Imposing An Ideology: Cultural Trauma and Political Taboo in Nebojša Slijepčević's Srbenka

Studies in Eastern European Cinema
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Imposing an ideology: cultural trauma and political

taboo in Nebojša Slijepčević’s Srbenka
Yago Paris
To cite this article: Yago Paris (2021) Imposing an ideology: cultural trauma and political taboo
in Nebojša Slijepčević’s Srbenka , Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 12:3, 260-275, DOI:
10.1080/2040350X.2020.1861753
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2020.1861753
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Studies in Eastern European Cinema
2021, VOL. 12, NO. 3, 260–275
https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2020.1861753
Imposing an ideology: cultural trauma and political taboo

in Nebojša Slijepčević’s Srbenka
Yago Paris
Department of Film Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The present paper analyzes Nebojša Slijepčević’s documentary Srbenka Cultural trauma; political
from a political and cultural perspective, from the point of view of polit- taboo; trauma theory;
ical taboo and cultural trauma. By tackling the murder of the Zec family documentary theory;
during the Croatian War of Independence, the film reflects on the situ- Croatian history; Croatian
society
ation of the Serbian national minority and the conflictive situation it
has to confront due to the national narratives that the Croatian state
has developed, which are a representation of political taboo. This situ-
ation provokes and reinforces an almost impossible to solve cultural
trauma inside the Serbian community, whose population, as a result,
reacts by hiding their ethnic origin in the public sphere, in a behavioural
pattern known as unacknowledgeability. The reconstruction of the mur-
der will allow me to analyze witness traumatization. In the end, a study
of documentary theory, based on Nichols six modes to categorize doc-
umentaries will be developed, in order to analyze how cinema, and also
the arts in general, can be used as vessels for the exposition of struggles
and the development of empathy.
In this article I claim that Nebojša Slijepčević’s documentary Srbenka (2018a, 2018b) suc-
cessfully exposes the description of the current sociopolitical context of Croatian society
that Blanuša (2017) analyzes in his article, in which the author addresses the conflictive
situation of national minorities from the perspective of cultural trauma and political taboo.
The film depicts the development of the theatre play Aleksandra Zec, which reconstructs
the murder of the Zec family during the Croatian War of Independence. The documentary
provides an interdisciplinary approach to the situation of the Serbian community living in
Croatia, which will enable me to deepen into different topics. First of all, a broad description
of the sociopolitical context will be addressed, after which an analysis of the national nar-
ratives developed by the Croatian state will be exposed, as a way to study how political
taboo works. This will lead me to study the repercussions over the Serbian minority. I will
start by approaching trauma from a general perspective, to later deepen into Alexander’s
(2004) concept of cultural trauma. The combination of political taboo and unsolved cultural
trauma is reflected in what Tebble (2011) has called unacknowledgeability, a self-defensive
behaviour based on fear and self-loathing. This conduct, which can be found in the Serbian
CONTACT Yago Paris yagoparis89@gmail.com Department of Film Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Múzeum krt.
4/a, Budapest 1088, Hungary
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Studies in Eastern European Cinema 261
Croats, as the documentary exposes, will help me better explain the political invisibilization
and marginalization the Serbian Croats face in nowadays Croatia.
Since people belonging to the Croatian ethnic majority participate in the documentary,
an approach to witness traumatization will be developed. There will also be an analysis of
the film form – concretely, from the perspective of the documentary theory – to understand
how the sociopolitical conflict can be transformed into images and sounds. I will base my
analysis on the systematization of the documentary film created by Nichols (2010a). Finally,
there will be a short reflection on the arts as triggers for social change through raising
awareness of these issues by critically exposing all the concepts previously mentioned. The
ultimate goal of the essay is to expose how Croatian society lives inside a political system
of manipulation, where the political taboo reinforces the not yet solved cultural trauma of
the Serbian community, and how different forms of art, like Srbenka, can help start the
confrontation of the past by raising empathy.
The sociopolitical context in nowadays Croatia

As historian Vjeran Pavlaković (2014) claims, The Croatian War of Independence, also
known as the Homeland War (1991-1995), has been used as a political tool to develop the
nation-building project of Croatia, a process that, in his opinion, has been a successful one
(8). This conflict confronted the Croatian military forces, which defended the independence
of Croatia from Yugoslavia, and the Serb-controlled Yugoslav People’s Army – also known
as the Yugoslav National Army –, which tried to prevent this action from taking place, along
with the forces of the Serbian national minority living in the Socialist Republic of Croatia.
The conflict ended in 1995 and the final outcome of it was the independence of the Republic
of Croatia. Pavlaković exposes that, due to this war, there is a strong consensus among society
regarding national symbols, borders, and the interpretation of the recent past (8). In order
to explain the idea of nation that the Croatian state has consciously developed after the
Homeland War, Blanuša (2017) uses the concept of the political taboo, which he defines as
‘a hegemonic silence around some mystified and sanctified words, concepts and narratives,
promoted as important for a group’s symbolic coming to consciousness of itself ’ (172). From
his perspective, the narratives built and reinforced by politicians, the media or the Catholic
Church since the end of the Croatian War of Independence (194) can be condensed into the
following ideas: the definition of what it is to be a real Croat, the Homeland War as the
founding event of the state and national identity, the treatment of the political doctrine of
Franjo Tuđman – the first president of the independent Croatian state – as the ideological
basis of the independent state, and the development of the concept of political enemies, those
who question or oppose to the political narratives (176). This biased way of understanding
history and nationalism is ‘a clear falsification of history’ (193) that creates a ‘the asymmetrical
binary opposition of victim vs. aggressor’ (194), leaving no room for a self-critical approach
to the cultural conflicts that the nation has suffered, such as the fact that ‘the cultural per-
petrator trauma from both periods [the Second World War and the Homeland War] is denied
and silenced’ (193). This way of making sense of Croatian recent history and the current
context provokes an imbalance inside a fragmented society such as the Croatian one, where
other ethnicities, such as the Serbian one, coexist and are invisibilized and marginalized by
such a strong public discourse regarding politics and the interpretation of history, up to the
point that proposing alternative visions has become an actual taboo in the public speech.
262 Y. PARIS
Already in 2006, Siniša Tatalović exposed that even though ‘[t]he regulation and the
practical exercise of the rights of national minorities became the benchmark of the democ-
ratization of the Croatian society’, the reality since the end of the 20th century was closer
to ‘policies marred by intolerance and jingoism towards diversity’, where ‘certain national
minorities were pursued as well as various forms of discrimination’ (45-46). The EU and
NATO demanded from the Croatian state the development of a proper legal normative to
promote and protect the national minorities (46), being the result of it the Constitutional
Law on the Rights of National Minorities, which was passed in late 2004 (48). Even though
these actions were implemented, Tatalović denounced that the ‘political and social situation
in Croatia does not facilitate the exercise of minority rights’, because of ‘[t]he consequences
of the war and a very complex economic and social situation’ and the fact that ‘the relevant
discussions cannot be as substantial as they could be in some well-ordered state’. In other
words, the perspectives offered by Tatalović and Blanuša are very similar. Despite this
pessimistic approach, Tatalović ended the text by pointing out that thanks to Croatia’s
recently acquired EU membership and its associated benefits, that were given precisely due
to the presence of national minorities, the situation would evolve towards a more accepting
scenario (58). The cited article written by Blanuša, published eleven years later, shows that
the situation has not improved. The Croatian documentary Srbenka, released one year after,
claims that, due to the rise of the far-right ideology, the situation has actually worsened. In
interviews given to promote the film, director Nebojša Slijepčević exposed that in Croatian
society only one acceptable national narrative in the public speech exists, precluding any
possible alternative vision of Croatian past, such as the one the Serbian minority has. Apart
from pointing out the main political taboo that nowadays in Croatia it is only acceptable
to mention the Croatian victims, one of the crucial parts of his reflection was to denounce
that the situation is getting worse in time (2018a). In another interview, he exposed that
politicians do not want the Croatian War of Independence to end, because it is a strong
political weapon to manipulate traumatized people. He concludes that, although in Croatia
the Serbian community has never felt integrated, the situation is getting even worse now-
adays (2018b).
The film focuses on the situation of the Serbian Croats, which is described in terms of
social exclusion and harassment. The documentary captures the development of the theatre
play called Aleksandra Zec, directed by Oliver Frljić. The play reconstructs the murder of
the Zec family, which took place on the 7th of December 1991, during the Croatian War of
Independence. A regular Croatian unit – a reserve police battalion – shot Mihajlo Zec, and
then took her wife, Marija, and one of their three children, 12-year-old Aleksandra, to later
murder them both. This was the only Serb family killed during the war in Zagreb, and since
the perpetrators were never condemned for this act, it has become a very famous case in
Croatia (Balkan Insight, December 7, 2018). This very controversial crime is the starting
point for the theatrical play and the documentary. Both intend to expose the issue of the
Serb minority living in Croatia by questioning the role of the Croatian state and its influence
over the Croatian ethnic majority. Both artworks claim that the development of the national
narratives has led to the formation of a problematic ideology that has provoked the mar-
ginalization and harassment of the Serbian national minority. This situation has led to the
reinforcement of the cultural trauma among the Serbian community that traces back to the
Croatian War of Independence. Blanuša (2017) defined cultural trauma as ‘a retroactive
collective epistemic process that happens “when members of a collectivity feel they have
been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group con-
sciousness” (Alexander 2004, 1)’. Following Alexander’s reflections, Blanuša pointed out
that the narrative of the cultural trauma needs to become part of the collective identity and
culture of the society (170-171), to allow the process of healing of trauma. This situation is
not taking place inside the Croatian society, due to the exposed national narratives: on the
one hand, they explain the recent past in terms of victimization of the Croat ethnic majority;
on the other, they avoid any responsibility towards the committed crimes of war. The Serbian
community has a different narrative of recent history, which questions the official one.
Hence, it becomes a political traitor for the Croatian state. As a result, the Serbian commu-
nity cannot solve its cultural trauma, which is not publicly recognized by the state and
society, and it continues to pass from generation to generation, a circumstance that has
been caused by a set of political taboos.
The political taboo of the Croatian state

There is a scene at the end of Srbenka which takes place before the premiere of the theatrical
play and depicts the reaction this event has caused among a group of Croats, reflecting how
political taboo works. As Figure 1 describes, they gather at the gate of the theater to demon-
strate against Oliver Frljić’s play, and some of the slogans are: ‘Who doesn’t know about
Aleksandra Zec? Who knows about Vericu Nikŝić, Marinka Marinkovića, Dalibora
Marinkovića, Ivana Petrovića, Marka Petrovića, Andrijanu Marinković and hundreds of
others?’, ‘When will the Croatian victims get a theatre play?’, and ‘86 kids from Vukovar’.
Even though it is completely understandable that this group of people mourn the war crimes
they refer to, their approach to the war crimes committed against the Serbian community
matches with the previously given description of the political taboo, a set of ideas created
Figure 1. The demonstrators protest in front of the theater’s entrance.

264 Y. PARIS
by the ruling class to control the collective consciousness of a concrete topic that directly
affects the development of a social group’s awareness of itself.
According to the theory exposed by Belgian historian Antoon Van den Braembussche
(1998, 106-110), there are four different types of taboo’s defense mechanisms, and these
can be found in the way the protesters approach the topic. The first one could be defined
as a conscious denial of what differs from the explanation of the past. By demonstrating,
the protesters are consciously trying to deny, or at least reduce all the possible attention to,
the war crimes committed by the Croats against the Serbs during the Croatian War of
Independence. The second one might be defined as a reinterpretation of historical events
to delegitimize historical undeniable facts. In this case, the existence of undeniable historical
facts, such as Aleksandra Zec’s case endangers the coherence of the already explained polit-
ical narratives developed by the Croatian state, and the usual response to this situation is
to consciously avoid those facts, as the demonstrators do.
The third one might be defined as the creation of myths, or legends, to justify historical
facts. In this case, the myth of the Croats having been the only victims of the conflict justifies
the killing of Serbs during the war, as it can be seen in the demonstrators, who only want
to talk about Croatian victims and do not take into consideration Aleksandra Zec’s case.
The fourth one might be defined as the unconscious repression of memory to avoid the
instability of national identity. By exclusively focusing on the Croatian children dead during
the war, the protesters choose to erase from their memory another murder of a child, which
is Aleksandra Zec herself. This is probably an unconscious decision, based on not wanting
to destabilize the national narratives which conform the national identity. Applying the
theory of Van den Braembussche, it is easy to conclude that, despite all the tragic deaths
suffered by the Croats during the War of Independence, the political discourse shown by
the demonstrators is based on the political taboo developed by the Croatian state.
The defense mechanism of the political taboo can be found in other fragments of the
film. In one of the first scenes of the film, the one that appears in Figure 2, the director and
the crew of actors are preparing the opening of the theatre play, which consists of the actors
adopting the narrative of trivialization and delegitimation of war crimes committed towards
the Serbian minority – the type of reasoning that the rest of the play will put into question.
Arguments such as the lack of knowledge of the Croatian children killed during the war,
the fact that more than 400 of them died, or the reference to towns which suffered tremen-
dous damage during the war, such as Vukovar or Slavonski Brod, are mentioned. Given the
fact that almost all of these arguments appear in the later demonstration, previously
described, it seems that the director and the actors had a strong understanding of how the
political taboo works and how the pattern of reasoning that the national narratives offer is.
Another aspect of fundamental relevance inside the logic of the political taboo is the
creation of political enemies, who are the ones who question the national narratives. In
that sense, everybody involved in this theatrical play becomes a political enemy of the
state, because of their participation in an artwork that openly questions the national nar-
ratives. As the documentary exposes, days before the play, Oliver Frljić is attacked by the
right-wing media. These attacks were an attempt to scare the director and the members
involved in the play, as well as a tool to destabilize the production itself. Even though the
focus is put on the director – who mentions that even his girlfriend is receiving threats
via e-mail –, there are concerns among the crew of actors, because of the consequences of
being targeted and socially stigmatized by society, despite their belonging to the Croat
Figure 2. The improvisation of one of the actresses during one rehearsal.
ethnicity. In one of the testimonies offered by the documentary, one of the actors manifests
his fear towards the media, which could accuse him for participating in this play despite
being a Croat from Vukovar who was traumatized by the war when he was a child, and
being the possible repercussions receiving a treatment as bad as the one people belonging
to the Serbian ethnicity receive. In conclusion, the national narratives developed after the
Croatian War of Independence gave birth to a political taboo that is manifested in Srbenka
in two main ways: on the one hand, the appearance of the four taboo’s defense mechanisms
exposed by Van den Braembussche, which can be recognized in the claims of the demon-
strators and are also acted out by the crew of actors and the director of the play. On the
other hand, the creation of political enemies, in this case every person involved in the
theatrical play, since it is an artwork that questions the national narratives.
The cultural trauma of the Serbian Croats

The first scene of Srbenka is one of the most powerful ones in terms of emotional charge,
as it captures the consequences of cultural trauma among the Serbian community. Without
any previous contextualization, the camera captures the testimony of a young girl who had
attended the premiere of the theatrical play. She explains that the play has had a huge impact
on her and has felt the need to tell her experience, which is related to the issue addressed
on stage – the trauma of the Serbian community living in Croatia. When talking about her
issues during primary school, she explains: ‘First they started calling me a chetnik,1 and then
I was called stupid, and stinky. They were cursing me. “I will fuck your mother, your chetnik
mother.” […] I couldn’t take part in the gym class. I mean, I was participating, but they would
trip me’. If we take Caruth’s (see 1995) definition of trauma, it could be understood as the
consequences of having suffered an overwhelming experience. According to this definition,
this girl is a traumatized person who feels the urge to start talking about what she has
266 Y. PARIS
Figure 3. A Serbian Croat spectator offers her testimony.
suffered, but struggles to express herself, because, being a traumatized person, the situation
overwhelms her, as it can be understood by the fact that she starts crying, as Figure 3 shows.
This could be understood as the first time the girl felt entitled to start talking about her
trauma in public, and thus maybe the first time she started dealing with it in a self-conscious
way, as a way to start healing it. One of the most useful therapeutic approaches to trauma
consists of the victim telling their experience to the Other. This Other is normally a psy-
chologist or a psychiatrist, but, in the end, it could be anyone. The idea is that when some-
body listens to the testimony of a victim, this person is listening to the victim’s departure
from the event, in order to break the isolation that the event imposes (Caruth 1995, 11).
The role of the listener is fundamental for treatment, up to the point that the testimony
includes the listener, who becomes some kind of ‘blank screen on which the event comes
to be inscribed for the first time’ (Felman and Laub 1992, 72–79). By telling her experience
to the director – who we can hear asking her questions – and to the audience – who will
receive the testimony when they watch the documentary –, she is using the person in front
of her and the camera as the blank screen on which the traumatized person is able to write
her experiences and starts departing from them.
Even though approaching the struggle of this girl from general trauma theory is appro-
priate, it is not enough to fully acknowledge the complexity of the context. In the case of
communities, ethnicities, or even whole nations it is necessary to confront the issue from
a different perspective, which includes the cultural aspect of the collective, in this case the
Serbian minority. In those cases, such as the one addressed by the documentary, it is nec-
essary to talk about cultural trauma. According to Alexander (2004), cultural trauma takes
place when people belonging to a social group have the feeling they have suffered a shocking,
unforgettable experience which changes their awareness of themselves as a collective. The
importance of the collective aspect of this kind of trauma is explained by the idea that, in
those cases, these groups of people identify with the traumatic experience that others inside
of this community suffered, up to the point that they can even take responsibility for it. In
those cases, even though some individuals might not have suffered the traumatic experience,
they are in fact traumatized by the event itself, as they identify with other members of the
community (1). Cultural trauma is, thus, shared among the individuals who form the social
group, and, as a result, it is necessary to deal with it, so that the new generations belonging
to this social group can avoid the traumatic identification. In the first scene of the film,
even though the girl was probably not even born when the murder of the Zec family took
place, she identifies with the suffering of these people because they belong to the same
community, so the girl is traumatized by the event and takes responsibility for it.
There are other similar examples that can be found in the documentary. The film pays
special attention to the character of Nina, a 12-year-old girl who is part of the crew of actors
and becomes the protagonist of the narration. During the rehearsals, the camera focuses
on the reaction of the audience observing them. During the film we can see the group of
teenage girls in this situation, and it is fundamental to analyze the difference between how
Nina experiences these moments and how the others do. This is explained by a fact that is
revealed in the second part of the documentary: unlike the rest of the girls, Nina is a Serbian
Croat, so the whole theatre play has a very different meaning for her in terms of emotional
involvement. Nina shows a deeper reaction to what she observes and experiences, as it can
be seen in her sometimes blank face or her nervous behaviour. As it happened with the
young girl from the first scene, the fact that Nina belongs to the same community as the
Zec family provokes a strong identification with the observed suffering. The protagonist
shares different testimonies of her past, that help better understand her traumatic experi-
ence, such the one Figure 4 exposes, where she narrates the exact moment she became
culturally traumatized when she acknowledged her actual origin: ‘I asked my mum once, I
didn’t know the correct word for “Serbian,” “Mum, am I Srbenka?.” I started to cry because
until the age of seven I considered myself a Croat’.
Figure 4. Fragment of the testimony given by the protagonist, Nina.

