Shifting histories: Film and nationalist mythmaking through trauma

Introduction: The narrative origins of nationalism

National imaginaries remain a central grounding point for politics and identification, even in a post-modern political world. Despite the fact that the tenuously tethered anchor of nationalist identity seems more contested and fragmented than ever, ‘history’ continues to generate credibility to particular arguments over ‘authentic’ national identities. The ability to present a dominant narrative for specific events, even defining which events are worthy of specificity in a nation’s history, remains a powerful legitimating force. This is particularly so during times in which states claim to be addressing the grisly events of their pasts. As such, mediation between traumatic histories increasingly appears to be an everyday component of contemporary state politics.

With the proliferation of conflictual media sources, information warfare and ‘fake news’ alongside new platforms providing the ability to share individual accounts with large audiences, the consistency of state narratives has become uniquely strained. Appropriating myriad individual accounts into a coherent national imaginary now implies the deconstruction, reconstruction and privileging of the experience of citizenry, weaving disparate traumas into coherent stories of dedication, sacrifice and triumph, often with depoliticizing effects (Caruth, 1995, Caruth, 2010; Edkins, 2003, 2014).

Such representations, projected onto the national consciousness, have the potential to bring about continued violence to events that may intrinsically resist representation. This is readily apparent when repressed violent pasts directly contest national narratives, challenging the appearance of repaired social rifts. Truth and reconciliation tribunals, for example, emerge for this purpose, addressing deeper psychological wounds to attenuate energies that threaten to reignite violence or to do continued harm to vulnerable populations (Coulthard, 2014). The importance of the contestation over such narratives’ symbolic value in reference to constituting present-day political subjectivities should not be underestimated. Reclaiming individual experience on behalf of state narrative blurs lines between what constitutes public and private spaces, relying on processes of memorialization to recast narratives of the nation. Further, it is through this process of historical narrativization that modern citizen subjects are produced.

In this article, I conduct an analysis of two complementary documentaries as a means to explore how film harmonizes particularly well with the structure of national historical discourses. Through the films – Waltz with Bashir (2008), directed by Ari Folman, and The Act of Killing (2012), directed by Joshua Oppenheimer – I explore the pedagogical potential for the medium of trauma-centred pseudo-documentary represented by both films as it pertains to challenging nationalist histories projected by the state.

Waltz with Bashir follows the director’s experience of coming to terms with his involvement as an Israeli soldier in the 1982 Lebanon War, while The Act of Killing is a surrealistic depiction of Anwar Congo’s journey through his own history of participating in mass killings in Indonesia in 1965–1966. Notably, the latter film’s director is a foreigner to the national history his film depicts, a significant distinction between the two films.

These films are unquestionably vastly different in the nature of their subject material and cultural background. What binds them is the pedagogical nature of their expression through pseudo-documentary in regard to revealing the structure of current state narrativization of historical trauma in the service of a specific political present. Both directly contradict a teleological vision of the present, existing self-sufficiently and independently of the present-day discourses.

Examples abound where film has a unique synergy with myths of the nation – the films of Leni Riefenstahl or DW Griffith being prominent illustrations – but they also fit the role of interrogator of national narratives as easily as they can reinforce normative ideals. This article, therefore, discusses how competing interpretations of foundational historical events interrogate ‘a past that is always already presented to us in the form of a narrative which attributes to these entities a continuity of a subject’ (Balibar and Wallerstein, 2011: 86), substituting fragmented subjects and inviting new forms of interaction with contested pasts and forming historical counter-narratives.

The documentary form, in particular, exists in a reciprocal relationship with memory and historical time. For Elizabeth Cowie (2011), the documentary is a ‘memory machine’ which not simply recalls events but produces a re-encounter with past events, carrying with it an affective energy that aligns with processes of mourning, memorialization and forgetting that are essential processes in national identity formation (p. 6). Cowie argues that documentaries have the ability to engage in ‘a kind of making and unmaking of a history in a “now” time of remembering that is a forgetting in its memorializing, producing a transformation in the remembered’ (p. 184). This is a confrontational experience, but also an edifying one for the spectator. And yet, documentary art is precisely that – an art, and not a science. Regardless of claims to objectivity, it relies on spectacle and a fictional structure (Cowie, 2011; Piotrowska, 2013). What is perhaps unique regarding the films I discuss here is that they eschew attempts at realism in order to pursue a certain form of historical truth.

