The Act of Killing - 2013 Documentary

http://www.berlinale.de/en/archiv/jahresarchive/2013/02_programm_2013/02_Filmdatenblatt_2013_20133913.php

In the year following the Indonesian military coup of 1965, pro-regime paramilitaries of the Pancasila Youth and sadistic criminals killed more than a million alleged Communists. These murders went unpunished and the perpetrators are still powerful, influential people who can rely on the support of corrupt politicians. These men proudly recall their struggle against the Communists and demonstrate their efficient methods of slaughter. Slim Anwar Congo and portly Herman Koto are delighted when the film's directors ask them to re-enact these murders for their documentary. They zealously set about finding actors, designing elaborate costumes and discussing possible scenarios. They see themselves as film stars who will show the world Indonesia's true premen or 'free men'. But eventually the film project gets these men to talk about and reflect upon their actions as they have never done before. Congo says that for the first time he felt what his victims must have felt. It begins to dawn on him exactly what he did to hundreds of people. The reconstruction of reality has become more real for these men than their actions originally were.

http://www.clydefitchreport.com/2013/05/documenting-the-act-of-killing/

How did you find your main character in the film, Anwar Congo, and what has been his reaction the film?

By the time I met Anwar, who was the 41st perpetrator with whom I filmed, and the 41st perpetrator who suggested we visit the places where he had killed and demonstrate for me how he had killed, I was explaining the point of the film very openly. I would say, “You have participated in one of the largest killings in human history. Your entire society is based on it. Your lives are shaped by it. You are eager to show me what you have done. Go ahead and show me what you have done, in any way you wish. I will document the process, and film your re-enactments in whatever ways you propose. We will combine the re-enactments with the discussions around their creation, and we will create a new form of documentary that shows what these events mean to you and to your society. I don’t know if it will work, but let’s try.”

This is, in fact, what we did. So the men in The Act of Killing were not tricked into making the film. Anwar has seen the film and is very moved by it, and remains loyal to it.

http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/news/the-act-of-killing-trailer.php

As you can see in the new trailer for the doc, some of their short films end up looking like crime films, some experimental art films, and some gaudy Bollywood musicals, but the tie that binds them all together is that they’re really disturbing to watch, and they just may leave you examining how you react to the murder you see so frequently projected up on the big screen, and why it is you react the way you do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_killings_of_1965%E2%80%931966

http://blogdaboitempo.com.br/2012/09/18/welcome-to-the-spiritual-kingdom-of-animals-slavoj-zizek-on-the-moral-vacuum-of-global-capitalism/

A very interesting concept that shold produce a lot of resonance in viewers.

whoah

I watched it at the SFIFF. It was kinda fucked up!

Murderers enthusiastically re-enacting their crimes with a large dose of projecting themselves as heroic movie stars? How could that be fucked up?

I don't know why I thought I wouldn't be affected by it, but it really disturbed me. I'm glad I watched it though.

this is one of the best ideas for a movie ive ever heard

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Film/Pix/pictures/2012/9/14/1347638153352/The-Act-of-Killing-008.jpg

The two dudes in the middle of that shot are mass murderers.

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/101east/2012/12/2012121874846805636.html

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/09/30/1965-victims-protest-against-the-act-of-killing.html

The film leaves out the role of the military, whereas in fact, said Astaman, most of the murders of PKI members in the province were committed by members of the military.

“The film did not involve the military, despite the fact that soldiers carried out the massacres. I voice my protest,” Astaman told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

http://www.whatsondalian.com/news-5335-actors-may-sue-director-of-lauded-film-the-act-of-killing-on-1965-indonesian-massacre.html

Anwar said that he was surprised to learn the title of the film had been changed. According to Anwar, who was born in the 1940s, the film was shot in North Sumatra and was originally titled Arsan dan Aminah (Arsan and Aminah).

He portrayed Arsan, who falls in love with Aminah, a member of the Gerwani, the PKI women's movement, and the daughter of a PKI member.

