ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two fi lms whose subjects are genocide and the offi - cial silence that followed in their wake-one concerns events during Pol Pot’s regime in the mid-1970s when nearly two million people, roughly a quarter of the Cambodian population, were systematically destroyed by means of starvation, overwork, torture, and execution; the other occurred in Indonesia in the mid-1960s after the fall of the Sukarno regime when a new government under General Suharto ordered the military to execute as many as two million Indonesians suspected of being communists. I am
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deeply moved by both these works: S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (S-21: la machine de mort Khmère rouge, dir. Rithy Panh, France/Cambodia, 2003, 101 min.) and The Poet: Unconcealed Poetry (Puisi tak terkuburka, dir. Garin Nugroho, Indonesia, 2001, 90 min.). They each recuperate memory using very different strategies of re-enactment and performance to utter speechless horror and shatter lingering silence.
