Re-enactment and Traumatic Memory: Cinematic Ethics in The Act of Killing and S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine

The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer, 2012) and its companion piece, The Look of Silence (2014), are powerful works of cinematic ethics. The former is a ‘perpetrator documentary’ that invites killers to make movie re-enactments of their crimes, the latter a case of ‘ethical witnessing’ in which a victim’s descendant questions his brother’s killer. In what follows, I explore The Act of Killing’s use of stylised re-enactments, using various movie genres as distancing and mediating devices, which enable the perpetrators to approach and expose their traumatic acts of violence. I contrast this with Rithy Panh’s perpetrator/witness documentary, S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), focusing on the mass killings perpetrated by the Pol Pot regime (1975–1979), which uses both visual representations and a more direct, bodily performative mode of re-enactment, to represent and communicate traumatic memory. Both films examine a range of moral emotions, solicited through interview sequences and different modes of cinematic re-enactment. These strategies enable the perpetrators to expose their traumatic violence and, in some cases, acknowledge the suffering of their victims, but also allow the perpetrators to be questioned and held to account, staging an ethical encounter wherein the social recognition of traumatic memory of political violence might become possible.

Accident as Event

Dealing with a broad sweep of experimental novels of the period that make accident a central concern, this chapter examines writing by Samuel Beckett, Brigid Brophy, Eva Figes, Gabriel Josipovici, Nicholas Mosley, Muriel Spark, and Stefan Themerson. In these the accident emerges as a thematic motif or philosophical principle: as chronological paralysis, traumatic violence, revelatory or epiphanic understanding, or eroticized encounter with technology. In late modernism, the uneasy mingling of the precariousness induced by an awareness of life as threatened by the atomic as well as constituted by it seems contradictory to an understanding of the accident as inevitable. This is prevalent in Beckett’s invocation of the void as much as in the frantic figurations of a writer like Brophy. The accident then emerges as what reveals the late modernist disposition to passivity, non-mastery, dissolution, and silence, pushing at the limits of what can and cannot be known.

Rethinking the Age of Revolutions

This new collection brings together some of the most exciting and important research now being done on the French Revolutionary era by prominent historians from North America and France. Adopting a variety of approaches, and tackling a wide variety of subjects, they show the continuing vitality and importance of the field, not just for specialists, but for anyone interested in the origins of some of the most important issues in the politics and culture of the modern West. Among the subjects dealt with in the chapters are human rights, race relations, celebrity, charisma, the aftermath of traumatic violence, and the problem of choice in modern societies.

Yearning for affection: Traumatic bonding between Korean ‘comfort women’ and Japanese soldiers during World War II

This work analyses the complex and contentious issues of mutual affection and codependency in relationships between Korean ‘comfort women’ and Japanese soldiers during World War II. Drawing on a combination of interviews and published resources, it explores the groups’ perceptions of one another within the framework of ‘traumatic bonding’. Despite traumatic violence and stark inequalities, this article finds nuanced contributions from the parties involved. For the soldiers, the relationships provided a form of emotional relief from the violence of war and from the oppression they themselves were subjected to by those of superior rank within the military hierarchy, while the women often sought kindness and protection from the military men with whom they had formed relationships. However, underneath the yearning for human connection, these relationships were highly complex and deeply affected by the overarching power dynamics of gender and the racialised colonial hierarchy.