Josh Oppenheimer's "The Act of Killing"

Josh Oppenheimer’s "The Act of Killing"



　
1.

Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier?"


"Who speaks today about the annihilation of the Armenians?"
attributed to Hitler

In August 1939, Hitler spoke about the objectives of the war that he was about to prosecute. This speech, transcribed by several witnesses, is called "the Obersalzberg Speech." Three versions of the speech are known to exist. One of them contains the quotation above-stated. The Turks, who massacred one and half million Armenians during World War One deny this genocide. Accordingly, they deny that Hitler spoke about the Armenians at Obersalzburg.

Historians differ as to the authenticity of the quote. The text citing the Armenian genocide in support of Hitler’s plans for a war of extermination in the East was first disclosed during the Nuremberg Trials in a typescript offered as evidence by an American journalist. The journalist, Louis Lochner, an Associated Press reporter, claimed that a German source had provided him with the transcript in 1942. He was unable to provide convincing information about the identity of his source and so Lochner’s version of the speech (so-called L-3) was not admitted into evidence at the War Crimes trial.

It doesn’t really matter whether Hitler said these words. The point remains the same. Everyone knew that the Armenians had been murdered en masse by the Turks in 1915. Hollywood made films about the subject – Ravished Armenia (1919) – and a German novelist, Franz Werfel, wrote a bestseller about the calamity in 1933; lurid posters supported Red Cross fundraising throughout America for Armenian refugees. But the fact that the world knew that the Armenians had been slaughtered made no difference – no one was brought to justice, no reparations were paid, nothing was done to prevent the future occurrence of similar bloodbaths.

In Language and Politics, Noam Chomsky wrote "more people are aware of the Armenian genocide during the First World War than are aware of the Indonesian genocide in 1965."

　

2.

"The Act of Killing" is an immensely rich and complex documentary. But, on some level, the film is fundamentally about justice.

People raised in the United States and Western Europe during the last fifty years share a concept of international justice that was forged in the crucible of World War Two. In the popular mind, World War Two was a just war in which events followed a mythic pattern that we have been raised to regard as inevitable: unequivocally evil men somehow assumed power and committed vicious acts. The world opposed the wrongdoers and a great war was fought resulting in the total defeat of the evil power and the restoration of justice. This narrative is particularly forceful in the United States where it echoes popular understanding, at least in the North, of the Civil War – a conflict fought to end an unambiguously evil system. Martin Luther King asserts this ideology when he says: "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice..." (Temple Israel of Hollywood Speech, Feb. 25, 1965).

But what if these idealistic notions are wrong? What if the moral universe does not bend ineluctably toward justice? What if evildoers triumph and are rewarded in their evil? What if the suffering of the downtrodden is not ameliorated? This is the great problem posed by Oppenheimer’s film.

　

3.

Most of The Act of Killing takes place in Medan, an Indonesian city of four million inhabitants, located on the island of North Sumatra. This is where Anwar Congo lives, the protagonist of Oppenheimer’s documentary. (The gorgeous natural locations, the plunge waterfall called Sipisopiso, and the water-filled caldera, Lake Tobu, are north of Medan in the volcanic mountains on the island.)

We know little about Indonesia. It is a huge nation, the size of the United States. It is the fourth most populous country in the world. After World War II, the people in Indonesia waged a war of insurgency against the Dutch who had colonized the country, or, at least, some of its islands – the Dutch had been earlier expelled from the archipelago by the invading Japanese. (Dutch explorers established trade routes to the Indonesian archipelago beginning in 1502 and the many of the larger islands, at least on the sea-coast were operated as plantations by the Dutch East India Company until 1800. In 1800, the country was annexed by Holland, but the Dutch never had more than a tenuous hold on the vast island nation.) In 1949, the 13, 500 islands comprising the archipelago won its independence. At that time, Indonesia was exceptionally poor – it’s standard of living was lower than India, and, therefore, a target for Communist revolution.

