Indonesian death squad leaders responsible for the 1965 genocide of an estimated 2.5 million communists and ethnic Chinese restage their murders through the medium of film in The Act of Killing (2012). The observational "documentary of the imagination" directed by Joshua Oppenheimer will have a special screening and audience discussion with the director at Ryan Auditorium on Monday, November 4, at 6:30 p.m.
Culled from 1,000 hours of raw footage shot over seven-and-a-half years, Oppenheimer’s film is centered on Anwar Congo, a former member of the Pancasila Youth paramilitary movement single-handedly responsible for putting to death a reported 1,000 members of the communist opposition under government orders.
Unlike other perpetrators of widespread atrocity who are confronted with their past misdeeds later in life, Congo is not outwardly remorseful or guilt-ridden for his crimes. Quite the opposite, actually. He is proud – boastful, even – going as far as to giddily dance the cha–cha on a roof where some of his victims met a particularly grisly demise by garrote wire.
In fact, Congo is so enthused recollecting his past as a death squad leader that he, along with some friends, decide to make their own films representing his "memories of murder."
The old adage that history is written by the victors – or as another death squad leader quips in the film, “‘War crimes’ are defined by the winners” – seems to hold true in Congo’s case. The Western-backed anti-communist regime he helped police a half-century ago remains in power in Indonesia today, putting its bloody footprint on history and continuing a decades-long reign of oppression in the present.
Through propaganda, many Indonesians are manipulated into revering Congo and his ilk as national heroes, celebrating their slaughters and elevating them to a pseudo-celebrity status through widely broadcasted talk show interviews and government approval. (One television personality in the film’s trailer lauds the killers’ development of a “more humane, less sadistic ... system for exterminating communists.”) It's small wonder that, when asked to reenact their crimes, Congo and his men take on the roles of movie stars in a Hollywood production.
Oppenheimer, fascinated by Congo and his affiliates’ denial of guilt and self-aggrandizement, has documented these men as they restage and film their garish crimes with props, special effects and elaborate costumes and sets. Their reenactments, cut as short films, are grotesque, surreal and often darkly funny. Many of the segments were inspired, as the killers’ violence and gangster mentalities were, by American cinema.
How does such a project – outlandish, daring, historically important – have its genesis?
Oppenheimer, an American filmmaker, first traveled to Indonesia in 2002 under the assumption that he would be shooting a film called The Globalization Tapes, a comparatively light documentary detailing the struggle of Indonesian plantation workers to form an organized trade union. What he encountered in the rural countryside was a working class people wracked by terror. Many of the workers he interviewed were too afraid to speak on camera for a fear that their potential killers – and the killers of their ancestors – would hear and punish them.
On a tip from the same collective of workers, Oppenheimer interviewed one of these killers, a neighboring former plantation security guard who happily recounted to the camera crew, along with his own 10-year-old granddaughter, how he drowned some 250 communist workers in irrigation ditches in the mid-1960s.
The trail Oppenheimer and his assistants (many of whom are credited as Anonymous for safety concerns) followed from there eventually led to Congo, a wry man in his early 70s with a broad smile and cunning sense of humor that thinly disguises his penchant for abominable cruelty. As a cinephile, Congo helped plant the idea of restaging the massacres as Hollywood-esque films, and from there he, his associates and Oppenheimer created what eventually became The Act of Killing.
Interestingly, Oppenheimer has insisted that even as a death squad leader, Anwar Congo is no more a monster than you or I, and that empathy is the emotion to be garnered from his documentary. Congo presents a mirror to ourselves, displaying an unfettered dark side of psychology well-versed in that most human of acts, something unique to our species: killing for the sake of killing.
Regardless of these sympathies, Oppenheimer has been integral in raising awareness for the genocide to which Congo actively contributed. He's been vocal in his demands for a presidential apology for the killings, tribunal prosecution of the top commanders, a truth and reconciliation process and, finally, rehabilitation for the victims and the families of victims.
The Indonesian media is no longer silent about the matter either.
Tempo Magazine, one of the premier publications in the country, ran an unprecedented feature in conjunction with the release of The Act of Killing wherein the magazine’s editor-in-chief sent out a squad of reporters to scour the Indonesian countryside. Their purpose was to investigate communities where criminals akin to Congo had murdered many and then remained in positions of power, a venture that uncovered just how deep-seated the roots of injustice remain in Indonesia.
Tempo’s article, which includes 75 pages of regime killers’ tell-all testimonies, was one of the first pieces of national media to acknowledge the massacres, better yet be critical of the devastation they wrought.
On December 10, 2012, International Human Rights Day, The Act of Killing was widely released for Indonesian cinemas. A handful of screenings have been made public, but most continue to be held in secret due to the probability of paramilitary intervention.
Despite the threat of arrest and violence, audiences averaging about 200 viewers attend the now-daily screenings of The Act of Killing, which are held in 118 cities across the country. Some screenings have had up to 500 people in attendance.
Oppenheimer’s documentary has additionally received an overwhelmingly positive critical reception in the states. Nick Schager, a film critic for The Village Voice, writes, “To dub Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary a masterpiece is at once warranted and somehow limiting, the term is too narrow for what the first-time American filmmaker achieves with his debut.”
When Oppenheimer met with fellow documentarian and The Act of Killing co-producer Werner Herzog after the film’s release, he was worried about the measure of impact his work would have on the Indonesian people and Indonesian history, if it were to have any at all.
“Art doesn’t make a difference,” Herzog told him with a smile. “Until it does.”
The screening at Ryan Auditorium in the Technological Institute will be free and open to the public. Director Joshua Oppenheimer will be in attendance to give the inaugural EDGS Rajawali Distinguished Lecture and participate in audience Q-and-A after the film.