The Act of Killing: the banality of evil like you’ve never seen it

Okay, here’s a jaw dropper.  In the chilling documentary The Act of Killing, perpetrators of genocide in Indonesia are asked to re-enact their murders – and they are pleased as punch to do so.  We meet unapologetic mass murderers face-to-face.  Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer has created the year’s most startling documentary.

After the 1965 military coup, death squads sympathetic to the military labeling opponents of the regime, landless farmers and ethnic Chinese as “communists” – and killed 2-3 million fellow Indonesians.  The killers were mostly Indonesian paramilitary groups and gangsters.  The Act of Killing introduces us to several of these murderers,  who don’t try to evade or spin their deeds, but instead look proudly and nostalgically at their murders as the highlight of their lives.

The film primarily focuses on two self-described gangsters, Anwars and Herman.  The two enthusiastically embrace the film project so they can document their murders for history.  Anwars is said to have killed a thousand by himself.  Because beating them to death produced too much messy blood, he devised a method of strangling them with wire. The corpulent Herman chooses spends about a third of movie dressed in flamboyant drag, which is ridiculous, but the film is so disturbing that the audience just can’t laugh. Besides acting out interrogation torture murders and a village massacre, the two come up with a Bollywood-like musical number of Born Free, complete with dancing-girls in front of a waterfall, in which the garotted dead reappear to thank Anwars for sending them on to the afterlife.  It is beyond bizarre.

In the film’s most riveting scene, a guy who has been recruited to play a torture victim in the film-within-a-film, recounts the death squad murder of his step-father to Anwars and Herman.  To keep his composure, he awkwardly laughs as he describes the abduction – but his eyes are clearly blaming the old gangsters.  Then he acts out his torture for the camera.

The Act of Killing is hypnotically compelling – you can’t believe what’s on the screen, can’t believe that you’re still watching it and can’t stop watching.

The Act of Killing is directed by Oppenheimer and co-directed by someone credited as “Anonymous” and Christine Cynn.  Oddly, there is no writing credit.  The great documentarians Errol Morris and Werner Herzog are among the executive producers.

[We don’t often explore genocide from the perpetrator’s point of view, although two excellent documentaries come to mind:  Shoah and Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, both on my 5 Essential Holocaust Films.  The current film Hannah Arendt is about the academic theorist who coined the term “banality of evil”, but that story’s duel of letters between hand-wringing intellectuals makes for a stale discussion.]

The Act of Killing is a very uncomfortable movie, and I suspect that it wouldn’t be not a great choice for most of my readers.  But it pushes the envelope of cinema and is the most uniquely original film of the year (or millennium so far?).  I’m really glad that I watched it.

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