The Act of Killing (2012)

After having seen a particular movie, fictional or documentary, I sometimes ask myself the question: should I really have watched this movie? This question is not alway a reaction to a film being sub-par in terms of quality. Here, I have in mind the question whether some images should be seen at all, as I am unclear what they do with me. The Act of Killing (dir. Joshua Oppenheimer et al) is hard to watch. It is strange and I am not sure whether the project in itself should be applauded. Another thing I was not sure about when I watched it was how it was directed, what the director(s) said to the people he encountered and what his idea of the film was. Generally, I might not have been worried by such questions, but the specific content of the film (where a skewed image makes a difference) seemed to elicit a puzzle like that.

The mass-killing of "communists" in the sixties in Indonesia (millions were slaughtered) are the dark core of the film, in which several of the murderer re-enact the killings. They take on the aura of movie stars, proudly calling themselves "gangsters" and rendering the murders with a cinematic quality: when they re-enact the events of the sixties, they do it like a thriller, or a musical. The film consists with these re-enactments along with discussions among the "gangsters". It is not obvious how one should think about this combination of horror and cinema: on the one hand, there seems to be a critique of cinema here somewhere, but at the same time, The Act of Killing itself moves head-on into the realm of images where it is not that clear how we should watch, and as I sad, what it means to watch these people re-enact what they did. Many times, I was not sure where the re-enactment began and where they ended - I am thinking especially of a TV show that included some of the weirdest responses I've seen in a while. The strangest thing in the documentary is watching the murderers' own accounts and testimonies: most of the time, they are not precisely sorry for what they did, they try to justify the mass-killings and represent themselves as cool heroes. At some points the facade drops, and we realize that of course the victims haunt their killers. But where they make these confessions, what does the presence of the camera mean? What does it mean if Oppenheimer staged some of the scenes? What are these re-enactments, really?

The image of Indonesia one gets from the film is not a rosy one. I get the impression - without have any knowledge of it really - that the murderers are still close to the political and commercial power in the country and that the para-military movement that took part in the killings is still going strong.

What troubles me about The Act of Killing is that I am confronted with a string of confessions and testimonies (and sometimes also a compulsion to make other watch, and that might include you and me in a very unsettling way), but the nature of these confessions are so muddled, so double-minded and so compulsive that one is tempted to direct one's attention to the psychological defenses of these killers rather than what they actually did. And that felt very strange. So the point is not that The Act of Killing is a bad movie; I am just thinking about what kind of movie it is.