268 Y. PARIS
This share of responsibility for the other’s trauma is also manifested in another testimony,
where she explains one nightmare she had: ‘I have dreamt that I was Aleksandra Zec and
that I had a sister and a mother. I don’t know for what reason, but I had killed my sister. I took
out her organs, arranged them neatly on a tray and put them in a cellar. […] This shook me
up a bit’. These examples show it is appropriate to deal with these experiences from the
basis of trauma theory, but not enough to fully understand the complexity of the issue, a
fact that can be better acknowledged by using the description Alexander offers to describe
cultural trauma.
The unacknowledgeability of the Serbian Croats

In one of the several testimonies of the film, the one that Figure 5 captures, one male actor
recalls a memory of her elder sister blaming his father for being a Serb: ‘Once my sister came
home and attacked my dad. “Why did you have to be a Serb? I’m condemned because of it. I
can’t say that your name is Simo. Everyone’s looking at me differently. If you’re Serbs, you
could’ve gone to live in Serbia. Why come here?”’. Another similar testimony appears later,
when another actor explains how in the past he would change his father’s surname in official
documents, in order to hide his Serbian origin: ‘Kids in 6th grade already start to talk about
who’s a Croat and who’s a Serb. Who attends religious education and who doesn’t. One had
to adapt to all that. Maybe I became an actor because of that. I have always been careful about
every detail. In documents I’d change my father’s name’. The third testimony that could be
connected to these other two is the one already exposed regarding the moment when Nina
discovered she was a Serb and started crying because she was aware of how hard it was to
belong to that community and live in Croatia. These three examples expose the conse-
quences of suffering a cultural trauma that is almost impossible to overcome because of the
presence of a political taboo. These consequences have been collected by Adam James Tebble
(see 2011), who proposes the term unacknowledgeability to explain the conflictive situation
certain communities face when they are not publicly recognized as victims by the state. The
author used this concept to expose the situation of homosexuals. The key factor that dif-
ferentiates this marginalized social group from others, such as women or black people, is
that it is not obvious if a person is homosexual or not. In the short-term, it is useful for
Figure 5. Fragment of one of the testimonies given by an actor.

them to be unnoticeable, as a way of preventing harassment or violence, but in the end this
situation provokes the total public, and therefore political, invisibilization of the collective
(923). Furthermore, this concealment foments their unacknowledgeability, but it is also a
response to their own ‘deeply ingrained feelings of shame, disgust, and self-loathing’ (927).
As a result, the concealment, known as living in the closet, is not felt by this collective as
protective, but as a ‘feeling of recurring anxiety’ toward being homosexual in the public
domain (928). Applied to cultural trauma, these traumatized communities, when harassed
by the ideas defended by the political taboo, can adopt the defense mechanism of the unac-
knowledgeability as a way to prevent violence against themselves. This attitude, although
useful in the short-term, provokes a partial, or even total, public invisibility of the collective
and its cultural trauma, preventing them from properly dealing with it.
The key that defines this special case of marginalized communities, such as the homo-
sexual one, is the fact that the trait is behavioral, not physical. In principle, it could be argued
that this concept does not apply to the case of the Serbian Croats, since ethnicity is not a
behavioral trait. However, since from the perspective of their physical traits Serbian and
Croatian ethnicities are very difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate from each other,
this type of ethnicity can be concealed. As a result, this concrete case is a mixture of both
types of marginalized groups described by Tebble and, as such, can be explained through
the use of this concept. Unacknowledgeability appears in the Serbian community due to the
national narratives that have turned the people belonging to it into political enemies. In
other words, being openly Serbian in Croatia is something problematic in the public sphere.
People from this social group, hence, prefer to hide their ethnic origin, in order to avoid
harassment or violence. Consequently, most of them become publicly, and therefore polit-
ically, invisibilized, so their integration into society becomes almost impossible, as well as
the defense of their legal rights. At the same time, as well as homosexuals do, Serbian Croats
can have feelings of shame, disgust and self-loathing. Altogether, this situation creates their
own living in the closet, represented by feeling anxious about people discovering their ethnic
origins, as it can be seen in the cited testimonies, where a daughter blames her father for
being a Serb, a son would systematically change his father’s surname in official documents,
or a child panics when she realizes she belongs to a marginalized and harassed community.
All of them are different examples of the ‘often tortuous private emotional journey against
a background of communally induced self-loathing’ (Tebble 2011, 928).
It is very complicated for the Serbian community to openly talk about this situation and
publicly show themselves as Serbs, because they risk suffering violence and harassment.
The result of this situation can be seen in the character of Nina and her role in the theatrical
play. She is ashamed of herself, of her origin, a fact she has hidden from society. During the
documentary, it is easy to find out that the theatre play has a different meaning for Nina.
During one scene, the group of young girls need to tell their names, age and nationality.
The documentary shows the rehearsal first, and already it can be seen that this situation is
different for Nina. Whereas the other three girls are Croats, she is a Serb, and publicly
admitting that is already hard for her even in front of a crew of people who are, actually,
against the political taboo that is conditioning her life. As she manifests when asked about
her feelings, she expresses her concerns: ‘if somebody i know will be watching me, and prob-
ably somebody will…How they will react to my nationality’. Even though the director offers
her the choice to not expose her true ethnicity in public, she chooses to confront the situation
and during the premiere she says she is a Serb, confronting the ‘permanent exposure to
270 Y. PARIS
public humiliation, discrimination, or violence’ (Tebble 2011, 927) she was avoiding through
the mechanism of the unacknowledgeability. However, the behavioral consequences of this
act are manifested in the last scene of the documentary, where it can be observed how
agitated she is. While for the rest of her classmates the theatre play is a great experience,
for Nina it is a big disturbance in her emotional state. Just after the play finishes, she goes
out of the building, with a tense, fast way of walking, as if she somehow was trying to get
away from her social situation. With this ending, the documentary transmits the idea that
people like Nina are suffering discrimination in their everyday life in Croatian society, and
that, in the case of Nina, the situation does not finish with the ending of the theatre play.
At the same time, having started to break with the unacknowledgeabilty and its dynamics
of self-loathing and concealment can be understood as a first step into trying to start dealing
with her unsolved cultural trauma, even though without the political recognition in the
public sphere of the Serbian community living in Croatia as victims of injustice, this trauma
is almost impossible to overcome.
Witness traumatization during the theatre rehearsals

At the beginning of the film, there is a scene where the actors meet with the director of the
theatrical play in order to get informed in depth about Aleksandra Zec’s case. As Frljić
develops his speech, the images capture the tension of the actors, who have to confront such
a shocking happening. The testimony is followed by a series of photographs of the murdered
family, and one of the actresses is so affected by the deep acknowledgement she is experi-
encing that she cannot cope with the situation and starts crying, as it can be seen in Figure 6.
This scene is a perfect example to understand how witness traumatization works, which is
based on the fact that the listener can become a traumatized person by the act of listening
to somebody else’s trauma. In other words, trauma can be understood as some kind of
contagion that is spread by language and representation. If trauma is thought of as not
attached to the event and its witnesses, the possibility that the other’s testimonies are able
to traumatize the listener is related to the idea of trauma traveling ‘across histories and
cultures to resonate within the very structures of our being’ (Crownshaw 2013, 170). In that
case, the result of the described situation is the possibility of the listener to be traumatized
Figure 6. One of the actresses starts crying due to witness traumatization.

by the testimony of the victim, a fact that is known as witness traumatization, or vicarious
trauma. In the cited scene, it can be understood that the mental processes, as described by
McCann and Pearlman (1990), are the outcome of a break in the basic cognitive schemas,
which include beliefs such as trust, safety, power, independence, esteem, intimacy and
frames of reference, which, in the end, is the same type of experience a victim from primary
trauma suffers. By receiving verbal and visual information of the case of the Zec family, the
crew of actors experiences the psychological process known as witness traumatization.
There are more situations during Srbenka that exemplify the process of witness trauma-
tization. During the rehearsals, the documentary does not focus on the performance itself,
but on the reactions of the people who observe it. In one of them, there is a shot that depicts
how the adolescent girls watch the scene, and the facial expressions transmit fear, disgust,
and suffering, which, altogether, supports the idea of contagion spread through language
and representation. This also happens even to the director of the theatre play, who explains
he is really surprised about how he is starting to have strong emotions by watching the
performances: ‘I can’t believe what kind of emotions the theater is arousing in me at my age.
I’ve been so proud of myself for being able to keep a ‘healthy’ distance’. Even Nina, who was
already conscious about the social situation in Croatia and in fact traumatized by it, also
suffers from witness traumatization due to her participation in the rehearsals, as it can be
understood from the fact that during the rehearsals she has a nightmare where she becomes
Aleksandra Zec. In all of these examples the idea of witness traumatization, that is, of
becoming traumatized by listening to the other’s testimony or representation of trauma,
is shown.
But a strong part of the witness traumatization comes from the fact that the crew of
actors need to interpret both the roles of the victims and the perpetrators, as Figure 7
exposes. Even though it is not real, still they become witnesses of the representation of
something that did happen in the past, and the reenactment reinforces the possibility of
trauma resonating inside the secondary victim, provoking the traumatization. Having this
Figure 7. The reenactment of Aleksandra Zec’s case.

272 Y. PARIS
in mind, it is understandable the degree of tension and strong feelings in the actors during
the rehearsals, and how some of them have difficulties when creating or receiving such
violent scenes. As a result, the actors of the theatre play are an example of witness trauma-
tization not only by the exposure to others’ traumas, but by the reenactment of the traumatic
experience itself.
Turning trauma into images: Srbenka and documentary theory

On a purely film theoretical level, Srbenka is a very good example of how complicated it is
to define what a documentary is. Using the classification proposed by Nichols (2010b), the
film has, in a higher or lower degree, aspects of four of the six different modes – the reflexive,
poetic, observational and the participatory – the author proposes, being the reflexive mode
the most important one, and thus the film will be analyzed from this perspective. In reflexive
documentaries, directors are more interested in reflecting on the act of representing the
world, the historical facts, and all the problems related to it. By doing this with their images,
they establish some kind of negotiation with the audience (Nichols 2010b, 194). In Srbenka,
one of the starting points is how to deal with the three different levels of reality the film
exposes: the information about the real Aleksandra Zec’s case, the theatre rehearsals and
final play, and the testimonies of the different actors and everything that is shown between
rehearsals, on the backstage or outside the theatre play; in other words, the past, the fiction,
and the present reality. For such a complex situation it can be helpful to use a reflexive
approach, in order to focus on how the different levels relate to each other.
This perspective, of course, makes the documentary less veridical, in the sense that the
idea of representation, of manipulation of reality, is present during the whole time, and,
most importantly, the viewer is aware of it. In Srbenka, the concept of representation is very
present, embodied by the rehearsals. The actors become figures submitted to the reenact-
ment of past actions and attitudes, and, in some cases, to thoughts and beliefs that are still
present nowadays – the play starts with the actors representing the usual arguments of
conservative people against the Serbian community. At the same time, some mise-en-scène
decisions are based on this idea. The director almost never shows what is happening on
stage, so we never have an actual representation of Aleksandra Zec’s case. Even if the director
would have shown the actual rehearsals, the viewer would have been watching reenactments,
and not the actual truth. By shooting this way, Slijepčević emphasizes the idea of how dif-
ficult it is to access the actual reality. By using this approach, the filmmaker offers a reflection
on the act of creating a documentary, which is the basis of the reflexive mode. In the end,
instead of approaching the real historical world the film is based on, the idea is that the
audience watches the artifact as an act of representation (194), as it can be seen in Figure 8.
We can conclude that Srbenka approaches trauma from the perspective of the reflexive
mode. By breaking the laws of continuity of time-space logic, the documentary is able to
show the situation in a conceptual way, with a big importance of the different perspectives
involved in the conflict. At the same time, one of the most important aspects of the project
is to talk about reconstruction while approaching the past. By taking this decision, the
documentary offers a blurred vision of past facts, as a way of expressing how complicated
the conflict is, as well as how difficult it is to really know what happened, two facts that are
directly related to the idea of trauma as a tremendously complicated issue that is hard to
figure out and represent, an idea which is vastly present in the images of Srbenka.
Figure 8. The reenactment of Aleksandra Zec’s case.
Conclusion: arts in dealing with trauma

Srbenka is a Croatian documentary that talks about the social conflict that exists nowadays
in Croatia, in relation to the Serbian minority and its difficulty to be properly integrated
into society. To approach this issue, the film exposes the development of the theatre play
Aleksandra Zec, directed by Oliver Frljić, which reconstructs the murder of the Zec family
in Zagreb on the 7th of December 1991, during the Croatian War of Independence. The
national narratives built by the Croatian state after its independence have created a political
taboo that prevents society from tackling the war crimes committed against this collective.
Meanwhile, the Serbian community suffers from cultural trauma, and, by the way trauma
works, the fact that this social group does not receive public recognition as a victim, and is
actually invisibilized and marginalized, provokes an almost impossible psychological recov-
ery. Since they actually suffer from violence and harassment, people belonging to this
minority choose to hide their ethnic origin, in a behavior of fear and self-loathing that
Adam James Tebble (2011) has called unacknowledgeability. These three concepts are rep-
resented in the different scenes of the film, as well as witness traumatization, which hap-
pened due to the fact that the theatre crew acknowledged the past facts and the current
situation, and had to reenact the happening on stage, during the rehearsals. At the same
time, all these ideas are included in the film form of the documentary. Being basically a
reflexive documentary, the film deals with trauma in many different ways, touching issues
of representation and history, but also showing signs of the poetic, participatory and obser-
vational modes. In the end, Srbenka is a complex film that tries to deal with a conflictual
topic from different perspectives, such as the political, the cultural, the cinematographic,
and the meta-cinematographic ones, in order to express how cultural trauma and political
taboo are conditioning the dynamics of Croatian society regarding its own recent past.
Taking into consideration the possible social repercussion of the documentary and the
theatre play inside of it, it might be interesting to close this essay by developing a short
reflection about the chance the arts have of making a difference in society. Miroslav Ballay
(2018) analyzes two theatre plays directed by Oliver Frljić, 25,671 – which tackles issues of
Slovenian society – and Aleksandra Zec, in order to point out the characteristics of a type
of theatre based on creating a huge moral impression among its audience. In Ballay’s opinion
274 Y. PARIS
this reconstructive approach to the past can have a powerful effect over the viewers, a fact
that can lead to increasing awareness about harming cultural stereotypes, trauma, and taboo
(240-241). Blanuša (2017, 185–188), too, collects a series of theatrical plays directed by
Oliver Frljić that question the Croatian national narratives, which the author understands
as acts of de-tabooization. Besides Aleksandra Zec itself, he also analyzes Bakhes and Croatian
Theater. The three of them have been unified into one play performed in three acts, called
The Trilogy Croatian of Fascism. Besides the protests exposed in the documentary, the other
two received a strong rejection from different spectrums of society as well. Bakhes was
initially banned, and Opus Dei organized prayers for the souls of the director and the actors,
as well as protests against the Croatian Theater. All these frontal rejections are the result of
trying to expose issues that have been turned into taboos.
The same conclusion can be applied to any artistic creation of any discipline based on
trying to explain a reality made invisible by the official discourse, such as the YouTube clip
We, the Croats or the theatre play The Fall (Blanuša 2017, 188–193). Using such powerful
media to tell alternative perspectives of reality can be used as a strong pedagogical tool to
expose and start to deal with invisibilized traumas. And this could be possible because,
although the media diffusion is really useful, the empathetic aspect of trauma is crucial.
Since we all have direct or indirect experiences of trauma, we all can understand each other’s
traumas. As a result, trauma can travel culturally (Crownshaw 2013, 169), because, in the
end, trauma is not about ‘what we simply know of each other, but on what we don’t yet
know of our own traumatic pasts’ (Caruth 1995, 11).
Note
1. “A member of various irregular Serbian military forces that in periods of disorder (as during
World War II and following the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991) pursued ultranationalist aims”
(Merriam-Webster). Used colloquially as a racial slur for Serbian. Retrieved January 82,019
from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Chetnik
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very insightful remarks, professor Margitházi
Beáta for her enlightening consulting role during the different stages of the development of this article,
and director Nebojša Slijepčević, who kindly allowed the use of any material of his documentary Srbenka.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Yago Paris is currently a student of the MA in Film Studies at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest,
Hungary. He has written his MA thesis on the aesthetics of the Transformers saga and the cinema of
Michael Bay, a research he intends to develop in his PhD. Other fields of interest include the cinemas
of Eastern Europe, with special regard to Hungarian cinema, and animation.
References
Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma.” In: Cultural Trauma and
Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser,
Piotr Sztompka, 1–30. Berkeley: University of California Press
Ballay, Miroslav. 2018. “Expressional Bipolarity of Theatre (Selected Case Studies in Contemporary
Theatre).” The Slovak Theatre 66 (3): 231–241.
Blanuša, Nebojša. 2017. “Trauma and Taboo: Forbidden Political Questions in Croatia.” Croatian
Political Science Review 54 (1-2): 170–196.
Caruth, Cathy. 1995. “Trauma and Experience.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by
Cathy Caruth, 3–12. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Crownshaw, Richard. 2013. “Trauma Studies.” In The Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural
Theory, edited by Simon Malpas and Paul Wake, 167–176. London and New York: Routledge.
Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. 1992. “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening, and an
Event without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival.” In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Chap. 2. New York: Routledge.
McCann, Lisa, and Laurie Anne Pearlman. 1990. “Vicarious Traumatization: A Framework for
Understanding the Psychological Effects of Working with Victims.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 3
(1): 131–149. doi:10.1007/BF00975140.
Nichols, Bill. 2010a. “How Can We Differentiate among Documentaries? Categories, Models, and
the Expository and Poetic Modes of Documentary Film.” In Introduction to Documentary, Chap.
6, edited by Bill Nichols, 142–171. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Nichols, Bill. 2010b. “How Can We Describe the Observational, Participatory, Reflexive, and
Performative Modes of Documentary Film?” In Introduction to Documentary, Chap. 7, edited by
Bill Nichols, 172–211. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Pavlaković, Vieran. 2014. “Symbolic Nation-Building and Collective Identities in Post-Yugoslav
States.” Croatian Political Science Review 51 (5): 7–12.
Slijepčević, Nebojša. 2018a. “Interview with Nebojsa Slijepcevic/Srbenka/AFF 2018.” Astra Film
Festival. Accessed January 8, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVJ62TqT-gQ
Slijepčević, Nebojša. 2018b. “Nebojša Slijepčević introduces his film Srbenka.” DAFilms. Retrieved
January 8, 2019 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp-Viye-CB0
Tatalović, Siniša. 2006. “National Minorities and Croatian Democracy.” Politička Misao XLIII (5):
45–59.
Tebble, Adam James. 2011. “Homosexuality and Publicness: Towards a Political Theory of the
Taboo.” Political Studies 59 (4): 921–939. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9248.2011.00884.x.
Van den Braembussche, Antoon. 1998. “The Silenced past: On the Nature of Historical Taboos.” In
Swiat Historii. Festschrift for Jerzy Topolski, edited by Wojciecha Wrzoska, 97–112. Poznan:
Historical Institute.
analecta polit. | Vol. 12 | No. 22 | PP. 1-26
| enero-junio | 2022 | ISSN-e: 2390-0067 (en línea) | Medellín-Colombia
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.18566/apolit.v12n22.a02
Perpetrator Trauma as
a Possible Solution for
Cultural Trauma: The Case
of Joshua Oppenheimer’s
The Act of Killing (2012)
and The Look of Silence
(2014)
Cómo citar este El trauma del perpetrador como una posible
artículo en APA:
Paris, Y. (2022). solución al trauma cultural: El caso de The Act
Perpetrator Trauma
as a Possible Solution
of Killing (2012) y The Look of Silence (2014),
for Cultural Trauma:
The Case of Joshua
de Joshua Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer’s The Act
of Killing (2012) and The
Look of Silence (2014). YAGO PARIS
Analecta Política, 12(22),
1-26. doi: http://dx.doi.
Ph.D. Candidate, Doctorate Program of Humanities: Language and Culture
org/10.18566/apolit. Universidad Rey Juan Carlos - MadridResearch
v12n22.a02 Group in Visual Arts and Cultural Studies (GIAVEC)
Fecha de recepción:
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3003-6675
07.09.2021 yagoparis89@gmail.com
Fecha de aceptación:
20.11.2021
Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 4.0 Internacional.

2| Yago Paris
Perpetrator Trauma as a Possible Solution for Cultural Trauma: The Case of
Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014)
Abstract
The present article analyzes Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentaries The Act of
Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014) from the perspective of trauma.
The aim of this study is to give new approaches that could allow a deeper
understanding of such a complex sociopolitical situation as the one that is
taking place in nowadays Indonesia. First, I will introduce the term cultural
trauma to explain the situation of the victims of the 1965-66 mass killings
that took place in Indonesia. Then, I will make use of the concept of the
political taboo to better understand how the official narrative imposed by the
government has worked, and still works, as some sort of unquestionable myth.
Afterward, I will point out that these two concepts give birth to a vicious cycle
from which escaping becomes highly unlikely. A possible solution I propose
here comes from studying another type of trauma, that of the perpetrator,
since, in an indirect way, it can lead to an improvement of cultural trauma.
By approaching trauma in a non-moralistic sense, allowing the perpetrator
the status of a victim, I intend to highlight the importance of empathy and
understanding in the process of healing of not only perpetrator trauma, but
also, and more importantly, cultural trauma.
Keywords: trauma, cultural trauma, perpetrator trauma, documentary,

Indonesia
Resumen
El siguiente artículo analiza los documentales The Act of Killing (2012) y The
Look of Silence (2014), de Joshua Oppenheimer, desde el punto de vista del
trauma. El objetivo de este estudio consiste en ofrecer nuevas aproximaciones
que puedan permitir un entendimiento más profundo de una situación
sociopolítica tan compleja como la que tiene lugar hoy en día en Indonesia.
Primero, presentaré el término «trauma cultural», para explicar la situación
de las víctimas de las matanzas de 1965-66 que tuvieron lugar en Indonesia.
Posteriormente, utilizaré el concepto «tabú político» para entender mejor
cómo la narrativa oficial impuesta por el gobierno ha funcionado, y continúa
haciéndolo, como una especie de mito incuestionable. A continuación,
señalaré que estos dos conceptos dan lugar a un círculo vicioso del que escapar
es altamente improbable. En este punto propongo como una posible solución
el estudio de otro tipo de trauma, el del perpetrador, puesto que, de una
manera indirecta, puede dar lugar a una mejora del trauma cultural. Mediante
Analecta Política | Vol. 12 | No. 22 | enero-junio 2022

Yago Paris |3
una aproximación no moralista al concepto de trauma, una en la que se le concede al

perpetrador un estatus de víctima, pretendo poner de manifiesto la importancia de la
empatía y el entendimiento en el proceso de curación, no solo del trauma del perpetrador,
sino, además, y aún más importante, del trauma cultural.
Palabras clave: trauma, trauma cultural, trauma del perpetrador, documental, Indonesia
Perpetrator Trauma as a Possible Solution

for Cultural Trauma: The Case of Joshua
Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012)
and The Look of Silence (2014)
At the beginning of The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012), a set of
titles explain to the audience the context of present-day Indonesia, as a result of
events of its recent past:
In 1965, the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military. Anybody

opposed to the military dictatorship could be accused of being a communist:
union members, landless farmers, intellectuals, and the ethnic Chinese. In less
than a year, and with the direct aid of western governments, over one million
“communists” were murdered. The army used paramilitaries and gangsters to
carry out the killings. These men have been in power –and have persecuted their
opponents– ever since.
A very similar message appears at the beginning of The Look of Silence (Joshua
Oppenheimer, 2014). With this very short contextualization, director Joshua
Oppenheimer sets the ground for his double effort to tackle the very conflictive
sociopolitical situation in Indonesia. In the first film, he exposes the vision of
the past from the perspective of the perpetrators, whereas in the second one, he
gives voice to the victims of the mass killings. With these two documentaries, the
filmmaker attempts to shed light on this situation, in order to better understand
the blockage that the Indonesian society is suffering in terms of human rights.
This paper seeks to continue the work initiated by Oppenheimer, but with
the attempt to widen the perspective on the situation, partially by questioning
some of the decisions and moralistic visions offered by the films. First, I intend
enero-junio | Vol. 12 | No. 22 | Analecta Política