Through investigating the relation of the individual (soldier) to the event, film can reinvest past historical space with a narrative of persons that do not assimilate into homogeneous national populations and open a pedagogical space that is politically volatile. I use the term pseudo-documentary here as a means of singling these particular films out from a larger number of films amongst which they belong, but simultaneously exist at arm’s distance from what most would consider conventional examples of the genre. These films delink the seemingly essential documentary foundations of realism and authenticity, eschewing any pretence of objectivity in order to produce an indirect truth through extremely personal experiences. Through pseudo-documentary’s hypervisual and conspicuously fictionalized approach, the invitation to interrogate the image presented inspires deeper critical relationships to the histories that they present.

History and nationalism: Memory and national consciousness

As an early historian of modern nationalism, Ernst Renan (1996) addressed the mythic quality of the genesis of nationalism derived from popular sovereignty. Reflecting on the almost spiritual nature of the modern nation suspended between history and present, he considers that nation is a ‘soul, a spiritual principle’ (p. 47), which guides the cultivation of loyal and sacrificial subjects. As such, nationalism is deeply linked to a process of subjectivization that depends upon a responsibility in the present, a mantle carried by citizens that projects continuity of a nation’s history into the future. This continuity confirms political legitimacy and yet its historical veracity is malleable.

Renan’s discussions regarding the relationship of the past to the future-oriented present are perhaps his most prescient. It is not the clarity of the nation as an historical project that creates national strength in the present; rather, Renan focuses on the necessity of forgetting as perhaps the foundational act and continued duty of the nationalist project. Arguing that the violent origins of states must in fact be obscured within the fog of time, for Renan, the historian is more likely to be the enemy of the nationalist project rather than its guardian.

The mediation between past and present produces an inheritance of the legacies of historical storytelling that obfuscate national origins that citizens must bear. Benedict Anderson (1991: 11) echoes this when he wrote of the ‘modern darkness’ that accompanies the Enlightenment and the emergence of the nation state which springs from ‘an immemorial past and . . . glides into a limitless future’. As a cultural production, the state exists not necessarily as a historical progression but perhaps more as the result of historical acquisition. An articulation of the past, therefore, does not recognize ‘how it really was. It means to take control of a memory . . . to deliver tradition anew’ (Benjamin, 2006b[1938–1940]: 391).

Thus, the citizen emerges as both object and subject of national histories (Bhaba, 1990: 297). The formation of any national subject through a process of subjectivization derived from a bloody and violent past obfuscates the symbolic registration of such violence as violence. Or rather, this process acknowledges violence without recognizing its object. National origin stories then are often recognizably birthed from violent beginnings, yet their myths belie the actors involved. Instead, such origin stories nationalize and depersonalize individual accounts into affective notions of sacrifice and love of nation that form the ties that bind the modern citizen to the state. The recipients of violence, even if they survive, exist outside of a symbolic register that could acknowledge such lived experience within a narrative of the state. This paradox is recounted in Lefort (1996), whose analysis of modern state ideology refers to an ambiguity that exists in the authority of state power which ‘must owe nothing to the movement which makes it appear . . . must be abstracted from any question concerning its origin’ (pp. 212–214). This self-referential aspect of the state’s authority is maintained in part through a control over national narrative and communal memory.

Waltz with Bashir and The Act of Killing offer insight into the psychological and mythical structure undergirding national histories and their relationship with the individual qua citizen. If the nomos of the modern state is indeed the camp, then such spaces and the bodies that occupy them are simultaneously spaces of abject powerlessness and, at the same time, threatening spaces via their potential disruptive return (Agamben, 1998). Filmmakers who choose to reflect socially or politically through their medium as contemporary investigators of modern history demonstrate the use of unorthodox yet expressive media to wrestle with the present legacy of past events. In many ways, Joshua Oppenheimer and Ari Folman’s aesthetic portrayals convey the weight of past events in the light of their political present. These representations should be understood as critical additions to writing a political history of trauma in their individual contexts. Both convey the spectral persistence of trauma in political presents. Together they insist upon their own social–psychological health, questioning the presumption of national strength and conformity.

By appropriating individual accounts of violent pasts into a coherent national imaginary, disparate traumas are woven into coherent stories not simply of dedication, sacrifice and triumph on behalf of the state, but they also become the originary justification, post facto for the state’s existence qua protector. The depoliticization of individual experience corrects a fractured experience and projects it into a national consciousness, which returns renewed violence upon the experience of the traumatized, be they victim or perpetrator, via a history that absents their lived or dying experience.

If state genesis is fundamentally built upon the silenced and catastrophic history of the oppressed (Benjamin, 2006b[1938–1940]), this is particularly exposed where repressed violent pasts force themselves back into public spaces, rupturing both the historical continuity and social homogeneity projected by the nation, evincing social rifts via a ‘making visible’ of the return, or rather the always present presence of abject fragmented subjects. Such is the case in the figure of the traumatized soldier.

