This is the first of two essays on Joshua Oppenheimer’s deeply disturbing 2013 documentary. It serves as an introduction and contains no spoilers. A companion essay Catching Conscience is a detailed critique for those who have seen the film.
The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
― Hannah Arendt
In 2014, in a nearly empty Bangkok movie theatre, Diogenes saw Julien Oppenheimer’s documentary, The Act of Killing for the first time. It was unbearable. Diogenes frequently looked away, unable to take in the events he was witnessing on the screen, usable to comprehend, unable to formulate a reaction to the film’s searing, surrealistic truth-telling.
Months later, he saw it again, this time on multiple television screens at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Bangkok. In this environment also, the actual content of the film was impossible to absorb. The club’s convivial atmosphere worked against comprehension, even though the director was there for a Q and A.
Now, in the light of the horrors of Gaza, Diogenes is watching The Act of Killing again, this time not looking away. He is allowing himself the discomfort he once avoided, perhaps because he finds himself now looking away from the atrocities being broadcast on Al-Jazeera.
As we know, atrocities have taken many shapes throughout history well before and after the Holocaust. The NEVER AGAIN monuments in Dachau and Auschwitz are quaint, given subsequent forgotten genocides.
So let us examine, and seek to understand, this genocide.
Indonesia 1965-66
In 1965-66, over a million “communists”, mostly Chinese, were killed by the newly established Suharto government, that came to power in a US backed military coup. The former Indonesian President, Sukarno, was seen as a danger to the American hegemony in the region and beyond.
The atrocities, sometimes described as a genocide or politicide, were instigated by the Indonesian Army under Suharto. Research and declassified documents demonstrate the Indonesian authorities received support from foreign countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965–66
The article makes a distinction between politicide and genocide because the atrocities were ignited not only by the political issues, but by long festering ethnic tensions between the Muslim majority and the Chinese. Much of the killing was subcontracted by the Indonesian Military to gangs and militias, including the 500,000 member Pancasila Youth paramilitary organization that exists to this day.
Here's a five-minute video account.1
This genocide was a brilliant success. Not only was the PKI (Parti Kommunist Indonesia) eradicated, but Suharto remained in power for over three decades. Many of those who committed the murders not only were never punished; they went on to rule and prosper. Decades later, they are still the the “Big Men”, the Orang Besar, ruling over villages, towns, cities with a combination of corrupt political power and coercive gangster intimidation.
The victims disappear from public records or don’t dare tell their stories. Joshua Oppenheimer was forbidden to interrogate them. They are silent.
For a moment imagine that the Nazis won the war in Europe and that, in the decades after, the Konzentrationlager commandants and the Einsatzgruppen officers have settled into comfortable retirements, many having gone on to successful careers in politics, media, business. They were able to build their fortunes on the stolen properties of their Jewish victims, the empty houses, the jewelry surrendered at the camps. They hug their little Aryan grandchildren.
The ideological and cultural permission structures would still be intact: the propaganda, the music, the rallies, the youth movements. Nazi narratives that inspired the commission of genocide would still be celebrated on the media, be taught in schools, be commemorated on holidays.
Our starting point for THE ACT OF KILLING was thus the question: how had this society developed to the point that its leaders brag about their own crimes against humanity, recounting atrocities with a cheer that is both celebratory and also intended as a threat? – J.O.
Over the course of a few weeks at the end of 2001, early 2002, it was as though I was realizing I’d come to Germany 40 years after the Holocaust to find the Nazis still in power. But unlike the Holocaust, nobody really knew about this. As I dug deeper, it turned out that the West had supported the killings, so the killers were shameless in talking about the killings because they thought the world had supported them. Also, because they were insisting to themselves, rather desperately it turned out, that what they did was justified. So there was this kind of insistence or assertion of impunity in the boasting. – J.O.
The problem of evil is agonizingly difficult to approach on film.
Fictional films like A Clockwork Orange, Winter Light, Viridiana, Come and See, Salo, and others, have had attempted it as have TV series like Breaking Bad. And there are so many cinematic Macbeths. We watch, mostly from the outside, as atrocities happen to others, or as others become the purveyors of atrocities. What we often witness in these narratives is the perpetrator of evil becoming inured to it. Macbeth, Flyora, and Walter White lose their humanity as their atrocities accumulate.
