“The Act of Killing” (2012) a Real Life Exorcism on-screen?
My viewing of Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing last year opened me up to a range of entirely new possibilities for the documentary filmmaking realm, and the importance of exposing horrific events in the process in order to extract the truth from history. Although I had heard about this documentary prior to watching, and had already previously seen the trailer and developed serious interest in watching the film, seeing it finally did not remove the mystery that it is clouded by. I was constantly asking myself, “how is this even possible?”, in regards to the fact that the members of Pemuda Pancasila walk freely around communities of Indonesia openly bragging about the executions and tortures they have committed. Even more disturbingly shocking to me, was the fact that they happily shared their memories of murdering the citizens of their country in front of an active production crew.
The concept of a film based on real events and re-enacted within a documentary, was so intriguing to see unfold. The hypocrisy of the Pemuda Pancasila paramilitary gangsters who constantly referred to the anti-communist propaganda films of the 1960’s that inspired them to become executioners, and their acknowledgement that these films they were brainwashed by were staged and exaggerated, was profoundly bizarre to watch as an outsider. The brilliancy of this meta documentary became most evident in some of the scenes during the production of the paramilitary’s reenactment film, when the members began to become self-aware and realized that the communists were perhaps not the truly cruel ones.
The pride and boastfulness of their actions slowly faded into unadmitted disgust and guilt, and the lies they tried to tell themselves to feel less responsible for the bloodshed was an incredible look into the human condition. There were plenty of strange moments of hypocrisy from Anwar Congo, including his concern for injured ducklings and his teachings of gentleness to animals to his young grandchildren, showing that he would have had to have seen communists (or communist sympathizers) and suspected left-leaning citizens as less than animals during his murderous years in the 1960’s.
I felt a combination of admiration and bewilderment towards the production crew for The Act of Killing for being brave enough to dive deep into the extremist’s world and see this concept through. I finished the film asking myself the main questions, “Did the production crew for The Act of Killing know that they would get this much out of Anwar Congo and his killer friends? Was any of this manipulated? Did they not fear for their lives while digging into the explicit stories of murder by these cold blooded criminals?”. There was so much to take in from the psychopathic personalities of Anwar Congo and Herman Koto, especially when they would express their creative cinematic ideas for their film to each other. The vision and artistic value of their production gave themselves the ability to possess a glimmer of humanity, despite being completely warped and despicable individuals.
The Act of Killing proves that films are used as tools of propaganda, but also for finding the truth and through one’s empathy for others on screen, humanity can be born within even the most wicked individuals. Only through re-enacting the crimes committed and watching it back from a third person perspective could the main subjects of the film realize what they had done to other human beings. All in the name of destroying their society’s opposing political ideology. My lasting feeling after the film’s ending was that of a kind of sadness for the result of the lives lived by Anwar Congo and the other paramilitary murderers – a complete loss of potential for what could have been lives devoted to something positive and beautiful, perhaps as filmmakers or artists. The eventual exorcism-like realization for Anwar Congo, who only after experiencing going through the production of his film, was able to show some empathy for his victims, made for a dizzying watch.
His heaving and vomiting upon truly imagining himself in the position of the many people he brutally killed following reenactment scenes he took part in was a brutally real look at a person finally admitting to themselves that they were capable of doing things that were unthinkable to the everyday person. The reality for Anwar Congo is that he had always seen himself as an everyday person, and to have the mirror held in front of him to show what he was truly responsible for and his ensuing reaction to this was a more traumatizing image to witness as a viewer than even many of the most notorious scenes from The Exorcist.