Anwar said he was upset with his portrayal as a villain who crushed the PKI in North Sumatra. "If I knew this would happen, I wouldn't have acted in the film."

Saw it at TIFF. It's pretty much exactly as messed-up and compelling as it sounds.

In one scene a gaudily dressed old gangster mass murderer confesses to another he has trouble sleeping because he watched his victims die as he strangled them with wire. The other guy just says "Yeah but you watched them die when you used other methods as well".

this reminds me very much of a film i saw in france:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-21:_The_Khmer_Rouge_Killing_Machine

this movie was just

yup

otm

V curious to check out the near-three-hour director's cut kicking around now.

Eh I didn't really feel it. What was I meant to learn, that brutal psychopaths are brutal, psychopathic? That there is yet one more fucked up country in the world? Not that the story doesn't deserve to be out there, maybe it was the approach that was problematic - I got fed up with following these vile shitheads around for two hours, having their fantasies enabled. The more traumatic re-enactments were especially grim, felt like the filmmakers were highly complicit there. And any supposed remorse or understanding from the killers felt entirely bogus.

i'm reading as little as possible about this before I see it. Seems a little more gonzo than S21, though.

i am drawn to this, yet repelled. like, it sounds fascinating, but then i wonder why i'd want to put myself through that.

It's rough for sure. Ledge, from what I can gather this was the *only* way they were able to tell the story, since the authorities wouldn't let them speak to the survivors; so, as well as being a compelling angle/gimmick, allowing the killers to tell *their* story sort of gives them enough rope.

As for the "bogus" remorse, I'm certain that's how the filmmakers want it to seem! Like, it was fascinating watching how Congo starts to get into the role of a man tormented by memories of what he did, but the guy's a shitty actor and nobody but nobody seeing this film is falling for that shit.

I did find a lot of this film to be really distressing. The question of "complicity" is an interesting one, but ultimately I'd rather this film existed than not. The presence of anonymous (the anonymous who co-directed, that is) reassures me slightly wrt where this film's coming from. Idk maybe that's a copout.

Haven't seen this yet, although I've started reading Toer's Buru Quartet..

http://guernica.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/TAoK-credits.jpg

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/history/2013/07/the_act_of_killing_essay_how_indonesia_s_mass_killings_could_have_slowed.html

contains a great deal of the historical background on Indonesia 1955-1965 that I left this film wanting to know more about, as well as context concerning the escalating war in Vietnam

why was everyone in the credits anonymous?

fear of reprisals

Found myself getting genuinely angry at the guy fondly reminiscing about raping children - I suppose I should though eh.
Like in any war, it's difficult to tell who's an actual psychopath who took advantage of a situation to fulfil their needs, and who's just too unimaginative to reflect on themselves in any way.
The shocked silence in the cinema at the end was pretty deafening. Good vomiting scene too.

me and my mate were so tense and unsure of how to process this that during Anwar Congo's heaving fit at the end there i mentioned bob fleming (off 'the fast show non UKers) and we both ended up in bits trying to stifle laughter on the front row for the last 5 minutes. you feel like you need a bath after watching it.

Can anyone recommend any articles/books on the role of US Corporations in this era in Indonesia? I came across stuff about Freeport-McMoran's mining operations there through work-related reading, and I think their operations started during this era, but I'm not clear on whether they actually backed the Suharto regime from the start (or before) or just took advantage of it after.

Eh I didn't really feel it. What was I meant to learn, that brutal psychopaths are brutal, psychopathic? That there is yet one more fucked up country in the world? Not that the story doesn't deserve to be out there, maybe it was the approach that was problematic - I got fed up with following these vile shitheads around for two hours, having their fantasies enabled. The more traumatic re-enactments were especially grim, felt like the filmmakers were highly complicit there. And any supposed remorse or understanding from the killers felt entirely bogus.

