In reference to Embrace of the Serpent (Guerra, 2015) and The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer, 2013).
By Joseph Gilson
“Is it my Chullachaqui?” he asks, sitting on the bank of the Amazon, gazing down at a photograph of himself for the first time.
“This is a memory,” he replies, “A moment that has passed.”
Karamakate, the shaman-warrior hero of Ciro Guerra’s breath-taking black and white fable, Embrace of the Serpent, looks down again at the crystallised image, this alien object that he holds in his hands. He sees neither time nor himself. He sees his Chullachaqui. The legend of the Chullachaqui tells of an enigmatic and deceitful being that lives deep in the rainforest and can morph into an almost exact replica of a human, a mirror held up to your vision of yourself. This being, explains Karamakate, may look just like you, but is empty, hollow, holding no memory, drifting like a ghost, lost in time, without time.
Theo, the photographer, sees a timeline from which the image has been lifted, something linear and unwavering. The moment has passed, but it is connected to the present, and then to the future. And it is destined to be forever suspended as a memory. He upholds Roland Barthes’ notion of the punctum; the moment of personal poignancy when looking at a photograph. Theo sees a mnemonic symbol, an object that clings dearly to time and never lets go.
Guerra saw the legend of the Chullachaqui as a parable that could speak to the modern world, for, “we are living at a time where people are communicating through virtual avatars.” He saw the mirror held up by the Chullachaqui as the personal computer and phone screen, the thin layer of light separating the physical world with the infinite realm of the virtual. French sociologist Jean Baudrillard proposed the question of what would happen when the divide between the real and virtual worlds was no longer recognised, when we didn’t have this perceivable schism – the screen, for example – separating the two? He glimpsed into this state and witnessed the hyperreality: “The whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum. Not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.”
What the Chullachaqui can be seen as, then, is the embodiment of an entity perpetuating its own simulacrum, its weightless, untethered existence. So what if we explore the Chullachaqui of memory? In Embrace of the Serpent, Karamakate’s memory was instilled into a physical photograph which he saw as a fraudulent kind of other. Another recent film perhaps illustrates this memory condition to a greater and more chilling effect - that being Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary, The Act of Killing. Herein lies the surreal case of Anwar Congo.
Towards the beginning of Oppenheimer’s film we see Anwar Congo strolling down the centre of a bustling street in Medan, Indonesia. He divides the crowds before him like Moses parting the Red Sea. A pristine white suit jacket hangs from his shoulders. He is Don Fanucci from The Godfather II -a pastiche at least. Congo, the perpetrator of mass killings of communists in 1965-66 in Indonesia, describes himself as a “movie-theatre gangster.” What we witness throughout this film is his attempted retreat into a refuge of fiction, a disappearance of his actual self into layers upon layers of make-believe that shroud the psychological consequences of his memory – the blood-stained images of his victims. This is why he jumps at Oppenheimer’s idea to re-enact his killings in any manner Congo sees fit. These range from lavish musical numbers to spaghetti westerns, dream sequences to dimly lit noir movies. Wouldn’t these just add to the make-believe and distance himself even further from the real?
Errol Morris, a producer on the film, asks, “Is it possible to kill 1,000,000 people and then forget about it? Or if it has been erased from consciousness, is there an unconscious residue, a stain that remains?” As Congo plays out his atrocities in his apparent realm of fiction, his intention is clearly to add more layers. What begins to transpire, however, is that the layers of his grandiose simulacrum in which he is but a “movie-theatre gangster” begin to unravel. In Henrik Ibsen’s play, Peer Gynt, the titular character peels away layers of an onion to reveal its, and symbolically his own, emptiness. Similarly, Congo’s participation in his re-enactments serves only to reveal to him the emptiness on which his layers of fiction are built.
In several chronological scenes, Oppenheimer illuminates firstly Congo’s attempted construction of his memory simulacrum, and then the subsequent unravelling of this fantasy. Firstly, the director situates Congo in a barber shop, the mirror in front of him highlighting his split self; the real and the dream. He then begins to transform. His hair is dyed black and he clicks a set of false teeth into place. He morphs into his Chullachaqui of memory. However, because he witnessed this transformation as he stared back at himself through the mirror, the divide remains. As Baudrillard states, “To simulate is not simply to feign. Feigning leaves the reality principle intact.”
In the next re-enactment, a prop body enters the frame. It is Congo made of papier-mâché, it is Congo’s Chullachaqui; it is empty, hollow, holding no memory. The real Congo sits behind the camera in his director’s chair, watching his replica’s throat grotesquely being slit. Again, the reality principle remains intact, the distinction is clear: one Congo is the real, one is the character.
Next, Congo and his associates are interviewed on a television chat show. Oppenheimer shoots from within the control room, a close up of Congo’s face is displayed on no less than 14 television screens. The division is clear to the viewer, and the layers of his simulacrum have run amok. However, as Congo celebrates himself and his malevolent actions across time, he crucially no longer recognises the division. Here, he does not witness either his transformation into his Chullachaqui of memory or its physical manifestation. He is now enveloped in the sugar-coated simulacrum of a victor’s history.
We return to the icy tones of the noir re-enactment. Congo, once the interrogator, becomes the interrogated. He is blindfolded, bound to a chair, and a length of wire is placed around his slender neck – the exact same length of wire he used on his victims all those years ago. If we can place ourselves in Congo’s body for a moment: our eyes are open but we see only darkness, we are breathing heavily but inconsistently, an unseen voice screams questions but we can’t make them out, and the length of wire slowly begins to tighten around our neck. We can’t see the cameras anymore. The film set, the director, the associates, the layers and layers of simulacrum are all gone. There is only the wire. We begin to retch. Slowly at first, as if something from deep within is trying to escape. And then suddenly very violently.
Like our embodiment of Congo, in this brief moment he himself had embodied a victim of himself. The simulacrum, the Chullachaqui, had been shattered and only the stain remained. That unconscious residue that had been shrouded by images of fantasy, pastiche, fiction, but was nonetheless waiting, waiting to release Anwar Congo’s memories as they were, in their raw and brutal reality.
We all have our own Chullachaquis. The dissociation we feel, the illusions we tell ourselves, the flashing images beyond the screen, floating in a timeless virtual world. The next time you see your Chullachaqui staring back at you, it is important to remember, you are not alone. You are there too.
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