Indonesia’s first president was Sukarno. Sukarno navigated a middle way between the Communist party, a very strong political movement in Indonesia, the right-wing military. However, the United States, concerned about the growing Communist threat in southeast Asia, and considering full-scale war in the must smaller and less strategic Vietnam, was determined to retain control over Indonesia. Accordingly, the CIA backed the military in a coup against Sukarno led by six military commanders. The coup was a failure and the six commanders were executed and their bodies dumped in a well. But this attempted coup, on September 30, 1965, led to a counter-revolution. CIA and right-wing operatives in Indonesia proclaimed the coup was the result of Communist scheming – in fact, the aborted coup seems to have been manufactured by the United States and the generals involved. On the pretext that the Communists were about to rise in a full-scale revolution, the American State Department compiled lists of leading Communists in Indonesia and, then, supported death squads that annihilated those alleged insurgents. At that time, the Indonesia Communist party (the PK) was the largest non-Soviet-bloc Communist party in the world – far larger than the relatively tiny communist forces in Vietnam.

The United States feared that Indonesia would become a Communist regime. The nation’s geopolitical strategy at that time was "containment." Adopted during the Truman presidency, the notion of "containment" was to support nations and tribal alliances at the boundary of the Soviet Union to oppose further Communist expansion. The September 30, 1965 coup in Indonesia ultimately brought General Suharto to power, resulted in the suppression of the largest Communist party outside of the Soviet bloc, and established a military regime in Indonesia that has lasted in various incarnations until the present-day.

Erroll Morris, together with Werner Herzog, produced The Act of Killing and have vigorously promoted the film at festivals and colleges. Morris, who is a brilliant historian in his own right, has written an essay that accompanies the movie as a booklet in its DVD version. (Morris is defensive about the film – he recalls vividly that, at Telluride, where the movie had its American premiere, a prominent critic said: "After seeing this film, I know less about what happened in Indonesia than before I watched the movie.") Morris’ essay provides political and historical context for the picture. He notes that the genocide in Indonesia occurred at the same time as Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam war. Robert McNamera, and others in the Johnson administration, seem to have vaguely intuited that the destruction of the Communists in Indonesia removed the single largest domino from the field of play – that is, effectively ended any Communist threat of expansion in the strategically central Indonesian archipelago. In other words, if the "domino theory" is accepted, the slaughter of the Indonesian Communists rendered the war in Vietnam superfluous. Southeast Asia could not possibly fall to the Communists because of the Indonesian massacre. Morris quotes several news articles to this effect and observes that McNamera himself seems to have understood this implication. But Morris, also, observes that the relative ease with which the Communists were butchered in Indonesia seems to have emboldened the United States to additional measure in Vietnam – if the Communists could be defeated so readily in Indonesia, why not in Vietnam? Morris argues that the American obsession with "containment," a doctrine invented by George Kennan, led to the Indonesian genocide which, in turn, emboldened the United States to escalate its war in Vietnam. These events are all interconnected with nightmarish circular logic.

As to the American involvement in financing and supporting the terror in Indonesia, there is no doubt. Lyndon Johnson kept a private dossier on the Indonesian situation with body-counts as to Communists killed. Morris cites State Department memos and telegrams that clearly express support for the military crack-down on the Communists. CIA operatives said that the destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party was a classic, and effective, "black bag operation."

　

　

4.

Joshua Oppenheimer was born in Austin, Texas. He is presently 39. He was born in Austin, Texas, graduated from Harvard, and has a doctoral degree from the University of Arts in London. He presently lives in Copenhagen.

Oppenheimer has made a number of films, mostly about economic injustice. In 2000, he first worked in Indonesia on a documentary called The Globalization Tapes. (This film is about oppressed workers on a coconut plantation). Some of the people that Oppenheimer interviewed for The Globalization Tapes were survivors of the 1965 massacres and, in that way, he first learned about the million Communists and ethnic Chinese killed in 1965. Oppenheimer was astounded to discover that the perpetrators of this genocide spoke openly about their role in the slaughter, were celebrated as heroes, and, indeed, led an enormous paramilitary organization, Pacasila youth, dedicated, in large part, to the memory of the death squads who had conducted the killings. Oppenheimer set out to learn more about this phenomenon and conducted interviews, meeting with many of the men implicated in the massacres.

