The land keeps the score: Ghosting environments in documentary re-enactments

Abstract

In this article, I look at environmental agency in Sven Augustijnen’s Spectres (2011) and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012). Both films are structured through re-enactments of political violence that involve perpetrators as protagonists. In this context, I study the traces of disruptions that exceed the agency of human makers and protagonists. I argue that landscapes can ‘ghost’ filmic re-enactments by refusing access or communication. Seen through the lens of decolonial theory, these spectral disobediences connect to the shadow side of rational thought and action. The environmental agencies in these films act as ghosts by pointing to different orders of remembering, resisting a singular view of contested sites of trauma. They push against the framing of truth as a document to be extracted by the camera. I conclude that environments can both store memories and prevent these memories from being retold in seemingly innocent ways. This refusal unfixes the traditional distance between filmmaker, protagonist and environment. It prompts viewers to seek layered truths and healing informed by accountability.