The Act of Killing

The Act of Killing

Murder is not a business that lacks warmth, and murderers are not people who lack blood in their veins. “The Act of Killing” introduces us to some Indonesian mass killers who could be described as movie stars. Joshua Oppenheimer, the documentary’s director, gives them an opportunity to make a film of their own a re-enactment of their years spent carrying out the anti-Communist purge that resulted in more than one million deaths in 1965-66. They were recruited by the military as muscle, and became among the most feared and sadistic of the liquidators.

But they did it with style: Anwar Congo, a celebrated killer, points to a black-and-white photograph of himself as a young man who looks like a sleek cross between Charles Bronson and Smokey Robinson. “That’s me,” he says. “I’m wearing a plaid shirt, camouflage pants, saddle shoes” Don’t put him in that outfit for the massacre scenes, he tells the film’s costumer. “I wore jeans for killing. To look cool I imitated movie stars.”

Fit and spry at 60-something, Congo uses the film to confront facts long denied publicly and long sublimated personally. He believes or wants to believe that no court can try him for his crimes four decades later: not local authorities’ courts or foreign tribunals’, not even the International Criminal Court itself. This gives him leave to provide unguarded performances for his movie (and astonishingly candid testimony for Mr. Oppenheimer’s), but almost every night some of his hundreds of victims visit him in dreams.

One of this film’s most excruciating recurring motifs is seeing present-day civilians doing their best real-life acting when these gangsters are around. Indonesia may have returned to something like democracy after Suharto stepped down in 1998, but politicians and business leaders are still murderers.

And they’re still terrifying. Chinese shopkeepers and market vendors old enough to have been around when their people were haphazardly swept up in the purge must keep wide smiles on their faces while handing protection money over to Safit Pardede, arguably the film’s most repugnant gangster. (Later, taking a break from filming a re-enactment of a village massacre, he wistfully recalls with his friends raping 14-year old girls. “I’d say, ‘It’s going to be hell for you but heaven on earth for me!’ ”) Moments like this made me wonder if I was watching another re-enactment it seems pretty insane for a thug to confess crimes on camera.

It seems that long standing corruption has ossified into an Indonesian core value, alongside democracy and capitalism. We see politicians make speeches boasting that they’re gangsters and reminding the crowd that “gangsters” only means “free men” in their society. A newspaper publisher boasts of manufacturing evidence against suspected Communists supplying long lists for the death squads. This is the smiliest atrocity documentary I’ve ever seen.

During filming of a historical movie in between camera setups, Suryono, Congo’s neighbor shares how the death squads took away his communist stepfather. He tells them that he is not criticizing what they are doing but that he found his dad’s body under an oil drum the following day. At 12 years old, he had to help bury him in a ditch by the roadside.

Oppenheimer then pans the documentary camera back onto Suryono who has started to crack beneath his nonchalant exterior just moments after this revelation as Adi Zulkadry Congo’s friend and a tough old executioner with the look of Ray Winstone about him berates everyone else for whitewashing their crimes: “Everything Anwar and I have ever said is false. It wasn’t the communists who were cruel. I know very well we were.”

This compulsion to confess becomes the ultimate special effect of the film (and its film within the film). We’re seeing cosmic justice at work here; a law more precise than any court could be which wrings out truth from these guys like blood from a stone they can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to talking about what bad people they are and how constant partying, self-medication and having relatively happy families stops them facing up to what they did.

Denial is second nature twin birth with convulsive shame; if all else fails there’s always relativism: “When Bush was in power Guantanamo was right [Bush claimed] Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction That was right according to Bush but now it’s wrong The Geneva Conventions may be today’s morality but tomorrow we’ll have Jakarta Conventions…”

The film-within-a-film historical picture doesn’t look like it had a huge budget but seems made lovingly by attentive hands working on limited means: re-enactments strive for brutal accuracy while some fantasy sequences come across as if a madcap telenovela co-directed by John Waters and Alejandro Jodorowsky. In one sequence, Congo’s friend and the portly, vicious but hilarious paramilitary leader Herman Koto appears in full preposterous beauty queen drag: an Indonesian Divine.

There have been no shortage of dark, bleak documentaries setting forth the cruelties of life and horrors/banality of evil thereof. I have watched hours upon hours of war crimes/genocides/mistrials committed by dull men with dim souls thanks to this genre “The Act Of Killing” is out to top them all. I don’t think even its heavyweight exec producers Herzog/Morris have ever presented cognitive-dissonance this densely yet delicately packed in a single doc.

Oppenheimer’s visual/aural rhythms here feel like he’s slowly/carefully scaling a mountain made of shame/regret each step taken in the absolute knowledge that there’s solid rock (even if it’s jutting & jagged & hurts) waiting underfoot. When we finally reach the summit, the view is heartbreakingly beautiful; however from up thereabouts onwards for half an hour or so into “Act Of Killing,” what we’re surveying seems divinely art directed: eternal damnation looks just like home law and order suburbia with malls and McDonalds thrown in for good measure.

Fatherhood has softened Congo somewhat: he now resembles Mandela (rather than Amin whom his friends say his dark skin makes him look like) with those lovely laugh-lines around his eyes and that winning smile which lights up every room

With his grandsons, while watching the movie he made, Oppenheimer realizes something about himself and those he killed. He asks a question that makes him speechless for a moment. The monster who was almost a saint suffocates with truth as it turns out to be such an agonizingly righteous orgasm of money about this propaganda masterpiece which is also cinema and vanity all at once as instruments used by power against humanity.

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