After three years of filming interviews, many with hesitant and evasive subjects, Oppenheimer encountered Anwar Congo and his cronies. Congo was happy to justify his involvement in the killings and, indeed, as the filming progressed asked Oppenheimer to make the footage more interesting by re-staging the murders. It appears that the paramilitaries associated with Congo and his friends, particularly the Pancasila Youth group, were enthusiastic about the project and, in fact, as the work progressed the Indonesian government took an interest and also seems to have lent its forces to some large-scale re-enactments. The result is the extraordinary footage showing Indonesian death squads with tanks and jeeps fictionally destroying entire villages. The Indonesian TV and film industry seem to have been complicit with the killers, at least as the documentary progresses. This is not surprising. In 1984, the Suharto regime produced a film about the 1965 genocide, Penghianatan G30S/PKI ("The Treachery of the September 30^th Movement/PKI"). That film is precursor, in some ways, the lurid imagery orchestrated by Kongo and his friends. In the government-produced film, Suharto appears as himself. The movie shows him learning to his horror that six of his comrades, higher ranking generals, have been murdered by the Communists. After much soul-searching and deliberation, Suharto decides to avenge the death of his comrades and crush the Communist insurgency. According to Errol Morris, the film ends with Suharto’s "funeral oragion at the resting site of the dead generals, pleading with the Indonesian people to carry on" the legacy of the murdered men. (In the Act of Killing, Mr. Congo and Adi Zulkadry discuss the 1984 film, Congo asserting that the movie "makes (him) feel not guilty" but Zulkadry denouncing the picture as unrealistic propaganda.)

Oppenheimer worked on his film, The Act of Killing for eleven years. He filmed sequences with Mr. Congo and his friends, particularly the ebullient side-kick, Herman Koto, over a period of seven years. Apparently, vast amount of digital footage exists – unlike filmed documentaries, movies made on digital equipment can produce virtually unlimited amounts of raw imagery. Film has to be developed, a costly process; digital images are simply stored in computers, a technological advance that is virtually free. It may be that the extraordinary material that Oppenheimer has gathered into the finished cut arises as a consequence of the enormous amount of time spent on the project – after working for many years with his principal protagonists, Oppenheimer seems to have enjoyed their complete confidence and was privy to their most intimate thoughts and emotions as to the burden of the history in which they were involved. Oppenheimer also seems to have had an unlimited amount of intriguing and grotesque footage to draw upon in editing the movie into its final form. One has the suspicion that Oppenheimer could construct another half-dozen movies on various subjects from the material that he has gathered and, indeed, during the production of The Act of Killing, the director has made several other shorter films also on Indonesian subjects.

A question that deserves consideration is this: Oppenheimer has devoted eleven years of his life to interviewing massacre survivors and the perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Indonesia -- Why? Oppenheimer is the child of Jewish academics who were also socially committed activists. His grandfather fled from Berlin in the thirties. All members of the Oppenheimer family that remained in Germany were murdered. Accordingly, Oppenheimer feels that his movie is unavoidably related to his family’s experience of the European Holocaust. Oppenheimer, however, remains something of an anathema to most Jewish critics for this reason: he has publicly stated that no one learns from history and, least of all, many Jews – after all, he said in an interview with a liberal (socialist) Jewish newspaper, "the same people who had been brutalized in Europe commenced their own program of ethnic cleansing in Palestine not more than three years after being liberated from the camps." Needless to say, such public pronouncements have been controversial and have not endeared Oppenheimer to many supporters of the Israeli state.

In some ways, another famous and great film, Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary about the Holocaust lurks in the background to The Act of Killing. In Shoah, the destruction of the European Jews is represented as an absence, as a kind of great emptiness or void. Lanzmann shows the concentration camps as they look today – haunting, barren spaces, overgrown foundations, railroad tracks that lead nowhere. He avoids any documentary footage of the atrocities on the principle that seeing some pictures minimizes the event. Lanzmann’s point is that Holocaust is so huge and terrible, an annihilating wind of nothingness, that it can not be represented at all – his huge film is profoundly iconoclastic, a series of interviews, voice-overs, words cast into the face of an immense darkness. The Act of Killing is the anti-Shoah. Oppenheimer reverses Lanzmann’s strategies: his film is about the perpetrators, all of them prosperous, respected members of their communities. The victims are without voice in the film. Shoah refused to re-enact or, even, depict, crimes. The Act of Killing gradually becomes nothing more than a montage of re-enactments. Shoah defamiliarizes and asserts the singularity of the event; The Act of Killing shows mass murderers trying to normalize their crimes by construing them within the conventions of mediocre genre films. Shoah is austere; The Act of Killing is gaudy, cheap, meretricious. There are different ways to approach material of this kind. But the comparison is not without merit: after Shoah and Night and Fog, The Act of Killing is the greatest film ever made about mass murder.