4| Yago Paris
to offer a possible explanation of the very impacting scenes that appear in both
documentaries. In order to do that, I will first introduce the term “cultural trauma”,
which will help me better explain the situation of the victims. Afterward, I will
introduce the term “political taboo”, one which will clarify the reasons for having
created such an inflexible official narrative of the past, one which does not allow
any type of criticism or alternative vision of it. One of the key goals of this essay is
to highlight the fact that these two concepts are interconnected: the perpetrators,
whose actions led to the development of cultural trauma in the other social group,
created a narrative reinforced by political taboos, and by doing so, they prevent
cultural trauma from healing. This enhances the negative repercussions of cultural
trauma over the victims, and the reinforcement of cultural trauma provokes an even
higher need to apply the political taboo, in order to maintain the status quo. In
other words, this is a vicious cycle in which both sides reinforce each other.
After having explored this situation, I will develop a study on the behavioral
traits of the perpetrators, in order to find key aspects that would lead to a possible
improvement of the situation. More concretely, I will explore the concept of
“perpetrator trauma”, one that usually receives little attention, but which can
actually be the key to improving this conflict. Through the analysis of Anwar
Congo’s behavior, one of the perpetrators and the protagonist of The Act of Killing,
I will propose the phenomenon of “witness traumatization” as the key point of
his partial dramatic arc of acknowledging the Other as a victim of his actions. At
the same time, I will explore the reasons why perpetrators are not usually allowed
the status of victims of the traumatic events, and will propose a non-moralistic
approach to trauma to improve the healing of perpetrator trauma, which will
indirectly help in the healing of their victims’ trauma. In conclusion, after having
explored the situation from many different angles, proposing ideas and concepts
to better understand the reasons behind such a problematic sociopolitical context,
I will propose approaching trauma in a different sense, one in which empathy
and understanding, and not moralistic judgment, can be the key to an actual
improvement of conflictive situations.
I. The Unsolved Cultural Trauma

Following Cathy Caruth’s (see 1995) psychoanalytical approach, trauma can
be defined as the consequences of having suffered an overwhelming experience.
One of the most useful therapeutic approaches to healing trauma consists of the
victim telling their experience to the Other. This Other is normally a psychologist

Yago Paris |5
or a psychiatrist, but, in the end, it could be anyone willing to listen. The idea is
that when somebody listens to the testimony of a victim, this person is attending
the victim’s departure from the event, in order to break the isolation that the
event imposes (Caruth, 1995, p. 11). The role of the listener is fundamental for
treatment, up to the point that the testimony includes the listener, who becomes
some kind of “blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first
time” (Laub, 1992, p. 57).
Having this in mind, the depiction of the situation that the victims of the
Indonesian genocide have to confront already goes against recovery, since, due
to their fear of speaking about the past, the trauma cannot be fully healed. As
opposed to the perpetrators, who talk about their experiences with an impressive
amount of detail and with a tone that goes from the need to tell their story to
pure pride, the main trait of the victims’ behavior is their unwillingness to talk.
This can be explained mainly as a result of fear, because, even the ones who dare
face the camera and tell their story still do it in a very different manner. In these
cases, the audience will not find a set of details or passionate speeches. On the
contrary, victims speak scarcely, since they are still in pain, and remembering
becomes a strong confrontation for them. There is a sequence in The Look of
Silence that highlights this difference. The fragment of the documentary exposes
the remembrance of the crimes that took place in a certain area of the country.
First, the perpetrators’ point of view is illustrated, and afterward comes the one
from one of the victims, a man who was able to escape the mass murder. In the
first case, there is a highly detailed, frivolous narration of the actions, even with
reenactments of the killings. In the second, silence dominates the scene. The
narration of the victim is short and does not offer many details, and there is the
constant reminder of the lives lost in the area, up to the point that the victim
directly addresses their souls and asks for forgiveness for being there, disrupting
their rest. As a result, and due to the past and present sociopolitical context,
the victims have to face a psychological barrier that prevents them from actually
healing from their trauma.
Nevertheless, in the case of communities, ethnicities, or even whole nations,

the previously exposed psychoanalytical perspective of trauma is not enough to
understand the situation; it is necessary to confront the issue from a different
perspective, one which includes the cultural aspect of the collective. In those
cases, it is necessary to address the concept of cultural trauma. According to
Jeffrey C. Alexander’s social theory of trauma, cultural trauma takes place when
people who belong to a social group have the feeling that they have suffered a
shocking, unforgettable experience which changes their awareness of themselves

6| Yago Paris
as a collective. Complementary to it is Ron Eyerman’s definition, in which cultural

trauma is considered as “a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social
fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion”
(2004, p. 61). In both definitions, the notion of the collective is paramount.
This is explained by the idea that, in such cases, these groups of people identify
with the traumatic experience that others inside of this community suffered, up
to the point that they can even take responsibility for it (Alexander, 2004, p.
1). These different conceptions of trauma –the one offered by Caruth and the
one by Alexander and Eyerman himself– have been signaled by Ron Eyerman
(see 2019a). According to this author, the psychoanalytic approach offers “the
naturalistic assumption that trauma is the direct result of [...] a wound [...] visited
on the mind through an overwhelming experience,” whereas cultural trauma
“is more contingent and involves discursive practices, collectivities, collective
memory, and collective identity in a struggle to define what is experienced as
traumatic” (Eyerman, 2019a, p. 145-46). The latter approach is the one that will
receive more attention throughout this paper.
Taking Alexander’s previous quote, trauma is shared by the community, as it

can be seen in one of the last scenes of The Look of Silence, in which the mother
of Adi, the protagonist, meets the survivor introduced before in this text. When
they meet, the mother instantly starts to cry, and both melt in a hug without the
need to express anything through verbal communication, because the mutual
understanding allowed by the same trauma creates a context of shared suffering,
which connects with the emphasis that Eyerman puts on collective memory and
identity formation (see 2004, 2019a). Another crucial aspect of cultural trauma is
the fact that, even though some individuals might not have suffered the traumatic
experience, they are in fact traumatized by the event itself, as they identify with
other members of the community (Alexander, 2004, p. 1). This can be observed
in the case of Adi, who is traumatized by the murder of his elder brother, even
though he was not even born by the time this happened –as it is explained in
the documentary, Adi was born two years after this event–. In other words, Adi
does not even have memories of the mass murders, let alone of his brother, and
yet he has developed a trauma due to the sharing quality of cultural trauma, in
which “members of collectivities define their solidary relationships in ways that,
in principle, allow them to share the sufferings of others.” (Alexander, 2004, p. 1).
Cultural trauma is, thus, shared among the members of the community, through
the construction of shared collective memory, and, as a result, it is necessary to
deal with it, so that the new generations belonging to this social group can avoid
the traumatic identification.

Yago Paris |7
As it has been pointed out, trauma is healed through talking. The victim starts
departing from their trauma by sharing their story, which means that another
person has to listen to what they have to say. Listening is a form of acknowledging
what happened, and doing it legitimizes the suffering of the victim, which is
recognized as such. In cultural trauma, where the most likely scenario is that
a social group acts in a way that provokes trauma over another social group,
the idea of legitimization scales to the public sphere. In these cases, State
recognition of these collectives as victims is a necessary step for proper trauma
healing. Nevertheless, many times the social group in power is the one who has
inflicted trauma, normally as a way to achieve such power. This is the case of the
Indonesian genocide. By 1965, the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) was ruling
the country, when a military coup took place. The same anti-communist group
has remained in power ever since –even after the death of dictator Suharto–,
since the hypothetical democracy that came afterward has been anything but
democratic. As it is exposed in both documentaries, the press is controlled by
the government, and the perpetrators of mass murders, who are gangsters and
members of paramilitary groups, can openly talk about what they did, since
there is total impunity for their actions. As a result, the sociopolitical situation
in Indonesia is far from encouraging a public debate about the recent past of the
country. One of the main reasons for this is that the victims themselves are afraid
of talking, since, as they know who controls the power in their nation, speaking
out will most likely mean suffering the consequences, which, as it is exposed in
the documentaries, can escalate to the level of murder. In The Act of Killing, the
actions of some artists and activists are addressed, and it is explained that one of
them was kidnapped and has never come back, which is interpreted as an almost
certain murder.
But besides the actual brutal force that can be applied to the ones who dare
question the regime, the case requires a deeper study in order to fully understand
the complexity of the situation. At this point, it is fundamental to address
the attitude of the perpetrators. Injustice and genocide are, unfortunately, not
unusual. Nevertheless, the most striking aspect of these two documentaries
is the behavior of the perpetrators, a fact that becomes the core of The Act of
Killing. Even when killers are openly considered as such, they are expected to
act by avoiding to talk about it, or pretending they had nothing to do with the
mass murders.
This is not the case in Indonesia, where the killers openly talk about what
they did, with a mixture of ignorance of the repercussions of their actions and
an actual pride toward it. This is the attitude shown by the protagonists of

8| Yago Paris
The Act of Killing. Anwar Congo, Herman Koto, and Adi Zulkadry act in a
similar manner, a type of behavior that can be understood through the logic
of the political taboo. This concept can be defined as a set of ideas created
by the ruling class to control the collective consciousness of a concrete topic
that directly affects the development of a social group’s awareness of itself.
These ideas are unquestionable in the public sphere and become some kind of
“mystified and sanctified words,” resulting in the lack of any kind of criticism
toward the past (Blanuša, 2017, p. 171). This official discourse, which could be
understood as propaganda, creates a fixed, unquestionable version of the past,
one in which the rulers become heroes and the members of the other social
group are portrayed as enemies of the State, dehumanized to the point that
violence and murder are justified and even celebrated.
With this in mind, it is easier to understand what could bring people like
Anwar Congo to openly talk about how he killed other members of society, who
had been accused of being communists, and more concretely, how he can speak
in a frivolous, sometimes even humorous, manner about the methods utilized to
perpetrate such assassinations. The perpetrators can behave in such a way because
their actions have been justified and glorified by the official discourse, and given
form through the logic of the political taboo, which prevents any questioning of
the official version of the past.
When the logic of the political taboo is applied to cultural trauma, it can
provoke the refusal of a collective to recognize the other’s suffering. In this case,
the perpetrators do not want to recognize the victims as such, since they consider
this social group as an enemy of the State. This is crucial when the collective who
refuses to recognize it is, precisely, the direct responsible for the creation of such
trauma. In those cases, the perpetrators do not want to recognize the victims as
such, also because that would mean recognizing that what they did was wrong.
Political taboo applied to the Other’s cultural trauma often comes along with the
idea of victimization. The collective which has caused the trauma not only does
not recognize it, but also feels that, actually, the traumatized group is the cause
of all its problems and sufferings. In this case, the perpetrators feel that they were
victims of the communists, and, as a result, their actions were deemed needed.
This way, their terrible actions are justified and glorified as an act of defense of
themselves and their country. In summary, the political taboo not only does not
help in solving cultural trauma, but also leaves the traumatized to suffer alone
(Alexander, 2004, p. 1). In other words, the political taboo can play a crucial role
in the impossibility to heal cultural trauma.

Yago Paris |9
In order to prevent the political taboo from being questioned by the members
of its own community, there are certain defenses prepared to avoid this from ever
happening. According to the theory exposed by Antoon Van den Braembussche
(1998, pp. 106-110), there are four different types of taboo’s defense mechanisms.
The first one could be defined as a conscious denial of what differs from the
explanation of the past. Throughout The Look of Silence, every time Adi tries to
speak about the past with the different perpetrators he meets, a similar pattern
takes place. In the beginning, the questions are not harsh or confrontational,
and, as a result, the perpetrators feel comfortable explaining what they remember
about the past. This changes when Adi brings up topics that connect to ideas of
guilt or responsibility. In these cases, every interviewee reacts in a similar manner,
by rejecting the version of the past that Adi offers. There is a fixed idea of the
past, and any diversion is immediately canceled. In the interview with Inong,
the leader of a village’s death squad, he justifies the killings of the members of
the Communist Party by arguing that they had no religion, and that they would
sleep with each other’s wives. When Adi answers that these were only rumors, he
exclaims “[t]hey said it themselves! When we interrogated them.” There is a fixed,
immobile vision of the past which does not allow any discrepancy.
The second defense mechanism might be defined as a reinterpretation of

historical events to delegitimize historical undeniable facts. The best example of
this can be found in the NBC newsreel filmed in the country shortly after the
coup had taken place, and it is included in The Look of Silence. In it, a journalist
is interviewing a Balinese person, who explains why the massacre had taken place:
-Journalist: “Bali is such a beautiful island. People are so attractive, the climate is
so lovely. It's hard to believe that so many unpleasant things went on here over
the last year.”
-Balinese: “Yeah, but now Bali has become more beautiful without
communists.”
-Journalist: “What actually happened here, in this village?”
-Balinese: “Some of the communist leaders from this village realized they were
wrong, and they came to the village council and asked when the village council
will clean the village of communist people.”
-Journalist: “You mean the communists themselves asked to be killed?”
-Balinese: “Some of them. Some of them wanted to be killed. 'Now give me a
chance to say goodbye to my relatives, and the next morning I'm ready to be
killed.'”

10 | Yago Paris
By building up a new narrative –even when it is a very hard to believe one–,

the perpetrators delegitimize any possible alternative explanation of the past,
even when there is proof that the official version is false. This can only happen
due to the third type of defense mechanism, which consists of the creation
of myths or legends, to justify historical facts. Political meetings take place
during The Act of Killing, and one of them is the one that The Pancasila Youth
organizes. This far-right paramilitary organization had a leading role during the
1965-66 massacre, and they have perpetuated the official narrative of the State
ever since. One of its higher rank members is Yapto Soerjosoemarno, who gives
a speech at this gathering: “All Pancasila Youth members are heroes,” because
they exterminated the communists, fought the neo-communists and left-wing
extremists, and any enemy of the State. He claims that “[t]his isn’t only the
duty of the army and police,” and that, as a result, this organization had to take
a stand. It is not only remarkable the way in which he describes the political
situation and the justification of mass murder, but also the fact that he is not
only speaking about the past, but about the present situation, too. Altogether,
this mythical description of the Pancasila Youth members, portrayed as heroes
who helped and continue to help in saving the nation, prevents any self-
criticism about their actions.
The fourth defense mechanism consists of the unconscious repression of

memory to avoid the instability of the identity. This can be observed, in a general
sense, with any of the interviewees, since all of them offer a similar pattern of
denial of certain actions and repetition of similar ideas which belong to the
official discourse. They do this in order to justify their actions so that their formed
identity will not be questioned and that their fragile sense of inner peace is not
threatened. It is also remarkable to discover these patterns among the people who
belong to this social group, but who had not taken direct action in the massacres
themselves. This can be observed in a scene from The Look of Silence where Adi
visits the family of one of the perpetrators, Amir Hasan. The initial idea was to
interview him, but, since he had passed away by the time the documentary was
being developed, the film crew decided to organize a meeting with his widow
and his sons. Before witnessing this conversation, the audience has had access to
footage of an interview with Hasan, along with Inong. In these images, we can see
Hasan accompanied by his wife. The most remarkable aspect about this footage –
which was filmed during the development of The Act of Killing but in the end was
not included in the documentary– is the presence of a book written by Hasan,
so that his story, the testimony of what happened, will survive his death. This
book, where–as it happens with the rest of the perpetrators that appear in both
documentaries–their responsibility in the murders is not only not hidden, but

Yago Paris | 11
openly celebrated, is the undeniable proof that Hasan was responsible for the
death of 32 people. Even Joshua Oppenheimer received a copy of this book,
that Hasan proudly gave to him. This copy reappears in the cited scene in The
Look of Silence, where Adi meets Hasan’s family. Besides the expectable rejection
that all the members of the family express toward Adi’s alternative testimony, the
crucial situation that can best explain this fourth defense mechanism is the fact
that Hasan’s widow claims that she was unaware of the existence of this book,
despite the fact that the audience has previously seen her in the cited footage,
directly engaging with it. This suppression of certain memories and facts is, thus,
necessary in order to ensure the official discourse’s survival.
In a general sense, in order to better understand why these defense mechanisms

are applied, it could be argued that an important aspect of the idea of identity
is based on the need to create a strong differentiation between the Self and the
Other. “The individual identifies with the specific myths of a nation's enjoyment,
which structure everyday beliefs and practices of the group” (Krstic, 2002, p. 10).
Consequently, hatred toward the Other’s enjoyment is created as a result of this
group feeling that the Other is trying to steal the enjoyment that belongs to the
former, which is the basis of this collective’s existence. Promoting hate and lack of
empathy toward the Other, who needs to be dehumanized and understood as a
threat, is a way of enforcing the definition of the Self. This can clearly be observed
in the double scene in The Look of Silence, where the audience witnesses how the
official discourse is explained to children at school by teachers:
“Communists are cruel. Communists don’t believe in God. To change the political
system, the Communists kidnapped six army generals. They sliced the generals’ faces
with razor blades. [...] The Communists were cruel, so the government had to repress
them. The Communists were put in prison. Their children couldn’t become government
officials, […] if you rebel against the State, you go to jail. So let’s thank the heroes, who
struggle to make our country a democracy.”
Afterward, one of the students, who happens to be Adi’s son, tells him what
he was taught. The conversation evolves as it follows:
-Son: “The generals refused to sign, so their faces were cut with razors. Their eyes
were gouged out. Another general refused to sign, so they sliced his cheek. When
he still refused, they gouged his eyes.”
-Adi: “According to your teacher, who killed the generals?”
-Son: “The killers.”
-Adi: “Didn't he say it was the Communists?”

12 | Yago Paris
-Son: “Yes.”
-Adi: “It’s all lies. All this talk about gouging eyes…”
-Son: “So the communists weren’t cruel?”
-Adi: “No, they weren’t.”
-Son: “I was told they were cruel.”
-Adi: “The generals were killed by the army, not by the Communists. Did your
teacher mention the people killed at Snake River? Or the million innocent people
who were murdered? No.”
In this double scene, we can find the different defense mechanisms that help
in preventing the questioning of the political taboo. By offering a fixed, inflexible
version of the past, there is a conscious denial of alternative explanations. At
the same time, historical facts, such as the actions of the communists, are
reinterpreted in order to delegitimize those historical undeniable facts. At the
same time, the State is portrayed in a mythical sense, as the saviors of the nation,
which is only acceptable if the people involved in creating or perpetuating it allow
unconscious repression of memories that would question this national identity
that has been created. So, in the end, the four taboo’s defense mechanisms help
to create a hegemonic ideology that silences the traumatized Other and prevents
the Self from dealing with its own past and responsibility in the generation of
such cultural trauma. In other words, as I have claimed at the beginning of this
chapter, the political taboo prevents cultural trauma from healing.
II. Perpetrator Trauma

As Saira Mohamed highlights in her paper (see 2015), the approach that
director Joshua Oppenheimer takes for the development of The Act of Killing, that
is, giving the perpetrators space to tell their story and, in a sense, offering a more
humanized depiction of them, provoked rejection in some sectors of film criticism.
Nevertheless, as she claims in her essay, the first thing we must acknowledge is
the fact that “a cultural evolution in the concept of trauma from a psychological
category to a moral one” has taken place, and, as a result, she considers that “a
counternarrative of trauma–one that recognizes trauma as a neutral, human trait,
divorced from morality, and not incompatible with choice and agency” must
be developed (2015, p. 1157), in order to “restore trauma as a category with
no predetermined moral status” (2015, p. 1208). Bernhard Giesen agrees with
this perspective when he claims that “[p]erpetrators are human subjects who, by
their own decision, dehumanized other subjects and, in doing so, did not only

Yago Paris | 13
pervert the sovereign subjectivity of the victims but challenged also their own
sacredness” (2004, p. 114). He further argues that, since the Other’s recognition
is fundamental for one’s self-consciousness, “it is exactly this recognition that is
denied to the perpetrators (cp. Hegel’s famous dialectics of recognition, Hegel
1927, 148ff).” (2004, p. 114). This approach, Giesen and Mohamed share,
would already help in relating with the Other in a more fair sense, but the latter
takes this argument even further when she later claims that this approach would
not only be beneficial in terms of reintegration of the perpetrator into society, but
could also help in actually solving the conflictive situation between perpetrators
and victims in social contexts such as the Indonesian one, because “[t]hose who
are traumatized are less likely to have empathy for others, and more likely to
continue to ‘devalue and blame’ victims” (Mohamed, 2015, p. 1204). In other
words, helping the Indonesian perpetrators heal from their trauma can actually
help in solving the sociopolitical situation of the Indonesian victims, and thus
help in healing their cultural trauma.
As Bernhard Giesen claims, “constructions of national identity cannot escape

from an orientation toward the past, which does not pass away, whether traumatic
or triumphant. Traumas and triumphs constitute the ‘mythomoteurs’ of national
identity (Barthes 1996)” (2004, p. 112). This can apply to cases where different
social groups of the same nation have different narratives of the past. In the case
of the Indonesian society, there is a group that has a triumphant narrative –the
official discourse of the perpetrators, which gives birth to the political taboo that
helps maintain it–, whereas another has a traumatic one –the cultural trauma of
the victims–. In both cases, the past –Eyerman’s sense of collective memory (or
memories, in this case)– marks the projection of the identity toward the future,
and, even though the narrative might be a triumphant one, this does not necessarily
imply that traumatic happenings were absent from the events that gave birth to
the later triumphant narrative. In both cases, “[t]hese myths represent the unique
founding moment by familiar patterns and turn the unspeakable experience into
a story that can be communicated” (Giesen, 2004, p. 113). In other words, events
are turned into narratives, and, as a result, an interpretation, or manipulation, of
the past can be applied in order to make an understanding of the events possible,
one in which unacceptable events might be transformed into acceptable ones.
In short, “a struggle over meaning” (Eyerman, 2019a, p. 145) takes place, and,
even though the author used this expression to describe the process of cultural
trauma, the description also fits the construction of the perpetrators’ narrative
that influences the collective memory of the group and the subsequent identity
formation of each individual belonging to it. This identity construction can help to
better understand two aspects of the perpetrator: on the one hand, how is it possible