― ledge, Wednesday, July 17, 2013 9:43 AM (1 week ago)

don't get this reaction at all. mass atrocities resist our understanding because of their scale, unpunished executioners violate our sense of justice, and fresh ways of looking at these issues are few and far between. these vile shitheads not just having their fantasies enabled - they're unwittingly confessing and exposing what has been hidden and suppressed. it's like watching all the president's men and saying eh all politicians are corrupt, so what!

yes, the remorse from congo seems false - another act, as convincing as any of his other acting jobs, but the hall of mirrors effect exposed the depth of his depravity, and on the whole the film has something to say about truth and aesthetics. that the ending can be interpreted several ways means oppenheimer captured the reality of the situation in all its shaded & horrible intractability.

I've read some critics complain that the film doesn't educate anyone about indonesia - maybe not, but I know more about indonesia and its history after doing research sparked by watching the movie. the movie is powerful enough, and popular enough, that it's hard to imagine it won't play some role in shaping indonesia's future.

has anybody seen both the 2 hr theatrical and 2 hr 40 min indonesian cut? I've only seen the latter and have no idea where you'd begin to cut.

this movie was just

― auscozeichnet (cozen), Tuesday, July 16, 2013 5:19 PM (1 month ago)

theatrical starts here in 2 weeks so I guess I'll answer my own question

this is insane + amazing

ive been trying to come to terms with, like, how adorable i found these dudes at times

what a crazy movie

brociopaths

how adorable i found these dudes at times

!! They were non-stop assholes! Immature, self absorbed, bullying, vain, ignorant. Not to mention psychopathic.

Maybe there is some adorable asshole thing I don't get, I mean I've always hater Homer Simpson.

*hated

I was with you till you compared homer simpson to mass killers

I'm no expert but a wiki informs me he's directly responsible for the deaths of at least two people.

Lol yeah I guess

They weren't good people tho

was laughing my ass off during this, but felt bad because i was the only one. but i dont know how else u can react to the chinese ghost giving anwar congo a medal and thanking him for sending him to heaven. its interesting that everyone upthread thought anwar was affecting remorse... he seemed like such a simple motherfucker to me, i could believe he'd just never reflected like this before. but then maybe your all right, maybe he was thinking "haha finally my emphysema comes in handy" when he was yakking up shit. the other guy, who was really open about how what they did was montrous but was smart enough to rationalize his way into living with it, was pretty scary. and the scariest dude was the protection racket guy who laughed about raping children.

the part where that guy is going around and shaking down shop keepers for protection money was one of the toughest parts to watch

All the bits with terrified ethnic Chinese are the stuff of nightmares, like the "co-star" of that one scene

amazing film.

so many unforgettable moments. like that one part near the end where the director directly interjects himself into the film for the only time (i think) when the guy has a bit of a breakdown after playing the role of an execution victim. in the car afterward, the guy is like "i was so scared, it was so terrible...do you think they felt as bad as that?", and joshua is like "YES. THEY FELT WORSE BECAUSE IT WAS ACTUALLY HAPPENING TO THEM.", which is the most obvious thing in the world, but he just stares distantly like it's a new thought to him. unbelievable.

I saw this w/ creepy pre-expectations but it won me over, esp w/ the gagging at the end.

Still think there was a lil too much slapstick with the obese crossdressing thug.

relax and Rolex

i need to read more background info on the making of the film, because my gf and i were having a debate about what the people in the film thought they were doing when they agreed to appear on the film. as in, did they realize that the bulk of The Act of Killing would be raw footage of them working to film the movie within a movie? or did they think that The Act of Killing was just going to be the film within a film - prearranged scenes with amateur actors reenacting executions? obviously they were aware that they were being filmed "off set", but did they just think that was going to go into a "the making of The Act of Killing" DVD extra or something?

at first glance it seems most people were aware that their off the cuff conversations would be used in the main film. but near the very beginning of the film, there's a scene where two of the main evil guys are talking at length about the scenes that they're shooting, and how they will finally present the "truth" of what really happened, etc etc. from that scene, it seems like they're thinking of the released film as this well-shot, hollywood style series of killings with some sort of narrative. it doesn't seem like they're talking about the film including scenes of them running for parliament, fishing, etc.

