Knowing the past affectively: Screen media and the evocation of intergenerational trauma

Introduction

This article engages in an exploration of the ways in which the affective force of Indisch intergenerational trauma is evoked by watching of The Act of Killing (2012), a documentary by Joshua Oppenheimer. The viewers here are Indisch (Indonesian-Dutch) viewers whose relatives suffered through various atrocities that took place in Indonesia in the 20th century, including those that the documentary portrays. Based on an analysis of ethnographic material, I argue that personal desires to unearth families’ histories of shattering silence, ¹ and the subjects’ struggle to verbally articulate multifaceted forms of felt dispositions that affectively connect them to various forms of violent histories to which this old, interracial diaspora were exposed, is a driving force for immersion in memory and genealogy work (Dragojlovic, 2014, 2015). Thus, watching Oppenheimer’s documentary is a vehicle for expanding one’s cognitive and affective ways of knowing the violent past, serving as un-intentional act of reconfiguring the self. This article explores how the affective capacity of screen media can intensify affective traces of intergenerational trauma, which can been experienced as different symptoms of anxiety disorders by some viewers.

My analysis of the relationship between the affectivity of screen media and its potential to emanate as an affective force of transmission of intergenerational trauma is based on long-term ethnographic research on the memory and genealogy work of Indisch people who trace their genealogy to Indonesian foremothers and Dutch (or other European) forefathers in the Dutch East Indies. Following Indonesian independence at the end of the Second World War, Indisch people recognised as Dutch citizens resettled to the Netherlands and to a lesser extent to Canada, the United States and Australia in the aftermath of imprisonment and torture in Japanese internment camps and by Indonesian freedom fighters. Only a small minority stayed in Indonesia following decolonisation (Bosma and Raben, 2008).

An analysis of the Indisch viewers’ experiences of watching The Act of Killing urges me not to fall into the trap of the Cartesian split between the mind and the body and the ensuing presumption that mind ‘thinks’ and the body ‘does’ (Sheets-Johnston, 1992). If the logic of Cartesian dualism is followed, the ways in which knowing relates to gaps and silences about historical violence can easily be situated around ‘silence’ (as not-knowing) and ‘articulation’ (as knowing). This is especially pertinent in the context of historical violence characterised by a subject’s struggle to articulate what might be perceived as a ‘coherent narrative’ but being imbued with a sense of knowing that lacks verbal articulation, as my ethnography demonstrates. In their discussion about narratives in the context of illness and emotional suffering, Lars-Christer Hydén and Jens Brockmeier (2011: 2) argue that narratives that are ‘broken’, ‘undecided’ and ‘fragmented’ have received lesser scholarly attention. Contributing to the broad scholarship of ‘illness narratives’ within the fields of social welfare, the contributors to this issue do not problematise the narrative form as such, nor do they critically engage with the ‘mind and body’ distinction that still tends to produce a sharp division between ‘ill’ and ‘healthy’ bodies. I am sympathetic to scholarship in the medical humanities fields that problematise the limits of narrative (Woods, 2011) and to anthropological scholarship that approaches narratives of illness and healing as embodied, performative and temporal (Mattingly and Garro, 2000). ²

