I saw Joshua Oppenheimer’s incredible documentary at this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival and I was absolutely taken with this piece of cinema. The Act of Killing is a documentary with guts. There are no political sides to choose nor are there talking-head experts or voiceover narratives to lead you along your journey. In fact, this film seemed more like a strange fever dream with teeth, challenging each viewer to make sense of a landscape populated with terrible figures and horrific nightmare stories. Worse yet, even the most fantastical candy-floss colored visions in The Act of Killing cannot deflect from that one thread winding its way through the film: it is all true.
Joshua Oppenheimer and his co-directors spent many years associating with some of the most “successful” leaders of the Indonesian death squads, men like Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry (both featured in the film) who were responsible for almost a million deaths. This period of history, the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66, changed the face of that country, as Oppenheimer deftly shows. But the men who star in this documentary, aside from being mass killers, are also passionate film fans. The Act of Killing follows this collection of death squad leaders as they create their own films; re-enacting the killings that, in a sense, made them famous. Their visions of film noir, war, horror and musical theater all explicate their experiences…and their love of the moving image. This is a rough film but it truly goes a long way in shattering currently held ideas of documentary work and showcases how fluid and complex a viewer’s relationship with screen characters can be.
CraveOnline: One of the things that I was very interested in within the context of The Act of Killing is your concept of the documentary of the imagination. Can you expand on this a little bit?
Joshua Oppenheimer: Sure. As a filmmaker, I don’t actually come from a documentary background and what has always interested me about film is the possibility of exploring, very simply, the nature of our reality. But what I mean by that is the way that fiction and fantasy is implicated in what appears to be our non-fiction reality. To cope with the maelstrom of the kind of molecular things that are going on just below the surface, we tell ourselves stories. We create stories about who we are, about what we are looking at, that feel right and allow us to make sense of things but also displace.
So I think of The Act of Killing as a film which, in a sense, over a week of production, let’s say, or over a few minutes of shooting, re-enacts a process that we go through in our minds in the sense that we are all telling ourselves these half-remembered, second-hand, third-rate stories, and role playing roles that we sort of shuffle through, one in reaction to the other, just as Anwar (in one section of the film) plays the victim at one point, indulging despairingly in a film noir fantasy. Throwing himself into the sadism of what he did in that office, he plays the victim out of self-pity, of all things! I think that was what led him to play the victim, then he feels a real trauma, feels dirty from the trauma and devises the next scene, thinking: “in order to cleanse myself from the trauma I will stage my redemption in heaven.”
It’s to make manifest the succession of stories that we tell ourselves about who we are within a fleeting moment but protracted into a sequence in the film or protracted into a section of the production. Part of my method was, of course, them [Anwar Congo and the other death squad leaders]. All the scenes had to come from them, otherwise they would reveal nothing, also we wouldn’t shoot 3-4 scenes at a time- we’d shoot one scene, we’d watch that scene, and then Anwar [and the other men] would think either individually or collectively, “What shall we do next?” in response so that a genuine journey would unfold. In every documentary we have this myth that we are documenting unadorned reality – which is always a lie – but in fact what we are really doing with documentaries is creating reality with the people we film. The reason that fly-on-the-wall or direct cinema films – and I do not use cinema verite, as that is a term that belongs properly to Jean Rouch and is closer to some of the other work I have done – are insightful is not because someone is catching important moments but rather because the camera elicits something.
It provides an occasion for people to show things they wouldn’t show, even in a film like Salesman [Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, 1969]; to get angry when maybe they would’ve held it in or maybe to get angry in a way they wouldn’t normally get angry or to protract the fight because they know they’re being watched and their honor is at stake. And of course the camera can kill moments. It can smother moments that are being created. But the point is that reality is always being created and then the question is what reality is most insightful to the situation you are trying to investigate? That is our responsibility as filmmakers.
Here, I was trying to understand why perpetrators, operating in impunity, having won, are boasting. What is the function of their boasting? For whom are they boasting? I was trying to understand why they’re open. I wasn’t trying to lure them to be open. My method was a response to that openness and an effort to understand it. How do they want to be seen? How do they see themselves? These questions are questions of the imagination and so I set the conditions for what I guess is a kind of documentary of the imagination.
One of your producers, documentarian Errol Morris, recently published a fantastic piece discussing the U.S. political involvement in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66. The film itself also showcases a certain influence of American culture in the men’s extraordinary passion for films, American genre cinema in particular. Can you discuss how the intervention of U.S. culture may have affected these men?
Well, one of the things that we had to face early on in the film was in order to go into that kind of analysis that Errol has gone into so beautifully would turn the film into a historical documentary and what I wanted to do with The Act of Killing is that there is this immersion and you almost get lost in the present-day reality of these men, and it’s very much a film about this place now and how the past is alive now. [It is about how] the past is used, misused, the source of obsession, fantasy, pain, trauma, collectively, individually, now. And as Anwar goes into his pain, we get kind of lost in that fever dream with him. So I knew that the history of the United States and the U.S.’ role in the killings which I investigated a lot while making the film would be something that would lurk in the wings. But I felt it was so important to create America, American consumerism, American culture as a kind of character that haunts the film. Now, of course, the genre choices are Anwar’s and that is owed to the fact that they love American movies. But the sense that the United States somehow haunts this place in a complicated way.
