Man…what a documentary…
As I was walking the Coops today, I listened to an interview with the filmmaker and almost immediately realized it was something I needed to watch. It sounded like something utterly and completely new that I had never seen before. It didn’t disappoint.
The Act of Killing is a documentary by american filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, where he follows an Indonesian “executioner” in the 1960s, Anwar Congo, as he grapples with his past as an old man. In the ’60s, Indonesia went through a communist purge in Sumatra, and Anwar was a gangster hired by the military to kill people. He killed thousands with his bare hands. At first, they would beat them to death. After realizing this was messy and stinky, they switched to tying wire to a post, wrapping the wire around the victims neck, and then tugging on the free end until their necks were crushed.
Shockingly, these gangsters are completely open about their past, talking freely and at length about who they killed, how they killed them, and how they acted with impunity. To this day, they live without fear of repercussion, beyond perhaps the demons in their heads. Enter an interesting twist to the story: Oppenheimer has Anwar take him to the small rooftop where he tortured and killed most of his victims, and act out how he’d do it. After viewing the footage himself, he’s so struck by how inaccurate his portrayal of the past is, he embarks on a several year journey of creating his own film, to reenact and (ultimately) interpret the acts of violence.
It’s a striking journey of a film within a film as these men literally attempt to turn their past into a movie, playing the parts themselves, and the portrait of an old man who was a monster in his youth. Anwar is a Hitler. A Stalin. An Idi Amin. What’s incredibly fascinating is seeing what any of those men would be like with a camera on them in their 70s, when time has afforded them some perspective, softened them, and they reflect on their past with a new set of eyes and a camera in their face to talk to.
I found it impossible to have sympathy for this man who had killed so many people and spent so much time rationalizing and excusing that fact. But it was a very clear picture of exactly how these atrocities happen. Someone like Anwar does something impulsively in the moment, like acting out on an order to kill someone, and then those that gave the orders tell him he’s done the right thing. He tells himself he’s done the right thing. Those around that might disagree tell him are terrified of him, and they tell him he’s done the right thing. The farce of fear and power and denial puts up the walls necessary for people, large groups of people, to do horrible things. Things that are not, in any sense, the right thing.
It’s estimated that 1 million people were killed during the Indonesian purge of the communists. It was a genocide that I knew nothing about. I wasn’t taught this in High School, or in college. That’s a frustrating fact. It’s not that those events were completely ignored by “the west,” but it seems more and more that such events are literally so commonplace that it would make textbooks too thick were we to put them all in. That’s a very, very, very sad reality.
The Act of Killing is overwhelming and riveting. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and the footage that Oppenheimer was able to get of these men, over the 10-year span he filmed, is flat-out remarkable. I’ve only seen this one documentary so far, but it’s hard for me to imagine that anything else will beat it for the Oscar this year.
It made me feel very fortunate that I was born who I am. And, I don’t mean that in any sort of smug, or entitled way. I mean it in that I recognize that I had absolutely nothing to do with, or say in where I was born. None of us get that choice. And those who were born into Sumatra in the 1960s were very, very unlucky. I literally can’t imagine, and yet I feel an obligation to try…because I know my unsoiled upbringing was dumb luck, and not because I’m any different than they were.
An astounding achievement, it’s decidedly not for the faint of heart, and it’s available for streaming on Netflix.