Positioning my own approach, it is important to stress that my analysis is inspired by and based in affect theory (e.g. Ahmed, 2004; Blackman, 2012; Brennan, 2004; Seigworth and Gregg, 2010; Leys, 2011; Massumi, 2002; Navaro-Yashin, 2012; Thrift, 2008) and body studies (e.g. Blackman, 2008, 2012; Shildrick and Steinberg, 2015), which emerged in the wake of poststructuralism, as a corrective to the ‘discursive’ and ‘linguistic’ focus of the 1970s and 1980s. The latter has been criticised for giving primacy to language and discourse over matter, the visceral, and lived experiences of the body. My analysis takes as its starting point the idea of ‘lived bodies’ (Williams and Bendelow, 1998: 3) that perceives human bodies as always in process, emphasising the specificities of material existence while still stressing the importance of cultural and social processes. Equally important for my analysis has been the work of Dutch anthropologist Annemarie Mol (2002); in particular, her seminal work, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Based on ethnographic research conducted over four years in Dutch hospitals, Mol observed the practice of atherosclerosis, which led her to make a compelling argument that the human body is an open system, always connected to other bodies, human and non-human, practices and performances. Situating my approach within body studies that engages with affect, it is important to state that such engagements characterise the body in predominantly two ways: as open, multiple, with a capacity to affect and be affected, rather than being closed biological and psychological entities; and as always in a process of becoming (Blackman, 2012: 2). Following Seigworth and Gregg’s (2010) argument that bodies are not stable things or entities, Lisa Blackman (2012: 1) cogently argues that ‘rather than talk about bodies, we might instead talk of brain-body-world entanglements, and where, how and whether we should attempt to draw boundaries between the human and non-human, self and other, and material and immaterial’. I take Blackman’s nexus of ‘brain-body-world entanglements’ as crucial for my analysis as it avoids the pitfalls of a particular stream of affect theory scholarship (Clough, 2004; Massumi, 2002; Thrift, 2008) that perceives affect as only aligned with the non-cognitive, thus perpetuating the dichotomies of mind and matter, biology and culture, body and cognition, and physical and psychological. Importantly, I wish to distance my analysis from affect theory that postulates the banishment of the subject from affect scholarship, and argue instead that the theorisation of affect and embodiment needs theories of subject and subjectivity (Blackman, 2012; Dragojlovic, 2015; Dragojlovic & Broom, 2017; Navaro-Yashin, 2012). This approach allows one to study subjective formations as ‘perceptual becoming … always becoming otherwise’ (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 3), as an assemblage of human and non-human processes (Blackman, 2012: 1).

When ethnographically studying how Oppenheimer’s documentary about historical atrocities and their aftermath shape a continuum of cognitive and affective ways of knowing, I did not watch these films with my interlocutors, nor did I ask them to watch these documentaries as a part of their participation in my research. Instead, open-ended conversations on the topic were initiated during encounters with my interlocutors as a result of public announcements for film screenings, my interlocutors viewing the documentary, or attendances at Oppenheimer’s public talks. In numerous instances my interlocutors insisted on hearing how I felt watching the documentary as a way of gauging this against their own experiences and feelings.

1965–66 killings

The mass killings that took place in Indonesia in the period of 1965–66, targeting communists, alleged leftists and ethnic Chinese people, led to the biggest massacre in the Indonesia’s history, followed by decades of stigmatisation, marginalisation and suppression of the Indonesian left, their sympathisers and anyone associated with them, including their family members. Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning scholarly literature that stresses the importance of personal narratives in understanding the scale and effects of the 1965–66 killings and their ongoing effects in Indonesia (e.g. Dwyer and Santikarma, 2003; Heryanto, 2006; Kammen and McGregor, 2012; McGregor and Hearman, 2007; Wieringa 2002) and among Indonesian people who have lived in exile from the mid-1960s onwards (Dragojlovic, 2012; Hearman, 2010; Hill, 2010; Stewart and McGlynn, 2000). Joshua Oppenheimer’s making of The Act of Killing coincided with this scholarly engagement and the growing interest in the Indonesian nation’s past (e.g. Hadiz, 2006; Zurbuchen, 2005). While a detailed analysis of this documentary is beyond the scope of this article, it is important to say that Oppenheimer’s work is concerned with questions of accountability for the 1965–66 killings and the fact that neither individual perpetrators nor the state structures behind them have ever been found accountable for the atrocities. The cinematic style in which the film was made clearly seeks to affectively draw large international audiences. Yet, how the affectivity of this particular kind of screen media is experienced and qualified by viewers who are differently situated in relation to divergent forms of historical violence remains an important field of inquiry.

