“I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade…it is unprecedented in the history of cinema.”
That is Werner Herzog, speaking as he signed on to be the executive producer of The Act of Killing, currently screening throughout the UK. The film follows Anwar Congo and his fellow Indonesian ‘gangster’ friends, a group of highly celebrated, low-budget film-makers and the heads of a right wing paramilitary group in the country. More importantly though, they are all men partially responsible for the mass murder of between 500,000 and 2.5 million people between 1965 and ’66. The film follows them as they write, direct and star in a film about their part in the killings. It looks surreal and horrific and upsetting and incredible.
Why are these men still free and unpunished? Everyone knows about the holocaust, and most know about Rwanda and the Khmer Rouge, perhaps Bosnia too, but beyond that the world’s past and present massacres seem to fade out of the collective consciousness very quickly. Certainly we should not spend our lives dwelling on the darkest acts of humanity, but equally we should not privilege one act of evil over another in terms of our attention, disgust and efforts to punish wrongdoers. The scope and size of an act does not diminish its impact on the community who experience it. What is upsetting is how infrequently those responsible are brought to justice, and how often the international response is reluctant, delayed, inadequate or in-existent. Whilst intervention might seem like an obvious course of action, it is not always effective and is often disruptive. What seems more important is to raise and then maintain awareness of situations like this and what we can do about them. What looks so unique and captivating about The Act of Killing is that not only does it strive to depict these atrocities to the Western world, but to the men themselves. It turns their own lens back on them, forcing them to look at their actions in a very direct way, even allowing them to re-experience the atrocities they committed in an atmosphere that is reflective not frenzied.
The message seems simple here: the Media have the power. Hotel Rwanda opened our generation’s eyes to the Rwandan crisis, and Kony became a worldwide villain thanks to YouTube. This film will certainly put more pressure on international groups to take a hard look at Indonesia but the reality is that very few people want to seek out all the wrongdoing in the world. We trust the larger media to inform us about what is important, but the media so often is undeserving of this trust. This trailer and these sort of thoughts are reminiscent of the documentary Manufacturing Consent, based on Noam Chomsky’s book of the same name and made up of interviews and speeches. Many of the interviewers can be slightly annoying and it is certainly rather dated now, but Chomsky is an extremely intelligent man and is always fascinating to listen to. It explores the media, its role in society, and its ‘unwillingness to criticize an ally of the elite’. It’s pretty old so you can actually find the whole thing on YouTube to watch for free. Beginning around 01.07.00 Chomsky presents a case study in the form of the Indonesian Massacres in Timor (not the same as explored in The Act of Killing), comparing the media’s reaction to this with their reactions to Pol Pot/ the Khmer Rouge. Chomsky’s claim is that the Western world’s partial responsibility for the situation in Timor is the cause of their silence on it. The United States and Canada were selling weapons to the Indonesians committing genocide. Compare this to the UK Government’s recent approval of £12billion in arms exports to countries with poor Human Rights records, and it seems like the UK are part of a tragic and recurrent culture of responsibility and hypocrisy.
Joanna Thompson