process and to design the audience interviews based on insights gleaned from the production data. These interviews, conducted by the research team (see note) were with a sample of transnational audiences, including 21 viewers in Denmark and Sweden, 12 viewers from the United Kingdom, 10 from Colombia, and nine from Japan, with an equal gender mix of 26 males and 26 females, aged from 20 to 60 years old. The timeframe for the fieldwork ran over 2 years (2014–2016) and involved the screening and distribution of the two films in the various regions during this period. As the team included researchers from Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Japan and Colombia, there was a flexible and pragmatic approach to the sampling and the team followed the films in their cinema and DVD distribution within these countries.

The sample and viewing context for the documentary audience research is connected to the argument made in this article. The audiences in this sample actively sought out the first film, The Act of Killing, choosing to watch it at the cinema, and in some cases, the director’s cut for the DVD. People heard about the film mainly through reviews and word of mouth; its reputation as a shocking film established a particular context to their engagement with the film at cinemas and documentary film festivals. Their motivations to engage with The Act of Killing were linked to these critical reviews and connected with audiences’ interests in documentary, human rights and social justice, in some cases for personal reasons and for others related to their work with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and activist groups. Thus, the sample contained motivated audiences who had a certain degree of genre knowledge of documentary and this film’s critical reception. This also meant people were motivated to watch The Look of Silence as a companion film, some watching at the cinema, others on DVD and streaming services. It is certainly the case that audiences in this study carried with them into the viewing experience their memories of the first film; this signals that narrative engagement with The Look of Silence is a complex process that builds on both films as part of a broader sense of the emergent genre of post-traumatic documentary cinema (Ten Brink and Oppenheimer, 2012).

The interview guides were designed as a series of open topics for each film, on themes such as viewers’ motivations to watch the films, genre, performance, editing and sound design. Each interview lasted around an hour and addressed a specific film. The data went through a descriptive coding process, for example, discussions regarding Adi in The Look of Silence were coded for character engagement. The descriptive coding was then clustered into thematic patterns, for example, negative affects coded into a pattern of engagement, including scenes involving Adi confronting the perpetrators of his brother’s murder, the performance of impunity and disempowerment, feelings arising from these scenes by audiences. The thematic codes were then refined and theoretically analysed. For the purposes of this article, a smaller selection from the main sample has been used to exemplify the findings in relation to affect, documentary and the imaginary; the analysis draws on data from the United Kingdom, Nordic region and Colombia to highlight these findings. Due to lack of space, the data from Japan are absent from the discussion (see Hill et al., 2019 for more details about the Japanese sample).

A key point to be made in this article is that these aesthetic and theoretical analyses of the documentary films imagine audiences, rather than drawing on audience research itself. This research extends such textual and theoretical analysis by speaking with the creators and audiences of documentary films, fusing production and audience research in order to build a bridge across the two sites of analysis. What we find from the empirical research is that documentary filmmakers, their subjects in the films, and audiences are imbricated in the overall documentary experience. In particular, Ngai’s (2005) work on ugly feelings and Guynn’s (2016) analyses of the affective dimensions of The Act of Killing suggest a dynamic aesthetic experience. For example, Guynn (2016: 2–3) notes how the ‘evocative power of the still visible traces of the past’ become present in a bodily encounter with the film; our bodily encounters make ‘present memory and past reality coalesce’. The empirical research in this article goes further in findings that suggest negative affects can create a critically productive space for documentary and the imaginary.

The power of documentary narrative

The Act of Killing (the cinematic and director’s cut version) has a narrative structure in three parts, where the final third sets the performance of Anwar as a killer against the backdrop of the socio-political context. The Look of Silence has a narrative structure that follows the reactions of Adi to the Snake River footage and his journey when interviewing his family and former death squad members and their families. The analysis pays attention to the construction of these performances, through the production interviews, and the reactions and performances of audiences in this sample to the endings of both films.

