THIS
year's Berlin film festival hosted movies by well-known directors including
Richard Linklater, Steven Soderbergh, Noah Baumbach, Michael Winterbottom and
Ken Loach
For most who saw it, though, none had more impact than The
Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer's disturbing and surreal documentary
featuring a group of North Sumatran mass murderers and thugs.
Executive-produced by Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, it
curls itself around your brain and guts, making you gasp in queasy,
mind-shattering disbelief as you become immersed in the grisly details of
Indonesia's blood-soaked 1960s and the personal torment of a man slowly
unravelling as he struggles to come to terms with his brutal actions.
This wasn't the film's first festival outing. However,
Berlin, where The Act of Killing won the audience award, arguably provided the
most resonant setting because of the stark contrast between the ways Germany
and Indonesia have responded to catastrophic events that have scarred their
national psyches.
Walking around Berlin, it is impossible to escape the triple
spectres of Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust; they haunt the city in landmarks,
museums and memorials that bear witness to Germany's descent into barbarism
under National Socialism.
In Indonesia, conversely, it has been almost taboo to talk
about the more than a million people murdered in anti-communist purges
throughout Indonesia in 1965-66. "That fact has long been a public secret,
a sensitive issue that has been erased from history lessons in Indonesian
schools," Farah Wardani commented in The Jakarta Globe recently, referring
to the slaughter that formed the backdrop to military strongman Suharto's rise
to power and a 30-year hold on the presidency.
Many of the dead - unionists, intellectuals, landless
farmers, members of the country's ethnic Chinese community - lie buried in mass
graves. Meanwhile, their killers live as free men, hailed as heroes by
political leaders. No one has been put on trial for crimes against humanity. No
one lives in fear of losing their liberty for their part in mass killings.
The country is no longer a dictatorship - Suharto resigned
in 1998 and died a decade later - but "much more has stayed the same than
has changed", claims Oppenheimer when we meet in the Berlinale Palast
during the festival. The Act of Killing, therefore, "emphasises
continuity", he says, "because Indonesia is a country where the
military is still overwhelmingly powerful; where the government and big Western
corporations use thugs to enforce oppressive labour conditions or to seize
people's land or to break strikes; and where there's still political censorship".
When the filmmaker tried to explore the truth about what
happened in 1965 through the experiences of survivors in the plantation belt
outside Medan, the capital of North Sumatra, he found: "They were too
scared to say what had happened to them because the killers were living all
around them." Police threatened the filmmakers with arrest, while
plantation bosses and civic leaders regularly found ways to interrupt shooting.
Eventually, the survivors asked Oppenheimer: "Why don't you film the killers?"
Suddenly, "all the doors flew open". Whereas his original subjects
had feared reprisals, the men who'd helped bathe Indonesia in blood were eager
to talk about their achievements.
"The first killer I filmed, I was astonished by the
boasting," he says. "I thought, 'Here is a very important story about
impunity, unless he's unique.' I said, 'Can you introduce me to other members
of your death squad, and to other death squads?' " The surprising result
was that Oppenheimer met every killer he could up the chain of command; in
dozens of interviews, he talked to army generals in Jakarta and to retired CIA
agents living outside Washington. Anwar Congo, one of the most feared
perpetrators - now a spritely, Hollywood-loving grandfather - became the main
protagonist. At first he was boastful like all the other killers, but there was
something different about him, Oppenheimer recalls. "I lingered on him
because he was somehow honest and his pain was right at the surface."
In a chilling scene at the beginning of the film, Anwar does
the cha-cha on a rooftop terrace where he dispatched many of his victims. He
explains that he began by beating them to death but, because of the blood and
the smell, switched to using a wire garrotte instead. Even as Anwar dances,
"his trauma is already present", suggests Oppenheimer. "He had
been trying to forget by drinking and doing drugs, and therefore became a
playboy by dancing and going to nightclubs."
Anwar introduced Oppenheimer to the newspaper boss who would
order whom to kill, and to Adi Zulkadry, another member of his death squad.
(First seen in the film stepping off a plane wearing a T-shirt with the word
"Apathetic" written across the chest, Adi claims he has never been
troubled by sleeplessness, guilt or depression.) We also meet Herman Koto, a
ponytailed hulk who comically tries to enter politics because of the
opportunities for extortion, and leaders of Pancasila Youth, a paramilitary
organisation heavily involved in the purge.
In a unique move, Oppenheimer invites the men to create
fictional scenes, in the cinematic genres of their choice, to describe what
they did. He films them putting the pieces together, and the increasingly
disturbing and disorienting results. "Killing always involves some kind of
distancing from what you are doing," he says. "Maybe that always
means a kind of performance and acting, some kind of storytelling. Maybe it can
just mean drinking first. But for Anwar, in part, it comes from the stories
that he would imbibe in the cinema, the images and roles, the process of
cinematic identification. The act of killing, for Anwar, was always some kind
of act."
