By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.9
Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Original language title: Jagal
Country: denmark, norway, united_kingdom
Year: 2013
Running time: 159
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2375605/combined
Kyle says: “THE ACT OF KILLING is the improbable must-see hit of the 2013 New Directors/New Films roster. This is a powerful documentary on the aftermath of the 1965-66 military overthrow of the Indonesian government and consequent mass killings by small-time gangsters army-promoted to professional executioners of more than a million communists, including ethnic Chinese, intellectuals, workers, families, friends and acquaintances. Contrary to viewer expectations based on historical carnage such as the Holocaust, where no one saw or heard anything, or nothing like that could have happened, these Indonesian killers are not only living openly, but also enjoying prosperity as local heroes, business leaders and politicians. They share with us pride in ridding their homeland of the victims, as well as the efficiency of their methods of murdering. Repeatedly the word ‘gangsters’ is defined as ‘free men.’ Within the documentary, these former movie theater gangsters — they controlled the black market in movie tickets — are making a movie to commemorate their extermination of the communists. This bone-chilling journey into the heart of darkness includes observations such as, ‘If you feel guilty, your defenses collapse’ and ‘War crimes are defined by the winners’ and ‘Power and sadism are why people watch movies about the Nazis’ and ‘The proof is, we murdered people and were never punished.’ Director Joshua Oppenheimer is scrupulous about advancing his idea that evil implicates not only the filmmakers but also the film’s viewers; he calls his work a documentary ‘of the imagination instead of everyday occurrences.’ In the end titles, the credit ‘Anonymous’ is repeated over and over again. Every screening I have attended featured the audience bursting into applause at the start of the end titles; you could have heard a pin drop at the end of this one. 5 cats
“Seen on Sunday, March 24, 2013, New Directors/New Films at the Walter Reade Theater, Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York.”
Bruce says: “In 1965, an attempt to overthrow the despotic rule of founding father Sukarno by left-wing insurgents was quashed by the military. Fueled by success, the military ultimately toppled Sukarno; General Suharto was elevated to head-of-state. To eradicate all the neo-communist supporters and sympathizers, the Suharto military outsourced killing to death squads made up of “gangsters who would do anything for money.”
“THE ACT OF KILLING ranks as one of the most inventive documentaries ever made. Knowing that many innocent people could lose their lives if they came forward to testify how the death squads killed their parents and other relatives, the directors – one must remain anonymous to remain alive – have brought to the screen the impossible by using a different tactic. Rather than get second hand information for the documentary, the filmmakers tracked down some of the death squad leaders and talked them into re-enacting their killings. These men, proud of what they did, go to locations where the killings took place and illustrate exactly what they did forty odd years ago. They willingly play both roles of victim and executioner.
“The film’s leading man is Anwar Congo, although many other death squad leaders and henchmen talk freely to the camera and participate in the filmings. Congo is a swashbuckler, wiry and cocky. Admitting to killing at least one thousand during his death squad days, he talks freely about how Hollywood films taught him new ways of torture and killing. Congo talks about his lack of remorse, then conversely admits how the death squads ‘tried to forget all this with good music, dancing, alcohol, marijuana and ecstasy.’
“Many men in the death squads came from Pancasila Youth, a paramilitary organization numbering over three million. This organization created masses of informers. Another great finger pointing source was the editor of a major newspaper. He identified leftists, and they were brought to his building and killed in a room nicknamed ‘the office of blood.’
“The zest and zeal with which the death squad leaders re-enact their past histories is alarming. At times the film precariously threatens to cross the line into reality TV territory. This, of course, is not the case. The film’s bookends are fabulous surreal scenes of chorus girls dressed in hot pink with black gloves, high boots and black hot pants emerging from a giant fish’s mouth and dancing along a boardwalk overlooking a body of water, with mountains standing majestically in the background. The fish, built of wood, has windows on the sides and looks to be an abandoned house. One of the henchmen, Herman Koto, dresses in drag to participate in the reenactment. Like a dedicated actor, he is willing to do whatever it takes to get the scene just right. 5 cats
“(This directors’ cut of THE ACT OF KILLING screened at the 2013 New Directors/New Films Festival co-sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln center and the Museum of Modern Art. The theatrical release has been reduced to 115 minutes.)”
Jason says: “THE ACT OF KILLING opens with a group of dancing girls emerging from a covered bridge shaped like a fish. This may not seem like a particularly apt way to start a film about the criminal and paramilitary gangs who systematically murdered dissidents during and after Indonesia’s 1965 military coup, but in this case, the absurd is called for. This is one of the most self-referential, strange documentaries one can imagine, and a rare one that uses that inward gaze to find power rather than express ego.
“What director Joshua Oppenheimer does is to have his subjects shoot their own movies about what happened back then, while his behind-the-scenes video captures them speaking about murder, intimidation, and other injustices in plain view. The killers
take on various roles behind the camera and in front of it, sometimes portraying themselves, sometimes playing accomplices and victims, while Oppenheimer, co-director Christine Cynn, and their collaborators (many of them anonymous) fill the audience in with details about the country’s recent history and present.
“The men he works with.. Well, they’re a transfixing group of people, if nothing else. Anwar Congo quickly emerges as the
central figure; he’s a rail-thin, dark-skinned, silver-haloed fellow who dresses like a pimp, cheerfully talks about having been a
‘movie-theater gangster’ who later moved up to torturing and killing the government’s enemies, and how he was inspired by a desire to top the violence of Hollywood movies. Herman Koto is like his sidekick, a tubby former paramilitary fighter who winds up cross-dressing when the picture needs a weeping mother and undertakes an ill-advised run for government in the middle of production. The less-flamboyant Adi Zulkadry flies in from where he’s been living abroad for many years, and newspaper publisher Ibrahim Sinik brags about people being tortured in his office. Then there are the more conventional monsters, including a paramilitary group founded by Congo and now led by Safit Parede; gangsters like Congo and public figures like Vice President Jusuf Kalla mingle at their rallies.