The documentary narrative structures for The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence are part of an exploration into ‘the potential of post-traumatic cinema to recover repressed memories of the violent past and translate these to the screen’ (Ten Brink and Oppenheimer, 2012: 9). For The Act of Killing, the film reveals the ‘generic imperatives conditioning perpetrators’ historical accounts, as well as the contemporary effects of these accounts’, such as the use of the musical genre in enactments. The narrative structure has a strategy of drawing a complicated process of ‘national– and self- imagining out from under the shadow and sway of catastrophe’ (Ten Brink and Oppenheimer 2012: 10). The director eschewed ‘an epistemology of representation’, instead using historical narration as ‘a performance whose staging produces effects’; the generic staging of the Indonesian genocide makes an intervention into official historical accounts, ‘countering the spectral powers of the history of terror’ (Oppenheimer and Uwemedimo, 2012: 291).

For The Look of Silence, the film marks the memories and embodiment of trauma for one family, offering insights into previously repressed historical details of a massacre and execution site in North Sumatra. Two former death squad members were taken to Snake River 38 years after the massacre, where they played the roles of victim and executioner. These men recounted their act of killing to the camera, shared stories within their local community, even self-publishing lurid graphic stories of these acts using the non-fiction sub-genre of mock-horror. This film explores the ‘power of narrative’; the perpetrators’ fascination with ‘their own terrorising fiction’ which manifests as a social force in the community (Oppenheimer and Uwemedimo, 2012: 291). As a counter performance to this spectacle of violence, the brother of one of the victims (Adi), watches this documentary footage and interviews former death squad members and their families in the region. In such a way, the performances of these perpetrators of violence, now captured on film, are given to survivors, and the documentary explores how Adi and his family ‘can imaginatively respond to a history’ that is intended to physically and symbolically deny them recognition and justice (Oppenheimer and Uwemedimo, 2012: 294).

Oppenheimer spoke at length about the controversial character of Anwar in The Act of Killing. He was a local gangster in the city of Medan in Northern Sumatra. Benedict Anderson (2012) has written about the historical context to the films, explaining the unusual conditions of the gangsters who operated closely with the army in this ethnic melting pot of Medan. There is an impunity performed by these professional criminals. The propaganda strategy of the Suharto regime, aimed at an international audience, spoke of securing communists for the sake of public safety; this euphemistic language precluded heroism or boasting of the massacres. Thus, men in the film like Anwar get a chance to re-narrate torture and killing, commemorating their actions in their own films within the film. The Medan gangsters draw on gangster films, westerns, mixed with local genres of supernaturalism or kitsch melodrama. These enactments form disturbing imaginaries within the film. As Anderson (2012) notes, the freedom to direct their own heroic stories is fraught with problems:

The gangsters re-enact whatever they wish and can imagine; but they cannot control what their film will be like in the end. Oppenheimer is a conundrum. He is there, like Rouch, beyond the camera’s reach, an unseen interrogator, pal, witness, kid, judge and motherfucker. They have no idea of how to control him because they are his actors and there is no final script that they can master. He is not part of their film but they are part of his. (p. 284)

There is a complex layering of subjectivities within the film, and the ending is designed to leave audiences with a conundrum: is Anwar using the films within the film as commemoration? Is he subjectively distancing himself from past actions? Or is he experiencing trauma during these performances?

For Heryanto (2014), Anwar is a flamboyant killer, someone who uses the mnemonic imagination of Hollywood films to represent himself as an icon for perpetrators of the genocide appearing in the film and watching the film. The film ends with scenes which show Anwar ‘critically reflecting on his crimes, demonstrating moral and physical suffering’ and such scenes, according to Heryanto (2014: 163), humanise the killer, ‘provoking a degree of sympathy in the viewers’; such scenes stand in stark contrast to other perpetrators in the film ‘who show no remorse, suffer nothing, and remain at large’.

Oppenheimer reflected on the ending to the film:

Some people will say ‘oh he is acting, he is staging his own redemption’. Other people will say ‘he is falling apart at the end and he is absolutely sincere’. This distinction becomes false. Of course Anwar might be staging his own trauma and be really experiencing trauma . . . I am not saying Anwar is redeemed at the end of the film. If he is staging his trauma or pain then that is even more tragic . . . He is lost in illusions.

The sound design was carefully edited to produce dynamic contrast, creating a negative affective structure for audiences to experience. Oppenheimer (2014, interview with Annette Hill, 11 June 2014, Lund) explained in detail how he imagined the negative affects:

Normally, if you think of the picture track as railroad ties – the shot, the shot, the shot – then the music provides a fluid, looping overlay that holds everything together. Here, we don’t have that space when the gap between the words, and what Anwar is feeling, grows. The sound design works like a score to take us away from the picture track, entering its own logic, flowing like music but always made out of concrete sounds.

