The Act of Killing
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The Act of Killing |
| Original title | The Act of Killing |
| Country of production | Denmark , Norway , Great Britain |
| original language | Indonesian , English |
| Publishing year | 2012 |
| length | 159 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Joshua Oppenheimer |
| production | Signe Byrge Sørensen |
| music | Elin Øyen Vister |
| camera | Carlos Mariano Arango de Montis, Lars Skree |
| cut | Niels Pagh Andersen, Janus Billeskov Jansen, Mariko Montpetit, Charlotte Munch Bengtsen, Ariadna Fatjó-Vilas Mestre |
| chronology | |
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The Act of Killing is an award-winning documentary film by US director Joshua Oppenheimer from 2012. Executive producers included Werner Herzog and Errol Morris .
In contrast to the classic documentary film, the makers of the film did not take a neutral, purely reporting position. Rather, they asked people who were involved as perpetrators in the mass murder of around half a million people in Indonesia , which was the subject of the film, to re- enact the events from 1965/1966 with distributed and changing victim / perpetrator roles. In doing so, they documented on film and through interviews which reactions this so-called re - enactment ("reenactment") evoked in the perpetrators of the time, who had never been held accountable for the state-ordered murders.
This cinematic novel approach to serious historical events, which had also been largely ignored in the West until then, polarized the critics. The film received mostly and partly enthusiastic praise, but also drew a few harsh criticism, which particularly criticized the lack of representation of the “ historical context ” of the mass murder .
In 2014 Oppenheimer's documentary The Look of Silence followed , this time dealing with the Indonesian mass murder from the victim's perspective and acting as a counterpart to The Act of Killing . Both films have won numerous film awards and were among others. a. Nominated for an Oscar in the Best Documentary Film category.
content
The film deals with the historical massacres that took place in Indonesia from 1965 to 1966 after the failed military coup of 1965 . This coup was only appended to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) by the Indonesian government without any official investigation , which according to current knowledge was probably a deliberate misrepresentation . As a result, a state-organized mass murder began , in the course of which union members, intellectuals , ethnic Chinese and landless peasants were accused of being communists , arrested or directly murdered. The exact number of victims is still unknown due to a lack of official investigations; the most likely estimate is a number of 500,000 murdered. The suspicion of being a communist amounted to a death sentence and was carried out by state-organized, paramilitary death squads and gangsters (interpreted by the perpetrators as "free men"). To this day, the perpetrators live undisturbed and even brag about their actions in public. In the documentary, some are asked to re-enact what they did in film scenes. The main character is Anwar Congo, who describes himself as a " gangster " and was showing American films in a cinema. Influenced by the behavior of the gangsters in these films, he carried out his contract killings; there were probably hundreds or thousands, an exact number is not given in the film. The re-enacted scenes of the killings, the form of which the murderers were free to choose for this documentary, are also influenced by film narratives .
The special thing about the documentary is that the perpetrators show no awareness of wrongdoing and some of them are still active today in leading positions, with contacts up to the highest levels of government in Indonesia. Ibrahim Sinik, editor-in-chief of the Medan Pos newspaper , who was present during interrogations and torture in his editorial offices, is still the newspaper's chief today. He gives detailed information in front of the camera. The Pancasila youth, one of the largest paramilitary organizations in Indonesia with three million members and involved in the massacres of 1965-66, is still active today. In front of the camera, MP Marzuki mentions the income of the Pancasila youth from illegal activities such as gambling , illegal logging of Indonesia's primeval forests, illegal fishing , racketeering and nightclubs. But the governor allegedly "needed" the paramilitary forces to maintain "security in the region". In a speech to his members, the leader Yapto Soerjosoemarno proudly shouts: “It is said that the Pancasila youth are a gangster organization. If we're gangsters, I'm the biggest gangster of all. ”A paramilitary prides himself on raping 14-year-old girls.
In a crowd scene in the jungle, the deputy minister for youth and sport Sakhyan Asmara appears in an orange uniform, which identifies him as a member of the Pancasila. He pretends to be an anti-communist . During the filming, some perpetrators of yore take on both the perpetrator and the victim role in an interplay. Anwar Congo begins to have doubts and asks himself whether the murders might not have been wrong after all. He mentions difficulty falling asleep and nightmares. In the end, he suffers from a gagging fit, but there is no real rethinking, at least not in front of the camera.
Historical background
After the mass murder of the Indonesian Communist Party , which had previously been one of the strongest in the world with around 3.5 million members, the dictatorship of General Suharto began in 1966 . He overthrew the dictator Sukarno , who was working with or sympathizing with the communists, and ruled until 1998. After taking power, the Suharto regime also officially banned the communist party and any corresponding political activity. The version of the sole guilt of the Communist Party (PKI) for the military coup of 1965 , which was never investigated , as well as the mass murder justified by it as "saving the fatherland" formed a kind of founding myth for the regime of the right-wing Suharto and his strictly anti-communist doctrine or state ideology of the "new." Order ”( Orde Baru ). Therefore, until Suharto's resignation in 1998, any criticism of this official version of the events - and thus of the alleged necessity and even moral justification of the murder - was strictly forbidden. The historical view of the coup and the massacre that was coined at the time and, according to the current state of research, is wrong or probably also deliberately falsified is propagated in Indonesian school books, on television and from official Indonesia to the present day. The efforts for legal and historical clarification that have been sprouting up for a few years have been made difficult or even blocked by the Indonesian government and social establishment to this day - which is partly due to their own involvement in the events of that time, as in the film based on the murderers' own stories is documented about their sometimes very successful careers. These connections partly explain the disconcerting attitude of the actors of the murder who have their say in the film, which appears to be seemingly completely amoral or without any awareness of wrongdoing in the film - whose attitude, according to the director, only consistently reflects the historical lie conveyed to Indonesian society for decades .