Anwar thought he could still distance himself from his
trauma in this way. Instead, Oppenheimer says, "he found that acting for
our re-enactments, he was reliving a kind of acting that he was going through
at the time." Rather than abandon the process, Anwar embraced it; and
midway through the shooting of the documentary, when the director suggested
they go deeper into his nightmares, he "decided to explore through the
filmmaking his own brokenness, his own trauma, his own pain". When Anwar
casts himself as the victim in a noirish gangster movie scene and puts the wire
noose around his own neck, he begins to understand what he has done.
"That's not a conceptual idea that came from me," says Oppenheimer.
"It's kind of an inevitable part of an emotional journey."
A horrifying re-creation of an attack on a communist village
so blurs the line between reality and fiction that it feels like the filmmaker
is losing his grip on the documentary. In fact, the raid and its upsetting
aftermath look far worse than when they were filming, he says. Even so, there
is a definite shift as "the fiction scenes take on a poetic truth, an
emotional truth, that starts to take over the form of the film", he says,
"so that it moves very much from being an observational documentary to
being a kind of fever dream".
Oppenheimer admits there were times when he worried about
collateral damage. When the ponytailed gangster Herman suggested Oppenheimer
film how he makes a living, the director found himself following him and a
Pancasila member as they extorted money from terrified Chinese shopkeepers.
"I felt terrible because I knew that suddenly these Chinese shopkeepers,
who are afraid of these men, now are confronted with the fact that, lo and
behold, they're so powerful that they have their own foreign TV crew. So I
would linger back, ostensibly to get a release form signed, but actually what I
would do is try and explain what we were doing because I didn't want to add to
their fear."
On another occasion, he realised when he was logging footage
that he had filmed Anwar's neighbour tell a story about how his stepfather was
murdered, and then go on, harrowingly, to play a torture victim as Anwar and Adi
look on. (The neighbour has since died of diabetes.)
"When I put the film together I felt utterly exposed, I
felt dirty, I felt tainted, I felt compromised," Oppenheimer admits.
"But I felt at the same time that if it's my mistake that I allowed that
to happen without my noticing, the fact that it happened - that he told this
story and then they continued to work with him, having him play the victim -
was more important."
It was an illustration of the men's sense of impunity that
everyone needed to see. Because of Indonesia's censorship laws, however, The
Act of Killing has not yet gone on general release there. Nevertheless, it has
been seen, in a longer cut than the one shown in Berlin, at nearly 300 special
screenings.
Disturbed by the film, the editor of the country's largest
news magazine, Tempo, wondered if it was a repeatable experiment or whether the
killers' openness was a response to something unique to Oppenheimer's methods.
"So they sent journalists all over the country to try
and find killers who would talk about what they did in 1965. To their horror,
they found that all over Indonesia the army had outsourced the killings to
gangsters and criminals and rewarded them with power afterwards, and that these
men were very happy to boast about the most grotesque, unthinkable things that
they had done to other human beings."
They told stories similar to the one Anwar had recounted on
the rooftop, they talked about burial pits, about slaughtering people in
rivers, about killing people by firing squads, and about starving people in
concentration camps. Tempo featured the testimonies and an extensive report on
The Act of Killing in a double issue published in October.
"It broke a silence in the Indonesian media that has
been in place ever since the killings," Oppenheimer says, "where no
mainstream news or media outlet would even acknowledge that the killings took
place."
It is now too risky for him to return to Indonesia. In an
email exchange after the Berlinale, he tells me that he is still in contact with
Anwar, with whom he's grown close, and that the killer watched the film for the
first time in Jakarta in November. Afterwards, they'd talked by Skype.
"He started to cry," says Oppenheimer.
"Tearfully, he told me: 'This is the film I expected. It's an honest film,
a true film.' He said he was profoundly moved and will always remain loyal to
it. I asked him how he felt during the screening, and he said, 'There is
nothing left for me to do in life but die.' I tried to comfort him as best I
could. 'You're only 70 years old, Anwar. You might live another 25 years.
Whatever good you do in those years is not undermined by the awful things in
your past.' It's a cliche, but it felt honest and it was all I could
manage."
Now that The Act of Killing has opened a debate in
Indonesia, Oppenheimer hopes it may lead to a nationwide investigation into the
events of 1965. There are probably too many men (possibly as many as 10,000)
like Anwar to put on trial ("I think you'd have a civil war if you
tried") but the people really responsible - the army generals, majors,
colonels and top paramilitary leaders - could be forced to testify in a
commission.
Ultimately, he wants understanding. The Act of Killing
doesn't seek to reassure us by painting the world in black-and-white moral
certainties like much of the cinema beloved of Anwar. Rather, it forces us to
see that the killers aren't so different from ourselves, which, perhaps, is the
most troubling (and salutary) lesson of all.
"I think this film wants us to say: 'There's no good
guys, there's no bad guys, there's just people.' That's its deepest
message."
The
Act of Killing will screen at the Sydney Film Festival (June 5-16) and the
Melbourne International Film Festival (July 25-August 11). A general release is
expected to follow.
Next
week in The Australian: Stephen Fitzpatrick on how The Act of Killing changes
the debate around a defining episode of post-independence Indonesia.
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