Waltz with Bashir and The Act of Killing as pseudo-documentary

Pseudo-documentaries reinvest past historical space with narratives of individual persons, whilst not collapsing the experience of the individual, and assimilate it into (national) populations. They open a pedagogical space that is politically volatile. I use the term pseudo-documentaries to signal their departure from conventional examples of the genre. These films delink the seemingly essential documentary foundations of realism and authenticity, abstaining from any pretence of objectivism in an attempt to produce an indirect truth through extremely personal experiences. This technique draws viewers toward their flawed nature. ¹ I link these films despite their notable aesthetic differences, the vast difference between each film’s respective subjects and dramatic variance in cultural contexts. I do not suggest that these films could not be categorized differently, but I link them via this term purposefully. If one can suggest that the classical objective of documentaries is the real, I argue that the fundamental difference presented by pseudo-documentaries is that they seek to discuss the true. At the same time, I do not wish to overextend into a discussion surrounding the categorization and classification of documentary as a genre. ²

Further, it is important to note that the discussion here is not one of the personal, psychological or internal ethics of the films themselves. Though great work has been done discussing the moral success or failure of both films (see, for example, Kraemer, 2015; Meneghetti, 2016; and Stewart, 2010), my focus is on the broader historical level that is a degree removed from questions of the ‘protagonists’ moral resolutions (Meneghetti, 2016). At the same time, the social and political contexts of these films do matter. As Piotrowska (2013), adopting a Zizekian analysis, suggests, ripping subject matter from its social and political context and presenting a documentary event as a social and political whole risks a ‘mortification’. Such a process, she claims, is ‘inevitably unethical’ and its truth is obscured through an alienation of its cultural and historical circumstances (pp. 134–135).

Waltz with Bashir and The Act of Killing are two unconventional yet deeply insightful political interventions into the relationship of state violence and individual subjects, revealing how competing interpretations of historical events interrogate pasts that are presented as objective narratives of continuous historical subjects by substituting fragmented subjects, inviting new forms of interaction with contested pasts, shifting the sensible space of political history and forming historical alter-narratives – but not counter-narratives (Balibar and Wallerstein, 2011). Indeed, neither film pretends to unearth new knowledge but instead retells a historical story from a displaced perspective.

While both films centre on their protagonist’s struggle with their own traumatic past, neither film is focused on the nature of trauma itself but rather involves a retelling of a historical narrative from the perspective of the traumatized. As such, these stories are told through trauma rather than telling about trauma. Further, neither film derives from the perspective of what might be termed the ‘absolute’ victim, thus rendering the central characters more relatable paradoxically through a degree of emotional distance.

The coherence of the national narrative is thrown into question precisely by these personalized histories that return the same national historical story alongside shattered subjects and absent the nation’s hyper-moralism and historical teleology (this juxtaposition is particularly well demonstrated in The Act of Killing). This ‘negative’ history of traumatized bodies is not simply collateral damage of state-building, but constitutive. However, the coherence of state narratives is unwound through traumatic narratives that resist reincorporation themselves. The question of subjectivity here returns, or rather does not, from trauma in such a way that traumatic subjectivity exists as unincorporated other, victims of which remain physically the same, but ultimately changed in essence, not form. Trauma specifically responds with a non-return of the subject and thus creates displaced citizens who are never ‘at-home’ in state rhetoric.

These films radically decentre larger social narratives about state violence and formation, and re-insert the person and personal into the larger historical story. By displacing historical coherence for fragmented and open experience, they demonstrate that, rather than traumatic events being the limit of intersubjectivity, they instead persist as a demand to an attentive ethical intersubjective reorientation and a fidelity to the (inter)personal relation to the traumatic event.

A former soldier’s search for an absent memory, a gangster’s directorial debut recounting his one gruesome act; these are not successful stories of psychological closure, or an ethical coming to terms with troubled histories, but rather in the films’ internal narrative failure, the unsettling of the viewer offers enlightenment through their structure in seeing war otherwise. The films do not simply testify to the depths and depravity of human actions, but rather reveal the impossibility of psychologically and socially resolving the violence of a historical past which continues to uphold the political present. This is particularly applicable to a political present whose tenuous existence resides in the liminal space between disavowal and defence against responsibility, on the one hand, and the ever-present threat of once again unleashing that which it cannot avow should it need to reassert itself, on the other. This is seemingly mimicked at times in films like The Act of Killing, where the internal moral struggle of individuals causes them to oscillate between remorse and self-affirmation.