14 | Yago Paris
that they can cope with terrible events that they have directly or indirectly been
involved with, and, precisely because of that, how is it possible that, even though
they belong to the triumphant narrative, they might be suffering from trauma.
As Giesen himself explains, using Cathy Caruth’s psychoanalytic approach,

“[t]raumas remember a moment of violent intrusion or conversion that the
consciousness was not able to perceive or to grasp in its full importance when it
happened” (2004, p. 113). In the case of the social group to which the perpetrators
belong, “collective consciousness tends to reject perceiving the actions of its
own community as barbaric in the moment when the barbaric violence occurs”
(Giesen, 2004, p. 116). This happens because, in these cases, the members of
this community would need to acknowledge that some of its members are not
the heroes that the narrative of the community claims they are, but, on the
contrary, have become “perpetrators who violated the cultural premises of their
own identity,” and that, as a result, “the reference to the past is indeed traumatic”
(Giesen, 2004, p. 114).
In such psychological circumstances, or, from the perspective of the social

theory of trauma, in such a struggle for meaning, the way the members of this
community can deal with “the fundamental contradiction between identity
claims and recognition [is] only by a collective schizophrenia, by denial, by
decoupling or withdrawal” (Giesen, 2004, p. 114). In that sense, Eyerman offers
a complementary vision of the process, in which atrocities would be possible
through peer pressure, the presence of a commanding authority, a preservation
instinct, and the dehumanization of the Other (2019b, 176-77). Having all of
this in mind, understanding the attitudes of the Indonesian social group to which
the perpetrators belong is easier to understand, as it will be further analyzed with
specific examples. At this point, we can propose an explanation as to how the
killers have been able to normalize their terrible actions, and why the people
surrounding them have chosen to erase certain memories or think of those actions
as necessary ones. Nevertheless, trauma might still be present, but simply blurred
in the mass of elisions and justifications. This is the case of the perpetrators that
appear in The Act of Killing.
Throughout the film, we can see different people having a certain need to
tell their story, regardless of how atrocious it is. This attitude can be explained
from different angles. As it was exposed in The Look of Silence with the case of
the perpetrator who decided to write a book about his story, or in the case of
the protagonists of The Act of Killing, who decide to shoot an amateur film to
narrate their past, there is a need for recognition, which is a normal behavior in

Yago Paris | 15
any social being. At the same time, the intense need for constant retelling feels
odd, as if something else was missing. This something else, I claim, is the need for
healing the trauma of the perpetrator. The continuous remembrance of the past
can happen because the events have not received closure. This is manifested with
special intensity in the case of Anwar Congo, who, as Lúcia Nagib argues (see
2016), suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is the traumatic
response of the individual to the traumatic event. Cathy Caruth describes the
consequences of this syndrome as “repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams,
thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event, along with numbing that may
have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to
(and avoidance of ) stimuli recalling the event” (1995, p. 4).
From the perspective of the social theory of trauma, Eyerman (2019b)

argues that perpetrator trauma can appear when both individuals and collectives
act against their moral beliefs. Since these beliefs are “so foundational”, the
consequences can be that “one’s identity and self-esteem can feel as though they
have been shattered, a sense that gives rise to a strong emotional response including
feelings of guilt and remorse,” that could lead to suffering pathological symptoms
(Eyerman, 2019b, p. 167-68). In the case of Anwar, this repetitive pattern of
thoughts and dreams –nightmares, actually– impel him to the reenactments of
the past events, both for the documentary and the amateur film. Even though
PTSD normally appears sometime after the event itself, it is the first time that the
victim has real knowledge of the experience. Being shocked by the happening,
the victim does not really register it in their memory when it takes place. As a
result, a void is created in the mind, with which the mind itself tries to deal later,
by trying to understand what is impossible to understand, what goes beyond
symbolization. This is why, when PTSD starts, the dreams and hallucinations
are not based on repressions or desires, but on literality. The repetitive visions
of the victim are fragments of memory that the mind recovers in an attempt to
understand what happened, so, in the end, trauma can be defined as the collapse
of the understanding of an overwhelming experience (Caruth, 1995, p. 7). This
constant repetition of memories and thoughts that Anwar Congo experiences is
an attempt of his mind to try to understand what took place in the past and was
against his moral beliefs, in this case, a set of events which can also be atrocious
for the person who actively perpetrated them.
Lúcia Nagib analyzes Congo’s behavior as the result of the symptom called
“presentification,” which consists of the impression that the past traumatic
event is still taking place in the present (2016, p. 229). Another sensation that is
common in PTSD and that is present in one of the most impressive scenes of the

16 | Yago Paris
documentary is nausea. The interpretation that Nagib offers to the situation that
Anwar Congo is experimenting is that he is attempting to “bring back the dead
to the present time in their material reality, through his own body, including a
harrowing scene of the actor’s unpredictable and uncontrollable retching as he re-
enacts the killing of his victims through strangulation” (2016, p. 219). Mohamed
offers a different interpretation, one which suggests that a collapse in linear time
is taking place, as a result of “the past resurfacing as a vivid present.” In other
words, it would not be the impression of the past event still taking place in the
present, but rather the “inability to distinguish present time from the time of
the traumatic wound.” Since Congo has never healed from his own trauma, it
has “never been properly consigned to the past,” and, as a result, the memories
attached to it reappear in the present time (Mohamed, 2015, pp. 1195-96). In
both interpretations, the result would be the same: the reenactment as a desperate
solution to try to properly deal with the traumatic past events, in a terrifyingly
painful struggle for meaning. As a result, even though we could interpret the
development of the amateur film as a frivolous approach to the past, with which
the political taboo of the official version given by the authorities is reinforced,
a more likely interpretation would be that of seeing this project as a desperate
attempt to seal the wound of the traumatized perpetrator.
Another aspect of trauma which could help in delving deeper into this case
is the one that manifests in one of the rehearsals of the amateur film, in which
Anwar Congo is not actually performing the role of a perpetrator –his real role
in the past–, but that of the victim –the Other’s role–. As a result, he is able
to experience, through a performative act, the feelings that his victims suffered.
This event causes a tremendous impression on him. He even needs to stop the
performance. I interpret this experience as a manifestation of the so-called “witness
traumatization.” This is normally described as a process that can happen when
the listener of the traumatized person becomes traumatized by the testimony,
through a logic of identification and empathy. If we take the perspective expressed
by Caruth, we can think of trauma as some kind of contagion that is spread by
language and representation. If we think of trauma as not attached to the event
and its witnesses, the possibility that the Other’s testimonies are able to traumatize
the listener is related to the idea of trauma traveling “across histories and cultures
to resonate within the very structures of our being” (Caruth, 1995, p. 10).
Congo’s performance could be understood as a variation of witness

traumatization, one which would be even more effective in that sense, since the
reenactment is a much more intense experience than the listening of a story. This
scene of the documentary is crucial to understand the evolution of the character

Yago Paris | 17
–or, at least, this is the narrative that Oppenheimer appears to have wanted to
offer, through the mise-en-scène, editing, and scriptwriting processes–. Before
this event, Anwar was in a state of constant repetition of the stories; in other
words, he was simply thinking about his own trauma. This is not the case in
this scene, where Congo is forced to actually put himself in the position of the
victims, something that he probably had actively, though unconsciously, avoided.
The result is the acknowledgment of the Other’s suffering, a knowledge that, from
then on, will be impossible to hide. This scene provokes the following ones, both
the one in which he shows his need for watching himself on the screen developing
this reenactment, and the later scene in which he revisits the rooftop where he
systematically murdered his victims, and eventually starts retching. From this
perspective, this last, extremely impressive scene, would have taken place only
because of the previous reenactment of the victim’s role, and not because of the
rest of the shooting of both the documentary and the amateur film. In other
words, Anwar Congo –the traumatized perpetrator– was too focused on his own
trauma to actually take into consideration the Other’s trauma –his victims–,
and the fact that he has acknowledged it through witness traumatization –the
reenactment of the victim’s role– has put him in a position where breaking the
political taboo and recognizing the cultural trauma of the other social group is
more likely to happen.
III. A Possible Solution to the Vicious Cycle

of Cultural Trauma-Political Taboo
Throughout this paper, the connection between cultural trauma and political
taboo has been described, in order to shed light on the issue. The intention of this
analysis has been to study the possible reasons for the persistence of problematic
sociopolitical contexts such as the one that exists in the Indonesian society
from 1966, after the military coup and the mass assassinations had taken place.
As it has been exposed, the fact that the perpetrators of those crimes remain
in power, or belong to the social group benefited by those in power, might be
a powerful reason to explain this situation. To reinforce this argumentation, I
have developed an analysis of the social context based on the political taboos
utilized to ensure the persistence of the official version of the recent past, given
by the government. This mythic tale of the people who saved the country from
the communists reinterprets the past in a way that it turns killers into heroes.
As a result, the cultural trauma inflicted by the killers cannot be healed, since

18 | Yago Paris
the people who suffered such acts do not receive public recognition as victims,
and since they themselves cannot publicly speak about their version of the past,
because they fear the consequences of questioning the official narrative. Since
healing trauma needs the traumatized person to speak about the traumatic event,
a listener who actively engages with the story, and the public recognition of their
status of victims, this social group cannot depart from the experience and, as a
result, cultural trauma remains unsolved.
After having reflected on this matter, I have turned my attention toward the
perpetrators themselves, in an attempt to understand their behavior. The central
question here has been “why do they not recognize the Other as a victim?”. In
order to answer it, I have highlighted the importance of another type of trauma,
which is perpetrator trauma. This approach offers the chance for the criminal to
also have been traumatized by the event, in this case, one that they themselves
have actively provoked. This approach is based on questioning the moralistic
attitude usually applied to the concept of trauma, one which denies the mere
possibility of this type of trauma, or even denies the opportunity for these people
to heal from it, as some sort of punishment. I consider that this is not only
morally questionable, but also, and more importantly, one of the reasons why
certain cases of cultural trauma might not be in the process of healing. As I have
exposed, the traumatized person is normally more invested in their own trauma,
a situation that can easily prevent them from taking the Other’s trauma into
consideration. This might be the case for the Indonesian perpetrators. At the
same time, if there is no place for them to earn some self-redemption, they will
be less inclined toward recognizing the status of the Other. The reasoning is not
only simple, but actually very understandable: if recognizing this situation means
becoming a monster, deprived of any kind of humaneness, it will be very unlikely
that the perpetrators will take this step, especially if we take into consideration
that they control, or are sheltered by, the State’s official narrative of the past.
This can explain why none of the perpetrators interviewed in The Look of Silence
are any close to recognizing that their actions were cruel and questionable, and
legitimizing Adi’s feelings as a victim of cultural trauma.
All these arguments are present in the case of Anwar Congo, the protagonist
of The Act of Killing, and one of the mass killings perpetrators. Nevertheless,
he is in a different psychological state than the rest of the perpetrators –or, at
least, that is the interpretation that the documentary offers–, since he is actually
suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He oscillates from the need
to express his suffering to negating the status of victims of the ones he killed. He
needs to express what happened because, deep inside, he knows that what he did

Yago Paris | 19
was atrocious, but accepting the consequences of this situation –becoming an

inhumane monster– is a weight too heavy to handle, and, as a result, he eventually
finishes his thoughts with the negation of the situation.
As I have exposed, the crucial change in his behavior takes place once he
allows empathy to play a bigger role in his circular thoughts. Through the
reenactment of a victim’s role, he allows a process of identification that provokes
the development of witness traumatization. Through acknowledging the Other’s
trauma, negating the situation becomes impossible, and the consequence is the
intensification of the PTSD, as the documentary shows in the already mentioned
scene where he starts retching.
At this point, it is crucial to understand the vision of this character offered

by the film. The way the narrative arc of the protagonist is developed, and the
fact that there is no redemptive catharsis for him, speaks about the moralistic
vision of trauma mentioned before. Director Joshua Oppenheimer aligns with a
vision of the issue that cancels any possibility for a perpetrator to be recognized
as another victim of the conflict. This approach can be found in many narrative
and mise-en-scène decisions throughout the two documentaries. On the one
hand, it is fundamental to acknowledge the almost absolute lack of historical
contextualization in both films–as it has been explained, it is reduced to a set
of titles at the beginning of each film–, a fact that can easily allow a certain, or
considerable, amount of manipulation. This situation is further reinforced by
the narrative approach, which is based on testimonies and emotions, and not
on a rigorous investigation based on facts, documents, and proofs. At the same
time, it is easily arguable that Oppenheimer takes advantage of the naivety of
the perpetrators, who are far from aware of how poorly they will be depicted on
screen, once their testimonies have been recorded, a situation that is enhanced by
a constant sense of frivolity in every action they develop in front of the camera
–the appearance of the films would be considerably different if they would
have followed the narrative model of the talking heads, with the conversations
or testimonies recorded with a solemn atmosphere in a studio, for example–.
Finally, the terrifying scene in which Anwar Congo starts retching is especially
cruel because of how long it is –it is very unlikely that one of his victims would
have been shown on screen for such a long time in such a pathetic situation–.
In the end, the director is taking advantage of these characters to encourage the
reenactments of their crimes, a situation in which Anwar Congo participates
because he “seems to be avidly seeking solace for his trauma through the re-
enactment of his crimes,” a scenario that never takes place, since “the film firmly
denies him such relief by exposing his and his comrades’ ill-directed sexual drives

20 | Yago Paris
and by piling up evidence to the enormity of their acts through their very re-
enactments” (Nagib, 2016, p. 229). The way the scene is shot, with the protagonist
appearing all pathetic, speaks of the moralistic approach of the project, which is
directly linked with the very long silences and the judgemental gazes with which
Adi punishes the perpetrators in The Look of Silence. In both cases, the films offer
no possible redemption or ease to the situation of the perpetrators, and, as it
has been argued, this might actually be part of the problem that provokes the
unsolvable cultural trauma.
Delving into the total lack of context of Indonesia’s recent past, Mohamed
points out that “after a mention that the killings were carried out under the
auspices of the military in the film’s opening text, the military, and the state more
generally, is absent from explanations of the crimes themselves” (2015, p. 1206).
She opens the possibility of him having been actually manipulated by the State:
“Was Anwar Congo indoctrinated? Desperate for money or power in a system that
oppressed him or people like him? Coerced by a superior? Forced?” (Mohamed,
2015, p. 1198), and even though she points out that the documentary never
addresses this possibility, in the end, she concludes that “[w]hen Anwar Congo
killed one thousand people, he was a free man; he wanted to kill and chose to
kill on his own,” because he claims that the government had no responsibility
on his decisions, that he just “had to do it,” as he himself argues (Mohamed,
2015, p. 1206). At this point, I am inclined to consider that this situation is too
suspicious to just accept it as it is. Even though there is no proof for confirming
either of the possible versions –just testimonies–, it is hard to believe that the
government did not ensure that the perpetrators followed its doctrine and acted
as the rulers wanted them to. The almost total absence of testimonies from the
past and present governments expands this suspicion. Nevertheless, there is one
testimony, given by Syamsul Arifin, the governor of North Sumatra, that can
help in understanding the relationship between the State and the perpetrators
that was developed during the mass killings: “Communists will never be accepted
here, because we have so many gangsters, and that’s a good thing. The word
‘gangster’ [preman] comes from English: ‘free men’. Thugs want the freedom to
do things, even if they’re wrong, but if we know how to work with them, all we
have to do is direct them” (emphasis is mine). If this were to be true, the rulers
would have manipulated the perpetrators into making them believe that what
they were doing was right and necessary, no matter the cost. This is the logic that
I suspect might be behind the case of Anwar Congo, who, following the logic
of the political taboo, could have unconsciously erased these manipulations –or
not even have been conscious of them– to allow the official narrative to remain
unquestionable, and thus giving him relief from his own traumatic past.

Yago Paris | 21
This interpretation would be further reinforced if we take into consideration

the testimony of another perpetrator offered in The Look of Silence, namely,
Adi’s uncle. He was one of the guards of a prison where people accused of
being communists were held before being executed: “I was ordered to guard
the prisoners. I didn’t know what happened after they took the prisoners away.
I was just a guard.” As the audience discovers during the conversation, Ramli,
Adi’s brother and the nephew of this perpetrator, was held captive in this very
prison. When Adi asks him if he could have done something to save his life, he
answers: “No, I couldn’t. Komando Aksi was under army command, and so was I.
I was ordered to guard the prison, so I did. […] If I refused, I’d be accused too.
Better just to follow orders.” (emphasis is mine). In this testimony, we can see
the level of implication of the State, through the army. According to the vision of
this perpetrator, they were coerced to act as commanded, with the risk of being
executed if they refused.
Taking this into consideration, it becomes even more believable that, instead
of being just free men acting as they wished, they could be “perpetrators who
operated within a systematic state-run killing machine,” as Rithy Panh described
in his documentary S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) (Mohamed,
2015, p. 1198). Mohamed herself discards this possibility and opposes the
actions of the Indonesian perpetrators to those of the Cambodian ones. Even
though they still remain just testimonies, and no definite claims can be done,
I am inclined to believe that the situation in the Indonesian genocide is more
complex than it has been described, and I suspect that the State had a direct,
strong implication in the decisions taken by the perpetrators. Controlling people
in the shades, in an extra-official manner, is actually a very useful approach for
the State, as another testimony offered in The Look of Silence suggests. In this
case, the speaker is perpetrator Amir Hasan, who, when questioned about the
level of support they received from the army, answers the following: “They waited
at the road, with the truck. They didn’t come down here. They called this ‘the
people’s struggle’. So they kept their distance. If the army was seen doing this,
the world would be angry. ‘The army is killing the communists!’. So to protect
their image, they made it look like the people exterminated the communists. But
everybody knows the army was behind it.” It seems very reasonable to extract the
conclusion that there was actual political interest in implicating the perpetrators.
By doing this, they not only did not receive bad press on an international scale,
but also made sure that the people themselves supported them and would not
question their actions in the future. The people themselves would be guilty of
the crimes and, in this scenario, it is less likely to develop criticism, because it
would actually be self-criticism, which is way less likely to take place. When

22 | Yago Paris
blaming the government for the holocaust implies blaming oneself, it is easier to
subconsciously erase memories or reinterpret the past in a way that one does not
become an inhumane monster.
As a result, the final claim of this paper is the need for acknowledging the
other side of the traumatic event and recognizing its relevance in fomenting the
healing of the traumas created. The usual way to approach trauma is from a
moralistic perspective, one that rejects any recognition of the perpetrator as a
human being who suffers from the actions they did in the past, and instead depicts
the perpetrator as an inhumane monster. As Mohamed claims, “recognizing
perpetrator trauma erodes the all-too-common perception of perpetrators as
cartoonish monsters by exposing their ordinariness and humanity” (2015, pp.
1157-58). At the same time, there should not be any doubt of this alternative
approach being a condonation or relativization of the past events. In other words,
“[t]he point is not to generate sympathy for a genocidaire,” but to recognize them
“as a person who chose to kill, and who now suffers because of it” (Mohamed,
2015, p. 1158).
As it has been exposed, this is necessary not only for the moral responsibility
of treating humans as individuals with humaneness, but also to help in improving
the situation of social groups affected by cultural trauma: “Acknowledging the
reality of perpetrator trauma can improve reconciliation efforts in the aftermath
of mass atrocity by exposing the need to rehabilitate perpetrators” (Mohamed,
2015, p. 1157). As a matter of fact, by better understanding the truth behind
these atrocious crimes, we can discover the real horror behind them, “that
perpetrators are merely people, and that any other person could do the same”
(Mohamed, 2015, p. 1158).
At this point, it is especially important to acknowledge our own share of

responsibility in the situation, and the moral implications of our approach
toward it. As Mohamed claims, treating the perpetrators as inhumane deviations
from society can be beneficial for ourselves, as a way to reinforce our sense of
community and humaneness: “To treat the perpetrator of mass atrocity as a
unique monster can convince us all that we are different from them, that we share
a common sense of decency and humanity, and that none of us could ever slide
into that same darkness.” In other words, keeping the perpetrators in this status is
very tempting for us, because, in an indirect way, what their existence tells about
us is that “we are different from those people, and that we are better” (Mohamed,
2015, pp. 1210-11).

