The surreal insides of Indonesian killers' heads

 By Daniel Nelson

The Act of Killing

Image by The Act of Killing

The Act of Killing is as weird and powerful a film as you’ll see this year. And it won’t help Indonesia’s prospects as a tourist destination.

After the press screening, there was total silence in the cinema as people tried to assess what they had just seen – and recover from the final extraordinary scene. On the way out a young man remarked, “I was thinking of visiting Indonesia later this summer as part of a trip to Southeast Asia.  I might just give it a wide berth now...”

Of course, no country can be assessed on the basis of one film, or one glimpse of a particular issue or group of people - any more than the photos of torture in Abu Ghraib tell the whole truth about the US - but there’s no getting away from the fact that what the director Joshua Oppenheimer calls this “documentary of the imagination” gives a bleak view of a corner of a vast and complex country.

Bleak not because the killers who so proudly star in the film are representative of other Indonesians, but because, as one of them says, “there are people like me all over the world.”

When he refers to “people like me” he is talking about small-time gangsters who modelled themselves on characters in American crime movies and who willingly joined in the Indonesian army’s mass murder in 1965 of perhaps one million people – alleged communists, intellectuals and minority Chinese – in one of the worst massacres of a blood-soaked century, a Cold War pogrom in which the West acquiesced.

The military was subsequently overthrown in Indonesia, governments have changed and elections have been held. But there has been no reckoning for the killings, no justice for the bereaved families, no truth and reconciliation commission. The killers live in their communities, some holding positions of power and influence, both legal and illegal, and with links to current government ministers ("Wow! All the killers are here") and the country’s Pancasila youth movement.  Many are wealthy from the money and goods they stole from their victims or from continuing extortion.

A conventional documentary would have identified one small group of such murderers in North Sumatra and interviewed them about their crimes: this film goes much, much further.  It sets up the group, led by Anwar Congo, to make a film – on their own terms – about what they had done, and records them making the film, re-enacting the murders, rape and pillage, as well as the conversations the filming triggers. They decide their film must be about the truth but also be entertaining, with musical numbers and humour – which produces some of the strangest scenes in the documentary.

The dangers are obvious: the men would use their film to glorify their unspeakable crimes. To this, Oppenheimer says: “I saw an opportunity: if the perpetrators in North Sumatra were given the means to dramatise their memories of genocide in whatever ways they wished, they would probably seek to glorify it further, to transform it into a ‘beautiful family movie’ (as Anwar Congo puts it) whose kaleidoscopic use of genres would reflect their multiple, conflicting emotions about their ‘glorious past’. I anticipated that the outcomes from this process would serve as an expose, even to Indonesians themselves, of just how deep the impunity and lack of resolution in their country remains.”

He says that the filming technique raises “questions of critical importance to understanding the imaginative procedures by which human beings persecute each other, and how we can then go on to build (and live in) societies found on systemic and enduring violence.”

If that sounds a remote and overly intellectualised explanation of literally giving self-confessed criminals a stage on which to act out their increasingly bizarre and shocking interpretation of events, I can only say, Look, listen and wonder. 

Giving these men a stage does fuel their bravado – with potentially serious consequences for those they are still exploiting – and the fascism with which some of them and their political masters espouse.

But there are insights, too, that parry suggestions of exploitation.  It’s fascinating how several people in the film turn the epithet “gangster” into a word of praise and argue that the term comes from the words “free men” – “and we need free men”, as a deputy minister says. Clearly, this is an orchestrated political response and shows how amoral thugs have been adopted and used by political elites.

Glimpses of self-awareness and of culpability intrude in unexpected ways.  A conversation takes place, for example, on whether there’s a difference between cruelty and sadism, which makes it clear that there is some realisation of the extent of the depravity that occurred. There is also discussion of nightmares and other manifestations of what those with apparently no conscience, or repressed conscience, consider “mental weakness”. 

In one of the few hopeful moments amidst the depressing refusal or inability to take responsibility for past actions, Anwar, after acting the role of one of the hundreds of victims he garrotted with wire (to cut down on blood) wonders aloud about whether the victim felt as bad when he was killed as he, the actor. It’s not much, but by then the viewer is grateful for any signs of empathy.

The sad truth is that of the men we see – and there are presumably others who are genuinely contrite – it is Anwar Congo who seems to be the most self-aware. This is demonstrated not only through his answers to off-camera questions,  by the conversations with his fellow gangsters, and by his responses to seeing screenings of painful scenes during the making of the film, but by the way he seems to use the re-enactment of incidents and the whole process of film-making to come to terms with his past.

But that, as Oppenheimer admits, almost turns him into a hero: “In that sense …  Anwar is the bravest and most honest character in The Act Of Killing. He may or may not ‘like’ the result, but I have tried to honour his courage and his openness by presenting him as honestly, and with as much compassion, as I could, while still deferring  to the unspeakable acts that he committed.”

The families of his victims may not feel so generous.

And to prove that this film is not about history, that Indonesia has not completely moved on, stay in your seat and watch the credits roll. Several jobs are credited only to Anonymous. It is still dangerous to give real names.