sorry, those are two of the most confusing paragraphs i've ever written, and that's saying a lot. i should probably just track down an interview with the director and see how they approached it.

sorry, guess i should read the first goddamn post in this thread:

By the time I met Anwar, who was the 41st perpetrator with whom I filmed, and the 41st perpetrator who suggested we visit the places where he had killed and demonstrate for me how he had killed, I was explaining the point of the film very openly. I would say, “You have participated in one of the largest killings in human history. Your entire society is based on it. Your lives are shaped by it. You are eager to show me what you have done. Go ahead and show me what you have done, in any way you wish. I will document the process, and film your re-enactments in whatever ways you propose. We will combine the re-enactments with the discussions around their creation, and we will create a new form of documentary that shows what these events mean to you and to your society. I don’t know if it will work, but let’s try.”

This is, in fact, what we did. So the men in The Act of Killing were not tricked into making the film. Anwar has seen the film and is very moved by it, and remains loyal to it.

unbelievable. i don't know why i'm surprised at their willingness to do that, even after viewing the film, but i am.

i guess the other specific scene i was remembering was the part where they reenacted the village massacre, and the govt. minister visits. he eggs everyone on to simulate a violent rage, but even he is taken aback by the rage, and advises everyone to tone it down a little. but then he suggests that perhaps it's good that they appear so violent because it will make good propaganda for their military.

all of that - the govt. minister did all of that realizing that he would be in the film saying those things? from the looks of it, it seems like he just thought he'd only appear as the "actor" in the scene, inspiring the village massacre.

i don't know. i'm not trying to criticize oppenheimer - even if there was deception, it helped to capture some amazing statements and actions.

oh that was in response to

me and my mate were so tense and unsure of how to process this that during Anwar Congo's heaving fit at the end there i mentioned bob fleming (off 'the fast show non UKers) and we both ended up in bits trying to stifle laughter on the front row for the last 5 minutes. you feel like you need a bath after watching it.

― ewar woowar (or something), Friday, 19 July 2013 14:04 (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i was going to go see 'the great beauty' as a palate cleanser but then i didn't do that

the hardest parts for me were the kids. what a movie. i wish it had more examples of indonesians who weren't/aren't complicit as a reminder of the 'cracks' and a broader context. like that woman at the start who didn't want to participate in the film. i kept hearing the lines about 'more humane killing' in the context of drone warfare. the communist interrogation scene was just. interested in reading the interviews linked up thread but right now i should try to go to sleep...

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2013/12/38850/

If what The Act of Killing fundamentally has to teach us is the simple fact of the atrocity of Indonesian death squads, I would think that there would be more efficient and useful ways of acquiring this information. If, on the other hand, what this film is offering is some sort of poetic or psychological or political insight into that information, I’m still waiting for critics to furnish me with some compelling testimony about what these insights might be. Maybe they’re present in the film and I can’t see them. But having suffered through the 169-minute “director’s cut” of The Act of Killing twice, I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that the media’s validation of mass murderers and relative lack of interest in their victims is by now too well ingrained in our cultural reflexes to be irrelevant to the appeal of Joshua Oppenheimer’s film. Maybe there’s some other use value for his showcase for the feelings of mass murderers that I haven’t yet been able to tease out of this material. But if this is the case, I’m not willing to try again until someone offers me a valid reason of why I should. (At least Shelly Kraicer makes a brave try at this in a Facebook post; I wish he convinced me.)

i agree it's about time we addressed the motivations and mindset of victims of violence

An inane project. The "ambiguity" of reality-versus-performance doesn't wash when a film's subject hasn't even been adequately confronted in the courts, never mind other docs. I suppose I'd be more forgiving -- "noble failure" and all that -- if the families of the dead weren't alive. I know one thug breaks down at the end but Stalin and Pinochet's men did too, I'm sure. More thoughts here.

Anwar was faking it in that last scene, which is what shot the movie's stock up for me in the end.

why isn't he up for a supporting actor Oscarr?