IV. Conclusion
The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence are two documentaries filmed by Joshua
Oppenheimer, which address the problematic sociopolitical context in nowadays
Indonesia. After the 1965 military coup against the communist government, a mass
killing of approximately one million citizens, accused of being communists, took
place. The perpetrators of this holocaust remained in power or did not have to
confront the law for the crimes committed, a situation that is still present in our
time. As we can see in The Look of Silence, the perpetrators of the mass killings
openly speak about them, even with pride in their voices. As it has been discussed,
this attitude can be understood due to the official narrative that the dictatorship
developed in order to explain the recent past. According to such narrative, the
killers become mythic heroes who helped save the country from evil, which would
presumably refer to the communists. In order to ensure that this discourse remained
unquestionable, a set of political taboos were developed, leading to a situation
where the victims are not only not recognized as such, but also afraid of speaking
out about their traumatic past. Because, indeed, there is another version of the past:
the one told by the victims of the mass killings. This is the vision offered in The
Look of Silence, which could be understood as the other side of the coin of The Act
of Killing. In order to explain the situation of this other social group, the concept of
cultural trauma has been used. Cultural trauma is a very specific type of trauma that
is attached to a concrete social group, with its own communal identity conditions
and shapes. A very remarkable trait of this damage is the fact that members of this
social group can become traumatized despite not having suffered the traumatic
event themselves. As we can see through Adi, the protagonist of The Look of Silence,
he has been traumatized by his brother’s death even though he was not even born
by the time the incident had taken place. As a result, the need for healing this type
of trauma is fundamental, since, due to the characteristics of cultural trauma, it can
be transmitted from generation to generation.
The process for the healing of cultural trauma –as with any type of trauma–
needs the individual’s recognition as a victim, through the presence of an active
listener, who validates the feelings of the traumatized person. At the same time,
it needs the public recognition of the State, so that the community is publicly
acknowledged as a victim of past events. None of these things are happening in
Indonesia, where victims are scared to talk about their feelings and experiences, and
where the government, which shares the ideology imposed after the military coup,
is not willing to take this step. In other words, as it has been argued, the political
taboo is blocking the healing of cultural trauma. In this paper, the analysis of both
sides and how one is blocking the evolution of the other has been exposed. However,
24 | Yago Paris
when it comes to finding a possible solution for such a block, proposing that the
ones in power change their minds and recognize the status of the victims did not
seem to suffice, because, if after more than 50 years this has not happened, a change
in the near future is unlikely to take place. Consequently, studying the behavior
of the perpetrators, in order to find possible psychological blocks that prevent the
status recognition of the victims, becomes relevant. To develop this analysis, Anwar
Congo, the protagonist of The Act of Killing, has been chosen as the main subject of
the study. Combining his traits, thoughts, fears, desires, and behavioral conduct, it
can be concluded that he is a traumatized person, too, a conclusion that has led to
study another type of trauma: perpetrator trauma.
By studying the past conflict from this perspective, the presence of a not-so-
usual idea when it comes to reflecting on trauma has emerged: the fact that the
perpetrator can also suffer from the moral and psychological consequences of
their own actions. Besides highlighting this thought, a reflection on the possible
manipulation that these subjects could have experienced from the government has
been made, a fact that would reinforce the status of victims of the perpetrators of
the mass killings. Having established this possibility as a fact, some of the scenes
where Anwar Congo exposes his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have
been studied as well as the partial dramatic arc that the documentary proposes.
In it, we see the perpetrator earning conscience of his own actions, therefore,
recognizing the status of the victims he killed, a fact that does not lead to a
cathartic redemption. At this point, it can be claimed that, even though Anwar
Congo was traumatized by his past actions, he was not able to take this step
further into acknowledging the status of the Other, and that this only happened
due to the reenactment of a victim’s role in the amateur film he was developing,
along with other perpetrators. In this essay, we claim that being traumatized in
a different sense, in this case, through witness traumatization, allowed a process
of identification through which Congo was able to recognize something that he
was unconsciously avoiding, due to guilt. The feelings of guilt and horror are key
aspects of perpetrator trauma, since, even though perpetrators are traumatized,
they are not willing to accept this situation or the fact that what they did was
atrocious. Acknowledging that would mean understanding themselves as
inhumane monsters. As a result, the fact that we tend to understand trauma in a
moralistic sense, not allowing the perpetrator to be seen as a traumatized person,
another type of victim, reinforces in them a pattern of rejection and denial, that
prevents other traumas, such as cultural trauma in this case, from healing. By not
accepting –both they themselves and the rest of the society– the perpetrator as
a traumatized person, we are freezing them in a state where no social change is
possible, especially in those cases where the perpetrators are in power. If we act in

Yago Paris | 25
a way that allows the presence of empathy, it will be more likely to understand the
Other’s actions, fears, and pain –without the need to condone atrocious actions–,
be this Other a victim or a perpetrator. As Cathy Caruth claims, trauma is not
based “on what we simply know of each other, but on what we don't yet know of
our own traumatic pasts” (1995, p. 11).
In conclusion, building a space where trauma is approached in a non-moralistic

way can improve the chances of provoking a social change that would lead to a
better life for the members of different social groups, as well as fomenting a more
peaceful society. Because, as Mohamed claims, “[w]hen perpetrators and victims
or survivors live beside each other, a gap in understanding or connection between
the two may lead to continued victimization on an individual level or even to
renewed conflict and mass violence at a collective level.” In other words, it is not
(only) about the perpetrator, but about peace, because “[w]ithout healing on the
part of all affected individuals, reconciliation will necessarily suffer” (Mohamed,
2015, pp. 1204-05).
References
Alexander, J. C. (2004). “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma.” In J. C. Alexander
(Ed.) Cultural Trauma and Collective identity (pp. 1-30). University of California
Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520936768-002
Blanuša, N. (2017). “Trauma and Taboo: Forbidden Political Questions in Croatia.” Croa-
tian Political Science Review, 54 (1-2), 170-196. https://hrcak.srce.hr/183305
Caruth, C. (1995). “Trauma and experience: Introduction.” In C. Caruth (Ed.) Trauma:
Explorations in memory (pp. 3-12). The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Eyerman, R. (2004). “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American
Identity.” In J. C. Alexander (Ed.) Cultural Trauma and Collective identity (pp. 60-111).
University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520936768-004
Eyerman, R. (2019a). “Cultural Trauma, Collective Memory, and the Vietnam War.” In
Memory, Trauma, and Identity (pp. 143-165). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.
org/10.1007/978-3-030-13507-2_7
Eyerman, R. (2019b). “Perpetrator Trauma and Collective Guilt: The My Lai Massacre.”
In Memory, Trauma, and Identity. (pp. 167-194). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.
org/10.1007/978-3-030-13507-2_8
Giesen, B. (2004). "The trauma of perpetrators." In J. C. Alexander (Ed.) Cultural trau-
ma and collective identity (pp. 112-154). University of California Press. https://doi.
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Krstic, I. (2002). "Re-thinking Serbia: A psychoanalytic reading of modern Serbian his-
tory and identity through popular culture." Other Voices 2.2 (pp. 1-28). http://www.
othervoices.org/2.2/krstic/index.html

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Laub, D. (1992). “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of listening, and An Event without
a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival.” In S. Feldman and D. Laub (Eds.) Testimony:
Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history (pp. 57-74). Routledge.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203700327-9/bearin
g-witness-vicissitudes-listening-dori-laub
Mohamed, S. (2015). "Of Monsters and Men: Perpetrator Trauma and Mass Atrocity."
Columbia Law Review (pp. 1157-1216). https://www.jstor.org/stable/43582425
Nagib, L. (2016). "Regurgitated Bodies: Presenting and Representing Trauma in The
Act of Killing." In Y. Tzioumakis, C. Molloy (Eds.) The Routledge Companion to Cine-
ma and Politics (pp. 240-252). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/
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past-on-the-nature-of-historical-taboos

Brolly. Journal of Social Sciences 4 (1) 2021
POWER RELATIONS AND THE INEVITABLE:

THE CINEMA OF MIKLÓS JANCSÓ FROM A FOUCAULDIAN
PERSPECTIVE
Yago Paris
Faculty of Humanities,
“Eötvös Loránd” University,
Hungary
yagoparis89@gmail.com
Abstract. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the concepts of power relations,
identity, and personality in the cinema of Miklós Jancsó. Even though I take the
film My Way Home (1965) as the object study, I point out that the analysis can
be applied to the rest of his filmography, since it consists of a recurrent study of
similar narrative patterns and topics. To achieve this goal and offer a better
understanding of the philosophy behind the cinema of the Hungarian director, I
approach the study from a Foucaultian perspective, from which I find a set of
relevant similarities and differences between the political visions of both authors.
I conclude that how power relations are represented in Jancsó’s films lead to the
idea of the inevitable, in which characters are not in control of their fate.
Keywords: Miklós Jancsó, Michel Foucault, power relations, Hungarian cinema,

structuralism, identity
In one of the first scenes of My Way Home (Így jöttem, 1965), Miklós
Jancsó filmed a series of interactions between individuals from
different sides at the end of the Second World War in Germany.
The protagonist is Jóska (András Kozák), a young Hungarian who
tries to go back home, but is caught by a group of Soviet deserters.
Suddenly, a group of military men who were trying to stop those
deserters catch them all and take them to the place where they are
holding a group of captive war prisoners. All of them will soon be
executed. However, just before this is going to happen, Jóska saves
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Yago Paris – Power Relations and the Inevitable
his life because he is Hungarian. The leader of the military group

spares his life and tells him to go back home. At the same time, one
of the deserters starts speaking in Hungarian, showing that he also
belongs to that nationality, and hence, he deserves to live, too. This
person with an unknown name is not that lucky and is executed,
along with the rest of deserters.
In another scene, later in the film, the protagonist meets a group
of Hungarians who are hiding from the military, trying to go back
home. When they start talking, they tell him to join and return, but
he refuses, because he feels comfortable in his new situation — he
has established a friendship with a Soviet soldier who, in the
beginning, was his captor. When the group discovers what is
happening, they start pushing him to go back to his previous identity
— him as an average Hungarian, a situation which necessarily means
understanding the Soviets as the enemy, until his friend arrives to
protect him. These two scenes not only expose the way Miklós
Jancsó understood power relations and identity but the similarities
and differences with Michel Foucault’s approach to those topics.
Both authors think of power as something that can only exist
through social dynamics of interaction. It is applied because it is
possible to do so, and because it is what defines interaction as such,
not because of the wickedness of the ones in power. Also, power is
something that escapes any type of control, allowing a switch from
oppressor to oppressed. However, Michel Foucault claims that
there can be no power relation where there is no freedom from the
side of the oppressed. Therefore, according to the description of the
first scene, Jancsó and Foucault would strongly differ at this point.
Regarding the identity of the individual, there is a sense of
individuality as a form of oppression, since it makes the individual
isolated, but at the same time deprived of a true personality, since
identity is built up from the system of rules and social norms, which
at the same time are defined by the power relations. As a result,
achieving an actual, true personality would become a form of
resistance towards power. In this essay, I claim that there is a close
connection between Miklós Jancsó’s cinema and Michel Foucault’s
104
philosophy regarding power relations and identity and that the

vision the director offers of life is pessimistic, since there is a feeling
of the inevitability of fate that conditions the lives of protagonists.
POWER RELATIONS
Michel Foucault is straightforward when it comes to defining power.

As it can be found in his text The Subject and Power, he claims that
“there is no such entity as power, with or without a capital letter;
global, massive or diffused; concentrated or distributed. Power
exists only as exercised by some on others, only when it is put into
action”. But it is also important to have in mind that power does
not appear as direct action on others — for example, physical force
applied on the other’s body — but as an action that affects the
other’s action/s (1997-2001, 340). At the same time, the author
claims that “power is exercised only over free subjects who are faced
with a field of possibilities in which several kinds of conduct, several
ways of reacting and modes of behaviour are available”. As he
points out afterwards, if we consider this approach, then the exercise
of power cannot exist in relations to slavery or, in other words,
freedom needs to exist in order to make the use of power possible
(1997-2001, 342). This is the reason why resistance is possible and
necessary: we would not want to become slaves, but we do react by
resisting the effect of power and, by doing that, we actually make
power possible. In summary, power appears in human relations as a
dynamic entity that needs the presence of freedom and resistance to
existing.
When we analyze the way Miklós Jancsó reflects on the use of
power, there are important similarities but also significant
differences. If we take the two scene samples exposed in the
introduction, we can see two types of use of power. The first one
would be that in which freedom is erased. From Jancsó’s
perspective, when soldiers take enemies as prisoners, they are using
power against them, up to the point of erasing freedom, but this
105
does not prevent the appearance and survival of power relations; on

the contrary, they are more present than ever. But this is not the
only case when power relations appear. Analyzing the second scene,
a type of situation very similar to what Foucault describes appears.
There is a group of people in power, who oppresses the protagonist.
Even though the oppressors become violent towards him, he is still
free to choose and he decides to resist this pressure that comes from
them. So, by resisting, he allows power relations to establish: they
take actions to affect the other’s actions. We could, thus, conclude
that from Jancsó’s perspective, life is just a matter of power
relations, which are present all the time.
This coincides with the analysis developed by Lorant Czigany in
his text Jancsó Country: Miklós Jancsó and the Hungarian New Cinema.
The author exposes that the cinema of this director is a reflection of
power relations. When talking about the beginning of Silence and Cry
(Csend és kiáltás, 1967), Czigany describes the opening scene in these
terms: “[t]he killing, and it is a killing, not an execution or a murder,
is a completely casual, bloodless, and emotionless business. A basic
human relationship is established: the man with the gun has the
power, the victim accepts it. Death is a result of a move.” (1972, 47).
Another important point stressed in the article is the way characters
relate to each other, with special regard to ones in power. The result
of the communication is never a dialogue, but a command: the ones
in power communicate by giving orders to the oppressed, not only
the captors to the prisoners, but also the higher rank soldiers to the
lower rank ones (1972, 48). Having this in mind, it is understandable
that Jancsó always chose to direct historical films during periods of
war or revolts because, in those situations, the exercise of power is
more intense than ever. In those contexts, he can expand his idea of
power relations as part of nature, something accepted by both the
oppressors and the oppressed.
Again, taking My Way Home as a reference, an interesting contrast
appears. In the central part of the film, the protagonist establishes a
friendship relation with a Soviet soldier. In the beginning, they were
supposed to be enemies but a series of situations provoke each of
106
them starts taking care of the other, discovering that, in fact, they
understand each other at a human level. Here, the interpretation
could be that, despite roles, identities and norms of behaviour, two
apparent enemies who cannot speak the same language can establish
a real connection, where the interaction is not based on power
relations and communication is not based on commands. But, in the
end, having this type of life means self-isolation because this
horizontal way of relating is not accepted in society, neither by the
oppressors nor by the oppressed.
In the end, we could conclude that, from Jancsó’s perspective,
and as Foucault claimed, power does not exist as an entity but is
exercised through power relations. At the same time, the Hungarian
author does not agree with the French philosopher when exposing
that power can be exercised in deprivation of freedom, up to the
point of proposing this situation as the purest form of power
relation. Even though there are attempts to establish another type
of human interaction, as it was exposed in My Way Home, the
pessimistic vision of Jancsó exposes the impossibility of getting rid
of power relations and all their painful consequences.
THE INDIVIDUAL AND POWER
When it comes to the way an individual is affected by power

relations, we could conclude that what is understood as personality
is something created and modulated by this power. Foucault
expressed that “[t]his form of power that applies itself to immediate
everyday life categorizes the individual, marks him by his own
individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth
on him that he must recognize and others have to recognize in him.
It is a form of power that makes individuals subjects” (1997-2001,
331). Later in the same text, the French philosopher affirms that the
modern state is “a very sophisticated structure in which individuals
can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would
be shaped in a new form, and submitted to a set of very specific
107
patterns” (1997-2001, 334). In that sense, individuality exists, but it

becomes a form of subjecting people, modelling their behaviours
and attitudes based on power relations with other individuals, up to
the point that actual individuality, understood as a genuine
personality, does not exist as such in this matrix of influences which
is the system of power relations that forms the modern State.
This pattern of individualization can be seen in Jancsó’s films
through the use of metaphorical or literal uniforms. If we take
Foucault’s perspective, we can understand nationality as some sort
of totalizing individuality, which forms, at the same time, the
individual and the collective. In his films, power relations appear
due to this concept — nationality can be exchanged for ideology
and it would work the same way— and affect the actions of the
individuals. When it comes to relations between the captors and
captives, nationality is the source for that. In other words, being an
ally or an enemy is a matter of nationality. This not only explains the
conflicts between different nationalities but inside the actual
nationalities as well. The same way the Soviet deserters take the
protagonist as a prisoner because he does not belong to their group,
he is later freed from being executed precisely because he is not a
Soviet soldier.
It is crucial to understand that power relations are also imposed
inside a group of people belonging to the same nationality because
it is the most important aspect Jancsó wanted to reflect on in My
Way Home. Here it is fundamental to add the idea of the traitor of
the consensus, a concept used by scholar Tibor Hirsch and used in
his lectures about Miklós Jancsó (2020). This term is used to explain
the conflict that arises when a character does not want to follow the
ideological set of the environment in which he lives. In other words,
it is the effect of power relations over the protagonist, who suffers
the actions that others do in order to try to modify his actions, in an
attempt to make him follow the set of rules and patterns that define
individuality, as expressed previously regarding Foucault’s thoughts.
The protagonist questions the hegemonic ideology and, as a result,
wants to live his life the way he considers appropriate, in an attempt
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to reach a genuine personality, with genuine values and thoughts.

This means stepping out of the system built up by the modern State.
The individuals are part of this State, and their actions are controlled
or modified by it — concretely, by power relations. At the same
time, their actions modify others’ actions, so they assure the survival
of the system. In this sense, even the oppressed — the group of
Hungarian prisoners who are trying to escape and ask the
protagonist to join them — can become the oppressors — they
force him to join and reject his attitude of being friends with the
enemy and not following the social norms.
The attitude of the protagonist can, thus, be understood as a
form of resistance. At the beginning of his text, Michel Foucault
exposed the different types of forms of resistance, and, in the end,
concludes that they are a form of confronting the ideology imposed
by the state, which does not respect genuine individuality and forces
individuals into concrete, pre-established patterns of behaviour and
thought (1997-2001, 331). These ideas describe the attitude of Jóska,
who establishes a new way of life along with his Soviet friend. They
live self-isolated from both sides, developing a horizontal way of
communication, where power relations do not exist. In the rest of
the contexts, both when talking with comrades and enemies, the
form of communication was that of the command. Here, there is
actual understanding, mutual respect and openness towards the
other’s decisions and actions. It is, in other words, something like
an oasis in the middle of the war.
Even though this idyllic situation takes place, Jancsó is
pessimistic about it. It can indeed take place, but it is also true that
it is possible because they are isolated from society. The contrast
can be perceived when the protagonist needs to interact with
members of society again. The first time, he goes to a group of
Hungarians to find a doctor who would cure his Soviet friend. To
achieve this, he needs to put on a uniform, both metaphorically and
literally: he can only receive help through the use of power relations,
that is, through pretending to be a Soviet and using his gun to force
the doctor to help him. But more importantly, at the end of the film,
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he tries to go back home using one of the trains in which many other
Hungarians are trying to achieve the same goal. When he is on top
of it, the group of Hungarian prisoners, who had a conflict with him
previously, recognize him and start punching him, preventing him
from returning home. This literal act can be interpreted as a
metaphor for the impossibility for the protagonist to reintegrate into
society having a different set of values. In other words, having a
genuine personality, different from the one imposed by the state,
means the incapability to live inside society.
CONCLUSION: MIKLÓS JANCSÓ’S STYLE AS THE CINEMA OF THE INEVITABLE
As it has been exposed in this essay, Miklós Jancsó’s style is based