Movie reviews
“'The Act of Killing' [takes] an ambivalent and, in this respect, the only appropriate attitude to the rudimentary cognitive process that it accompanies. On the one hand, the potential of the game, of re-enactment, ultimately: of the cinema, to lend historical events an immediacy, a concrete presence that makes them sensually and presently tangible and through this strategy opens up new ways of dealing with them. On the other hand, there is still the possibility of understanding them as mere game material despite their historical truth - Anwar Congo himself, later, together with his grandchildren, watches the recording of his acted torture, and between flashing moments of recognition and perhaps even a form of remorse one can always sense that form of pride in one's own crimes that perhaps shapes the most terrifying impressions of this monstrous film. "
The BBC journalist Nick Fraser, on the other hand, denied the film any gain in knowledge and instead referred to it as snuff , i.e. a film that presented real murders for entertainment purposes:
“I find the scenes in which the killers are encouraged to retell their deeds, often accompanied by enthusiastic expressions of satisfaction, harrowing; and not for the reason because it tells us as much as many think, but because it tells us so little of important. "
Replica of the director on allegations of "missing historical representation"
Like some other critics, Robert Cribb, an Australian professor of politics and history of Asia, criticized in an internet essay that the film did not depict the "historical connections" and accused the director of " manipulation ". Joshua Oppenheimer replied in an interview with the same online magazine:
“Essentially, the film is not about what happened in 1965, but rather about a regime in which, paradoxically , genocide was denied but also celebrated - to keep the survivors in a state of fear and terror , the public To keep it brainwashed , and to allow the perpetrators to get on with themselves ... It never pretends to be a comprehensive account of the events of 1965. The film tries to understand the impact of murder and terror on people and institutions today. "
Awards (selection)
- Best documentary
- Panorama audience award for the best documentary film
- Prize of the Ecumenical Jury for the best film in the Panorama section
Further awards
In 2016, The Act of Killing was ranked 14th in a BBC poll of the 100 most important films of the 21st century .
Web links
- The act of killing in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Official page for the film
- The Act of Killing at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
- Article about the film at Truthout
Individual evidence
- ↑ Catherine Shoard: The Act of Killing - review . In: The Guardian , September 14, 2012.
- ↑ http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/09/15/actors-may-sue-director-lauded-film-pki-killings.html
- ^ Anett Keller: Suharto processing in Indonesia: A monstrous crime. In: the daily newspaper . July 26, 2012.
- ^ John Gittings: The indonesian massacres 1965/66. In: Mark Levene, Penny Roberts: The Massacre in History. Berghahn Books, 1999, pp. 247-262.
- ^ A b Melvin, Jess (April – June 2013). "An interview with Joshua Oppenheimer" . Inside Indonesia. Quote: the film is essentially not about what happened in 1965, but rather about a regime in which genocide has, paradoxically, been effaced [yet] celebrated - in order to keep the survivors terrified, the public brainwashed, and the perpetrators able to live with themselves ... It never pretends to be an exhaustive account of the events of 1965. It seeks to understand the impact of the killing and terror today, on individuals and institutions. "
- ↑ Jochen Werner: Without shame or remorse. Pearl Divers , November 14, 2013, accessed November 14, 2013 .
- ↑ The Act of Killing: don't give an Oscar to this snuff movie. The Guardian, February 23, 2014, engl. Quote: I find the scenes where the killers are encouraged to retell their exploits, often with lip-smacking expressions of satisfaction, upsetting not because they reveal so much, as many allege, but because they tell us so little of importance.
- ↑ Cribb, Robert (April – June 2013): "Review: An act of manipulation?" . Inside Indonesia.
- ^ The Panorama Audience Award . Berlinale 2013
- ^ Robert Award for Best Documentary . Danish Academy Award 2013
- ↑ Bodil Awards (Sær Bodil) . Bodil Awards 2013
- ↑ Grand Prize (DOX: AWARD) ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . CPH DOX 2012
- ^ Grand Prix (Documentaire) ( Memento from August 25, 2013 in the Internet Archive ). Festival de Cinéma Valenciennes 2013
- ↑ Grand Prize of the Jury ( Memento of the original from September 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Documenta Madrid 2013
- ^ Grand Prize . Beldocs Belgrade International Documentary Film Festival 2013
- ↑ Audience Award for Best Feature Film ( Memento from June 24, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ). FICUNAM Mexico City 2013