Only one case of category fraud per year (e.g. Julia Roberts).

I'm uncertain he was faking, Eric, why aren't you? Is the filmmaker?

Because the movie didn't convince me he'd actually embarked on a spiritual-moral journey. And I think the filmmakers picked up on that and gave him enough rope to garrote himself with.

so is Oppenheimer lying when he says he developed a friendship with Anwar? That creeped me out when I read it. Oppenheimer's doing a Q&A next week in NY btw.

so did you two think this worked?

No, I find Oppenheimer's motives creepy too. But, given movies often make what little semblance I have of a moral compass spin in circles, that's not something I mark in the debit column.

it worked differently, but I will do a second viewing in the next few weeks.

The "ambiguity" of reality-versus-performance doesn't wash when a film's subject hasn't even been adequately confronted in the courts, never mind other docs. I suppose I'd be more forgiving -- "noble failure" and all that -- if the families of the dead weren't alive.

I'd be more forgiving of your opinion if you had to publish it as anonymous else face imprisonment or worse, like nearly everyone who worked on the film. if they and oppenheimer had waited for justice to be served before making it, the families of the dead would also be dead - of old age. documentary filmmakers and investigative reporters often have to work with unsavory ppl to tell their stories. getting close can involve exhibiting false sympathies and looks a lot like complicity. when documenting massive atrocity the burden of making moral judgment shifts easily to the viewer. the desire to expose these acts is judgment enough, I don't need it spelled out for me.

the act of killing isn't a puff piece and oppenheimer isn't merely enabling genocidal fantasies. he doesn't let them off the hook. while watching one of his performances anwar asks "did the people I tortured feel the way I do here?" oppenheimer could've followed his lead and gone for the easy answer, "yes, isn't it terrible." but he goes further: "actually, the people you tortured felt far worse, because you knew it's only a film. they knew they were being killed."

"The families are still alive" argument doesn't fly with me because a big part of the doc is that these people weren't punished and they're actually heroes because history is written by the etc etc

I can't even understand a moral objection on those grounds.

The fact that this film leaves out data and counter responses is one of its best assets.

Noticed yesterday that Herzog does a commentary for this and dammit if i don't want to hear it.

saw the movie last month with discussion and q&a with the guy after in which he was very cogent and expansive and reflective - I'm sure he does this all the time but it was impressive

most uncomfortable scene for me was one of anwar & co.'s lackeys confessing during filming that his stepfather was murdered and offering it as additional inspiration

It was disturbing when one of the other thugs confessed in the first ten minutes, after which it was "OK, I get it, they're worse than sadists."

maybe it's more complex than that the objections to Drake from non-REAL HIPHOP people

Didn't realise this was the first part of a diptych:

Oppenheimer: I should correct myself and say that we’re still editing it. But it’s a film about a family. The Act Of Killing was never meant to stand alone; it’s always been the first film of a pair. This new film is about a family of survivors who come to find out who killed their son in 1965 in Indonesia, through my work with the first 40 perpetrators I filmed before I met Anwar. The youngest brother in this family was born after the killing, and conceived by his mother as a replacement for his dead brother. So he grew up with this terrible burden, in a family that’s been terrorized into silence. He now has children of his own, and they’re going to school and being brainwashed that all this that happened to their family was their fault, and that they deserved it, and he’s no longer able to abide that silence. He’s determined to break it, and he goes and confronts all of the men involved with killing his brother. And they react with fear, with threats, with anger. If there’s any hope, it’s in the next generation… how they react. Although some of them also react with fear, threats, and anger.