　

　

5.

The Act of Killing is an epic for an age obsessed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The film proposes that entire societies, whole nations, can be afflicted with PTSD. Of course, a valid question can be posed: can there be post-traumatic stress when the originally traumatic event was not perceived in those terms – that is as "traumatic" – to the men perpetrating the atrocities. But, perhaps, the etiology of PTSD lies precisely in the failure of the perpetrators to acknowledge their atrocities.

After the tsunami scoured the shores of northern Japan, a disquieting phenomenon manifested itself. Hundreds of ghosts appeared to haunt the living. The people said that the most disturbing ghosts were small, bedraggled children searching for their parents and endlessly crying out to their mothers. Many corpses were never recovered and this resulted in the ghost-infestation. Both Buddhist and Shinto priests had to be retained to exorcize the phantoms. Japan is a modern, technological society, but most Japanese believe in ghosts. To the people on wave-ravaged coast, the ghosts weren’t imaginary or metaphoric or symbolic of anything – they were simply objective inconveniences like the shattered roads and the tainted water.

How do you lay to rest an angry or confused ghost? In psychoanalytical terms, what can a therapist do to dissolve the ghostly manifestations of trauma, the flashbacks, the sudden and catastrophic resurgence of repressed memories? An answer lies in the related concepts of catharsis and abreaction.

Let’s consider abreaction first. Freud coined the term (abreagerien) in 1893 and used it with respect to therapy that he provided to patients categorized as suffering from hysteria. The great female hysterics of Victorian era were like opera divas, consummate actresses who converted their sexual repression into bizarre and impressive symptoms – blindness, for instance, paralysis, fits of weeping, sexual mania, masochism. Freud asserted that by forcing his patients to talk about their traumas, almost entirely sexual in character (real or imagined rapes), the victims would abreact – that is, experience the emotions of their trauma afresh and be inoculated against future hysteria arising from the suppression of those emotions. In some respects, The Act of Killing is devised as a cinematic abreaction of the emotional energy suppressed by Indonesian society traumatized by mass murder. When Mr. Congo sees himself tortured on screen, a process of abreaction is triggered resulting in the terrifying final sequence in the handbag shop where the murders occurred. "Murder will out" – Congo tries to violently expel his memories of murder from his body

A related concept is catharsis. Plato thought that catharsis was a therapy by which diseases of the soul were exposed and extruded so that they could be overcome. Aristotle applied this notion to tragedy – tragedy induced strong feelings of terror and pity so that these emotions can be controlled and, even, experienced as pleasureable. Catharsis arises from the representation of tragic events. Congo and his friends are obsessed with recreating, albeit in different film genres, the murders that that they committed. The reproduce the murders as part of a film noir gangster picture, as a Western, even as a movie musical – that is, they re-present the killings in the style of the movies that they enjoyed when they were young men. (It must be remembered that Congo and his cronies began as small-time thugs and gangsters – their first criminal enterprise was scalping black-market movie tickets in front of a theater. This movie-house was across the street from the storefront where the paramilitary committed the "thousand" murders for which Kongo takes credit). At first, Congo recreates the murders for purely documentary purposes – he wants to show his garrotting technique. But as the film proceeds, the representation of the murders in the context of elaborate and stylized film genres seems to become an end in itself. In the hallucinatory last third of the film, depiction of the murders overwhelms any pretense at documentation – the representation of the act of killing absorbs everything into it; the act of killing as cinematically depicted takes over the entire film, creating a dream-like and visionary phantasmagoria in which the boundaries of past and present dissolve, just as the movie erases gradually the distinction between sober documentary and hallucinated fantasy. As the film descends into a surreal reverie in which everything refers to mass murder, the repressed subject matter returns with a vengeance – the memory that was suppressed now takes over the entire world of the film. A subject that was once taboo becomes the only thing anyone can talk about.

