CMTS Dialogues

The text discusses the legacy of the Cold War in Canada by looking at Prime Minister Diefenbaker's "Diefenbunkers"-eleven nuclear fallout shelters constructed in secret in the late 1950s to protect the Canadian national and provincial governments from a nuclear strike. While many of these sites have fallen into disrepair or been sold off, one such site has recently been repurposed as "Canada's Cold War Museum" with the explicit purpose of fostering "interest and critical understanding of the Cold War." The text questions how the site, its museumological apparatus, and the community curation of various rooms in the museum, constructs a "Cold War" for use in Canadian memory; questions the validity of considering the Diefenbunker as a memory site, following Pierre Nora's seminal concept; and explores the role of fictions in the interactive exhibits that aim to engage Canadian youth-in particular-in the issues of nuclear war, emergency measures, and the role of civil defence. The museum and its displays are interrogated for their performance of and possibilities for inscription, re-inscription, and resignification of Canadian cultural memory.

The Act of Killing is a documentary film on the Indonesian genocide that took place between October 1965 and March 1966, during which time an estimated 500,000 to 2.5 million accused communists, including landless farmers, unionized workers, labour organizers, intellectuals and ethnic Chinese Indonesians, were killed. However, much of the film is dedicated to fictional re-enactments of the 1965-66 killings. Oppenheimer's approach is to bring into relief the contours of the extermination of communists in Indonesia by inviting former death-squad leaders and paramilitary gangsters to re-enact the killings in whatever ways they choose. They opt at times for a realist aesthetic and at other times for genres as diverse as Hollywood westerns, film noir gangster movies, and glitzy musicals. The text explores the aesthetic and political consequences springing from this modality of representation while comparing the film to other representative testimonial documentaries of genocides and extermination.