Documentaries, many of them stemming from the holocaust also have portrayed the face of evil. Night and Fog, Shoah and The Sorrow and the Pity come to mind, as do filmed accounts of the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments. In these movies, we see the social, political, forces, that give rise to casual brutality and mass murder. Again, we stand outside gazing in at either the victims or the perpetrators, or both. The documentary narrations do our judging for us.
We may see the face of evil, but getting behind those eyes is almost impossible.
Joshua Oppenheimer rejects the “fly on the wall” methodology of “objective” cinema vérité. Even Titicut Follies, even Warrendale.
For my part, as a filmmaker, I’ve never been a fly-on-the-wall documentarian. I have no commitment to that method. I believe it’s a lie. I believe every time you film anybody, you create reality with that person—whether it’s fiction or nonfiction. If you acknowledge that filming is an occasion where people express things they might not otherwise express, that offers a much more insightful analysis of why documentaries—even of the fly-on-the-wall variety—are powerful. J.O.
The Act of Killing, interrogates evil in a way no other film has – ever.
Oppenheimer presents us with a mass murderer presenting himself. The film explores mass murder not only as an historical event, but as a psychic construction – a willed act of the human imagination. It presents the narrative correlatives, buttressed by socio-political structures, that enable the human imagination to actually commit crimes against humanity and then to cognitively buffer memories of those crimes so that the perpetrators maintain their power and their sanity. He is not a fly on the wall; he is a gadfly.
Anwar Congo
Anwar Congo, our protagonist, executed perhaps a thousand “communists” in the vicinity of Medan, Sumatra. He’s now in his 70’s, with an engaging smile and a twinkle in the eye. He’s the kind of grandfather everybody would like to have. It’s hard to believe he was once a brutal killer.
His side won. Not only did Anwar never face justice, he never experienced an iota of regret. Instead, he became a revered celebrity in his city of Medan in Northern Sumatra, boasting of his exploits, proudly addressing the still powerful Pemuda Pancasila at mass rallies. The entire apparatus of genocide has not been dismantled. It still celebrates itself in full uniform and full strength. Congo dances at the rallies. He is the dancing founding father, the dapper mass murderer who smiles and cha-cha-chas.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Joshua Oppenheimer gives Anwar and his collaborators the opportunity to reenact their acts of killing by making, a beautiful family movie in which the executioner-protagonists will, once again, return to those thrilling days of yesteryear. Anwar and his comrades will reproduce their heroic exploits in the manner of the great Hollywood studios.
This is who we are. Step by step we will tell the story of what we did when we were young.
Oppenheimer’s camera will record for us is the production of Anwar’s filem within Joshua’s film.
This leads us to a crucial aspect of the acts of killing in 1966 and The Act of Killing in 2014. We are in the presence of the imaginative constructs that lead to mass murder. How do we understand them? How does the murderer-mogul Anwar Congo remember his past crimes?
He will employ Hollywood heroism to excuse and glorify his acts. The narratives established by John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart powerfully influenced the actual killings.
In the early days of research (2005), I discovered that the army recruited its killers in Medan from the ranks of movie theatre gangsters (or preman bioskop) who already hated the leftists for their boycott of American movies – the most profitable in the cinema. I was intrigued by this relationship between cinema and killings, although I had no idea it would be so deep. Not only did Anwar and his friends know and love the cinema, but they dreamed of being on the screen themselves, and styled themselves after their favorite characters. They even borrowed their methods of murder from the screen. – J.O.
Now, the one-time murderers will reenact those killings using the very same tropes. Once again, they will ride to the rescue of Indonesia wearing cowboy hats and fedoras.
Like Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, or Shakespeare’s Bottom Anwar Congo exercises complete control of his opus. He casts it, chooses the locations, designs the costumes, applies the make-up, conceives of the special effects, arranges the lighting. Of course, he plays all the major roles, dying his hair to regain his youthful appearance.
But in the course its making, Anwar Congo – producer, director, star embarks on an extraordinary psychological journey recorded in unblinking detail by Oppenheimer.