The Act of Killing is a decisive film in Indonesian history. It represents the "return of the repressed" in the culture of that country. Although the film is, more or less, forbidden in Indonesia – it is mostly screened in clandestine showing on college campuses -- everyone knows about it. The thing that could not be discussed is now on everyone’s lips.

Joshua Oppenheimer is a persona non grata in Indonesia. He has been threatened with libel suits by most of the people identified in the film, including the formidable Yapto Soejosoemarno, the leader of the paramilitary Pancasila Youth. Oppenheimer received a Tweet from Indonesia after the premier of his film – "if he comes to Indonesia, the name of the movie will be The Act of Being Killed." Oppenheimer has said that he doesn’t intend to travel to the country in the future.

　

6.

The Act of Killing is a big film, complex, with many scenes and a broad perspective. Because of the film’s ambition, the picture is sometimes compared to Shakespeare’s "theater of the world," his "poem unlimited." In his essay on the movie, Errol Morris invokes Hamlet, specifically the part of that play in which the hero reconfigures an old tragedy, The Murder of Gonzaga, into The Mousetrap for presentation at the royal court. Hamlet inserts lines into the play within the play to see if he can catch "the conscience of the king" – the idea parallels the principal action in The Act of Killing: the reenactment of a murder to see what effects that performance has on the perpetrators of that murder. Morris points out that Hamlet’s objectives in staging The Murder of Gonzaga as a play within a play are obscure: is he trying to verify a suspicion? Force a confession? Or instill rebellion in other members of the Court? Or does he have some other motive entirely? The same questions might be raised about the historical re-enactments staged by the killers in Oppenheimer’s film. Indeed, Oppenheimer’s movie raises even more difficult issues: after all, Hamlet was not the murderer, but merely someone suspecting that a crime had occurred; in The Act of Killing, the garish re-enactments are contrived entirely by the perpetrators. Are they trying to justify themselves? If so, why do they adopt movie musicals, tawdry horror movies, and B-picture gangster films as the vehicle of their justification?

Shakespeare presents many variants on the theme of hidden crime and punishment. Another parallel suggests itself. The re-enactments designed by Mr. Congo and his cronies are, perhaps, advanced as some sort of justification for the men’s crimes, but the project backfires – what happens seems more like the revenge of an angry, unsatisfied ghost, the return of the mutilated Banquo to the feast that Macbeth has hosted. Congo and the other members of the paramilitaries are prosperous, happy, beloved, it seems...but, there is a specter at their banquet. And the return of the murdered man to the festivities signifies the triumph of the conscience: Macbeth can’t convince himself that what he has done is just or, even, warranted. The emblem of his guilty conscience is the apparition. Similarly, The Act of Killing evolves from documentary into a bizarre fantasy – the more peculiar and outlandish the imagery, the more apparent, it seems, that something is terribly wrong, that there is an army of corpses attending upon Mr. Congo and his friends.

Another reference occurs to me: Woody Allen’s 1989 comedy-drama Crimes and Misdemeanors. In that film, a prosperous opthalmalogist, Judah, has an affair with an airline stewardess. The doctor is happily married and, when the stewardess tries to blackmail him, he hires a mobster to kill the woman. After the stewardess has been murdered, the eye-doctor has to retrieve his private effects from her apartment. There Judah sees her bloody corpse, becomes terrified, and believes that a just God will punish him for his crime. But nothing happens. A drifter is accused the murder and imprisoned. Judah finds that he is able to forget about the crime that he has committed. He awaits some sort of retribution but nothing bad happens to him. His wife loves him, his children are successful, his practice flourishes and he is admired by all. At a wedding, the doctor meets a friend who is a film-maker. Judah tells the film-maker that he has an idea about a man who has committed a murder, but not been punished for the crime:


Judah:
And after the awful deed is done, he finds that he’s plagued by deep-rooted guilt. Little sparks of his religious background, which he’d rejected, are suddenly stirred up. He hears his father’s voice. He imagines that God is watching his every move. Suddenly, it’s not an empty universe at all, but a just and moral one, and he’s violated it. Now, he’s panic-stricken. He’s on the verge of mental collapse, an inch away from confessing the whole thing to the police. And then one morning, he awakens. The crisis has lifted. He takes his family on vacation to Europe and as the months pass, he finds he’s not punished. In fact, he prospers. The killing gets attributed to another person – a drifter who has a number of other murders to his credit, so I mean, what the hell? One more doesn’t even matter. Now, he’s scott-free. His life is completely back to normal. Back to his protected world of wealth and privilege.