The Act of Killing was filmed over several years in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra, Indonesia. The film presents a series of re-enactments of interrogations, torture and killings that took place in 1965–66, as performed by the same people who took part in these events 40 years before. Encouraged by the director, the protagonists boast about their past brutalities by restaging the butchering of alleged ‘communists’, and narrate their dreams, fantasies and nightmares. The Act of Killing is the first documentary made in Indonesia that was nominated for an Academy Award. It was a co-winner of the Royal Anthropological Society’s prize for ethnographic film and gained recognition at numerous documentary festivals. The documentary has received more than 500 reviews (Yngvesson, 2014) and has been widely debated across numerous academic fields. For example, in 2014, the journal, Critical Asian Studies, dedicated a special issue to the film, where 13 prominent scholars and activists engaged in a discussion focusing on ‘sexual politics’ (Wieringa, 2014), ‘ethics’ (Van Klinken, 2014), ‘impunity of screen’ (Hearman, 2014) and ‘aesthetic sensibility’ (Tiwon, 2014), to name a few. Scholars have acknowledged tangentially that The Act of Killing has affected viewers across the world (Heryanto, 2014; Hoskins and Lasmana, 2015; Van Klinken, 2014) as well as in Indonesia (Wandita, 2014). In his critique of the film, historian Robert Cribb (2014: 147) has argued,

The killings are presented as the work of civilian criminal psychopaths, not as a campaign of extermination, authorized and encouraged by the rising Suharto group within the Indonesian army and supported by broader social forces frightened by the possibility that the Indonesian communist party might come to power.

Indisch people

The formation of Indisch cultures began in the colonial Dutch East Indies – present day Indonesia (Bosma and Raben, 2008). From the early 17th century onwards, European (mainly Dutch) men took Indonesian women as their companions, either as legitimate wives or as so-called nyai (housekeepers/bed partners), which resulted in a large Indo-European population. Over the centuries, this practice was normalised (Locher-Scholten, 1995; Taylor, 1983) and interracial intimacies were accepted as long as they followed prescribed gender, race and class patterns. Indisch people and communities in the Dutch East Indies occupied an ambivalent space – on the one hand, they were granted privileges reserved for Europeans, but on the other, they were able to move between European and Indonesian worlds (Stoler, 2002).

During the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies (1942–1945), Indo-Europeans came to be classified as ‘Asians’ rather than ‘Europeans’ and, while the majority of the European population was interned in prison camps, those of Eurasian descent were given the opportunity to avoid internment in the prison camps if they succeeded in proving a desirable degree of Indonesian heritage. Approximately 100,000 Dutch and Eurasian individuals were interned in the Japanese prison camps, while approximately 220,000 Eurasians were able to avoid them (De Jong, 2002). Many Eurasians suffered terrifying brutalities during the initial period of the Indonesian independence movement between 1945 and 1946, known as the ‘bersiap’ period (Anderson, 1972; Dragojlovic, 2011). Following the formal recognition of Indonesian independence in 1949, those recognised as Dutch citizens were forced to leave the country. Many moved to the Netherlands, the United States or Australia (Bosma et al., 2006) and were exposed to the assimilationist policies that pervaded in the mid-20th century in the Euro-American and Australian contexts.

Knowing the past affectively: The act of watching

In my recent work on the practice of Indisch genealogy work (Dragojlovic, 2014, 2015), I have discussed the dynamics of intergenerational transmissions and felt dispositions in relation to old multiracial diaspora by drawing on the work of Paul Connerton (1989) on memory and remembering as shared and collective. Connerton’s focus is on what he terms non-inscribed memory – memory transmitted through human and non-human actors that includes embodied habits, traditions and rituals. For Connerton (1989: 102), memories are not just inscribed through the construction of cultural texts but are also sedimented in the body. Thus, bodies are containers and carriers of memory, which is unconsciously incorporated (Connerton, 1989: 72–104). Equally instructive for my analysis was the work of Vikki Bell (2007) that draws on the concept of lineage to stress the ways in which various forms of shame, trauma and affect are communicated intergenerationally. Building on Paul Gilroy’s work on diaspora and critical race studies, Bell (2007: 33) argues for the importance of exploring the background of felt dispositions, which she describes as ‘those relations that are neither of identification nor of alterity, that is, those of genealogical connection’. Drawing on Connerton, she argues that these connections are dispositions and relations transmitted by means other than speech – photographs, films, fiction and more embodied practices of remembering.