These are questions of critical importance to understanding the imaginative procedures by which human beings persecute each other, and how we then go on to build (and live in) societies founded on systemic and enduring violence J.O.
As the tapes of the dailies came in, Anwar views them on his television set with the critical eye of a would-be Scorsese. He sits beside his co-star and co-perpetrator back in 1966 – Hermann Koto.
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxTKozLWSKSNspIdMq7pA8hQLkA5Der8kQ?si=7mlKV7PpHbZZl34K
It would be easy for Oppenheimer’s film to judge Anwar, or to turn him into a monster, or a mockery. But what we see throughout the film is Anwar’s humanity. We see him awake and asleep. We see him collecting bribes from Chinese shop owners and at Pancasila political rallies. We experience Anwar Congo contextualized not only in the film he’s making, but in the privileged and haunted life he’s leading. The institutions around him confirm the validity his past. They celebrate a glory that never was. They reaffirm the collective forgetting.
Perhaps the overriding irony of Oppenheimer’s approach is that the stories of the victims he was forbidden to film do get told. In allowing the killers to transform their memories into cinematic spectacle, The Act of Killing depicts the horror of the the Indonesian genocide more effectively than a Sorrow and the Pity approach ever would. There is no possibility of forgetting these acts, these killings.
America also forgets:
American society, infused as it is with violence, is in a constant state of collective forgetting.
We've all seen innumerable beatings, shootings, stabbings, etc. on movie and TV screens, but how many of us have ever knocked someone unconscious or stabbed or shot someone? How many of us have actually seen a murder being committed? Our society is infused with violence, but those who actually commit violent acts are still seen as outside of society. The Act of Killing brings us into these people's neighborhoods, homes, and minds. It forces us all to understand that when the act of murder is taken lightly, it is immeasurably easier for things like the Holocaust, the Indonesian killings of 1965-66, the Rwanda genocide, chemical attacks in Syria, or even the Sandy Hook massacre to take place.
Ethics on Film: Carnegie Council
In the USA, mass killings occur on an almost weekly basis, but the perpetrators are either killed, suicided, or locked away. We watch wars, some of which our country engages in or perpetrates, but we give almost no thought to the actual action of killing, whether from a police issued handgun, an AK-47, a bayonet or a bomb-bay. Police officers and our armed forces are permitted to kill with occasional impunity on the streets and in foreign wars.
We know the victims, but we never know the killers, most of whom never know themselves.
But two American screen villains do, famously, justify their acts.
In Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, speaking “truth” about “the horror” of the US action in Southeast Asia, Brando’s Kurtz is highly aestheticized. He’s lit like an apparition, like a ghost, like a god -- and his voice resonates his peculiar justification for his crimes.
Mistah Kurtz acquired his evil from the locals, from the barbarous “they” who hacked off every inoculated arm of children the civilized American forces had come to save with Western medicine. Kurtz adopted their barbarism.
You have to have men who are moral, and yet who will utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion without judgement – without judgement. Because it’s judgement that defeats us.
In a swaying cabin on Vienna’s Prater Wheel, Harry Lime speaks another truth to his old pal – it’s the capitalism, stupid. It’s only a business.
Nobody talks about human beings. Governments don’t. why should we? They talk about the people, the proletariat, I talk about the suckers, the mugs. It’s the same thing.
Both these perpetrators wind up dead. We walk away from the horror like Holly Martins in the cemetery.
Somehow, in his reenactment of Hollywood tropes, Anwar Congo gets closer to the source than any of these two imagined American characters.
The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.
The Act of Killing depicts not the King, but one of the thousands of nobodies that do his bidding. More profoundly, this documentary depicts the complex psychological and mimetic process by which a murderer catches his own conscience. Anwar views the dailies and comes to an agonizing recognition.
In a future essay, Diogenes will examine Anwar’s journey in detail. For now, we’ll have a pause to avoid spoilers, In the gap, perhaps you will want to view The Act of Killing yourself. Here is the IMDB link. You can watch it on Prime. Don’t look away.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2375605/
It must be noted that the image 4.01 and 4.11 minute was actually from the brutal event in Thailand called "Thammasat University massacre" which student protesters accused of being communists killed by the far-right groups in October 1976.