I was talking earlier about how documentary is defined by a series of codes and conventions, which is why I don’t like to identify myself as a documentarian per se. But that’s particularly true in films that are pigeonholed as human-rights documentaries, about victims. Making this film, editing this film, is like navigating a minefield of clichés, most of which serve to reassure the viewer that there is, out there in this horrible upside-down moral universe of genocide, a stable, good person with whom to identify. It’s always the victim, or the human-rights advocate who’s campaigning for some kind of truth and reconciliation. But that would be an utterly hypocritical thing to propose after making The Act Of Killing, and it’s something I think fundamentally does not serve our understanding of the experience of the survivors. It’s more to reassure ourselves that we are not like the perpetrators. That we are somehow different. That we are like the survivors, wholly good.

And so we dishonestly and deceptively present the survivors as uncomplicated, and do a disservice to the understanding of how these things happen, and to the humanity and complexity of the experience of surviving. So to avoid all of these clichés, and invent a new subgenre of human-rights documentary, has been to find a new cinematic language—something more poetic, I think. The film is turning into a kind of poem, I hope, about the silence that’s born out of terror—a poem about the necessity of breaking that silence, but also a poem for the trauma that comes inevitably when you do break that silence.

this is one of the weirdest films i've ever seen

on netflix now btw

That proposed second film sounds interesting, hadn't heard about that before.

Though fwiw I don't think TAoK "needs" an explicit victim's-perspective companion piece to function.

http://www.indiewire.com/article/killing-the-documentary-an-oscar-nominated-filmmaker-takes-issue-with-the-act-of-killing

ughlollll "no critic has admitted discomfort," stopped reading there

I do prefer S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine

If nothing else that article is a great primer on documentaries that cover similar material.

There is no mention in Oppenheimer’s film of the role of the U.S. in the Indonesian massacres, or of the bigger Cold War drama.

This isn't true, though, is it? I saw it last saturday, and I remember quite distinctly, that there was some text in the beginnning saying the coup happened with support from the west. Also, is it really the job of a director to spell something out which every audience member should be able to figure out for themselves?

I take your point about the title cards, even though it's an afterthought (the images and actors should show this info w/out the doc telling us); but, yeah, it's the job of a director to avoid universality. According to the set pieces we see, this meditation on acting and reality could have happened in El Mozote, Chile, or East Timor.

How should indonesian gangsters boasting about their own exploits be able to show us, that it was actually orchestrated by the CIA at several steps removed? Also, the film does make clear that the killings were orchestrated, through all the seens with the paramillitary group. The article also says that the reenactments should have been made with the victims, but how does the writer know that that isn't the case? Half the crew were Indonesian, listed in the credits as 'Anonymous'.

scenes, not seens.

Interweaving footage from the time. Interviewing reporters or experts in national security. I know this would have changed the doc entirely -- I didn't like the final result at all.

I don't think that was really the point of this doc and if it didn't work at what it wants to I'd complain.

After seeing it, I have things I'm not sure about as well - mainly the way the aesthetics of the reenactments is allowed to stay so 'other' and how that could function as a way for the western viewer to hold the problems at arms length. But I thought it was quite subtle in the way it so clearly showed how the premen were perhaps just stooges for the guys with the real power.

Oppenheimer's next film is from victims' perspective.

http://www.screendaily.com/news/production/oppenheimers-killing-follow-up-readied-for-autumn-fests/5071115.article

My review of Look of Silence is now online: http://www.cinemascandinavia.com/cphdox-the-look-of-silence/

C0lin! with not just TAoK skepticism, but tearing Errol Morris a new one.

It is difficult to say why Oppenheimer paints the 1965-66 mass killings as some kind of hysterical Red Scare rather than a genocide carried out to permanently shift the balance of the country’s social forces, as even the most superficial political analysis would identify it to be. Does he feel that communists don’t make sympathetic victims? Has he been so deeply conditioned by the liberal account of American red scares that he cannot believe that powerful communist parties existed outside of the U.S.S.R. and its satellites? Whatever his reasons, the effect is to foreclose from the outset any truly political understanding of the history the film addresses....