on the exposition of power relations, which are very close to the
theories exposed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. There
are strong similarities, such as how power is executed within people
belonging to the same social group or the idea of identity as a pre-
established personality that is not actually genuine and which
provokes the necessity of adopting an attitude of resistance as a way
of obtaining it. The biggest difference appears when it comes to
power executed in the absence of freedom, that is when captors
interact with prisoners. Whereas for Michel Foucault there is no
power when freedom does not exist, for Miklós Jancsó power
relations are possible both in the presence or absence of freedom.
After having exposed how similar the ideas of both authors
regarding power relations are, I have pointed out an important
characteristic of Jancsó in this field, which is the idea of the
inevitable. This is, in fact, a concept that also connects him to
Foucault. The philosopher pointed out that the oppressed is part of
the system of oppression, and this is the basis of Jancsó’s discourse.
He takes this proposition to the extreme, exposing how the
oppressed are accomplices by their own fate, up to the point that
they, in some way, participate even in their own death. This is clearly
exposed in the already mentioned scene, where the protagonist
110
forces a doctor to help him by using a gun. In this scene, there are
four people against the protagonist, which means that, if they acted,
they would probably succeed in taking his gun. And yet, they do
nothing. This is just an example of a narrative pattern that appears
constantly in his films. This situation could be understood as Jancsó
sending the idea that the oppressed accept their role, even if it would
mean to be executed. Execution scenes are actually very typical in
his cinema.
To conclude, I would like to point out that the cinema of Miklós
Jancsó not only reflects the already exposed ideas of power relations
but also how they provoke the inevitable, in the form of accepting
the role inside the system, the fate that this situation might lead
characters and how being part of society establishes a strict set of
rules of behaviour thought that people need to adopt them if they
want to be integrated. In the end, the individual, deprived of a
genuine, authentic personality, cannot control his fate if he stays
inside society, because power relations control the way they behave
and think.
REFERENCES
Czigany, Lorant. 1972. “Jancsó Country: Miklós Jancsó and the Hungarian New
Cinema”. Film Quarterly, 26, no. 1 (Autumn 1972): 44-50.
Foucault, Michel. 1997-2001. "The Subject and Power". The Essential Works of
Michel Foucault 1-3. New York: The New Press, 1997-2001: 326-348.
Hirsch, Tibor. “The World of Miklós Jancsó - Narrative Patterns”. Lectures for
the MA in Film Studies, Spring 2020, Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem,
Faculty of Humanities, Budapest, Hungary.
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Escaping Confinement
Phone Footage in Fictions About the COVID-19 Pandemic
Yago Paris
Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem, Budapest
Received: September 13th, 2021 | Accepted: November 15th, 2021 | Published: January 30, 2022
Abstract
One of the most representative aspects of fiction films that address the COVID-19
pandemic is the insistent appearance of electronic devices (laptops, tablets,
smartphones) to allow virtual communication between the main characters of the
story. I claim that, in those films, the use of these devices and the images they produce
is different from those that appeared in pre-pandemic cinema, and, as such, conveys
different meanings to the filmed images. In order to explore these ideas, I will first
study the ontology of phone footage imagery, to establish the main traits of this type of
image. Afterwards, I will signal the differences between pre-pandemic and pandemic
phone footage imagery, in order to understand the key formal traits that imply
different meanings for each case. Finally, by analyzing some of the most relevant
commercial films about the COVID-19 pandemic that have been produced so far
(Songbird (2020), Locked Down (2021), Safer at Home (2021), Host (2020), and
Ctrl+Alt+Trick/treat (2020)), I will intend to prove that in these fictions phone footage
(as opposed to other electronic-device footage) addresses the desire to gain certain
freedom in a scenario of confinement.
Keywords
Confinement, COVID-19, Electronic-Device Footage, Immersive Narrative,
Mainstream Cinema, Pandemic Cinema, Phone Footage, #IFM2021
Paris, Yago. “Escaping Confinement: Phone Footage in Fictions About the COVID-19
Pandemic,” Interactive Film and Media Journal v.2, nº.1 (Winter 2022): 32-47.
https://doi.org/10.32920/ifmj.v2i1.1512
This article is released under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). 32
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1. Introduction
The affordability of the prices of smartphones has led to a scenario where the
production of images has been democratized. As a result, a new type of images has
become paramount in our everyday life: “phone footage.” The impact of this imagery
cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration the role of the Internet.
As Tanya Shilina-Conte argues, phone footage is “a unique mode of image production
and distribution through social networks” (29). From trivial scenes, such as the highly
popular short clips of cats, to the most serious records of reality, such as the videos
filmed to denounce several types of violations of human rights, phone footage is
understood as a type of image recorded by the rear-facing camera of smartphones,
which is usually thought of to be shared through the Internet with other users,
normally on social media. The fact that smartphones have the capability of both
recording images and connecting to the Internet has made this relationship almost
unbreakable. As a result, the democratization of smartphones has turned us into
everyday producers and uploaders, as well as consumers, of phone footage.
If phone footage is a fundamental part of our everyday life, it surely has played a
crucial role during the COVID-19 pandemic, since the need to be confined and
maintain social distancing required a bigger presence of online communication. This
paper aims to study the representation of phone footage in fiction films that have
depicted the coronavirus confinement. To analyze the meanings and implications of
such images, first I intend to study the general characteristics of phone footage, as a
way to later establish a comparison between those images and the ones created after
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the start of the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, I will be able to extract conclusions
about the ontology of the COVID-19 phone footage (discuss its aesthetics and the
ideas it carries) and, at the same time, since it is a field which is starting to develop, I
will also propose paths alternative to the one I have followed—an intellectual
excursion that could be stimulating for further research.
2. The Ontology of Phone Footage
Phone footage imagery has a set of formal traits that makes it instantly distinguishable
from other types of images. The hypermobile camerawork, the blurry, fuzzy quality of
the images, which usually show low resolution, and the poor sound quality, are
characteristics that define average phone footage (Andén-Papadopoulos 345-346).
This aesthetic has already been used in fiction film. One of the most famous videos of
phone footage is the one that records the moment where members of the National
Transitional Council captured Libya’s former dictator Muamar el Gaddafi. This actual
scene can be found in Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016),
where the director actually included a fragment of the real video when reconstructing
the event. Bay himself imitated the aesthetics of phone footage in a later film, 6
Underground (2019), where a dictator is left alone to confront his population at the end
of the film (see figure 1). This time, being the story completely fictional, instead of using
real footage, he imitated the aesthetics by filming a fragment of the scene with phone
cameras. In both cases, phone footage appears in fiction as a result, not only of the
deep penetration of this new type of imagery among society, but also of the inherent
meanings these images carry: protest, injustice, vengeance, anonymity, collectivity,
ideology, etc.
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Figure 1 – Still from 6 Underground (Michael Bay, 2019)
The type of images mentioned until now have been associated with the rear-facing
camera of the smartphone. Nevertheless, another type of camera, the forward-facing
one, has been present in smartphones as a standard feature since the early 2010s
(Gunn 152). This other type of camera has allowed the creation of a very different type
of phone footage imagery, one in which the creator of such images is present in them.
In other words, if one of the main traits of the rear-facing camera footage is usually the
anonymity of the creator, as well as the focus on other anonymous individuals, who
appear on screen, in the case of the forward-facing camera footage, the creators
become the center of the images they create. This completely changes the ontology of
the image, which deals with the constant relation and interaction between the self and
the environment, as well as with the idea of the constant presence of the self, as some
sort of perpetual protagonist of an everyday narration. Despite the fact that this
imagery is very common among phone footage creators, it has been poorly studied, as
Jenny Gunn (153) argues when discussing the usage of the selfie. The following
argumentation is a result of her study on the phone footage imagery created during
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the 2021 United States Capitol Attack: “[T]he event of 6 January suggests that we
have perhaps not considered enough the question of the forward-facing camera as a
narcissistic new media form nor the extent of its psycho-social and thus political
impact” (154).
These insightful reflections go beyond the aims of this paper, but they do fuel its
intention, which consists of studying a very specific type of phone footage imagery
whose usage has been expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic: the forward-facing
online video calls during the confinement. Since the start of the confinement, some
directors and producers have found in this context a rich environment for reality-
based fictional storytelling. As a result, during 2020 and 2021 a set of films have
addressed the ways in which human communication has been altered due to the health
crisis, mainly through the representation of video calls, both one-on-one and group
calls. The goal of this article is to analyze how the cinematic fiction has addressed these
new narrative scenes, and whether these types of images carry meanings and
reflections that speak about the fears and desires of the confined population.
3. The Phone Footage of the COVID-19 Era
In both types of phone footage previously described (the one produced with the rear-
facing camera and the one produced with the forward-facing camera), the recorded
videos are thought of to be shared. Usually, this can apply to a whole community (for
example, the social media followers of the user’s account) or to a single person (such as
a WhatsApp private chat with another person). In both cases, whether the recording
happens prior to the sharing, or whether the video is being live streamed, two
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conditions usually apply: on the one hand, the aim is to share an experience or event;
on the other, the addressee of the video is not involved in it. This changes when it
comes to analyzing the type of phone footage present in the fiction film of the COVID-
19 pandemic. Video calls are not a recent phenomenon, and, as a result, society has
been familiarized with this type of phone footage before the start of the coronavirus
crisis. Nevertheless, the socio-political implications of the confinement have changed
the inherent meanings these images carry. Accordingly, video calls that appear in
fiction film prior to the start of the pandemic do not have the same meaning as the
ones that have been used precisely to reflect on the health crisis and its emotional
impact in society.
Different types of devices have created these images, mostly laptops, tablets, and
smartphones. Thus, it should be necessary to coin a new term to include all of them. I
propose calling these images “electronic-device footage.” The aforementioned devices
all involve the usage of a forward-facing camera, which means that in the three cases
(smartphone, tablet, laptop), the footage is different from the usual types of phone
footage, as exemplified in the previous subchapter by the two cited films of Michael
Bay. Nevertheless, there are still differences between the images produced by these
three types of devices and, as a result, different meanings can be found in these forms
of electronic-device footage. With close analysis of five film examples that address the
COVID-19 confinement, I intend to prove that the footage created by smartphones
has different implications than that created by tablets or laptops. As it will be
highlighted, I claim that the COVID-19 phone footage speaks of the desire of earning
some spatial freedom in a scenario of physical (and emotional) confinement.
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4. Electronic-Device Footage in Fiction Films About the COVID-19 Confinement
I. Songbird (Adam Mason, 2020)
Songbird is a dystopian thriller that depicts a hypothetical scenario in which the virus
mutates and becomes highly mortal. Everybody must remain at home, except for the
very uncommon immune people, who can move around the city without the need for
any protection. The protagonist, Nico (KJ Apa), is one of those people and is in a
relationship with Sara (Sofia Carson), who in turn must remain inside her apartment.
The film is based on the idea of the contrast between the outside and the inside, and on
the physical separation as a barrier to destroy, in order to achieve the full version of a
love relationship. This idea is reinforced through the use of phone footage. Nico and
Sara are forced to communicate through video calls (see figure 2), and, whereas he
talks to her from different parts of the city, she is always in her living room, forced to
remain confined. There are, thus, two types of phone footage: the one produced by
Nico’s phone and the one produced by Sara’s. Still, even though Sara has to remain at
home, the fact that she is using a phone allows her to communicate with Nico while
moving around the apartment, which could be understood as an attempt to earn some
spatial freedom in such a claustrophobic sociopolitical situation. This idea is
emphasized in the scene where Nico talks to his boss, Lester (Craig Robinson), while
the latter is moving around the warehouse. The fact that Lester is using a phone makes
it possible for him to drive a vehicle while attending the video call. In summary,
Songbird’s phone footage is used to emphasize the claustrophobic environment of this
dystopian society, and to express the desire to step outside one’s home.
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Figure 2 – Stills from Songbird (Adam Mason, 2020)
II. Locked Down (Doug Liman, 2021)
In Locked Down there is an immense amount of video calls, which take place both for
personal and working reasons. Linda (Anne Hathaway) is an executive of a
multinational corporation and has many meetings to attend, all of which take place via
group calls. Paxton (Chiwetel Ejiofor), on the other hand, is a delivery man, and
communicates with his boss, Malcolm (Ben Kinglsey), via one-on-one video calls. At the
same time, both protagonists talk to friends by using this form of communication. The
interest of this case study lies in the ways in which different electronic devices can be
used for those video calls, and what they transmit in each case. Linda attends her
meetings by using her laptop, a fact that reinforces the idea of statism: the laptop is on
a table, and she sits in front of it, never changing the scenario. The complete opposite
of this would be the footage streamed by phone. The best example is one of the
conversations that Paxton has with his boss (see figure 3), in which, as it happens in
Songbird, the latter is moving around the warehouse while talking to him, and even
stays outdoors for a bit. This change of the scenario happens in one of Linda’s
meetings, in which one of the participants is using a phone, instead of a laptop, and
hence able to walk around the house. A sort of in-betweenness happens with the use of
tablets. In one scene, Paxton is using a tablet while displacing himself around his house,
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implying the capability of these images to carry the meaning of mobility. Nevertheless,
in another scene, he is “trapped” in a small room, moving but at the same time not
having enough space. As a result, this second scene transmits the idea of confinement,
which is that of being able to move, but not enough. At the same time, this can be
understood as the characteristics of a tablet: it offers a certain degree of movement,
but not as much as a phone does.
Figure 3 – Still from Locked Down (Doug Liman, 2021)
III. Safer at Home (Will Wernick, 2021)
Safer at Home is another dystopian thriller. After two years of pandemic, a group of
friends decide to organize an online party, but, after having consumed ecstasy, a series
of unfortunate events happen, which lead two of the protagonists to leave the house,
even though they live in a police state and they are risking being shot by the
authorities. This film offers the biggest contrast between the static footage of laptops
and tablets and the mobile images provided by the smartphone. This case study is a so-
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called desktop film (a film which takes place entirely on the screen of a computer). In
this case, it takes the form of a video call, which means that during the whole duration
of the film, what the audience watches on screen is the group video call. As a result, any
spatial movement of any character must be recorded in a believable way by an
electronic device. Under these tight production circumstances, the role these devices
play is fundamental, and, as a result, the contrast between the affordances each one
can offer is enhanced.
This situation is exposed in the parts of the film where the characters decide to leave
their houses. In these fragments, the only believable way to do it is by being connected
to the video call through their smartphones. In some cases, this situation is
represented by the character participating in a call while they are driving. The formal
appearance of the image is similar to the rest of the windows of the call, which are
taking place in the living room of the houses: the person is inside the car in a static
form, while the car is moving around the city. The movement is present, and as a result
it already implies different meanings, but the biggest difference happens when these
characters decide to leave their cars and start walking. The aesthetic of the image is
transformed into a blurry, low-resolution one, very similar to the typical rear-facing
camera phone footage (see figure 4). In this case, the desire to leave the house is more
of a need, in order to avoid the consequences of confronting the law inside a police
state, even though leaving the house is still a very risky choice.
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Figure 4 – Stills from Safer at Home (Will Wernick, 2021)
IV. Host (Rob Savage, 2020) and Ctrl+Alt+Trick/Treat (Harvard John, 2020)
These two examples are identical in their premise and offer a similar usage of phone
footage (see figure 5). In both cases, there is a meeting of friends at a group video call
to perform a paranormal experience. In both cases, the characters participate in video
calls through laptops, which gives a static dynamic to the images of each participant. At
the same time, at a certain moment, some of them decide to leave their houses, and
switch from using laptops to using smartphones to continue the online meeting. In the
two films discussed, the duration and implications of each fragment is very reduced,
and thus, has a small repercussion on the narration. Still, they are meaningful, and add
to the idea of phone footage used as a form of earning more mobility in a sociopolitical
situation of spatial stillness, and in both examples phone footage is used in a
provocative manner, as a way to challenge and question the strict rules of the
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confinement, which can be understood as a variation of the idea of phone footage as a
carrier of the desire to leave the house.
Figure 5: on the left, Host (Rob Savage, 2020), and on the right, Ctrl+Alt+Trick/Treat (Harvard John, 2020)
5. Conclusion
Phone footage has been present in cinema before the COVID-19 pandemic started,
but a change in its usage appears to have happened after the start of the confinement.
The goal of this paper was to study how phone footage has been used in fiction films
that talk about the coronavirus crisis. In order to achieve that, I first studied the
characteristics of phone footage and its usage prior to the pandemic. Afterwards, I
proposed a set of traits that differentiate this new form of phone footage, such as the
need to talk about electronic-device footage unless it was confirmed that the images
were produced by smartphones, and the fundamental ontological implications that
arose from changing the rear-facing camera to the forward-facing camera. After that, I
analyzed five case studies (Songbird, Locked Down, Safer at Home, Host, and
Ctrl+Alt+Trick/Treat), from which I have extracted the conclusion that, in different
forms, the usage of phone footage in these films carry the desire of society to earn
spatial freedom in a state of sociopolitical and/or emotional oppression. I acknowledge
that the number of examined cases is not sufficient to confirm that this tendency is an
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actual fact, but the strong similarities of very different commercial films, that address
very varied topics, encourage further research in this direction.
At the same time, there are other paths for this research, which, despite going beyond
the aims of this paper, are worth studying. One of these could be the usage of online
platforms that allow the conversations we witness during the films, such as Zoom,
Skype, or Teams. This paper has reflected on the idea of character mobility, and how
this level of motion is reflected in the aesthetic of the image (the contrast between the
static image of a laptop-camera compared to the fuzzy, shaky image of a smartphone
camera that is being moved through space). In other words, this paper has analyzed the
images created by electronic-device users, who happen to be characters in a film.
Another perspective that could be applied is that of the images received by those
characters, the ones that appear on the screens of the devices they are using in the
fiction, which are those of the different video call platforms. Despite the level of
motion that any given character could display inside the frame of an electronic-device
image, the quadrant-image offered by the platform remains, ultimately, static. This is
not the case in Songbird, but the rest of the cases offers a varied range of screen time in
which the frame becomes the screen of an electronic device. This is especially relevant
in the case of Safer at Home, Host, and Crtl+Alt+Trick/Treat, three examples of the so-
called desktop films, which entirely consist of an online group call. In those cases, the
images analyzed in this paper are a part of a bigger picture, the one displayed in the
platform, in which the film screen can become a quadrant with multiple small windows,
one belonging to each participant/electronic-device image producer.
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This alternative perspective involves another type of cinematic assimilation of the
images produced by electronic devices, in this case the aesthetic of video call
platforms. This has already started to influence the evolution of film language (such as,
for example, the way in which this new type of visual narration can be exploited to
create a successful horror film, as it happens in Host), and could lead to standardized
narrative patterns in the near future. Among some of the characteristics of electronic-
device footage useful for creating a disturbing atmosphere are the lack of definition or
sudden micro-cuts in communication created by connection problems; the editing
process offered by these apps when they allow the speaker’s image to become the only
image displayed, instead of the quadrant-image with all the participants of the group
call (some platforms offer a chance to switch from the quadrant-image to this other
type of image); and the small dimensions of each image of the group call, and the
feeling of imprisonment that these quadrants can generate.
Another approach worth studying is that of the bodily presence of characters, which
goes beyond the purely aesthetic aspect of the images. The fact that characters are
filming themselves, and are included in images they themselves are creating, has a
direct repercussion on the ontology of the image, such as the fact that the camera is
included in the diegesis of narration, or that characters are constantly breaking the
fourth wall by looking directly at the lenses of their electronic devices. Going further,
the cited online platforms create a new scenario where users are able to see
themselves continuously, since their image is part of the quadrant-image, and thus, in a
way, it can function as some sort of a mirror. Is this situation affecting the way they
behave in front of others? Can this situation enhance the self-awareness of the person
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in question and the feeling of being observed? These ideas, along with the fact that
these conversations usually take place at home, in very intimate scenarios, can
provoke a feeling of too much presence of the character, who is sharing his or her
intimacy (which, in a way, could be understood as the evolution many social media
users have taken, turning their accounts into diaries of their lives).
It seems clear that the field of research is wide, and it encourages us to explore it.
Phone footage and new online media are experiments in an ever-growing
technological evolution, and the result is a massive penetration of our lives. Cinema
creators have acknowledged this situation, as the role of these new media and formats
has started to be represented during the 21st century, until they both have become
standardized. One of these cases is phone footage. In this paper I have focused on the
role of phone footage during the COVID-19 era; more specifically, I examined the
aesthetic of such images and the meanings they carry. These other ideas and intuitions
I have exposed, highlight the fact that there is a wide field for further research, which is
especially relevant due to the ubiquitous presence of the phone footage in modern,
hyper-digital societies. These are all stimulating points of departure that are definitely
worth further research.
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Works Cited
6 Underground (USA, 2019, 2h 8m) Directed by Michael Bay. Cast: Ryan Reynolds,
Mélanie Laurent, Manuel Garci-Rulfo.
Andén-Papadopoulos, Kari. “Media Witnessing and the ‘Crowd-Sourced Video
Revolution’”. Visual Communication, vol. 12, no. 3, 2013, pp. 341-357.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357213483055.
Ctrl+Alt+Trick/Treat (UK, 2020, 29m) Directed by Harvard John. Cast: Emma-Kate
Barry, Charlie Howard, India Howland.
Gunn, Jenny. “Theorising Digital Self-Mediation and the Smartphone as Filmic
Apparatus after 6 January 2021”. Frames Cinema Journal, vol. 18, 2021, pp. 150-
163. DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v18i1.2255.
Host (USA, 2020, 57m) Directed by Rob Savage. Cast: Haley Bishop, Jemma Moore,
Emma Louise Webb.
Locked Down (USA, 2021, 1h 58m) Directed by Doug Liman. Cast: Anne Hathaway,
Chiwetel Ejiofor, Stephen Merchant.
Safer at Home (USA, 2021, 1h 22m) Directed by Will Wernick. Cast: Jocelyn Hudon,
Emma Lahana, Alisa Allapach.
Shilina-Conte, Tanya. “Phone Footage and the Social Media Image as Global
Anonymous Cinema: Ana Nyma’s (Anonyme) Fragments of a Revolution (2011)
and Peter Snowdon’s The Uprising (2013)”. Frames Cinema Journal, vol. 18, 2021,
pp. 29-68. DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v18i1.2248.
Songbird (USA, 2020, 1h 25m) Directed by Adam Mason. Cast: K. J. Apa, Sofia Carson,
Craig Robinson.
SINESTESIEONLINE
SUPPLEMENTO DELLA RIVISTA «SINESTESIE»
ISSN 2280-6849
a. XI, n. 34, 2022
RUBRICA “IL PARLAGGIO”
Puentes de comprensión: Trauma cultural, tabú

político, unacknowledgeability y trauma del
testigo en Avatar: La leyenda de Aang
YAGO PARIS
ABSTRACT
Questo saggio analizza la serie televisiva animata L'ul- In the present essay, the animation television series Av-
timo dominatore dell'aria (The Last Airbender) (2005- atar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008), co-created by
2008), co-creata da Michael Dante DiMartino e Bryan Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, is ana-
Konietzko, dal punto di vista del trauma culturale e del lyzed from the perspective of cultural trauma and polit-
tabù politico. L'analisi parte dal presupposto che en- ical taboo. The article starts from the assumption that
trambi i termini siano due facce della stessa medaglia: both terms are the two sides of the same coin, that of the
l'evento traumatico. Lo studio analizza il contesto socio- traumatic event. The study analyzes the sociopolitical
politico proposto dall'universo della serie, sofferman- context proposed by the series, focusing on the way in
dosi sul modo in cui autori e vittime sono condizionati, which perpetrators and victims are conditioned, respec-
rispettivamente, da tabù politico e trauma culturale. tively, by political taboo and cultural trauma. After an-
Dopo aver analizzato le "manovre di occultamento delle alyzing the tactics of concealment developed by the vic-
vittime e la tendenza dei carnefici a collocare le proprie tims and the tendency of the perpetrators to position
vittime come alterità, il testo analizza le alternative che their victims as the otherness, the text analyzes the al-
la serie propone, alcune delle quali, attraverso l'empa- ternatives that the series proposes, ones where, through
tia e il processo di traumatizzazione del testimone, pos- empathy and the process of witness traumatization,
sono essere raggiunti ponti di comprensione tra i gruppi bridges of understanding between social groups can be
sociali per superare le differenze e realizzare il bene co- built up, in order to overcome differences and reach the
mune. common good.
PAROLE CHIAVE: trauma culturale; tabù politico; unack- PAROLE CHIAVE: Cultural trauma; Political taboo;
nowledgeability; L'ultimo dominatore dell'aria (The Unacknowledgeability; Avatar: The Last Airbender
Last Airbender)
AUTORE
Yago Paris (Spain, 1989) is a Ph.D. candidate at Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid). He graduated from the MA in Films
Studies at Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem (Budapest, Hungary). He wrote his thesis on the aesthetics of Michael Bay’s
transformers and its influence on the representation of CGI robots. He has published various articles in academic journals
and has presented papers at numerous conferences. He is a film critic on the magazines Cine Divergente and El Ante-
penúltimo Mohicano, and has collaborated with the newspapers InfoLibre and Ctxt.
yagoparis89@gmail.com
LA LEYENDA DE AANG
L a serie televisiva de animación Avatar: La leyenda de Aang (Avatar: The Last