A shattering silence about the manifold forms of violence which Indisch people experienced in the 20th century permeates the entire corpus of Indisch genealogy work, which, I argue, is a complex matrix of active, dynamic and performative engagements with the past. This genealogy work includes but it is not limited to the following practices: (a) consumption and production of novels, fiction films, theatrical productions, and pop music with Indies themes, that value bonds based on kinship; (b) cultural and/or legal, individual, and collective claims to belonging based on ancestry; (c) forms of cultural and political activism that rely on genealogy in order to make legal claims and (d) the relationship between wider socio-political frameworks and the individual and collective practice of genealogy (Dragojlovic, 2011, 2014). ³

Practices of genealogy work that are expected to draw the subject into an affective engagement, such as traveling to the places where an individual’s ancestors were imprisoned, tortured, prosecuted, murdered and/or buried, often pose prolonged emotional contestations that accompany a decision to embrace such experiences (Dragojlovic, 2014). Similarly, and almost without exception, my interlocutors express that they felt strong emotions when making the decision of whether or not to see one or two of Oppenheimer’s documentaries, being The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014). ⁴ These emotions included a keen determination and almost a sense of necessity to see them, accompanied with a strong sense of apprehension of how such experience might affect them emotionally. For the same reasons, some of my interlocutors were convinced that they should keep away from an exposure to such explicit material and resorted instead to seeing trailers, reading reviews or watching them on the ‘small’ screen – a TV set or a computer screen.

Whether intentional or not, however, engaging with Oppenheimer’s documentaries was almost unavoidable for any Indisch person who has taken part in the Indisch cultural spaces in recent years. By ‘taking part’, I mean participation in media such as mailing lists, Facebook, Twitter, online discussion groups and similar, and attendance at cultural, social and political events that relate to Indisch themes. The Act of Killing was not only screened at public cinemas throughout the Netherlands but also at many events organised by Indisch communities across the country. In the Netherlands (as in many other parts of the world), the documentary and its content brought about many public debates, making it yet another source that was potentially able to provide some closer insights into the shattering silence that surrounds the many atrocities that occurred to Indisch people in the 20th century. At first glance, Oppenheimer’s two documentaries might not appear to be the most obvious sites for Indisch memory work, as they portray the violence that took place in the mid-1960s – the majority of Indisch people had left independent Indonesia by the mid-1950s. Yet, presuming that these two documentaries would not be of interest to Indisch viewers for such reasons would be naïve.

One of my interlocutors, Marel, who was born in the 1950 in the Netherlands a year after her parents moved from Indonesia, said about The Act of Killing:

After seeing the trailer I do not think I can bear to see the whole film … so much horror, and the killers are celebrating what they did, just like that, and they are free to move around, to live as what they did was fine. Well, it must have been seen as fine by those in power. One of my older brothers died during the bersiap [early stages of the Indonesian war for independence] and two of my aunties. Poor people, after they had just survived Japanese camps, they were killed by Indonesian revolutionaries – for what? They weren’t colonial soldiers defending the colony. My mother had three children after the little Jaap, but I don’t think she ever recovered. He was always somehow present in our lives, as a grief that never ended. Seeing the killers in the trailer terrified me; the only thing I could think of was that the bersiap soldiers were like that [she shivers and hugs herself]. It really terrifies me, but I also want to see it, but I am afraid of being traumatised. This is not just about any sort of killing – it is Indonesians killing innocent people and never being prosecuted for it. Some people say it is good to see it, it might be therapeutic, like a shock therapy or something – I do not know about that. My cousin Marlice suffered greatly after seeing the film. She began to have dreadful nightmares and her claustrophobia became really bad – she had a panic attack the other day when she was stuck in traffic!

