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The documentary The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer, 2013) is a recording of the process of how perpetrators look back on the crime of killing (the allegedly communist) opponents of the military regime in Indonesia after the army’s coup d’etat in 1965-66. This film is distinct from many other documentaries about war and conflict, in that it neither uses the expository mode often used for historical documentaries – the mode that tells the viewer confidently what happened, often by using survivor interviews, re-enactment, and iconic historical props – nor the observational or ‘fly-on-the-wall’ mode dominant in contemporary war documentaries resulting from embedded journalism. Instead, this documentary employs a mix of reflexive and poetic frames (cf. Potzsch, 2013; Bonner, 2013). The challenge of ‘representing the unpresentable’ visibly informs the structure of the film, while the scope of the historical drama is evoked, not represented, by using theatrical props and settings. Assembled almost haphazardly and often veering on the grotesque, the eerie murder weapons, poky interrogation rooms, and fantasy attire establish a metonymic connection to the past. The effect is chilling and utterly perplexing. This paper will discuss how the films strange material scaffolding allows the main in the The Act of Killing to re-enact the drama of the past as the perpetrators they once were. Re-enactment is in fact one of the key-terms in the film as it quietly establishes a veiled connection between trauma and performance (or performativity) that allows for a sense of continuity between the past and the present, both on the personal level and politically.

Heritage and Social Media explores how social media reframes our understanding and experience of heritage. Through the idea of ‘participatory culture’ the book begins to examine how social media can be brought to bear on the encounter with heritage and on the socially produced meanings and values that individuals and communities ascribe to it. To highlight the specific changes produced by social media, the book is structured around three major themes: Social Practice. New ways of understanding and experiencing heritage are emerging as a result of novel social practices of collection, representation, and communication enabled and promoted by social media. Public Formation. In the presence of widely available social technologies, peer-to-peer activities such as information and media sharing are rapidly gaining momentum, as they increasingly promote and legitimate a participatory culture in which individuals aggregate on the basis of common interests and affinities. Sense of Place. As computing becomes more pervasive and digital networks extend our surroundings, social media and technologies support new ways to engage with the people, interpretations and values that pertain to a specific territorial setting. Heritage and Social Media provides readers with a critical framework to understand how the participatory culture fostered by social media changes the way in which we experience and think of heritage. By introducing readers to how social media are theorized and used, particularly outside the institutional domain, the volume reveals through groundbreaking case studies the emerging heritage practices unique to social media. In doing so, the book unveils the new issues that are emerging from these practices and the new space for debate and critical argumentation that is required to illuminate what can be done in this burgeoning sector of heritage work.

The use of new media in the service of cultural heritage is a fast growing field, known variously as virtual or digital heritage. New Heritage, under this denomination, broadens the definition of the field to address the complexity of cultural heritage such as the related social, political and economic issues. This book is a collection of 20 key essays, of authors from 11 countries, representing a wide range of professions including architecture, philosophy, history, cultural heritage management, new media, museology and computer science, which examine the application of new media to cultural heritage from a different points of view. Issues surrounding heritage interpretation to the public and the attempts to capture the essence of both tangible (buildings, monuments) and intangible (customs, rituals) cultural heritage are investigated in a series of innovative case studies.