Airbender, 2005-2008), co-creada por Michael Dante DiMartino y Bryan
Konietzko, ha suscitado cierto interés dentro del estudio académico, debido a su
tratamiento de aspectos culturales de gran relevancia. Probablemente el más
ampliamente estudiado sea el de las representaciones de culturas y razas, 1 pero
también se han desarrollado análisis basados en los estudios de género 2 o de
discapacidad. 3 En el ámbito sociopolítico, destaca el estudio desarrollado por
Gayatri Viswanath4 en torno al conflicto entre poder y resistencia, donde se abordan
ideas como el silencio, la imposición de discursos oficiales o la elaboración de
acciones encaminadas a borrar un pasado traumático. Este contexto es la base del
presente estudio, que toma el punto de partida de dicho ensayo para ampliar el
análisis, y al mismo tiempo ofrecer visiones sobre el contexto sociopolítico de la
serie que están ausentes en el texto de Viswanath. Concretamente, propongo un
estudio en torno a la estrecha correlación que existe entre el trauma cultural y el
tabú político, y cómo, en situaciones donde los perpetradores han alcanzado el
poder a costa de las acciones acometidas sobre las víctimas del trauma cultural,
estas últimas optan por mejorar su situación mediante acciones que pasan por la
ocultación de sus verdaderas identidades. El objetivo final de este análisis consiste
en abordar la serie desde esta perspectiva, señalando cómo el relato ofrece, en
última instancia, una alternativa a la ocultación, una que necesariamente implica el
uso de la empatía para establecer puentes de comprensión entre víctimas y
perpetradores, en un intento por alcanzar un bien común y superar el sufrimiento.
1. El universo de Avatar: La leyenda de Aang
Cuatro son las naciones que existen en el mundo de Avatar. Estas son la Tribu
del Agua, la Nación del Fuego, el Reino de la Tierra y los Nómadas del Aire. Cada
nación habita unos determinados territorios del planeta, y las cuatro viven en
1 C. LIDDELL, New myths for the modern era: Remembering Japanese imperialism in Avatar: The Last
Airbender, trabajo de fin de máster, Indiana 2014; P. WOOD, Peter, Reframing Sympathy for Indigenous
Captives in Avatar: The Last Airbender, en «Undergraduate Review», XIV, 1, 2018, pp. 176-181; F.
AGNOLI, Francis, Animating Race: The Production and Ascription of Asian-ness in the Animation of
Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, tesis doctoral, East Anglia 2020.
2 K. SALES, Subversive Masculinity in Children's Animation: Hey Arnold, Avatar: The Last Airbender and
The Loud House, trabajo de fin de máster, Tennessee 2019.

3 M. KELLEY, Issues of universal design and the relational model of disability in Avatar: The Last Air-
bender, trabajo de fin de máster, Harrisonburg 2017.

4 G. VISWANATH, Power and Resistance: Silence and Secrecy in Avatar: The Last Airbender, en «SubVer-
sions», II, 1, 2014, pp. 26-47.
SINESTESIEONLINE/IL PARLAGGIO, 34 | 2022 2

YAGO PARIS
condiciones de paz, donde se permiten tránsitos migratorios e intercambios

comerciales. La gran característica que define a cada nación es la existencia de
determinados individuos que presentan habilidades especiales. Se trata de poderes
mediante los cuales son capaces de controlar alguno de los cuatro elementos de este
universo: el agua, el fuego, la tierra y el aire. Quien controla uno de estos elementos
pertenece a la nación cuyo elemento incluye en su nombre. Así, un maestro del agua
pertenece a la Tribu del Agua, uno que domine el fuego pertenece a la Nación del
Fuego, uno que controle la tierra es parte del Reino de la Tierra, y, finalmente, un
maestro del aire forma parte de los Nómadas del Aire. Estas habilidades especiales
no se manifiestan en todos los integrantes de cada nación, pero tampoco son
excepcionales. Como resultado, las capacidades especiales están normalizadas y se
manifiestan abiertamente en sociedad.
Esta situación cambia en un determinado momento de la historia, cuando la
Nación del Fuego decide invadir los demás territorios, en un intento por dominar el
planeta e instaurar un régimen totalitario homogeneizador, donde dicha nación se
imponga sobre las demás. Para asegurar el éxito de la maniobra, el ejército de la
Nación del Fuego decide capturar o asesinar a todos los maestros de los elementos
de las restantes naciones, pues, ante la ausencia de personas con habilidades
especiales con las que defender sus territorios, las demás naciones se encuentran en
un estado de desventaja insuperable, que las condena a una inevitable derrota frente
a la Nación del Fuego. Debido a esta maniobra totalitaria, la población de las
naciones invadidas sufren un proceso traumático. La otra cara de la moneda la
ofrece la población de la Nación del Fuego, que debe lidiar con el hecho de que está
actuando de manera despótica.
Los miembros de las restantes naciones se convierten en ciudadanos de
segunda categoría, constantemente amenazados por las autoridades de la Nación
del Fuego, que han invadido sus territorios. Esta situación se manifiesta con especial
crudeza en el caso de aquellos miembros de los colectivos que presenten las
habilidades especiales. Al ser considerados una amenaza directa para los intereses
de la Nación del Fuego, estos se encuentran en un estado de persecución constante.
Sin embargo, una característica fundamental de dichos poderes es el hecho de que
pueden ser ocultados. Como resultado, resulta imposible diferenciar a una persona
sin habilidades especiales de una que sí las presenta. Como consecuencia, los
maestros de los diferentes elementos se ven forzados a ocultar sus verdaderas
identidades. Este es el caso de los protagonistas del relato, Aang y Katara,
respectivamente un maestro del aire y una maestra del agua, quienes, en su misión
de derrocar al líder de la Nación del Fuego, viajarán por los distintos territorios del
mundo ocultando sus identidades y sus poderes.

LA LEYENDA DE AANG
En paralelo, se narra la historia del antagonista, Zuko. El personaje pertenece a

la Nación del Fuego, y su misión consiste en capturar al avatar – Aang, el
protagonista de la historia – , un individuo con habilidades extraordinarias, pues no
es solo un maestro del aire, sino que también es capaz de dominar los cuatro
elementos. En un giro de los acontecimientos, él mismo pasa a ser perseguido por
las autoridades de su propia nación, dando lugar a una progresiva evolución en la
que será capaz de entender el sufrimiento de las demás naciones. A lo largo de este
artículo se explorará la manera en que conceptos como el trauma cultural, el tabú
político y la lógica de la unacknowledgeability se interrelacionan en un contexto
complejo y complicado de solventar, y cómo, la mismo tiempo, la empatía y la
traumatización del testigo pueden ayudar a solventar el conflicto y alcanzar un
escenario de paz y reconciliación.
2. Teoría del trauma
Cathy Caruth5 describe el trauma como las consecuencias derivadas de haber

experimentado un evento sobrecogedor. El trauma, no obstante, puede ser curado.
Esto se logra a través de la narración de los eventos que han causado dicho trauma,
para lo que la víctima necesita a otra persona que escuche de manera activa. La
persona traumatizada necesita sentir que está siendo reconocida como víctima, que
su historia es importante y que, por tanto, debe ser escuchada. Caruth propone que,
al contar su historia, la víctima se aleja del evento, como una forma de romper el
aislamiento al que dicho trauma la sometía.
Dori Laub describe el rol del escuchante como una especie de ‘pantalla en blanco
sobre la que el evento [traumático] se inscribe por primera vez’. 6 Por tanto, el
trauma se cura mediante la verbalización de la víctima y el reconocimiento de quien
escucha, pero, ¿cómo curar el trauma en un escenario donde la víctima no puede
hablar abiertamente de lo sucedido, y donde la persona que tiene enfrente, en
muchos casos, no está dispuesta a escuchar, y/o no reconoce su estatus de víctima,
pues es responsable directa o indirecta de las acciones que han llevado a su
interlocutora a sufrir un trauma?
Esta explicación del trauma es insuficiente para comprender el contexto de
Avatar, pues estamos ante un tipo concreto de trauma, que se conoce como trauma
cultural. Viswanath se refiere a este tipo como trauma colonial y/o bélico, y los
5 C. CARUTH, Trauma and experience, editado por C. Caruth, Londres 1995.

6 D. LAUB, Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of listening, and An Event without a Witness: Truth, Tes-
timony and Survival, en Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history, Nueva
York, 1992, p. 57.

YAGO PARIS
describe señalando que ‘ambos son comunales y colectivos en su naturaleza, un

trauma que ha sido experimentado por una comunidad, un colectivo, de personas’.7
Aunque el punto de partida es compartido por este análisis, a continuación se
procederá a una descripción más compleja de sus características. En estos casos, la
víctima no ha sufrido el proceso traumático de manera individual, sino que existe
una consciencia de que todo el colectivo al que pertenece lo ha padecido de manera
similar, algo que determina cómo este proceso se desarrolla. El trauma cultural se
presenta en aquellos casos donde miembros de un mismo colectivo tienen la
impresión de haber sufrido una experiencia impactante e imposible de olvidar, hasta
el punto de que esta cambia la idea que los propios individuos tienen de su colectivo.
La identidad cultural cambia debido a la intensidad del evento sufrido, pues esta ya
no puede entenderse sin tenerlo en cuenta. Un aspecto fundamental del trauma
cultural es la idea de colectivo, puesto que se produce un proceso de identificación
entre los miembros del mismo que es tan poderoso que llega a traumatizar a
individuos que no han sufrido dicho evento en sus propias carnes, lo que se podría
entender como un proceso a través del cual el trauma se comparte o distribuye entre
los miembros del grupo social. 8 Esta situación es especialmente problemática en
casos como los descritos por Avatar, puesto que el contexto sociopolítico impide la
curación del trauma y, como resultado, las nuevas generaciones, aunque no han
sufrido de manera directa los eventos traumáticos del pasado, también sufren un
proceso de traumatización.
Existen numerosos ejemplos en Avatar con los que explicar el proceso del
trauma cultural. He escogido los casos de dos de los personajes principales, pues
cada uno representa una de las variantes descritas para el trauma cultural. El primer
caso de estudio es el de Katara. La joven es una integrante de la Tribu del Agua que
ha sufrido de manera directa los eventos traumáticos. Una de las numerosas
invasiones perpetradas por la Nación del Fuego se produjo cuando ella era una niña.
Una de las víctimas de estos ataques fue su propia madre. El trauma desencadenado
por la muerte de un ser querido la lleva a ser víctima directa del trauma cultural,
algo que en en un futuro espoleará su decisión de ayudar a Aang en su misión. El
segundo caso de trauma cultural, aquel que se produce a través de la identificación,
y no por haber sufrido de manera directa las acciones traumáticas, lo representa,
precisamente, el propio Aang. Cuando era un niño, Aang descubrió que era el nuevo
avatar, una especie de identidad que se transmite a través de la reencarnación.
Cuando el templo en el que vivía fue atacado, Aang fue capaz de escapar a duras
7G. VISWANATH, Power and Resistance cit., p. 30.

8J. ALEXANDER, Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma, en Cultural Trauma and Collective identity, edit-
ado por J. Alexander, Berkeley 2004, p. 1.

LA LEYENDA DE AANG
penas, pero acaba en un estado de criogenización que lo mantiene vivo, aislado del
mundo, durante un siglo. Katara y su hermano, Sokka, localizan de manera fortuita
a Aang, quien sigue siendo un niño a pesar de que nació hace más de cien años. Al
inicio de la misión de Aang para salvar el mundo, los tres personajes visitan el
templo en el que el protagonista vivía en el pasado. A su llegada, el joven descubre
los esqueletos de sus compañeros, asesinados mucho tiempo atrás por la Nación del
Fuego. La asunción de estos gravísimos actos lleva a Aang a sufrir un proceso de
traumatización cultural por identificación, pues, como miembro de esa comunidad,
siente que le podría haber sucedido exactamente lo mismo. Como consecuencia,
Aang se traumatiza a pesar de que nunca llegó a sufrir los eventos, algo que es
posible debido a las características específicas del trauma cultural.
3. El tabú político
El tabú político es la otra cara de la moneda del trauma cultural, y uno refuerza
al otro, dando lugar a un círculo vicioso del que resulta muy complicado escapar.
Nebojša Blanuša define el tabú político como ‘un silencio hegemónico en torno a
unas palabras, conceptos y narrativas mistificadas y santificadas, que han sido
promovidas como importantes para la creación simbólica de la consciencia de un
grupo [social]’.9 Esta definición casa con la visión de Viswanath, quien afirma que ‘el
silenciado y el borrado forzado de historias y formaciones de conocimiento a través
de la destrucción de cuerpos culturales es otro método de gobierno del grupo en el
poder’. 10 Ambas citas se complementan con la creación de un discurso oficial,
manufacturado por las autoridades, que se torna en una narrativa de corte mítico, y
que por tanto resulta difícilmente cuestionable, pues se convierte en una especie de
escritura sagrada de la realidad. Esto se localiza entre la población de la Nación del
Fuego, un colectivo que no entiende las invasiones de su ejército como una maniobra
despótica de imperialismo, pues, debido a la narrativa oficial a que ha sido expuesta,
dichas acciones han sido descritas como necesarias para lograr un bien superior. En
otras palabras, la Nación del Fuego se ve a sí misma como la salvadora. Esto se
observa en el discurso en torno a la unificación de las naciones, que se justifica al
cuestionar la división en grupos separados. Este discurso globalizador y
multicultural, que en teoría abogaría por la integración y mezcla de culturas y la
erradicación de las diferencias como barreras que separan a los seres humanos, en
realidad esconde una trampa, pues la supuesta igualdad que defiende acarrea la
9 N. BLANUŠA, Trauma and Taboo: Forbidden Political Questions in Croatia. «Croatian Political Science
Review» LIV, 1-2, 2017, p. 172.
10 G. VISWANATH, Power and Resistance cit., p. 31.

YAGO PARIS
instauración de un nuevo orden en el que los ciudadanos de la Nación del Fuego se

encuentran en un escalón superior al de los integrantes del resto de naciones. Al
mismo tiempo, este proyecto totalitario impone la cultura de la Nación del Fuego
como la única válida, lo que se justifica al mostrar la invasión como una maniobra
que permitirá compartir su cultura y su progreso con el resto de naciones – la Nación
del Fuego sea la única que cuenta con tecnología industrial, lo que sirve al mismo
tiempo para justificar las invasiones y para perpetrarlas de manera violenta – .
El tabú político se manifiesta con especial intensidad en el tratamiento de
aquellos individuos del resto de naciones que poseen poderes. Uno de los aspectos
fundamentales del tabú político impuesto por los grupos sociales dominantes es la
tendencia a describirse a sí mismos como víctimas. Por tanto, no solo esconden su
rol como perpetradores, sino que además se retratan como las víctimas del conflicto.
Esto se manifiesta en el caso de los maestros de los otros tres elementos.
Al ser los miembros de la sociedad que con mayor fuerza pueden cuestionar el
nuevo orden establecido, debido a que sus poderes les permiten debilitar las fuerzas
del ejército de la Nación del Fuego, ellos son los que mayores represalias sufren.
Como consecuencia, son perseguidos por las autoridades del régimen autoritario.
Para poder justificar acciones tan cruentas, las narrativas oficiales de propaganda
del Estado autoritario deben encontrar la manera de convencer a su población de
que lo que está sucediendo no solo es necesario, sino también beneficioso. Esto se
consigue al convertir a las víctimas en amenazas. De esta manera, los maestros de
los otros elementos son retratados de manera tergiversada, siendo convertidos en
villanos que atentan contra la sociedad del bienestar que la nación autoritaria está
tratando de defender. Así, encarcelarlos o ejecutarlos ya no es una acción violenta y
desalmada, sino una estrategia defensiva para preservar valores morales superiores
y modos de vida más justos. Este ejemplo es el más claro de los que se dan a lo largo
de la serie, puesto que es aquel en el que la narrativa oficial se aleja más de cualquier
sentido de realidad objetiva, algo para lo que resulta imprescindible la imposición
de una serie de tabúes políticos que refuercen y protejan dicha narrativa.
Antoon Van den Braembussche propone la existencia de cuatro tipos de tabú
político para reforzar las narrativas oficiales.11 El primero consiste en la negación
consciente de aquello que difiere de la explicación del pasado. El segundo supone la
reinterpretación de sucesos históricos para deslegitimar hechos históricos
innegables. El tercero expone la creación de mitos, o leyendas, para justificar hechos
históricos. Por último, el cuarto propone la represión inconsciente de recuerdos
para evitar la inestabilidad de la identidad nacional. Aunque a lo largo de las tres
11A. VAN DEN BRAEMBUSSCHE, The Silenced Past: On the Nature of Historical Taboos, en «Swiat historii.
Festschrift for Jerzy Topolski», Poznan 1998, pp. 106-110.

LA LEYENDA DE AANG
temporadas de la serie pueden encontrarse situaciones y subtramas que explican

las diferencias entre la realidad y la narrativa oficial de la Nación del Fuego, el
ejemplo que mejor representa esta situación se da en el episodio 17 de la tercera
temporada, de nombre The Ember Island Players (Giancarlo Volpe, 2008). En él, los
protagonistas, que para entonces se han infiltrado en la Nación del Fuego, asisten a
una obra de teatro donde se ofrece una versión oficial de lo que ha sucedido en todo
lo concerniente a la batalla entre el avatar y la Nación del Fuego.
Más allá de que los personajes no se sientan en absoluto bien representados, el
conjunto de la obra consiste en una simplificación paródica de sucesos graves y
complejos. Así, todo lo concerniente a las invasiones de la Nación del Fuego y sus
consecuencias sobre la población se convierte en una comedia donde el peso se
deposita sobre las relaciones entre los personajes, mientras que al mismo tiempo se
evita confrontar las implicaciones morales y sociopolíticas de las acciones de la
nación. Es decir, mediante un doble proceso de tergiversación, la obra sirve como
un arma de propaganda que ayuda a solidificar la narrativa oficial, ofreciendo por
un lado una visión frívola de una situación grave, fomentando que la población no
se detenga a replantearse las implicaciones morales de dicha narrativa y, por otro,
al esconder abiertamente toda una serie de decisiones moralmente cuestionables
que han sido tomadas por la nación, lo que implica un proceso de ocultación de
información a la población.
4. Las repercusiones de la lógica de la unacknowledgeability
Viswanath describe ciertos procesos de silencio y ocultación, siendo uno de

ellos un ‘“silencio protector”’, que ‘porta la lógica de que el silencio, durante un
periodo de tiempo, calmaría el dolor del trauma’.12 Esta lógica conecta con la de la
unacknowledgeability,13 pues consiste en adoptar una actitud para protegerse del
contexto sociopolítico. Sin embargo, porta implicaciones y modos de actuación
diferentes. El término unacknowledgeability se podría traducir como “la capacidad
para no ser reconocido”. Tebble utiliza este concepto para describir un modo muy
concreto de ocultación de ciertos grupos sociales marginados. El autor compara los
modos de actuación del colectivo negro con los del homosexual. Aunque se trata de
dos grupos sociales marginados que son víctimas de acoso social, no se comportan
de la misma forma en el espacio público, debido a que las características que definen
12G. VISWANATH, Power and Resistance cit., p. 30.

13A. TEBBLE, Homosexuality and Publicness: Towards a Political Theory of the Taboo. En «Political Stud-
ies», LIX, 4, 2011, pp. 921-39.

YAGO PARIS
ambas identidades son diferentes, provocando una actuación distinta en sociedad.

La clave que
diferencia a ambos colectivos es que, mientras la población negra no puede
ocultar el hecho de que su piel es de dicho color, la población homosexual sí puede
esconder su identidad sexual. Como consecuencia, los homosexuales son capaces de
mimetizarse con el colectivo dominante – el heterosexual – y pasar desapercibidos,
mientras que los negros no pueden hacer lo propio con la población blanca. Esta
circunstancia permite que, en primera instancia, el colectivo homosexual tenga una
sensación de protección, pues, en efecto, el hecho de actuar de esta manera acarrea,
como consecuencia inmediata, una reducción del nivel de acoso social y sufrimiento.
Sin embargo, esta conducta provoca consecuencias negativas a largo plazo, puesto
que los miembros de dicho colectivo desarrollan ‘sentimientos muy arraigados de
vergüenza, asco y desprecio hacia sí mismos’, 14 así como un ‘sentimiento de
ansiedad recurrente’.15 Al actuar mediante el ocultamiento, estos colectivos pasan
en buena manera desapercibidos, y por tanto sus luchas y sufrimientos no se
perciben como algo presente en el día a día, y que por tanto requiere atención,
reflexión y un cambio de ciertas conductas y pensamientos por parte de los grupos
dominantes. Colectivos como el homosexual, cuando actúan a través de la lógica de
la unacknowledgeability, se convierten en invisibles en el ámbito público, y por tanto
también en el político, lo que acarrea una segunda consecuencia, que presenta una
relevancia capital para los intereses de este artículo: al darse estas circunstancias,
el trauma cultural de estos colectivos no se resuelve, pues sus miembros actúan en
la dirección contraria a la sanación, que pasa por contar el trauma y ser reconocidos
públicamente como víctimas. La lógica de la unacknowledgeability es, por tanto, un
modo de actuación perfectamente comprensible, puesto que ofrece una alivio del
sufrimiento a corto plazo, pero, a largo plazo, funciona en contra de los intereses del
propio colectivo.
La lógica de la unacknowledgeability es reconocible en los personajes de Avatar.
Los individuos pertenecientes a las naciones sometidas actúan mediante una lógica
que, si bien no llega a ocultar completamente sus orígenes, sí aboga por actuar de
manera discreta, sin llamar demasiado la atención. Esto alcanza niveles de auténtica
ocultación en el caso de personas que hayan decidido vivir en la Nación del Fuego,
un lugar en el que solo pueden integrarse si se hacen pasar por miembros de dicha
nación. Sin embargo, el ejemplo más claro, pues muestra en todo momento una
actuación basada en dicha lógica, se localiza en el caso de aquellos individuos con
poderes. A medida que los protagonistas del relato visitan diferentes partes del
14 A. TEBBLE, Homosexuality and Publicness cit., p. 927.