Recently someone said to me, “You know, Josh, this movie isn’t about American cinema, it’s post ’65 Indonesian slasher genre cinema that they’re making.” And I had to think about that and I would say that there was a strong film industry developing in Indonesia until 1965 which was inspired in part by Italian Neo-realism and in part by the formalism of Soviet filmmaking and part something uniquely its own. And it was totally destroyed. The prints were destroyed, the negatives were destroyed, the scripts were destroyed, everything’s been lost except for a couple prints of one film that has been saved so we don’t know what it was really. The people who made it were destroyed, they were killed. We don’t know what that cinema was, it is lost to us, like much else. And this kind of cultural, political moral vacuum, totally ahistorical and apolitical but also repressive, built atop mass graves, somehow embodies that loss, is haunted by that loss.
So for me, the victims and this kind of hollow, sickening afterburn of American culture, not just American culture but consumerism more broadly- it was very important to me that this haunt the entire film. Adi and his daughter drifting through the shopping mall or the limited crystal collection, the empty tableaus of shopping malls… We are closer to Anwar and his friends than we’d like to think and we are, in a sense, guests at their cannibalistic feast. We’re not as close to the slaughter, but we’re at the table.
I have a quote that is apparently in the longer cut that says that Anwar considered the film that they were making to be a “family film.” Can you perhaps explain what he meant by this? It certainly doesn’t seem like it would fit into that landscape.
I think what he means by this is that it’s kind of Hollywood family fare entertainment, like Lassie is what he was hoping for. But I think he knows its not. If you look at Anwar’s words through the film as a transcript you would see very little evolution as a person, and film is not a good medium for words, film is a good medium for subtext, for doubt, and I think that what holds the film together is Anwar’s doubt. It’s a film that is very much about men who don’t believe the things they’re saying.
One of the things I learned while making this film is that we know one set of facts and we are perfectly capable of believing something totally contradictory as a way of coping with or living with the facts that we know. As you may have read, Anwar was the 41st killer I met, so I was expecting to make a film with simple reenactments with many killers from across the region. Then I meet this man who takes me up to the roof where he has killed thousands of people and he dances the cha-cha-cha. He has to be in denial of the meaning of what he has done in order to do that, otherwise he couldn’t dance, or he has to be totally without a conscience. And I don’t believe he is without a conscience because what he says right before he dances the cha-cha-cha is “Look I’m a good dancer because I’ve been desperately drinking, taking drugs, going out dancing to forget what I have done.”
So his conscience (or at least his trauma) are there from the beginning, but I was focused on the obscenity of him dancing where he’s killed a thousand people, and I thought to myself, “I have to see if when I play this back to him if he will recognize himself in the mirror of the movie.” So I play it back to him and he looked very disturbed and I think he is very disturbed, and he doesn’t dare say he is disturbed or that this makes me look bad because to do that would be to admit something that he’s never been forced to admit, namely that it was bad…Anwar’s never been told that what he did was wrong. On the contrary, he has been told to celebrate it, justify it, so finally [your original point about the family movie aspect] is a perfect instance of that. He thinks, “If I can make a beautiful movie about mass killing, maybe I can put it right for myself or make it okay for myself” and he can’t, of course, and he comes to realize that. And he comes to realize that even the most graphic and painful aspects of the movie will never be adequate to the horror of what he’s done.
One of the aspects that The Act of Killing represents so well is the very process of filmmaking itself. Can you discuss the Anwar and his friends’ casting process for their films?
Well, as shown at the beginning of the film, Anwar goes through the streets and collects people off the streets and idea of this was to show that everybody already knows the story. How even if this were to come out in Indonesia and people were to say, “Oh we didn’t know this about our country,” you can see that everyone already knows the scenario. It was much more about how this story and this memory was alive collectively.
Then when they prepare to do the village massacre, I said, “There’s no way we’re going to have anyone there who is not your immediate children,” to the thugs and to the perpetrators, “Anyone you cast in the street, I’m not going to allow on the set.” So they held new auditions in Herman’s house for this scene. I felt it was there’s no way it’s acceptable to even accidentally have real survivors appear in this attack on a village.
There has been a certain level of controversy about the scene in which Anwar expresses a great level of emotion and physically reacts to what appears to be a climactic realization of what he has done. Certain parties feel that he was performing as much at that point due to the camera being there as he was when he was making the films with the rest of the men. Can you talk about this?
I think Anwar’s completely blindsided and caught off-guard by what is happening. He’s trying to do what I’ve asked him to do which is tell me what happened up on that roof. We’d been struggling to get back into that office for five years until the very end of the final shoot because, as you can see in the final shot, there are some flowers. A new tenant had taken over the shop and she let us in. The only other time I filmed there I didn’t know what happened and there are so many important stories that come up again and again in the shooting that happened in that office that I didn’t cover in that office because I didn’t know them yet. So I wanted Anwar to walk through and say, “This happened here, that happened there, this happened here.” Foolishly, I thought he’d be able to hold himself together enough to do that despite 5 years of shooting together, and then suddenly he’s just blindsided, like something just hits him. The [physical response] is absolutely real and he’s struggling to hold himself together and continue speaking…thinking presumably that I will just cut this out, and I think that the people who think its fake…I don’t. I’m sure he was going through something terrible in that moment.
Ariel Schudson is a featured columnist at CraveOnline and the president of the Student Chapter of the Association of Moving Image Archivists at UCLA. Stalk her electronically at @Sinaphile.
