Rarely a film “reinvents the wheel” when it comes to cinematic language, and, on top of that, does it to maximize the emotional impact. The documentary “The Act of Killing” by Joshua Oppenheimer and associates is one of such films. Although, production-wise, it is not an Asian film, it is so rooted in the context of Indonesia it could serve as a recommendation for the Movie of the Week here.
Oppenheimer first came to Indonesia to film parts of his 2003 video-documentary “The Globalisation Tapes”, but there he found a haunting story from the country's history and spent the greatest part of the following ten years working on the project. During the 60s, the tensions mounted between the left-leaning government lead by Sukarno and the army that resulted in a series of massacres of suspected communists, progressive intellectuals, syndicalists and members of the Chinese minority. Massacres were conducted by the military and the paramilitary forces, and between one and two million people perished in them.
“The Act of Killing” is a documentary about the massacres and memories of them, but the question more important than “what” is “how”. Maybe the least shocking is that this time, we get to hear and see the story from the killers' point of view: Anwar Kongo, a cinephile, a small-time criminal and a death squadron leader serves as our guide, and his former second-in-command Herman serves as his model. Anwar does not only tell about the atrocities he committed, he re-enacts them in different cinematic styles, such as classical westerns, war movies, gangster flicks and even musicals, in something that could be best described as the theatre of absurd that penetrates deep into the human psyche. Shockingly, there would be no traces of remorse in Anwar, Herman and the rest of the gang, not even the generic excuses that they have only followed the orders, or that the times were confusing, there are no stories of PTSD and nightmares (since it is the sign of weakness), they actually take pride in what they did.
“The Act of Killing” is a one-of-a-kind documentary, hard to describe as (almost) something out of this world. Oppenheimer also made a follow-up to it, “The Look of Silence”, which is equally potent, but more conventional in style and execution.