As we watch the ending to the film, ‘we witness something horrible and we are given a critical space not to get lost in the scene but to see the tableau as something horrible’ (Oppenheimer, 2014, interview with Annette Hill, 11 June 2014, Lund). The affective sound experience includes low-frequency sounds, such as a drone sound and a dripping sound with added reverb, and these sounds are dynamically contrasted with nightmare images of stuffed animals wrapped in plastic in a museum, or a wire wrapped around Anwar’s neck during one of the enactments of violence. The sound and images create a suffocating closeness with Anwar and his nightmares: ‘there is a synthesis where the perpetrator’s face becomes haunted as the film enters its final act and the words drop off’ (Oppenheimer, 2014, interview with Annette Hill, 11 June 2014, Lund). When watching the ending it invokes a haunted space for the absent victims.

How did audiences in this study reflect on the ending to The Act of Killing? In the context of the Colombian sample, audience members were primarily motivated to politically and socially engage with the film set against their experience of a long period of wartime. The interviews took place at a particular time when a peace treaty with the FACR-EP (Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia – People’s Army) was a topic of contested debate in a public referendum. The younger educated participants in our sample voted for the peace treaty; the moral uncertainty at the end of the film evokes strong reactions. For example, one viewer noted, ‘it is like dirty water and you try to see through it just because you believe there must be a light, but the light never arrives. The film just stays deep in the dark water that is Anwar and his twisted mind’ (30-year-old male, Colombian lawyer). They went on to explain,

You are trying to fight with your deepest emotions and with your deepest sorrows. I think especially for those like me that have been exposed to violence, first in Colombia and now here where I live in Mexico with all this drug lord bullshit that is going on, you become disconnected from it. It’s like some kind of violence anaesthetic, perhaps because your mind cannot cope with it. The surrealism of the film and the saturation of colours made it feel like a horrible dream for me.

They were left with feelings of disgust: ‘I hate injustice and what they did needs to have some justice. I guess it will come when they die and they don’t get to see the waterfalls and the dancing and singing and happiness of their victims’ (30-year-old male, Colombian lawyer).

The moral ambiguity of the narrative ending creates what Ngai (2005: 13) calls ‘ugly feelings’, referring to negative affects that are ‘knotted’ and produce a state of disorientation. Such affective disorientation is described by this viewer in their aesthetic experience of the film, where the ambiguous ending provokes different feelings of disquiet, a loss of control and suspended action; a sense of ‘being lost in one’s own “cognitive map” of available affects’ (Ngai 2005: 14). As Ngai (2005: 13) notes, ugly feelings such as disgust are experientially negative; they tend to evoke a negative feeling about the feeling. In such a way, negative affects can offer a form of critical productivity (Ngai, 2005: 2). The feelings of disgust that arise from the ending of the film afford a reflexive space for audiences in the Colombian sample to find their own moral orientation. In the earlier case, this relates to the lonely death of the perpetrators. In another example, the victims of the genocide become an absent presence in the ending of the film: ‘The missing voices, those are for me the protagonists and even though they are no longer in the physical realm this film creates a tribute to them’ (30-year-old female, Colombian NGO worker).

We can see how these viewers shape their negative affective experiences into something else:

Then you are just left wondering, what can be done now to stop that? If I could not stop it in the past, it was out of my hands, how can I stop it in my life, in my surroundings? How can I stop involving myself in situations of harm, how do I get violence far away from my life? This was the emotional evolution or change that came from watching the film. I started with that disgust, that fear, anger and pain but at the end I said to myself ‘what can I do? I cannot turn a blind eye to all the places where this has happened.’ (36-year-old male, Colombian visual content creator)

Note how this viewer started out with a visceral reaction to the ending of the film; they felt disgust and anger towards the situation of Anwar and other perpetrators of the genocide who live with impunity; they felt empathy for the suffering of the silent victims of this atrocity and fear for the survivors. Such negative affective encounters with the film evoke the kind of dynamic aesthetic experience that both Ngai (2005) and Guynn (2016) speak of in their work. This viewer asks ‘what can I do?’ and transforms their negative affective engagement, in particular, feelings about feelings, into a space for social action in the context of their lived experience in Colombia.

