Proud mass murderers envision themselves as movie stars in Joshua Oppenheimer’s THE ACT OF KILLING

THE ACT OF KILLING (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, December 11, $12 (can be applied to museum admission), 3:00
Series runs through December 23
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.theactofkilling.com

Joshua Oppenheimer’s Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing is one of the most disturbing, and unusual, films ever made about genocide, and you can see even more of it on December 11 when the Museum of the Moving Image screens the director’s cut, containing thirty-seven minutes of additional material, as part of the nonfiction series “Pushing the Envelope: A Decade of Documentary at the Cinema Eye Honors.” In 1965–66, as many as a million supposed communists and enemies of the state were killed in the aftermath of a military coup in Indonesia. Nearly fifty years later, many of the murderers are still living in the very neighborhoods where they committed the atrocities, openly boasting about what they did, being celebrated on television talk shows, and even being asked to run for public office. While making The Globalization Tapes in Indonesia in 2004, the Texas-born Oppenheimer met some of these self-described gangsters and, struck by their brash, bold attitudes, decided to create a different kind of documentary. In addition to following them around as they go bowling, play golf, sing, and dance, proudly showing off how happy their lives are, Oppenheimer offered them the opportunity to tell their story as if it were a Hollywood movie. The men, whose love of American noir and Westerns heavily influenced the stylized killings they perpetrated, loved the idea and began to restage torture and murder scenes in great detail for the camera, getting in period costumes, putting on makeup, going over script details, reviewing the dailies, and playing both the violent criminals and their victims.

The leader is master executioner Anwar Congo, who is perhaps the only one haunted by his deeds; although on the surface he is proud of what he did, he is tormented by constant nightmares. Such is not the case for the others, who laugh as they go over the gory details, especially paramilitary leader Herman Koto, Congo’s protégé and a man seemingly without a conscience. Meanwhile, fellow executioner Adi Zulkadry wonders whether telling the truth will actually negatively impact their legendary status. “Human rights! All this talk about ‘human rights’ pisses me off,” Congo says in one scene. “Back then there was no human rights.” Oppenheimer also depicts how frighteningly powerful the three-million-strong, government-connected Pancasila Youth is, ready to fight for the very same things that led to the genocide in the first place. It’s hard to comprehend how these men continue to walk free, and one can argue whether Oppenheimer should indeed be giving them the platform that he does. Watching these gangsters — or “free men,” as they like to call themselves, since the Indonesian word for gangster is “preman,” derived from the Dutch “vrijman” — artistically re-create scenes of horrific violence is both illuminating and infuriating on multiple levels that will leave viewers angry and incredulous.

A family searches for answers in THE LOOK OF SILENCE

THE LOOK OF SILENCE (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2014)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, December 11, $12, 6:30
Series runs through December 23
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
thelookofsilence.com

Oppenheimer’s Oscar-nominated The Look of Silence opens with an old man, wearing a pair man, wearing a pair of red optic trial lens frames, gazing into and around the camera for twelve uncomfortable seconds, in complete silence, showing no emotion. It is a striking metaphor for the rest of the film, a shocking documentary about the 1965–66 Indonesian genocide and a bold man determined to confront the men who brutally murdered his brother then, along with a million other supposed communists. In 2012, Oppenheimer made the Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing, in which the leaders of the genocide, who are still in power today, restaged their killings as if they were Hollywood movie scenes. Created as a companion piece to that documentary, The Look of Silence follows forty-four-year-old optometrist Adi as he learns the details of what happened to his brother, Ramli, who was butchered two years before Adi was born. Adi has decided to do what no one else in his country will: break his culture’s silence and denial and face the perpetrators to make them take responsibility for what they did. If they are willing to show remorse, he is willing to forgive. But he has set out on what appears to be an impossible mission; the men he meets with still run Indonesia, and they are more than comfortable threatening the well-being of Adi and his family. Meanwhile, Adi’s parents and patients don’t want to talk about what occurred back in 1965–66, or what is still going on today, as they live in fear of these same men. “No, nothing happened,” one woman says when asked about the killings in her town of Aceh. “You ask too many questions,” she adds. Kemat, a survivor of the Snake River massacres, says, “The past is the past. I’ve accepted it. I don’t want to remember. It’s just asking for trouble.” Adi learns horrifying details as he meets with village death squad leader Inong (the old man shown at the beginning of the film), Snake River death squad commander Amir Siahaan, and regional legislature speaker M. Y. Basrun, all of whom defend their actions, and their power and wealth, while more than hinting that Adi should end his quest. But Adi isn’t about to back down.

Adi faces a group of mass murders, including his brother’s killers, in powerful documentary

Adi is often shown in front of a television, mystified as Oppenheimer shows him footage taken for The Act of Killing; Adi stares ahead in disbelief and silence, much like we did when watching the final film, amazed at what we were seeing. It is a fascinating coincidence that Adi is an optometrist, going around his community fitting people for glasses, helping them see better, even if they don’t always want to look at certain things. He is appalled that his children’s school still teaches that the evil communists deserved to die; it’s particularly telling when his young daughter playfully puts on two pairs of glasses, as if perhaps the next generation will not look away — and to emphasize that, Oppenheimer cuts directly to Adi’s aging, decrepit father, Rukun (whom his wife, Adi’s mother, Rohani, claims is 140), his eyes closed, as he can barely see or hear anymore and needs to be taken care of like a baby. Adi has become a folk hero in Indonesia, where some regions have banned the film and screenings had to be canceled because of threats of violence from the police and military. But the film itself depicts Adi as an everyman; he could be any one of us, saying the things that need to be said. “Making any film about survivors of genocide is to walk into a minefield of clichés, most of which serve to create a heroic (if saintly) protagonist with whom we can identify, thereby offering the false reassurance that, in the moral catastrophe of atrocity, we are nothing like the perpetrators,” Oppenheimer (The Globalisation Tapes) writes in his extensive, must-read notes on the film’s official website. “But presenting survivors as saintly in order to reassure ourselves that we are good is to use survivors to deceive ourselves. It is an insult to survivors’ experience, and does nothing to help us understand what it means to survive atrocity, what it means to live a life shattered by mass violence, and to be silenced by terror. To navigate this minefield of clichés, we have had to explore silence itself.” In that way, to use a cliché, The Look of Silence speaks volumes. And although it’s specifically about the Indonesian genocide, it could just as easily be made about many other mass murders that have occurred, and are still going on, around the world. Adi might be receiving long standing ovations at screenings where he appears, but it’s telling that the film’s closing credits include more than two dozen people listed as “Anonymous,” from the codirector and a coproducer to a camera operator and production managers. Clearly, fear still rules in Indonesia.

An unforgettable film that needs to be widely seen, The Look of Silence, which was executive produced by Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, and André Singer, is being shown at 6:30 on December 11 at the Museum of the Moving Image, shortly after the director’s cut of The Act of Killing. “Pushing the Envelope: A Decade of Documentary at the Cinema Eye Honors,” which celebrates the upcoming tenth annual Cinema Eye Honors awards, continues through December 23 with such other past Cinema Eye nominees and winners as Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher’s October Country, Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross’s 45365, and Jennifer Venditti’s Billy the Kid, with the directors on hand for Q&As. Both The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence won Cinema Eye Honors for Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking and Outstanding Achievement in Production; Oppenheimer also won for Outstanding Achievement in Direction. The nominees for Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking for the 2017 Cinema Eye Honors are Cameraperson, Fire at Sea, I Am Not Your Negro, OJ: Made in America, and Weiner; the winners will be announced at the Museum of the Moving Image on January 11.