Another long-term interlocutor of mine, Dina, recounted her experience of seeing the film to me many months after seeing the film: ‘this film forced me to look at that past again; I had no choice but to face my “absent” grief’ (Dragojlovic, forthcoming). For Dina, seeing the film brought about embodied memories of her own family’s relationship to the events:

When the film [The Act of Killing] came out, I did not want to watch it, but it was everywhere; you could not escape it. You cannot escape such a past [as reference to herself]. At the end, I went and saw it … [long pause]. The atmosphere … the atmosphere grabbed me. I felt like I was about to suffocate. I couldn’t breathe [she begins to tremble, takes a large cushion from the couch next to her and hugs it as if to protect herself from the atmosphere she was talking about, and continues]. I grabbed Martin’s [her husband’s] hand. He tried to calm me by stroking my hand, offering me water, reminding me to take deep breaths, suggesting we leave … but I could not move. It was like I was paralysed. I was struggling to breathe. As the film progressed and, you know, the perpetrators were speaking, I started to shake with fear … such a fear … and one of them, one of the men … I am so ashamed to say this, but … but … he was … he was like my father. I remember my father as a very cruel man … [long pause]. Was my father like that before he lived in the Japanese internment camp, before he was imprisoned and tortured in 1965? I learned that both he and my mother were imprisoned in 1965 only in 2005, when my father passed away. I began to look for information but there was not much out there. I did not know many things about my parents’ lives in Indonesia, but now I know that the violence from the prison came into our house … I grew up with the violence from the prison!

When the film, ended I could not move. Martin tried to help me but I was paralysed, energy gone from my body. We waited for everybody to leave and then he carried me home. I started therapy afterwards, felt better, tried to live and work as normal, but couldn’t. And then you know I took time off work and ever since I’ve been trying to recover … It is so hard to get out of that frightful atmosphere from the film … I’m so low in energy, it is hard to sleep. (cited in Dragojlovic, forthcoming)

Similarly, Dina, Marel and my other interlocutors reported having been deeply affected by the film. Yet, the ways in which they qualified their experiences of it were different. Arguments that the strong effects that the film forced onto the viewers were misguided and unethical, were often part of prolonged narratives of anger and anguish about their families’ involvement in the complex histories of violence that blur the boundaries between perpetrators and victims. I suggest that the act of watching and affectively engaging with the histories of violence is multifaceted for all those who are affectively related to the historical violence – yet such relations cannot be seen in unified and homogenous ways.

The ways of knowing: Affectivity of screen media and intergenerational trauma

In her recent book, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge, Alison Landsberg (2015: 7–10) argues that many contemporary modes of engaging with history, from film and television to experiential museum performances foster an affective engagement with the past by investing in experiential modes of engagement with historical events. Landsberg (2015: 15) argues that, by being moved affectively and made to feel uncomfortable, we are forced to make sense of our experience; thus, when ‘affective engagements occur within a historical frame, new historical insights can be produced’. While suggesting that affective engagements with the past are important for raising political concessions and suggesting that affect is ‘not always positive’ (p. 15), Landsberg does not expand her analysis to documentaries about historical atrocities or how they might affect viewers whose desire to affectively know the past might evoke affective traces of intergenerational trauma.

The debates of the ways in which viewers can be affected by films is not new. It dates back to the very beginnings of cinema and to Hugo Munsterberg’s (1916 [2012]) study of the power of the new media to affect viewers from the films’ tactile and sensuous mode of address. In the 1930s, German cultural critics including Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer theorised about the experiential mode of cinema. Kracauer made an important point about films: ‘the material elements that present themselves in film directly stimulate the material layers of the human being: his nerves, his senses, his entire psychological substance’ (quoted in Hansen (1993: 458, emphasis in original)). More recently, Vivian Sobchack (1991), in her groundbreaking book The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, argues that film has a body and that viewers engage with that materiality. Similarly, Laura Marks (2000) has also persuasively argued for cinema’s sensuous and tactile mode of address. Recent studies in psychiatry argue that trauma may be able to be transferred through screen media. Thus, the initial definition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been extended to include mediated experiences, perceiving the screen as a potential source of trauma (Pinchevski, 2016). The most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) issued in 2013, published by the American Psychiatrist Association, provides a revised version of criteria for PTSD to state that under certain conditions, media may have traumatic effects. In this version of the DSM, these conditions only relate to ‘work related media exposure’ (Pinchevski, 2016: 55).