“The audacity and shamelessness of these people will, hopefully, make the audience’s collective jaws drop. The more horrible things they confess to, the stranger and more surreal things become – they’ll pose themselves in angelic costumes in pastoral settings and then joyously have blood and scars applied to play their own victims; the men will appear on talk shows to discuss the project, taking great pride in ‘fighting communism’ (any enemies of the state would be scapegoated as communists), and the point is repeatedly brought up that the Indonesian word for gangster is taken from ‘free man.’ Congo is obliviously vain even as the idea seems to get around that maybe what they’re saying isn’t portraying them in the best light.
“And then there’s the end, which is sort of a brilliant challenge to the audience. There’s a pivotal scene that, if this were a conventional narrative, would be the scene that changes everything… But in addition to being a scene in the documentary, it’s also a scene in the gangsters’ movie. And these are gangsters who openly talked about being influenced by the movies. How to weigh that against this guy’s utter lack of artifice throughout the picture? Sure, it looks kind of false opposite, say, Zulkadry (who never expresses remorse but whose tendency to say little may be telling), but it’s not picked at. It puts the viewer in a position where one has to decide not so much what happened – that is never in any particular doubt – but just how complex and human these guys can be allowed to be in one’s mind. Do we allow them to realize the errors of their ways, or do we believe this apparent change must be cynical? These people have done incredible evil, but their personalities include plenty more, and there’s no boundary between truth and fiction here, or between history and myth-making.
“It’s impossible to tell, and the filmmakers make sure of it. That can often be little more than just trying to show their own
cleverness, but this is a knot that may be impossible to unravel. It makes THE ACT OF KILLING just as much about film and storytelling as it is about atrocities, though without trivializing the latter. That’s pretty amazing, making this a film one’s unlikely to soon forget. 4.75 cats
“Seen 28 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)”
Chris says: “As the old saying goes, THE ACT OF KILLING must be seen to be believed. Few other nonfiction films swerve so fluidly between riotous absurdity and appalling horror; this one’s often both simultaneously. In 1965, Indonesia’s military overthrew its government. Consequently, death squads composed of gangsters-for-hire and various paramilitary groups slaughtered over two million communist citizens. Nearly half a century later, director Joshua Oppenheimer traveled to Indonesia to interview some of these surviving death squad leaders. None of them were ever punished for their acts—after all, what they did was legal in their regime; to this day, they’re perceived as pillars of a society where youth paramilitary outfits continue to flourish.
“Oppenheimer could have profiled these men, left it at that and ended up with an interesting film, even something worthy of Errol Morris or Werner Herzog (two of this film’s producers). Instead, he did something nearly brilliant and kind of crazy: he asked the men to make a movie of sorts, one recreating the various ways in which they exterminated the communists. Much of THE ACT OF KILLING is a behind-the-scenes account of those efforts. A few of the recreations take a deliberately cinematic, ‘entertaining’ approach: one meticulously stylizes itself like a 1940s gangster noir, complete with heavy shadows and period
suits, while another features a chorus of dancing girls, exotic, colorful locales like a scenic waterfall, one of the more portly men
done up in elaborate drag (wearing sparkly, revealing outfits that would make Divine blush) and a rendition of a 1960s movie theme that you’ll never, ever hear the same way again.
“Some of the recreations are far more realistic and startlingly so. When a depiction of an attack on a rural village casts hundreds of present-day villagers as victims, the filming itself ends up so raw and intense that more than a few ‘victims’ are genuinely traumatized by the experience. The whole process is highly disturbing to watch, all but forcing us to ask, why produce these recreations? Are they meant to shock the audience in showing how brutal these acts could be? Or are they more for the killers’ benefit, an attempt to get at least a few of them (and by default, the society at large) to realize, decades removed, how immoral these acts were and what real implications they had on their victims?
“As the recreations play out, their impact on the killers is not always crystal clear. Many seem generally unaffected by the acts, none more so than Adi Zulkadry, whom we first see exiting a plane wearing a black t-shirt with the word ‘Apathetic’ in big yellow letters sprawled across the front. Zulkadry is unrepentant to an extreme regarding his participation in the killings—he gives off a sense of being at peace with himself, only becoming cagey when Oppenheimer pushes the notion that he did anything immoral. In contrast, consider Anwar Congo, one of the most revered killers whom the film slowly gravitates toward. An almost beatific, gaunt, white-haired elder, he initially makes excuses for the killings, telling us he learned to live with them by partaking in a lot of ‘eating, boozing, dancing’ (promptly doing a pathetic little jig for the camera). Then, as the recreations commence, we discover just how haunted the killings have left him. One of his recurring nightmares even becomes fodder for a dream sequence in the recreations, while Congo himself plays the victim in the gangster noir pastiche.
“A simpler film would conclude with Congo full of remorse and begging the director or perhaps one of the victim’s descendants for forgiveness. Instead, Oppenheimer conveys this project’s moral complexity with two astonishing final scenes. The first illustrates how wide the chasm between action and perception distressingly remains for Congo, while the second captures, with chilling austerity, an involuntary guttural reaction to that chasm when he directly faces his own past. 5 cats”