I
wouldn’t be at all surprised if The Act
of Killing wins the Oscar for Best Documentary. It should certainly be nominated at
least, unless it’s the kind of documentary that travels too close to the edge
to receive that sort of mainstream awards-ceremony attention. This brave and deeply powerful film —
which both re-enacts and comments in detail on the government-sponsored massacre
of thousands, perhaps millions, of suspected Communists and ethnic Chinese throughout Indonesia in
1965 and 1966 — is directed by American-born filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer (who
currently lives overseas), and is executive-produced by master documentarians
Werner Herzog and Errol Morris.
I
knew Josh when we were both in college here in Boston nearly twenty years ago
now, and we went out on a couple of dates back then. I remember how smart and precocious he was, easily drawn to
the bizarre, and always unassumingly dressed in all black: from boots to jeans to t-shirt to
leather jacket. I recall how he
had scrawled a variety of slogans and snippets from poems across his dorm-room
walls. He told me at the time that
he was interested in the act of politically infiltrating certain kinds of
spaces. For instance, he had
attended an “ex-gay” camp just to gauge the atmosphere and see what actually
happens there, and to what sort of people. His student films were totally offbeat and distinctively
envisioned, and I knew that he’d probably do something important and fearless
someday. With The Act of Killing, he most definitely has.
Josh’s
work on the film began a decade ago, when he was commissioned to make a documentary series about globalization and Indonesian culture. He learned to speak the language that
way, and he was also introduced over time to his film’s subjects, the men of a paramilitary
organization called Pancasila Youth who had carried out the 1965 - 1966 massacres
and still boast about the killings with pride to this day. Many are now employed and protected as
officials of the Indonesian government, often terrorizing victims’ families
into not discussing or publicly acknowledging the crimes.
Oppenheimer
noticed that whenever he met and interviewed these men, their telling him about the murders was never
enough; they wanted to show him how
and where they’d committed their crimes.
Sadly, some in Indonesian culture still regard them as heroes. At one point in the documentary, we see
a handful of these men paraded onto the set of a nationally televised talk show,
where their killings of long ago are reverently applauded by the host and the
audience.
It’s
partly for this reason that Oppenheimer has said the film is not about
Indonesia’s past, but rather about Indonesia’s present. His focus in the film is a man named
Anwar Congo, who executed by hand over 1,000 of the killings in Medan, North
Sumatra. Though his age (and
grandchildren) have somewhat softened and tamed him, Anwar makes for a chilling
figure. He’s happy to demonstrate
for the camera, on multiple occasions, how he strangled his victims with wire, in
order to minimize the loss of blood while they were being killed. He stages these demonstrations in the
very same locations where he originally committed the killings.
For
anyone with a shred of conscience, which Oppenheimer was clearly aware that
Anwar Congo still possesses, such re-enactments will eventually begin to exact their
own psychological price. But the
true genius of the film is how much further it carries the scope of the
re-enactments themselves. (And
it’s worth noting that the filmed re-enactments were funded by grants from
academic and human-rights organizations.)
The templates for the re-enactments are often classic Hollywood film
genres: Westerns, gangster flicks,
film noir. The most elaborate
re-enactment features the original members of Pancasila Youth pillaging and
burning down an entire village.
I
haven’t stopped thinking about how trenchantly effective this device is since I
watched the documentary a week ago now. The Act of Killing is a film in which the medium of film itself forces the documentary’s subjects into a
gradual confrontation with their own sense of morality, especially in the case
of Anwar Congo. In the film’s
pivotal gangster-based sequence, Anwar plays the victim who’s being beaten by
his scenery-chewing sidekick Herman Koto, and yes, Anwar is eventually blindfolded and
subjected to his own death-by-strangulation-with-wire technique. The perpetrator has willingly backed
himself into his own gruesome corner, one that he can barely muster the energy
to stagger away from thereafter.
Early in the documentary, Anwar excitedly claims, “No other film has
ever used our method,” and he’s absolutely right about that.
Another
of the Pancasila Youth members who’s interviewed in the film is worth mentioning, too: Adi Zulkadry, perhaps the most
articulate, outspoken, and frightening of the documentary’s interviewees. Defiantly unapologetic about his past
crimes, he gets into a heated argument on camera with Oppenheimer as they’re
driving together in a car. Zulkadry
throws out the old line that history is written by “the winners” and says that
he’d be glad to be put on trial at the international court in the Hague because
then “I’ll be famous.” To prove
his hegemonic point, he challenges Oppenheimer, staring directly into the
camera, and rhetorically asks him why the mass genocide of Native American
Indians in the United States was never punished either.
From
this point onward, the film becomes increasingly nightmarish and surreal, and
it also cuts much closer to the bone.
Some dreamlike song-and-dance numbers are interspliced with the brutal
re-enactments in artfully hyperrealistic counterpoint. But Oppenheimer knows that his job for
nearly the entire time is to be an alert observer. We never see him on screen, though we do hear his voice a
few times when he’s directing, responding to, or sometimes interrogating his
subjects.
At
the most profound moment in the film, after Anwar requests to watch a video of the
gangster re-enactment on his television (with his two young grandsons sitting
on his lap), he remarks that he does feel what his victims felt, almost as a
way of trying to convince himself of his own sense of empathy. Josh calmly (yet incredulously) replies
that, no, Anwar does not feel what his victims felt because he knows that he’s only acting
for a film, whereas his victims knew that they were being killed. The film’s climax, in which Anwar
physically acknowledges but cannot expurgate his guilt, is excruciating and
unflinching.
The Act of Killing
will no doubt alter the game rules for the documentary form, opening it
up to an intense, imaginative realm that’s never quite been approached. It’s among
the most indelible explorations of moral accountability I’ve
seen.