The Act of Killing is a 2012 documentary film about the Indonesian killings of 1965–66
directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, and co-directed by Christine Cynn and an anonymous Indonesian.
It is a Danish-British-Norwegian co-production, presented by Final Cut for Real in Denmark
and produced by Signe Byrge Sørensen. The executive producers were Werner Herzog, Errol
Morris, Joram ten Brink, and Andre Singer. It is a Docwest project of the University
of Westminster. It won the 2013 European Film Award for Best Documentary, the Asia Pacific
Screen Award, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the
86th Academy Awards. The Act of Killing won best documentary at
the 2014 BAFTA awards. In accepting the award, Oppenheimer asserted that the United States
and the United Kingdom have "collective responsibility" for "participating in and ignoring" the crimes,
which was omitted from the video BAFTA posted online.
The Indonesian government has responded negatively to the movie. Its presidential spokesman on
foreign affairs, Teuku Faizasyah, claimed that the movie is misleading with respect
to its portrayal of Indonesia. A sequel to the film, The Look of Silence,
is scheduled to be released in 2015.
Synopsis The film focuses on the Indonesian killings
of 1965–66, an ostensibly anti-communist purge in which more than 500,000 people were
killed. When Suharto overthrew Sukarno, the President of Indonesia, following the failed
coup of the 30 September Movement in 1965, the gangsters Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry
in Medan were promoted from selling black market movie theatre tickets to leading the
most powerful death squad in North Sumatra. They also extorted money from ethnic Chinese
before killing them. Anwar is said to have personally killed 1,000 people by methods
such as strangulation with wire. Today, Anwar is revered as a founding father
of the right-wing paramilitary organization Pemuda Pancasila that grew out of the death
squads. The organization is so powerful that its leaders include government ministers who
are openly involved in corruption, election rigging, clearing people from their land for
developers, and genocide. Invited by Oppenheimer, Anwar and his friends
recount and re-enact their experiences and some of their killings for the cameras, and
make dramatic scenes depicting their memories and feelings about the killings. The scenes
are produced in the style of their favorite film genres: gangster, western, and musical.
Various aspects of Anwar and his friends' filmmaking process are shown, but as they
begin to dramatize Anwar's own nightmares, the fiction scenes begin to take over the
film's form, leading the film to become increasingly surreal. Oppenheimer has called the result
"a documentary of the imagination". Some of Anwar's friends state that the killings
were wrong, while others worry about the consequences of the story on their public image.
After Anwar plays a victim, he cannot continue. He says that he feels what his victims have
felt. Oppenheimer, from behind the camera, states that it was worse for the victims because
they knew they were going to be killed, whereas Anwar was only acting. Anwar then expresses
doubts over whether or not he has sinned, tearfully saying he does not want the memories
of what he did to come back to him. He revisits the rooftop where he claims many of his killings
took place, and gags repeatedly. The dancers from the film's theatrical poster are seen
before the credits begin to roll. Production
In 2001, while conducting interviews for their 2003 film The Globalisation Tapes, Oppenheimer
and Cynn began delving into the Indonesian killings of 1965–66. After moving up the
ranks of those involved with the killings, Oppenheimer's interviews led him to meet Anwar
Congo in 2005. The film was shot mostly in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia, between 2005
and 2011. After seeing an early preview of The Act of Killing, filmmakers Werner Herzog
and Errol Morris signed on as executive producers. The name "Anonymous" appears 49 times under
27 different crew positions in the credits. These crew members still fear revenge from
the death-squad killers. Reception
Critical response The Act of Killing received worldwide critical
acclaim. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 95% approval rating with
an average rating of 8.7/10 based on 132 reviews. The website's consensus reads, "Raw, terrifying,
and painfully difficult to watch, The Act of Killing offers a haunting testament to
the edifying, confrontational power of documentary cinema." On Metacritic, the film has an average
score of 89 out of 100, based on 30 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim."
Nick Schager of The Village Voice called it a "masterpiece." Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Chris Hedges called the film "an important exploration of the complex psychology of mass
murderers" and wrote that "it is not the demonized, easily digestible caricature of a mass murderer
that most disturbs us. It is the human being." In some quarters Oppenheimer has been accused
of treating his subjects in bad faith. As far as their goal at the beginning was to
glorify mass murder, Oppenheimer responds that could never have been his goal, therefore
that side of them may have been betrayed. In an interview with The Village Voice, Oppenheimer
said, "When I was entrusted by this community of survivors to film these justifications,
to film these boastings, I was trying to expose and interrogate the nature of impunity. Boasting
about killing was the right material to do that with because it is a symptom of impunity."
Australian National University Professor of Asian history and politics Robert Cribb stated
that the film lacks historical context. In reply, Oppenheimer said that "the film is
essentially not about what happened in 1965, but rather about a regime in which genocide
has, paradoxically, been effaced [yet] celebrated – in order to keep the survivors terrified,
the public brainwashed, and the perpetrators able to live with themselves...It never pretends
to be an exhaustive account of the events of 1965. It seeks to understand the impact
of the killing and terror today, on individuals and institutions."
Bradley Simpson, historian at the University of Connecticut and director of the Indonesia/East
Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, states the "brilliant Oscar-nominated
film" has prompted vigorous debate among Indonesians about the crimes and the need to hold responsible
parties accountable, and suggests that it could have a similar effect in the United
States, whose own role in the killings "has never officially been acknowledged, much less
accounted for, though some of the relevant documents have been made available to the
public." An Indonesian academic, Soe Tjen Marching,
analyzed the film in relation to Hannah Arendt's theory of the banality of evil.
The primary subjects in the film, Anwar Congo and Herman Koto, have seen the film and neither
feels deceived, according to Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer says that upon watching the film
Anwar Congo "started to cry...Tearfully, he told me: 'This is the film I expected. It's
an honest film, a true film.' He said he was profoundly moved and will always remain loyal
to it." A subsequent interview on Al Jazeera's program "101 East" revealed that Anwar had
misgivings about the film and the negative reaction to it in Indonesia, which was causing
problems for him. He confided these concerns directly to Oppenheimer in an apparent Skype
conversation displayed within the program. Top ten lists
The Act of Killing has been named as one of the best films of 2013 by various critics:
1st – Sight & Sound 1st – The Guardian
1st – LA Weekly 1st – Nick Schager, The A.V. Club
2nd – Mark Kermode, The Observer 3rd – David Edelstein, New York
3rd – David Sexton, London Evening Standard 4th – Eric Kohn, Indiewire
4th – People Magazine 7th – Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic
7th – A. A. Dowd, The A.V. Club 7th – David Chen, slashfilm.com
8th – Sam Adams, The A.V. Club 8th – Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, The A.V. Club
8th – Richard Corliss, Time 10th – Time Out London
10th – Devindra Hardawar, slashfilm.com Awards and nominations
References
External links Official website
The Act of Killing at the Internet Movie Database The Act of Killing at Box Office Mojo
The Act of Killing at Rotten Tomatoes The Act of Killing at Metacritic
The Act of Killing on Facebook "The Act of Killing": New Film Shows U.S.-Backed
Indonesian Death Squad Leaders Re-enacting Massacres. Democracy Now! 19 July 2013.