With regard to audiences in the UK sample, this included transnational cinema-goers living in London and reflecting on the ending of the film in relation to their home and host land. In one example, a Mexican male student, aged 30 years old, saw the director’s cut and reflected on the ending in relation to their experience of living in Mexico. Like other viewers in the sample, they had a visceral reaction to the film. There is a sense that Anwar is caught in a performance of terror that is powerful and unsettling, and this, in turn, imbricates the viewer in the process:

In the end it was a documentary on us watching them as a audience. Anwar collapses in the end, he mentions that he is seeing these dead people but then at the same time you don’t don’t know if he is acting. (30-year-old, Mexican male student)

For this audience member, ‘The achievement of the film is that without telling us as viewers we end up knowing that there is something fundamentally rotten to it all’ (30-year-old, Mexican male student). They explained how the film’s negative affects created a critical space for reflection:

The thing that shocked me the most in the film is how violence is naturalized. When you live in Mexico you don’t really realise how we are so used to living with these horrific stories . . . When we are in Mexico we don’t talk about the violence but then when Mexicans go abroad it is normal that we talk about it all the time. It was weird . . . seeing the craziness of other countries expressing violence and how they make it part of their everyday life and then seeing myself . . . with so many people being killed . . . and yet life goes on. While watching I constantly made those connections. (30-year-old, Mexican male student)

In this case, the ugly feelings evoked by the film are a resource for reflection on their past life in Mexico and their current experience of living in London – the comparisons generate connections between the film, their transnational experience and their imbrication in the narrative journey of the film.

Another example from the United Kingdom illustrates this point regarding the film’s experientially negative journey; how the feelings evoke more feelings that can become a resource for reflection. An American male web developer and his partner, an Italian female designer, both living in London, watched the director’s cut on DVD. They had a strong bodily encounter with the film, using words such as disgust and revulsion repeatedly in the interview: ‘My reaction to the film was “what the hell is that? I do not want to watch it”’ (40-year-old, Italian female designer). They reflected on their reactions to Anwar:

I trust Anwar to certain degree, like when he says he has nightmares and that he has a hard time, I believe him; and I think that when he feels revolted by the re-enactment I also think that is real. It is not because he feels remorse but he feels revulsion from the act of killing. It is not even a moral reaction. It is somehow like a physiological reaction, like an instinct. But I do not think he gets to a point where you could consider that he is having some sort of moral or ethical judgment against himself. There is not real truth and reconciliation going on, it is maybe going towards that. (60-year-old, American male, Web developer)

The feelings about feelings lead to broader questions of authenticity and morality in the documentary. These viewers were critical of the film and its ambiguous moral ending, arguing for a directorial position of judgement on the genocide in Indonesia. At the same time, they used the ending of the film as a resource for moral reflection on impunity; for example, on the history of Italian fascism and the Second World War: ‘people that you wouldn’t suspect could behave in such a way can behave in such a way; and actually under the right circumstances we may have been the ones to slaughter’ (40-year-old, Italian female designer). As this viewer reflected, ‘no one wants to confront any of this but everyone realizes that all of these horrible things happened in the past and that the same people are in power’ (60-year-old, American male, Web developer).

In relation to the context of the Nordic sample, there was a strong sense of social justice in audience reactions to the ending of the film, something that can be understood in the context of the social welfare system in this region and the social democratic political engagement of the viewers in the study. This Danish viewer watched the film at a documentary festival screening and described standing outside the cinema afterwards, feeling shocked and confused:

We all felt this was bizarre. For example, that scene where those girls are dancing around that fish, we were all like ‘what was that? Was it a fish? What was that fish doing there?’ And the dead souls were thanking them for setting them free. They get a medal; the death patrols have done them a favour. I mean it was such an absurd scene. We were all standing outside going ‘that was so weird!’ A terrible thing has happened but there is this weird mind twist that was just disturbing. (36-year-old Danish female, Administrator)

The surreal ending, the sense of Anwar lost in his illusions, generated other feelings and reflections about his character: ‘To have killed so many people. So perhaps it’s a way to protect yourself, you have to tell yourself that what you did wasn’t wrong in order to be able to survive’ (36-year-old Danish female, Administrator). The ending also generated moral reflection:

I wanted them to push him more, make Anwar reflect. There were small indications that he actually did feel regret . . .. he had started to think that what he had done wasn’t a good thing . . . You felt like ‘now, it’s coming, now it will come’ but then it never does. But, maybe that is just because that’s what I want. I want him to regret. It is my moral talking telling him to be remorseful. It’s the right thing to do. (36-year-old Danish female Administrator)

The negative affective encounter with the ending of the film imbricates the viewer in the documentary imaginary. And, whereas in the earlier example, this creates a space for critical reflection on their own country and context of violence, for this person, the moral ambiguity is too difficult to contemplate; they ‘want him to regret’, for the director to intervene and push Anwar to feel remorse because it is the ‘right thing to do’.

As we can see from this Danish example, these particular audiences struggled to understand the absence of retribution for the perpetrators and the denial of social justice for the victims of the genocide. This 36-year-old Danish female teacher questioned the emotional truth of the ending:

if I were to believe that he was not an actor, that part of him was not acting, I almost would say that he wasn’t a real person. I would have thought that any person would think about this in terms of good or bad. I thought it was awful to see that he was considered a hero, that he had done heroic deeds. The society around him put him on a pedestal, as he himself did. They were free men, gangsters and they had so much power. It was disturbing. It sort of unsettled my idea of living in a world where human rights or human lives matter. There was nothing of that, these people just considered him a God for what he had done. That is so weird in my world!

For this viewer, their bodily encounter with the film made ‘present memory and past reality coalesce’ (Guynn, 2016) in such a way that they forcibly rejected the ending:

To me it was more about a process about the past you go through, a past that follows you. No matter how much you try to put lid on it, whatever you do, it will catch up with you. That’s what I felt . . . It was totally painful to watch, I just wanted it to stop. I resisted the end, ‘that is it! That is enough!’ (36–year-old, Danish female teacher)

The context of her negative affective encounter is one where debate about human rights is part of the social fabric of Danish life; where memories and histories of the Second World War are part of civic culture. Her feelings about negative feelings generated at the end of the film collide, rather than coalesce; the social vision of a Nordic welfare state does not merge with the documentary imaginary of the film, and indeed we see the contrast between these two imaginaries. Such an example underscores how the critically productive spaces generated at the end of the film are contingent on the material and symbolic conditions of transnational audiences.

Re-imagining fear

When you tell a story from a place of disempowerment this can be another kind of power from below. Avery Gordon (2004) explains,

social stories are about the power to re-narrativise society . . . The world as it is – with its global systems and local particularities . . . with its overwhelming obviousness and haunting silences, and with its casualties and its hopes – comes out looking differently than it usually does. (p. 2)

In The Act of Killing, the main narrators are the perpetrators of violence, at times vulnerable, but never disempowered, in the sense that Gordon means regarding victims of violence. But, there is one scene where Anwar’s neighbour tells his story of memories of violence, when someone close to him was taken from their home and killed. He is sitting in a makeup chair, with Anwar and others. First, he is slapped down; they tell him to keep quiet, no one wants to listen to this, but he persuades them to listen to his story by suggesting maybe this can motivate the actors for the next scene. Oppenheimer (2014, interview with Annette Hill, 11 June 2014, Lund) noted,

he gives a tour de force performance; he is seizing back the power by taking the courage to throw the moral monstrosity of what they have done in their faces. These are painful and dangerous wounds and his performance leads Anwar to question the whole film. I could hear him whispering into his radio mic ‘don’t you think Josh is a communist’ because this was a moment of attack.

The framing of the filmmaker as a communist sympathiser only serves to signal how powerful this performance was in the re-narrativising of the atrocities of the genocide from the victim’s perspective. A viewer commented on the impact of this scene: ‘he was crying and you can see the reality of what is happening . . . those transformations that one needs to do on a personal level, to acquire this new identity. This allowed me to see that war cannot be generalized (30-year-old female, Colombian media analyst). As Gordon (2004) notes, explaining something is not enough; it sometimes takes the performance of a story to show another form of embodied knowledge. From a place of disempowerment arises the voices of victims and their politics of recognition.