Insofar as these are documentaries about history and not ‘the past’, these films force a recognition of the intimately linked nature of history and fantasy, all the more apparent through the very form of self-reflexive uncertainty that both films exhibit throughout. ³

This ‘absent’ documentary (Nichols, 2013), the one depicting events as they really were, cannot exist in temporal conjunction with a situated social and political present that supports the films’ protagonists, and therein lies the revealing nature of the film and its political commentary. This absent documentary can only be imagined by the spectator, but this imagined lack can evoke a moral force that can indeed be brought to bear upon the political present.

Waltz with Bashir: Trauma and the re:member/ing of the state

Waltz with Bashir tells the director’s own story of rediscovering his past as an Israeli soldier in the 1982 Lebanon War. Presented as animation, it immediately distances itself from more traditional documentaries. The chosen medium casts a critical eye towards its own trustworthiness, presenting itself in a conspicuously unreal form.

The film centres around Folman’s non-memory of his involvement in the war, and one event specifically. Importantly, this is not simply the confusion of memory but an absence where, in his own words, the event was not ‘stored in his system’. This undoing of the paradigm of the authoritative witness and truth as the central character of the film renders the protagonist, in his own words, the least reliable character, as his memory fails to reproduce an event. Thus, the film itself plays out in the sociality of truth, splicing together a series of related and unrelated stories in Folman’s search to recover his memories. Critically, Waltz with Bashir is not trying to uncover ‘knowledge’. That the massacres took place is an assumed given. Despite losing his memory, Ari is fully aware that he was in Beirut at the time of the massacres prior to his journey.

Psychoanalytic vignettes accompany flashback scenes and interviews in the present, and recount the very questionability of memory while highlighting the highly variable and interrelated temporal nature of the subject in the now. This counterfeit to a particular flashback sequence which drives the film then leads us to again to question the integrity of the whole endeavour. Fully cognizant of the potentiality of the flashback’s own non-existence, due to Folman’s inability to coherently place it within a larger chronology, but existing through its continued enacting, the film persists towards its evasive goal. As it proceeds, the repetition of Folman’s scene continues, and yet points to its nature as artifice, a practice of repression of the event. The reality of the flashback exists solely through its constant psychic recurrence.

Yet, consider that it is not the non-memory of the event that is the central driver, but rather the flashback that is ultimately shown to never have taken place. Crucial to the entirety of the documentary is the fictional event of Ari floating naked in the water outside Beirut (the only event that is repeated within the film). By the end, with the possibility of its reality finally exhausted, the literal screen memory reveals the truth of his involvement in the war that he can no longer remember, breaking through in the crushing culmination of his journey. It is too simple to describe Ari’s initial memory as false. It is more accurate to view it as analogous to many origin stories which anchor subjectivity in the present: it is real, though it never happened. This flashback causes the drastic rupture in his life, a self-questioning of the past that leads to the creation of the film.

Notably, there is no sense of Ari’s loss of memory being akin to amnesia. Rather, what is implied is an act of forgetting and the explicit replacement of that forgotten moment with a false memory, one nevertheless real in the sense that it shapes Ari’s past, present and future. This false memory is indeed the very ground upon which the story stands, without which this created world would not exist. Thus, the film operates in a suspended temporality that resists subsumption into any simple narrative. Initially driven by a non-event, there is little attempt at causality and chronology. Instead, the film is a constellation of personal recollections. The non-event forms the core of a personal discovery that can by the end remove itself as catalyst from the overall historical equation.

The false memory conceals the founding of the film itself, the traumatic moment towards which it inevitably marches but arguably never reaches. Within, we have a self-conscious display in both form and content of the fictional core of the narrative paradoxically driving the search for truth. Rather than attempting to portray the events with the utmost degree of realism, to assign to it a particular type of credibility, Waltz with Bashir displays itself as reflexively critical towards its own content. By displacing its perspective of entry, new access is given to the truth of the subject. Effectively, the story remains honest in that its message is passed on in full knowledge that it acts as a re-presentation of several stories for the sake of recounting a larger truth, an attempt to disclose the material truth of a concept of war.