What is troubling about The Act of Killing is not that it fails to answer every last historical question, but that it fails to pose such questions at all. Any filmmaker interested in helping their audience understand Indonesian history and politics would begin by asking what was at stake in the killings, which social forces they served and what kind of class relations underwrote them, what distinguished Suharto’s regime from the Sukarno presidency it replaced, and how the heroic myth that consecrates these anti-communist killers as national heroes has persisted for more than a decade since Suharto’s fall. Oppenheimer evinces not even the slightest curiosity about these issues. As the director of a film that he knew was destined to serve as an introductory text, his neglect of such questions, or the desire to inculcate them in his audience, can only be seen to follow from the judgment that historical understanding was secondary to other concerns.

http://incite-online.net/beckett5.html

Is that debate still happening? Zzzz

Man, writing an essay on Act of Killing in fall 2014 without mentioning Look of Silence even once is completely absurd.

who's in charge of the expiration dates? xp

I really do hate the fucking Moth Radio Hour.

except, Frederik, almost no one in the US has seen The Look of Silence.

No, but everyone knew it was coming. Writing a long exposé on the flaws of a film, without once mentioning 'btw part two is coming out soon', that's not very good.

except "part one" has already been analyzed on its own merits.

Well, yeah, but that has been a flaw all along in the discussion. The assumption that Act of Killing need to be all things to all people, rather than part one of a diptych on the murderers and the victims. The idea in that article, that it MUST be an 'introductory text', and therefore need to explain history in detail. It quite simply does not have that obligation, it has become an 'introductory text' because a surprising amount of people have loved it, not through any design on the film-makers part.

I like the whole historical part of the article, I like the discussion of Morris and the other filmmakers. It's a good article, and I'm glad I read it. It's just not good to me to grasp in on to a film that the filmmaker all along has said misses half the story he wants to tell. Wait a bit, watch Look of Silence THEN you can shout.

^^^

I suspect the second film will have less than half of the audience of the first (that's how these things usually work).

I don't think I'm alone in how this film had me running online seconds after it was over to do my own research, using as many different sources as I could find. the lack of questions, let alone answers, is precisely designed to do this. unlike most other documentaries out there, which strive to satisfy every last curiosity - those are the kind of films you have to watch out for, not this one

i think that essay still has merit. and a lot of the flaws with the act of killing are still there with the look of silence. at least this time it is less myopic, but even then, the same sense of repetition and no real broader perspective is intact (though at least there is some attempt to consider outside influence). oppenheimer is a great stylist, but i dont consider him a great documentary maker, as he is interested in very limited parts of his subject. yes he doesnt have to show or answer EVERYTHING, but the indonesian genocide is not like the german holocaust, where most people are informed on the basics, so a single minded art film on the subject is merely an appendix rather than explaining the whole story. i think hes a great filmmaker, but not a particularly sharp, or interrogative mind - when one of the murderers says something like 'joshua doesnt ask me questions like this', it seems quite telling of oppenheimer's limitations.

he is also every bit as bloodthirsty as an exploitation movie director, which he seems to admit somewhat, in the observer interview where he talks, a little disengenuously i think, about wanting people to recognise their own darker impulses in the killers. which is fine, except i wonder if he has paused to wonder what it says about him, and his own appetite for this sort of cruelty. he certainly seems to relish it a little too readily for discomfort. its like someone who works for vice tv, half politicised, half in rapture with the excess of violent atrocity (particularly those committed elsewhere, helping the viewer feel more comfortable about their own moral superiority).

so i dont really agree that oppenheimers idea that if you dislike his approach in TAOK, it means that you need an 'us and them' divide spelt out more clearly, its more that while i can recognise my own anger and violent feelings, i dont particularly want to revel in them, which is what he seems to do with the killers, who he is fascinated by.

TAOK wants to have its cake (look at these terrible men) and eat it too (but let us hear about their horrific crimes in graphic detail, again and again). this apparent lack of judgement in the viewpoint i think is just a bit of a cop out and also rather disengenous - its clear the conclusion he wants us to make (and should make, arguably, this is not exactly a morally blurry situation), he just doesnt want to spell it out, which ends up in a slightly snide, smug, passive aggressive film (TOAK I mean, not TLOS).