This is clearly visible in The Look of Silence, where Adi and his family come from a place of disempowerment and narrate their story of the genocide. Oppenheimer (2016) explained,

In The Look of Silence, I wanted to take the viewers into the haunted silences that punctuated The Act of Killing and feel what it is like to have to build a life there as a survivor. To live there, unable to mourn for all that has been lost. What is it like to live there surrounded by these powerful perpetrators? What is it like to live with half a century of fear?

For this family of survivors, there are still haunted silences, a fear and suffering that is invoked through their daily experience of living with the impunity of the perpetrators of the genocide in their local area. For Oppenheimer (2016), ‘Those moments of silence are often when we shift perspective to the absent victims. We mark out a space for them, something happens to that silence’.

The Look of Silence asks questions of the perpetrators:

There’s a scene where Adi comes in, you can see that he’s nervous, it’s unpleasant, he swallows, and he says: ‘My brother disappeared, he died’. And he still can’t touch the perpetrators. One of them says: ‘Yes, I signed all the forms. We killed five hundred people a day. That’s what we did. And it was a good thing’. And Adi talks about their moral responsibility and they say: ‘Well, that’s politics, and I don’t want to talk about politics’. And Adi’s final argument is: ‘My brother disappeared, and you’re responsible. I think you’re running away from your moral responsibility’. And they play their last card: ‘Perhaps you’re a communist. And who knows what might happen? Everything might happen all over again’. . .. There are family members who say: ‘We didn’t know anything. Why are you trying to reopen old wounds?’ That’s easy for them to say, other people are still walking around, being terrified. The world hasn’t become a better place. There’s no chance to fix things unless there’s political change. (47-year-old, Danish male filmmaker)

Adi’s narrative in the film is re-narrated by this viewer, adding a more forceful tone to his interaction with the perpetrators and their family members. The re-narration is both a personal and social story:

You watch, you observe, you’re not present. Instead, you’re sitting somewhere, just like Joshua, and he has set something in motion and you watch it unfold. You hear Joshua sometimes, he seldom backs off. He keeps going, mercilessly, he keeps going.

We can see how this viewer identifies with the filmmaker, they want to ‘keep going’ until there is recognition for the victims and some form of social justice.

Oppenheimer (2016) reflected on how these ‘confrontations were very painful’ but they allowed him to see the fear and trauma of Adi and his family from their place of disempowerment. He noted,

Adi’s not seeking revenge. He’s trying to end the conditions of fear in which his family has been living. If he came out for violence and revenge, the cycle of violence would just continue to the next generation. And I learned very much from Adi to see the perpetrators as human beings . . .. No matter how awful, or monstrous the way the perpetrators spoke, Adi would always insist in finding the humanity there. (Oppenheimer, 2016)

For Oppenheimer, it was important that audiences could identify with Adi as being like their neighbour, brother or son. And yet, the pervasive denial of victim recognition in the film makes such character engagement challenging for audiences in this study.

There is a scene towards the ending of The Look of Silence where Oppenheimer and Adi are in the home of a perpetrator’s family; the man who killed his brother Ramli has passed away and Adi is talking to his widow and grown up children. They deny involvement in the murder, despite the fact that Oppenheimer recorded their father on camera boasting about their actions, even making a graphic novel of the murder as a visual narrative of his act of killing. Oppenheimer contradicts their words, tells them he has evidence, but after this moment, the family calls the police and they are both forced to leave. A viewer noted how the filmmaker steps in, almost like ‘No, that’s it, I’ve smiled and nodded along for hours and I’ve listened even though I don’t agree and that’s enough!’ (31-year-old, Swedish male social worker). As with the previous example, this viewer re-narrates the scene in a more forceful way and wills the director to speak up: ‘enough is enough’. What happens in the silence is that the voices of the victims can be heard in the documentary imaginary of the film; and audiences critically reflect on this place of disempowerment occupied by the victims.