We can see from the ethnographic material I have outlined in this article that the viewers of Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing shared their experiences of watching the documentary by talking about the affective intensity of the film and the affective atmosphere it created. Theresa Brennan (2004) makes an ‘inquiry into how one feels … the “atmosphere”’, arguing that such inquiry needs:

to take accounts of physiology as well as the social, psychological factors that generate the atmosphere in the first place. The transmission of affect, whether it is grief, anxiety, or anger, is social or psychological in origin. But the transmission is also responsible for bodily changes; some are brief changes, as in whiff of the room’s atmosphere, some longer lasting. In other words, the transmission of affect, if only for an instant, alters the biochemical and neurology of the subject. The ‘atmosphere’ or the environment literally gets into the individual. (p. 1)

Here, the argument made by affect scholars (e.g. Ahmed, 2004; Blackman, 2008) for the cessation of the Cartesian split between the mind and the body is crucially important. In Dina’s case, the documentary generated an affective experience in the body – difficulty breathing and an inability to make physical movement – before she, the spectator, was able to articulate her feelings or take complete, conscious control over her body. In her case, affect was clearly autonomous and immaterial (Blackman and Venn, 2010). In a similar vein, paying attention to the extralinguistic and embodied aspects of experience as argued by ‘affect turn’ scholars is crucial for our understanding of how the documentary about historical violence might affect certain spectators. It is equally important to turn to the subject’s own articulation of their experiences. Doing so, we can see that affectivity of screen media can be produced in relation to the spectator’s specific family history of multiple violence and forced geographic mobility.

Moreover, from the subjective articulation, we can see that the affective atmosphere generated while watching The Act of Killing resonated long after the act of watching it. For Dina, watching the film becomes a significant event that not only effects immediate changes in the body, but also necessitates ongoing psychological, therapeutic intervention, taking the subject from a state of ‘being fine’ to being diagnosed with ‘burnout’ (see also Dragojlovic, forthcoming). For Marlice (Marel’s cousin), watching the film intensified her existing phobias (claustrophobia), which led her to have a panic attack in her car.

The affectivity of The Act of Killing for Indisch viewers as explored in this study operates in a continuum of affective and cognitive, intentional and non-intentional. Neglecting to incorporate into our analysis how such affectivity is articulated, given meaning and how it features in the reconfiguration of the subject, might be misleading, counterproductive and limiting if we try to see it through the binary oppositions of cognitive and affective, intentional and non-intentional. Certainly, the affectivity of screen media is multifaceted and the affective atmosphere that it might produce is not only dependent on the media itself, but also on its viewers, wherein the viewer’s specific positionality is of crucial importance. The affective impact that The Act of Killing can have on international (Heryanto, 2014; Hoskins and Lasmana, 2015; van Klinken, 2014) and Indonesian (Wandita, 2014) viewership has been acknowledged tangentially, but thus far, to the best of my knowledge, no detailed study of how such affectivity might impact viewers has being conducted. Clearly, affectivity of screen media will not have a traumatic impact on all viewers. Based on the ethnographic material discussed here, it can be argued that whether or not viewing The Act of Killing will have an affective impact on a particular viewer will depend on the viewer’s personal history of exposure to historical or more recent forms of violence; level of engagement in therapy to address that trauma and other personal characteristics (resilience, ability to disassociate and similar). As the ethnographic material demonstrates, while experiencing the affective atmosphere can occur across human and non-human interactions and beyond the subject–object distinction, the affectivity of screen media needs to be understood within particular historical contingencies. In this case, watching the documentary, which portrays violence in the Indonesian context, has been shown to bring about intensely affective and potentially traumatic states for Indisch viewers, who were exposed to a long history of violence – from oppressive forces of colonialism, imprisonment in Japanese internment camps during the Second World War, to persecution during the Indonesian war for independence in the aftermath of the Second World War, oppressive assimilationist policies in the Netherlands in the 1950s and imprisonment and torture during the 1965 violence for some of those Indisch people who stayed in Indonesia. It is important to stress that a personal desire to affectively know the past alerts us to the fragility of the embodied self in the wake of cataclysmic violence. Utilising the analytical tools offered by affect theory is useful here as it alerts us to the experiences of negative feelings that incorporate psychological as well as social, cultural and historical aspects of transference of intergenerational trauma.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.