Just as the false memory forms the ground upon which Ari’s traumatic reality rests, the final moments raise the question of their own coherence within the psychological framework of the film. Contrasted with the gritty newsfeed video that ends Ari’s journey, the previous roughly 90 minutes stand out in its surreal beauty. As a collection of stories that culminate in the director’s search for truth and meaning of his involvement in the war, the film and its form undermine a certain cultic value of an in-vogue hyperreal presentation. In fact, Waltz with Bashir and The Act of Killing both share this quality in foregoing representation via realism to demonstrate truth via the surreal presentation of experiences that could be said to exceed the capacity of reality to represent them. Each makes conspicuous the buttresses of fiction supporting their claims to communicate their stories, but this by no means indicates that they attempt to make what they portray altogether unpalatable, or to be overbearing via aesthetic technique to make violence itself easily rejected. Indeed, some of the most violent scenes appear as their most beautiful and alluring; for example, setting the stage for a sneak attack on a military unit and the killing of a small child in an orchard accompanied by Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto No. 5.

Waltz with Bashir is not a search for history but a search for memory that, while being unearthed, again flashes with an importance for the present as a dialectical image. Resisting its resting place along the line of historical progression, it is equally unplaceable within the context of the film-world. This is perhaps most strikingly evinced in the title scene of the movie, where rationality and reality are suspended in the retelling of a unit’s escape from being pinned down by enemy snipers through dance. Revolving around a trapped Israeli army unit in Beirut, Palestinian militants, ⁴ unseen in person but occupying elevated positions in the buildings surrounding the street, fire down on the soldiers who are helpless against the onslaught; they can do little but watch as their comrades are shot down. It is at this point when things seem most hopeless that the machismo character of Shmuel Frenkel single-handedly wins the day, by running into the middle of the road, thereby entering into an absurd dance, a waltz backgrounded with a poster of the film’s titular president-elect, spinning around deftly, avoiding the Palestinian sniper fire and returning fire which, although not shown explicitly, seemingly allows him and his comrades to exit the trap.

The ephemeral existence of the enemy combatants and their ultimate impotence to harm the manifestation of state power idealized in the soldier are complemented by the soldier’s dance with the poster of Bashir as his partner. Through its symbolic pronunciation of the complicity of the Israeli army with the war effort, and by extension the massacre, it points to the absurdity of war and the seeming inaccessibility for some to be embodied in the theatre of war. The absolute defeat in the face of the reassertion of national virility is underscored by the dance, a highly social interaction, seemingly excluding the assailants, rendering them ineffective. Read as analogous with the politics of the moment, and indeed of the politics proper of the nation-state system, the militants are doomed as soon as this logic is re-established. Though first representing a moment of the suspension of a national logic and temporality, the reassertion of a national temporality coincides with the soldiers’ demonstration of their political associations. The snipers are effectively rendered outside this place of ‘real’ action and thus their bullets fly harmlessly around the dancing soldier, never reaching their intended target, while the soldier fights with impunity. The Palestinians fight from a point of non-access. The soldier, an all-powerful sovereign force acting in a suspension of real space and time recognized by all who witness the event, reasserts a narrative (albeit absurd) of heroic triumph and success halting the momentary temporal interruption. The war will always end in the same way. This is perhaps the most truthful moment of the film, as the internal logic of the larger political context reveals itself through the ultimately impervious Israeli position. Not only does the dance of the Israeli soldier with the poster of Bashir in the background provide the film with its title, but it also emerges as Folman’s symbolic pronunciation of the complicity of the Israeli army with the war effort.

The film ends in almost biblical fashion with the ‘command’. The word is sent from a general to stop the killing. This command is respected immediately and both refugees and soldiers separate and walk away from each other. At this point, the viewer follows as a reporter enters the camps to see the destruction. We are presented with a narrative inclusive of the ‘reality’ of war, pictures of dead bodies clogging alleyways and courtyards, and children crushed under rubble. As it nears its end, the wailing of the refugees grows in volume from a distant roar to a piercing scream. It is at this point that the viewer comes to the realization that the protagonist manned a checkpoint outside one of the camps and the camera closes in on his eyes, seemingly incapable of taking in all he is witnessing. Here the viewer is left with the final image: grainy news footage. We have left our animated world and are presented simply with 50 seconds of actual footage from the massacres. Refugee women and children scream and mourn the dead. Then silence. The final shot as it fades to black is of a small child, dead amongst the rubble and other limp and bloated limbs. The return to normalcy, both visually and with the cessation of war – the reestablishment of state order – emerges from unregisterable devastation.