We can see this connection between the documentary imaginary and audiences in the following example of two UK viewers, living in London, and their journey with Adi:

When he goes to interview the family, they do not want to hear about it . . . I think that was perhaps the wake up call, that suddenly they are confronted by the evidence and the stories from fantasy become real. That is how I interpreted that . . . In the sense the whole film is his journey into solving the mystery of the crime so he can be at peace, and he feels that part of it is confronting the people who committed this crime. (53-year-old, British male office manager)

Adi becomes the symbol of the larger events because it obviously did not just happen to him, so it is about exploring one case as a symbol for all the others. (47-year-old, Italian female office manager)

In following Adi’s journey, described as a murder mystery, they see in his family’s experience a broader social story of fear and impunity. The search for truth becomes imperative, especially when compared with Anwar in The Act of Killing:

You know in the first film it is almost about the subconscious of these killers, the people who engage in such acts, whereas this film is more on the level of history, we need to know the truth. You see Adi, but you also get the sense that there is this whole society that has suffered . . . (53-year-old, British male office manager)

Also there is an element of the so-called ‘justice’, the fact that there is a search for the truth and at the end he reveals who he is . . . you know what I mean, like a mini-trial. Not a trial in the sense of a conventional trial but at least forcing the perpetrators and their families to confront the events of the past. (47-year-old, Italian female office manager)

As with the earlier example, these viewers sympathise with Adi and feel a strong desire for retribution. The murder mystery ends with the traditional trial; and although this is recognised as being an unconventional trial, nevertheless, this more forceful imagining of the ending to the film creates another social story than what we find in the film itself. Indeed, what we see is the various ways these audiences are imbricated not only in the journey of the filmmaker and Adi, but how they become editors of their own documentary experience.

Conclusion

This article has used a holistic approach to production-audience research to analyse documentary and the imaginary, focusing in particular on fear and impunity in The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. The narrative endings to both documentary films offer little consolation to audiences in this study; there is a sense of powerlessness, where the endings are haunted by the absent presence of the victims of the genocide. Benedict Anderson (2012), on the ending to The Act of Killing, noted the mixed emotions evoked through Anwar Congo, such as excess, boastfulness, despair, anxiety and ‘last: the smugness of impunity’ (p. 284). One of the gangsters says to the director ‘kid, we can re-enact anything at all, and there is nothing anyone, including you, can do to us’ (Anderson, 2012: 284). All the same, Anderson writes, ‘they are, like everyone else, under the sentence of death’. And there is no one ‘who can send them straight to heaven’. The film ends with the smugness of impunity, but for Anderson offers some kind of moral justice. In October 2019, Congo passed away, and in a report in The Jakarta Post (2019), Oppenheimer reflected on his own mixed emotions: ‘I hope his mistakes and his virtues are part of Indonesia’s national reckoning with its past’.

Ariel Heryanto (2014) has written about criticisms of the films within Indonesia. He highlights how there were great expectations that these documentaries would cause public outrage, perhaps altering perspectives on this violent past, revealing political scandal and ‘providing a new weapon for those seeking justice for the victims of 1965, both past and present’ (Heryanto 2014: 163). Heryanto hoped for such an impact, contributing to a special issue of Tempo on the genocide. But, he reflects on how the films address a complex reality: The Act of Killing enacts ‘an obscene testimony to the absolute impunity enjoyed by politicos-cum-gangsters, who continue to run the country nearly half a century later’ (Heryanto 2014: 163). This is a history and documentary imaginary replete with contradictions: ‘there is no easy linear progression toward self-expression or resolute demands for justice – let alone success in achieving it – that correlates with a greater freedom of speech’ (Heryanto 2014: 164). These paradoxes and ironies, in Heryanto’s words, are replete in the audience reflections analysed here; these are audiences from outside Indonesia, struggling to come to terms with the shock of the films in relation to their past memories and present day realities; and these are audiences who find, as Heryanto (2014) suggests, ‘truth and justice do not always prevail, and they do not necessarily arrive in the form or at the time desired by those who struggle for them’ (p. 163). Nevertheless, audiences do not give up, using the power of the documentary imaginary to continue such a struggle.

The affective disorientation at the end of both documentary films leaves viewers in this study feeling disgust towards the perpetrators of the genocide, sympathy towards the victims, and a strong desire to do something, identifying with the filmmaker and relating the subject of the documentary with their own experiences of fear, violence and war. The disturbing imaginary of the perpetrators and the politics of fear for the victims are re-imagined by audiences. People write themselves into the films, creating another more morally forceful ending, where there is the possibility of victim recognition and a space where perpetrators are punished.