15 Ivi, p. 928.

LA LEYENDA DE AANG
mundo, se observa cómo, en aquellos lugares bajo el dominio de la Nación del Fuego,
los maestros de los otros elementos deben comportarse como si no tuvieran dichos
poderes, pues, de saberse esta información, serían represaliados por las autoridades
del nuevo régimen. Esto también se manifiesta en varios de los protagonistas de la
serie, como los mencionados Aang y Katara. A medida que el contexto sociopolítico
de este universo se tensa, debido al recrudecimiento de las acciones de la Nación del
Fuego, esta necesidad de ocultación es cada vez mayor, hasta el punto de que se da
una doble ocultación a lo largo de la tercera temporada, cuando los protagonistas
deben infiltrarse en dicha nación para tratar de detener la invasión final que está en
proceso. Los protagonistas actúan mediante la lógica de la unacknowledgeability en
dos sentidos: por un lado, ocultan sus poderes y, por el otro, ocultan el hecho de que
no pertenecen a la Nación del Fuego. Sin embargo, los protagonistas actúan de una
manera que asemeja dicha lógica, pero en realidad no es tal, o, cuando menos, no lo
es de manera completa. Es cierto que se ocultan para evitar represalias, pero
principalmente lo hacen para pasar desapercibidos y poder llevar a cabo su plan. En
otras palabras, en realidad sí que están actuando en favor de la defensa de los
derechos sociales de los colectivos a los que pertenecen, aunque parcialmente
también son víctimas del miedo que sufren ante posibles represalias, lo que refuerza
esta actitud de ocultamiento. Quienes sí actúan exclusivamente en base a esta lógica
son los diferentes personajes de las diferentes naciones oprimidas que aparecen a
lo largo del relato, quienes se ocultan por miedo y, al no optar por otras acciones,
encuentran cierto alivio a la represión a corto plazo, pero, a largo plazo, se condenan
a no mejorar sus estatus y a no poder solventar sus traumas culturales.
5. La interrelación entre trauma cultural, tabú político y unacknowledgeability
En otra publicación he descrito la relación entre trauma cultural, tabú político y

unacknowledgeability. Sin embargo, en esta ocasión ofreceré una lectura más
compleja, al establecer conexiones directas, que se manifiestan en el citado círculo
vicioso que se forma entre el trauma cultural y el tabú político. Al mismo tiempo,
enfatizaré la relevencia de una de las posibles reacciones que se suele dar
habitualmente en este tipo de casos, que se manifiestan en la lógica de la
unacknowledgeability. Por último, propondré una posible salida a este círculo
vicioso, que puede ayudar, al menos en parte, a reducir sus consecuencias, y que
pasa por un desarrollo de la empatía a partir de la traumatización del testigo. Por
tanto, el objetivo de este apartado consiste en poner en diálogo los términos
expuestos anteriormente, y ofrecer alternativas a una situación estancada.
El trauma cultural y el tabú político son las dos caras de una misma moneda, la
del evento traumático. Cuando un grupo social perpetra una serie de acciones que

YAGO PARIS
son interpretadas por el colectivo afectado como traumáticas, se genera un trauma

cultural. Para justificar una serie de acciones por las que, de otra manera, habría que
tomar responsabilidad, los perpetradores crean una narrativa con la que poder
redimir sus acciones y esquivar el sentimiento de culpa. Habitualmente, dichas
narrativas los retratan, de hecho, como héroes que han luchado por el bien de su
grupo social, por lo que, de manera interesada o inconsciente, los miembros del
grupo perpetrador no solo no toman responsabilidad por los actos cometidos, sino
que los consideran moralmente necesarios y honrosos. Esta situación provoca que
la curación del trauma cultural quede bloqueada. Todo trauma se cura a partir de la
narración de dicha historia, así como del reconocimiento del estatus de víctima de
quien ha sufrido los eventos traumáticos. Especialmente en el caso del trauma
cultural, aparece la necesidad de obtener un reconocimiento público del estatus de
dicho colectivo como víctima. Teniendo en cuenta que en muchos casos los
perpetradores pertenecen al grupo social en el poder, este reconocimiento nunca
llega, ya que reconocerlo implicaría, en buena medida, perder un poder que se ha
ganado, en muchas ocasiones, a costa de dichas acciones. Como consecuencia, el
trauma cultural aumenta su impacto sobre un colectivo no solo traumatizado por
eventos pasados, sino frustrado por la incapacidad de solventar la situación. Este
recrudecimiento del trauma cultural tiene como consecuencia una intensificación
del tabú político. Cuanto más necesite el colectivo traumatizado ser reconocido
como víctima, mayor será el tabú político que refuerce la narrativa oficial para evitar
que dicho reconocimiento se alcance. Se produce, por tanto, una escalada de la
intensidad del trauma cultural y el tabú político, que genera un distanciamiento cada
vez mayor entre ambos grupos, que cada vez tienen más motivos para no alcanzar
el entendimiento mutuo y la cooperación. Este círculo vicioso estanca a los grupos
sociales en una situación prácticamente imposible de solventar.
Ante el dolor provocado por la sensación de injusticia, así como por el miedo a
sufrir nuevas represalias, algunos colectivos traumatizados por acciones de grupos
hegemónicos optan por la lógica de la unacknowledgeability, pues no encuentran
una manera satisfactoria de solucionar su situación, en un panorama donde los
perpetradores continúan en el poder y no muestran esfuerzos reales por modificar
la dinámica social hacia un escenario más favorable para las víctimas. Esta lógica
pasa por el ocultamiento en el espacio público, siempre que esto sea factible. Como
se ha expresado anteriormente, el colectivo de personas negras no tiene la
posibilidad de actuar a partir de esta lógica, ya que no puede ocultar la causa que
provoca su discriminación – su piel negra – . Esto es distinto en el caso del colectivo
homosexual, pues sí pueden ocultar la causa que provoca su discriminación – su
orientación sexual – . Esta ocultación es un alivio a corto plazo, que permite evitar
cierto grado de acoso social a costa de un proceso de invisibilización pública, y por

LA LEYENDA DE AANG
tanto política, dando lugar a un nuevo escenario donde la persona, de manera

individual, se encuentra algo más protegida – aunque a costa de una acumulación de
sensaciones negativas – , pero el colectivo sufre una desprotección en clave de
derechos humanos, ya que, puesto que cada vez existe menor sensación de que
existe un problema, cada vez resulta más complicado convencer a los miembros del
grupo dominante de que la situación tiene que cambiar. En última instancia, las
víctimas se ven forzadas a tomar una vía que en realidad no les es beneficiosa, ante
la inacción de sus opresores, quienes ostentan el poder y, por tanto, habitualmente
no llevarán a cabo ningún cambio en sus conductas que permita una vida mejor a
sus víctimas a menos que sean concienciados de esta situación. Es decir, la aparente
única solución que las víctimas encuentran no es tal.
Los tres términos, por separado, se localizan a lo largo del relato de Avatar.
Personajes, subtramas o detalles de conducta exponen una situación sociopolítica
afectada por un trauma cultural que no se puede resolver porque la nación en el
poder hace todo lo posible por no tomar responsabilidad por sus actos, lo que
provoca conductas de ocultamiento en los individuos de las restantes naciones. En
lo que resta del apartado, me centraré en dos subtramas de la serie, donde se
muestran de manera aplicada las interconexiones entre los tres términos.
El primer caso es el de Haru, un joven campesino del Reino de la Tierra, cuyo
pueblo se encuentra bajo control de la Nación del Fuego. El personaje está
traumatizado por las acciones tomadas por el ejército invasor, que ha detenido a
todos los maestros de la tierra y trasladado a una prisión donde no puedan hacer
uso de sus habilidades. Haru está traumatizado tanto de manera individual como
colectiva. De manera individual, ha sufrido la detención de su padre, mientras que,
a nivel colectivo, como miembro del Reino de la Tierra, sufre por las acciones
perpetradas contra otros integrantes del grupo social al que pertenece, y cuya
identidad configura. Por último, también sufre por identificación, ya que él mismo
es un maestro de la tierra, por lo que se identifica con las demás personas en su
situación. De hecho, si esto no le ha ocurrido es porque el joven ha sido capaz de
escapar de las represalias de las autoridades totalitarias al haber podido ocultar sus
poderes, actuando a través de la lógica de la unacknowledgeability, recibiendo una
reducción del acoso social a corto plazo. Sin embargo, a largo plazo, el poblado se
encuentra en un estado de ansiedad permanente, con miedo a que la opresión se
recrudezca o a ser acusado por otro vecino de alguna actividad no permitida. Es
decir, los miembros del colectivo se encuentran en una situación donde la lógica de
la unacknowledgeability no ha supuesto una mejora de su situación a largo plazo.
Una alternativa la ofrece el grupo de protagonistas cuando llegan al pueblo.
Comandados por Katara, los tres protagonistas ayudan a Haru, quien inicialmente,
cuando es descubierto por ellos practicando sus habilidades en secreto, siente una
enorme ansiedad y trata de ocultarse de ellos, ante el temor a ser denunciado. Sin

YAGO PARIS
embargo, cuando descubre que sus intenciones son favorables a sus intereses, se
une a la misión que le proponen: dejar de ocultar sus habilidades y pasar a utilizarlas
para luchar contra el ejército de la Nación del Fuego, y así tratar de liberar al resto
de maestros de la tierra encarcelados.
El segundo ejemplo lo protagoniza Hama, una integrante de la Tribu del Agua.
En el pasado, durante una de las invasiones de la Nación del Fuego, la joven trató de
defender a sus vecinos utilizando sus habilidades como maestra del agua, junto con
el resto de habitantes con poderes. Sin embargo, no fueron capaces de frenar dicha
invasión y todos los maestros del agua fueron detenidos y encarcelados. Hama, por
tanto, es una persona traumatizada individual y colectivamente, pues ha tenido que
sufrir las acciones de la Nación del Fuego en sus propias carnes, así como el trauma
colectivo que estas han supuesto en la identidad colectiva de su nación, dando lugar
al desarrollo de un trauma cultural. Una vez estando en la cárcel, en la que
permanece un gran número de años, la mujer logra dominar una variante de su
poder, que consiste en controlar la sangre, puesto que está fundamentalmente
compuesta de agua. Esto le permite escapar, a costa de herir de gravedad a sus
captores. En el momento en que se desarrolla la serie, Hama es una anciana que vive
en la Nación del Fuego, aplicando la lógica de la unacknowledgeability para pasar
desapercibida. Los protagonistas de la serie interactúan con ella, y a pesar de que
inicialmente se gana la confianza de estos, posteriormente se descubre que ha
permanecido en la Nación del Fuego, en lugar de volver a su hogar, para poder
vengarse de los perpetradores que le han causado todo su sufrimiento, una actitud
que ha extendido a todos los integrantes de la nación enemiga. Es decir, su objetivo
se convierte en matar al mayor número posible de personas pertenecientes a este
grupo, sin que importe qué grado de implicación tuvieron en unas acciones que
tuvieron lugar bastantes décadas antes del momento en que transcurre la narración
del relato de la serie. En este ejemplo, se ofrece un tipo de reacción al conflicto que
tampoco soluciona el problema, pues solo aviva las llamas del odio y del rencor.
Se han expuesto dos casos donde no solo se han podido ver de manera práctica
las interconexiones entre los tres términos, sino cómo ciertas soluciones habituales
están lejos de solventar este conflicto. A lo largo del siguiente apartado, analizaré
otro tipo de solución que propone la serie, que esta vez, aunque quizás de manera
idealista, ayuda a mejorar, al menos parcialmente, el complejo contexto
sociopolítico.
6. La traumatización del testigo

LA LEYENDA DE AANG
En este apartado analizaré el arco dramático del antagonista del relato, Zuko,
pues en él se describe cómo, al escuchar los testimonios de víctimas de trauma
cultural, un perpetrador de dicho trauma puede desarrollar un proceso de
identificación que, facilitado por la empatía, dé lugar a un acercamiento entre grupos
sociales enfrentados. Zuko es el hijo del líder supremo de la Nación del Fuego,
conocido como el Señor del Fuego, y es un miembro del ejército. Su misión consiste
en capturar a Aang, para así asegurar la victoria de su nación y ganarse el respeto de
su padre. Sin embargo, determinados giros de la trama provocan que el joven se
convierta en un fugitivo, perseguido por las autoridades de su propia nación. Es
decir, él también pasa a actuar a través de la lógica de la unacknowledgeability – pues
debe ocultarse dentro del Reino de la Tierra y pasar desapercibido – . Esto lo sitúa
en un contexto diferente, homólogo al de sus víctimas, y por tanto podrá comenzar
a entender que las acciones perpetradas por su nación están lejos de ser justificables
y necesarias. A lo largo de su viaje, interactúa con diferentes personas, que han sido
traumatizadas de diferentes maneras por el ejército invasor. A partir de la escucha
de estos traumas, Zuko gana conciencia y se traumatiza, dando lugar a sentimientos
de culpa, pues es consciente de que ha sido parcialmente responsable de la creación
del trauma cultural que arrastran las diferentes naciones a las que ha ayudado a
oprimir. Esta situación ya lo coloca en un nuevo estado emocional, pues ha tomado
responsabilidad por sus actos. Sin embargo, el punto clave de su arco consiste en el
momento en que descubre que él mismo ha sido traumatizado por la misma persona
que estas otras víctimas con las que ha interactuado: el líder supremo de la Nación
del Fuego, su padre. Zuko descubre que su progenitor es el responsable de la muerte
de su madre, un suceso cuyas repercusiones ha arrastrado hasta el momento del
presente en que se desarrolla la trama, lo que, junto con el proceso de
traumatización del testigo, provoca un cambio total en su actitud, que permite que
se cambie de bando y pase a combatir a su propio padre y al ejército de la Nación del
Fuego.
Aquí se puede observar una serie de procesos psicológicos directamente
relacionados con el trauma. El hecho de que Zuko haya podido ser capaz de ponerse
en el lugar de una persona perteneciente a un grupo social completamente diferente
al suyo conecta con la idea de que el trauma viaja ‘a través de historias y culturas
para resonar dentro de las estructuras de nuestro propio ser’.16 Al mismo tiempo, la
posibilidad de que pueda viajar culturalmente es el reflejo de que el trauma no se
basa tanto ‘en lo que simplemente no sabemos de cada uno, sino de lo que todavía
no conocemos de nuestros propios pasados traumáticos’.17 Por tanto, Zuko no solo
16 R. CROWNSHAW, Trauma Studies, en The Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory, Lon-
dres 2013, pp. 167-76.
17 C. CARUTH, Trauma and experience cit., p. 11.

YAGO PARIS
aumenta su capacidad para la empatía al escuchar los testimonios de otras víctimas,

lo que lo acerca a una manera más justa de actuar, una donde se reconocen los
errores cometidos y se lucha por obrar el bien común, sino que haber asistido a
dichos testimonios ha permitido mejorar el estado de su propio trauma de la
infancia.
7. Conclusión: La empatía como un puente entre colectivos
A lo largo de este ensayo se han descrito las complejas interrelaciones que se

producen entre el trauma cultural y el tabú político, en contextos sociopolíticos
donde los perpetradores de dicho trauma son al mismo tiempo el colectivo que
ostenta un poder ganado a costa de las acciones que han provocado dicho trauma, y
que por tanto actúan para mantener el statu quo. Una de las reacciones habituales
en estos contextos consiste en la de la unacknowledgeability, donde las víctimas
encuentran un cierto alivio a corto plazo, pero perjudican su estatus social a largo
plazo. La interconexión entre estos tres términos se refleja con claridad en Avatar,
una serie de televisión que, al mismo tiempo, ofrece alternativas a esta espinosa
situación, que puedan ayudar a solventarla. La más relevante consiste en un
aumento de la empatía, que permite un proceso de identificación con la víctima,
incluso hasta el punto de que quien escucha pueda sufrir un proceso de
traumatización del testigo. Esto resulta fundamental en el caso de los perpetradores,
quienes, para evitar tener que tomar responsabilidad por sus acciones, acostumbran
a optar por convertir a sus víctimas en la otredad. La traumatización del testigo en
perpetradores permite el establecimiento de puentes de entendimiento entre estos
y sus víctimas, en un proceso que aboga por la cooperación en la búsqueda de un
bien común. Esto, al mismo tiempo, se puede aplicar a las propias víctimas, quienes,
aunque de manera entendible, también colocan a los perpetradores como la otredad.
Esto se refleja en Katara, una víctima de las acciones de la Nación del Fuego que,
como consecuencia, es inicialmente incapaz de ver a Zuko como un aliado, a pesar
de sus evidentes muestras de que no comulga con las acciones de la nación a la que
pertenece. Esto sucede porque Katara, en su dolor traumático, es incapaz de
entender el propio sufrimiento de Zuko, así como los motivos que lo han llevado a
obrar de manera éticamente cuestionable. Como se refleja en la recta final de la
serie, el doble proceso de traumatización del testigo, que ha afectado tanto a Zuko
como a Katara, permite un entendimiento entre ambos y, en el caso de la víctima –
Katara –, un proceso de perdón del perpetrador – Zuko – . Reconocer el sufrimiento
del perpetrador y dejar de entenderlo como un monstruo inhumano puede ser parte
de la solución: entender que es más lo que nos une que lo que nos separa nos sitúa
en un contexto donde solventar el trauma cultural es más factible.

Imposing An Ideology: Cultural Trauma and Political Taboo in Nebojša Slijepčević's Srbenka

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Studies in Eastern European Cinema

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/reec20

Imposing an ideology: cultural trauma and political

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Imposing an ideology: cultural trauma and political taboo

The sociopolitical context in nowadays Croatia

The political taboo of the Croatian state

Figure 1. The demonstrators protest in front of the theater’s entrance.

Figure 2. The improvisation of one of the actresses during one rehearsal.

The cultural trauma of the Serbian Croats

Figure 3. A Serbian Croat spectator offers her testimony.

Figure 4. Fragment of the testimony given by the protagonist, Nina.

The unacknowledgeability of the Serbian Croats

Figure 5. Fragment of one of the testimonies given by an actor.

Witness traumatization during the theatre rehearsals

Figure 6. One of the actresses starts crying due to witness traumatization.

Figure 7. The reenactment of Aleksandra Zec’s case.

Turning trauma into images: Srbenka and documentary theory

Figure 8. The reenactment of Aleksandra Zec’s case.

Conclusion: arts in dealing with trauma

Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 4.0 Internacional.

Keywords: trauma, cultural trauma, perpetrator trauma, documentary,

Analecta Política | Vol. 12 | No. 22 | enero-junio 2022

una aproximación no moralista al concepto de trauma, una en la que se le concede al

Perpetrator Trauma as a Possible Solution

In 1965, the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military. Anybody

enero-junio | Vol. 12 | No. 22 | Analecta Política

I. The Unsolved Cultural Trauma

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Nevertheless, in the case of communities, ethnicities, or even whole nations,

enero-junio | Vol. 12 | No. 22 | Analecta Política

as a collective. Complementary to it is Ron Eyerman’s definition, in which cultural

Taking Alexander’s previous quote, trauma is shared by the community, as it

Analecta Política | Vol. 12 | No. 22 | enero-junio 2022

enero-junio | Vol. 12 | No. 22 | Analecta Política

Analecta Política | Vol. 12 | No. 22 | enero-junio 2022

The second defense mechanism might be defined as a reinterpretation of

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By building up a new narrative –even when it is a very hard to believe one–,

The fourth defense mechanism consists of the unconscious repression of

Analecta Política | Vol. 12 | No. 22 | enero-junio 2022

In a general sense, in order to better understand why these defense mechanisms

enero-junio | Vol. 12 | No. 22 | Analecta Política

II. Perpetrator Trauma

Analecta Política | Vol. 12 | No. 22 | enero-junio 2022

As Bernhard Giesen claims, “constructions of national identity cannot escape

enero-junio | Vol. 12 | No. 22 | Analecta Política

As Giesen himself explains, using Cathy Caruth’s psychoanalytic approach,

In such psychological circumstances, or, from the perspective of the social

Analecta Política | Vol. 12 | No. 22 | enero-junio 2022

From the perspective of the social theory of trauma, Eyerman (2019b)

enero-junio | Vol. 12 | No. 22 | Analecta Política

Congo’s performance could be understood as a variation of witness

Analecta Política | Vol. 12 | No. 22 | enero-junio 2022

III. A Possible Solution to the Vicious Cycle

enero-junio | Vol. 12 | No. 22 | Analecta Política

Analecta Política | Vol. 12 | No. 22 | enero-junio 2022

was atrocious, but accepting the consequences of this situation –becoming an