Whether the screams are indeed part of the history of the event can be called into question. The fact that these scant few seconds are the only ones to be presented in video suspends the immersion within the narrative of the film and marks a return to reality and the larger political landscape presented therein. Is this moment meant to portray the dark reality underpinning war, or the ultimate exclusion of the vanquished from its proper political relation to the war? Does the incommensurability of the final scene indicate the absolute inability to reabsorb such a moment into any appropriate narrative? Or perhaps the animated film ‘relinquish[ing] its authority to the live image’ essentially undermines its message (Kraemer, 2015; 63)? I argue that this scene, in conjunction with the seeming ease with which the murders were ended, conveys the meaninglessness of the event in an absolute sense. Rather than the live-action ending reducing everything to an objective ‘knowable’ (p. 65), I suggest the film does not give the indication that the live-action sequence should be privileged over the rest of the film, but that it exists in reciprocal relation to the animated universe of the rest of the film, affecting it but not fitting within it. Indeed, it exists beyond direct knowability within the animated lebenswelt of the film. Such footage exists, but the history or truth of the image is not reducible to that short sequence of live footage.

This is perhaps more in line with Garret Stewart’s argument, which suggests that, while the screen memory is erased by the video trace within the film,

the pivotal wrench of transition has been dialectical rather than reductive . . . Though cut loose from actuality over the course of the film, an unconscious screening-out of one’s guilt is no less true than the archived bloodshed and anguish it papers over with the desperately etched imagery of denial. The retreat to virtuality (and its techniques of animation) is therefore as much a record of the ordeal, in its psychic response, as is the video transcript of flailing misery. Together they are the truth of trauma. (Stewart, 2010: 62)

Ari’s flashback represents a foundational moment. Analogous to national origin stories, our symbolic registration of reality need not be an objective reflection of it. It is not attached immutably to the event or thing in itself.

The retroactive institution of the formative event occurs when the subject becomes what it has always already been but has not been recognized as such until registration within the symbolic. This supports Renan’s claim of the importance of forgetting and is reminiscent of Ahmed’s (1999) concept of home:

Home becomes home through the very failure of memory . . . the very failure of individual memory is compensated for by the collective memory, and the writing of the history of the nation, in which the subject can allow herself to fit in by being assigned a place in a forgotten past. (p. 330)

Waltz with Bashir, through its unveiling of one soldier’s traumatic past, is revelatory in the ways social histories construct modern subjectivity in the present. Interestingly, the absence in Ari’s memory is projected onto the absent figures of the refugees. The refugee as traumatic character symbolizes the necessary gaps in political memory transformed through performative acts of remembering/forgetting made conspicuous through their relation to the film. These performances correlate to acts of social and individual political memory and the nature of political inclusion/exclusion inherent in the foundation of any national historical project. Further, the malleability of said histories reveals a corresponding plasticity in the individual political subjectivities that come to comprise and support the larger political communities that call them into being.

The Act of Killing: The spectral return and violent repression

In The Act of Killing, director Joshua Oppenheimer follows Anwar Congo and several of his entourage as he recounts events of the Indonesian killings of 1965–1966, when hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of communists, ethnic Chinese, and Indonesian leftists were massacred across Indonesia. As one of the central orchestrators of the violence, Anwar Congo in many ways was the face of the violent appropriation of the state in the name of the ‘Free-men’ ‘gangsterism’ that operated as the unleashed and largely unchecked unofficial arm of the government.

As Demaria and Violi (2020: 89) state, The Act of Killing disrupts the dynamics of collective forgetting of a country that never completed a thorough democratization process and where, after ferocious dictatorships and mass killings, the very same perpetrators remain in power. The film is utterly unique as it delves deeply into the mind of a direct perpetrator of an event of mass violence. It becomes immediately clear that Anwar Congo is prepared to be incredibly forthcoming regarding the systematic torture and murder of his victims. The ambiguity of Ari Folman as Israeli soldier, as a young man afraid in a war he does not fully comprehend, stands in stark opposition to the portrayal of Anwar Congo as the flashily dressing, self-proclaimed gangster, leading his crew in extortion and murder.

Oppenheimer renounces the aesthetically real for the potential of the psychologically revealing. This makes space for Anwar himself to create and direct scenes from his history. Instead of historical review and testimony, perhaps accompanied by documented footage to lend weight to the claims of historical authenticity, The Act of Killing at times veers towards fantastical drama. Drawing from an apparent love of American cinema, what results is a surreal descent into Anwar’s madness, and ultimately his deepest psychological traumas, which haunt him during the filming. The cinematic functions not only as the mode of Anwar’s psychological expression, but is also openly credited as inspiration for many of his real-life violent acts. Anwar himself recounts that many of his techniques for interrogation and murder were inspired by the films he so admired and how central the Indonesian government’s propaganda film Treachery of G30S/PKI was to mass national (re)education. ⁵

