The Act of Killing

The Act of Killing is a rather off kilter work in that the documentarian lets his subjects take a certain amount of control, directing many scenes themselves. In many respects it resembles Idi Amin: An Auto-Portrait, but is ultimately far more surreal and disturbing.

"It is forbidden to kill therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets" Voltaire The above quote, appearing in The Act of Killing before the titles, permeates one of the strangest and most disturbing documentaries you will ever see. I'm not recommending it for faint-hearted liberals because its non-bloody violence is disturbing to the core of what we are as human beings.

By omitting the historical context behind the 1965–1966 Indonesian killings and letting the Indonesian death squad leaders tell their own story, watching The Act of Killing evokes the Nietschean idea of 'gazing into the abyss'. That if one were to 'gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

A strange, undoubtedly brilliant, and troubling documentary which invites those who committed mass murder to re-enact their crimes in the styles of different film genres and then follows the process of doing so. Much is exposed in the meantime in terms of how people handle their own extreme guilt, and the reality that though we like to imagine that those who commit such evil acts are other-worldly they are in fact worryingly normal.

In a word from the director added to the beginning of the film, Josh Oppenheimer rather fatuously assures us that really evil people only exist in the movies, and that most of the great crimes of history were committed by folks like you and me. Of course we all know there are such cases - Nazi officers who believed they were doing their duty, participants in the Milgram experiments.

The Act of KillingMix Truffaut's Day for Night with Fellini's 8 1/2, add some Sam Peckinpah and Tarantino and what do you get? The Act of Killing.

..and I am assuming you've seen a lot here.

Like many viewers of the documentary I had zero knowledge of the events that are remembered here, and on a fundamental level it has already succeeded by bringing its topic into the public sphere. It is of course political on a secondary level Oppenheimer seeks to reveal it to the American public and their deeply hidden involvement in the mass killings.

I'd be hard-pressed to name any film I've watched that is as strange and disturbing as 'The Act of Killing' (brought to you by executive producers Werner Herzog and Errol Morris).When Indonesian president Sukarno allied himself with communists in 1965, he was toppled by a military coup and a bloody, anti-communist purge followed.