Film maker:
But now his worst fears are realized.


Judah:
Well, I said it’s a chilling story.


Film maker:
I mean in the absence of a God, or something, he’s forced to assume the responsibility himself. Then, you have a tragedy.


Judah:
But that’s fiction, that’s movies. You see too many movies. I’m talking about reality. I mean, if you want a happy ending, you should see a Hollywood movie.

　

7.

Why should you care about something that happened in Indonesia almost fifty years ago?

In the film’s most famous shot, six show-girls wearing pink-flamingo-colored garments dance on a suspended walkway that leads into the mouth of an enormous metal fish. A fat man wearing a similarly neon-pink satin dress gestures at Mr. Congo. Mr. Congo is clad in a tuxedo with cane and tophat. The landscape in which this strange scene takes place is unbelievably beautiful and lush, a green slope overlooking a brilliantly blue lake.

On the commentary track, Werner Herzog, one of the producers of the film, observes that this lake is the place where human history almost came to an end. The expanse of water shown in the movie is Lake Toba, one of the largest caldera-lakes in the world. The blue water cradled among the high, lushly forested cliffs rests in the crater of a vast volcano that may, or may not, be dormant.

Between 66,000 and 70,000 years ago, Mount Toba erupted. The eruption was so explosive that a plume of dust veiled the earth and created climate change, a winter that lasted six years. Some anthropologists believe that this climate change wiped out almost all hominids living in Africa – in other words, strangled off most of the human race in its cradle. Only a tiny number of people survived this event, possibly four or five family bands. All modern human beings trace their lineage to the survivors of the six-year winter caused by Mount Toba’s eruption. (Herzog retails this story in the commentary track on the DVD; as with most things Herzog says, his account has to be taken with grain of salt – many anthropologists note that there is insufficient evidence of climate change in East Africa to believe that the Toba event created the bottleneck in human prehistory.)

There are innumerable volcanoes in Indonesia and many of them erupt from time to time. Indonesia is also the largest Muslim country in the world. One day, perhaps, it will erupt with dire consequences to the rest of us.



　

NOTES:

Pemuda Pancasila – The Pancasila Youth paramilitary club, said to number 3,000,000 members in Indonesia. Werner Herzog, in a wry aside on the commentary track, observes that the Pemuda Pancasila members run around in camouflage outfits that are bright orange – thereby, wholly defeating the purpose of the camouflage pattern.

Pancasila: These are the five (panca) principles (sila), adopted by Sukarno in 1949 as the basis for the modern Indonesian state. The principles are;

– Divinity of one supreme God;

– Just and civilized humanity;

– Unity of all Indonesia;

– Representative democracy;

– Social justice for all.

These principles have come under attack recently from Islamic fundamentalist. The Indonesian word for God ("tuhan") differs from the Arabic word, "Allah" and some Mullahs have preached that good Muslims can not subscribe to these guiding tenets since they don’t properly name the divinity.

　


QUESTIONS:

1. Who is the leader of the Pancasila Youth?

(A) Herman Koto (B) Yapto Soejosoemarno (D) Adi Sulkadry (E) Mustapha Kento

2. In Dutch, what does the word "gangster" mean?

3. In Indonesia, The Act of Killing is called "Jagal" ("anonymous"). Why does that film have that name?

4. Huddie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly, recorded this popular tune in 1940. It has also been covered by Harry Dean Stanton, Rose Marie on the Dick Van Dyke Show, Johnny Cash, Johnny Matthis, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Pogues, and Elvis Presley. Name that tune?

5. What American politician came to Indonesia two years after the mass slaughter of the Communists and remained in the country until 1971?

6. Who is Lolo Soetero?