The nightmarish quality of the film mirrors the surreal dreamlike quality of Waltz with Bashir. Complementing an argument for film as the perfect medium in which to present the story of traumatic memory, The Act of Killing plays with no observable chronology. As Jacqui Baker (2014: 150–151) notes: ‘film and memory share an otherworldliness, similarly cast from an eerie miscellany of visual, sensory, oneiric, and aural media . . . Of all the modern media, only film can adeptly capture the “aura of insubstantiality and dreaming” that remembering invokes.’ While Anwar’s conflicted directorial debut continues, the film follows on a tour across Indonesia, revealing the still strong presence of the violent Pancasilla Party. Relying on the idea of ‘gangsterism’, strong-arm tactics and the cronyism and corruption that infect local politics, followers revel in a form of nationalist zeal appearing as the raging national id that is constantly plumbed as a main source for state power and identity. Alongside Anwar’s own personal journey is the barely concealed obsession with the violent silencing of the defeated communist past that threatens to return. Thus, while Anwar engages in a cathartic re-enactment of his past misdeeds, we see mass demonstrations of an ever-vigilant political machine that continues to violently define itself against its own historical origin story. The threat of communist family members coming forth inspires a fervour in those who perpetrated the genocide to almost hysteric proportions. We see that far from ‘moving on’ in some form of processional history, the party of power remains mired in an identity reinforced only by the ever-vigilant oppression of the spectral return of an already defeated foe. This political identity relies expressly on reasserting dominance over a traumatic narrative.

The film is at its most poignant when Anwar struggles to re-temporalize his own actions and arrive at some moment of catharsis. Haunted by the open eyes of one of his earliest victims which he neglected to close, Anwar re-enacts his own death scene as both a moment of absolution and, through its temporal suspension, the foundational act for his own emergence as murderer coming to his own defence. The analogy here between the re-inscribed foundational cause for state violence and the absolution or banishing of its own moment of genesis is truly remarkable. Everything is justified depending on the chronology of the scenes, as Anwar insightfully comments while reviewing the scene, that should the film end with his death, it would merely appear as bad karma coming home to roost. However, if the film begins with his murder, the sadistic acts that followed would be justified. When his compatriot Herman points out that this therefore must be someone else’s head, Anwar responds that the scene takes place in a ‘time tunnel’. So too are national narratives consumed with controlling the temporality of their traumas in ways that support their own raison d’être. Anwar’s Congo layman’s philosophy of time rightly points to a problematic temporal relation between national histories and their genesis.

The suspended temporality of the scene, with Anwar taking both the position of sacrificial victim and the returning victor in the same person, in short reflects the suspended position of the state vis-à-vis its own traumatic past. The resetting of the subject within a space of atemporality leads to his own redemption. It is only through eliminating the space of the traumatized and reinserting itself in that stead, that the state both deflects its historical origin, and yet relies upon it for its own self-justification.

By the end of the film, Anwar’s final solution is to once again introduce the body of the victim, to allow it to enter as cleansed spirit, bestowing medals and thanks upon the victor/saviour figure of Anwar. The fact that the protagonist of the story is the antagonist of history provides a certain emotional distance for the observer to the extent that the film comes across as condemnation, yet limits the potential for personal emotion to overshadow a larger story of social and cultural trauma. Anwar’s personal staging of his enactment is constantly echoed by larger-scale political performances of a national narrative. These performances are an over-reaction, but demonstrate a certain degree of impotence, observably vulnerable to the continued coexistence of the family members of the dead. Anwar’s performances accompany a national theatre, both seemingly attempting to silence the gaze from the open eyes of the dead that continue to haunt them.

Pseudo-documentary, optical unconscious and national theatre

Insofar as national histories depend on the repetition and re-enactment of a particular version of events to accumulate a national popular historical narrative, excluding or limiting the individual nature of violent pasts, the pseudo-documentaries discussed here seem to possess anti-propagandistic qualities, raising questions for oppressive narratives without necessarily replacing or replicating them in form with different content. In this sense, both films expose the temporal limitations and the foreclosures of meaning involved in their nationalized counterparts. Though Ari Folman’s documentary is less overtly political, both the backdrop of Israeli politics and the inherited trauma of the Holocaust are discernible within the general critique of the film. Within The Act of Killing, the film plays out between Anwar’s individual re-enactment and the staging of national identity writ large through party politics, national media and general education.

If some aloofness from a societal level is necessary in order to come to terms with violent national histories, film may be best suited to the task. Though film may be the educative space, the multiplicity of lived experience for individuals as citizens is ubiquitous. This ability to convey history through a diversity of experiences and to resist the assignation of a particular meaning is transmitted through films that shun misleading linear narratives. As such, without reducing a film’s message to a particular didactic, the temporality of the film avoids progressive narratives that collapse events into successes, failures and teachable moments via a progression to the present, instead insisting on a constant rethinking and relating-to.

The appeal to reality through dreamscapes presented, each in their own fashion, stands interestingly juxtaposed when compared to the stylized realism of films that portray a different political inflection; consider, for example, Kathryn Bigelow’s (2012) film Zero Dark Thirty. The self-awareness and almost self-subverting critical position vis-à-vis themselves in these movies is crucial to presenting a sustained attack on the idea of national narratives in the first place, on the position of presenting a stable state of truth or narrative and undermining the possibility of a return to a fixed subject who could once again be reappropriable for the purposes of a state project.

This then is the crux of the pseudo-documentary via the traumatic subject. In presenting a fragmentary subject that cannot be made whole, the rhetoric of nation building hits a temporal block presented by the return of the victims who echo its irresolvable violent foundational past. As national imaginaries need constant reproduction in the present, these individual and fragmented narratives refuse to flow with ‘national time’. In turn, the individual histories function as resistances to the flow of dark communal origins and must therefore be constantly opposed by the state. This can occur through various means of national ‘acting out’, whether in the form of depoliticization, active violence, or co-optation.

The return of a traumatic subject, whose narrative deviates in content and form from a national linear time, presents a particular problem for a state’s self-referential authority (Bhaba, 1990: 297). The ‘time tunnel’ of the nation operates in only one direction after its founding moment.

These films reveal a pedagogical potential for an ‘optical unconscious’, offering up a ‘small part of the past which must touch the present in order for the now to emerge’ (Benjamin, 2006a[1935–1938]: 103). Through pseudodocumentary we approach not only nature but history in a different fashion. These films operate temporally the way Benjamin suggests film acted on our observations of the natural world, expanding both space and movement and enabling a different type of perception impossible without technological prostheses. ⁶ Similarly, pseudocumenteries such as those offered here reveal aspects of a historical narrative that becomes registered as reality but is received unconsciously. Memory displaces the angle of vision and creates a new relation to the past, one in which the present and its ability to control the speed of narrative creates a confrontation with the past. The nature of this confrontation reveals the past as a series of incongruous perspectives, discontinuous with an apparent motion of history produced by a communal persistence of vision.

Perhaps then it is the potential for modern trauma film, via an optical unconscious, to explode this world that seems ‘to close so relentlessly around us’ and to convey the world of the traumatized subject via the transmission not of traumatic experience itself, but the collective dream of the traumatic figure that may indeed prove to have real political emancipatory potential as counterweight to the dominance of national theatre (Benjamin, 2006a[1935–1938]:117). Any successful aesthetic intervention into the realm of the political must ‘propose a new way of relating to the world and to others in such a way that it allows new voices to come forward and to have their views articulated’ and in so doing these articulated subjects assert their political nature (Honess Roe, 2011: 215).

Conclusion

The films discussed here share the characteristic that they refuse to allow spectators to relax into a frame of reference within which they can judge. As we watch them, we find reflected the injection of an anarchic quality into the ordered hegemonic form of political history that serves as a referent for the legitimate authority of governments to rule in the political present. They provide a kind of pedagogical entry into a historical discussion of national and social histories. This is why criticisms that accuse The Act of Killing, for example, of not advancing the overall knowledge of the genocide itself are fair, while perhaps missing the potential of such films to make observable the sensible space of national history itself (Fraser, 2013). Both ‘withhold the visible winks that would allow us to sort social from psychic reality’ (Nichols, 2013: 27). Rather than ironic subterfuge of the genre, they offer an aesthetic and intellectual exploration into the nature of social history itself. Thus, such pseudo-documentary treatment of history, read through theories of trauma, delimits the political space of the sensible in terms of reading the subject of history itself. This works in part by rendering the spectator an active participant insofar as the boundaries of the films’ moral investigation, the framework for reference, are not assumed givens.

Insofar as these subversive stories can be told via film, they demonstrate trauma narratives in a way that requires political rethinking, not political re-appropriation. This kind of attunement to historical violence may be their most important contribution. From an ethical perspective, traumatic memory, through creating a rupture in the homogeneity of a national time, can produce the political moment for reconsideration and indebtedness to its own violated subjects; a transmission of fragmented understanding rather than its political transmutation into capital for a reaffirmation of national identity. The negation of an image of the continuous subject compatible with any kind of existing narrative, refusing the redemption offered by the promise of progress, leads to the possibility of entirely different futures and political presents.