Questions of Taste and The Act of Killing

The most successful documentary film of the last twelve months is probably The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer's startling and original exploration of the cinema ganster death squads in 1960s Indonesia. Recently Nick Fraser, editor of the BBC's Storyville series, wrote an article for the Observer berating the film for being tasteless. He also accused the filmmaker of indulging mass murderers in a manner that served to teach the audience nothing.

I am not an expert on documentary film but like most couch potatoes, I've seen a few over the years and I would assert that it is not necessarily the job of a documentary filmmaker to be tasteful. Sometimes tastelessness provides a straighter line to truth. One film that for me proved a significantly more troubling ethical dilemma than The Act of Killing was The Bridge, Eric Steel's 2006 film about people committing suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Steel's crew filmed the bridge for a year capturing 23 of the 24 suicides on tape and using some of that disturbing footage interspersed with interviews with family and friends to create a sense of why people did what they did. Part of Steel's defence was that the crew always alerted the authorities when they thought someone might be at risk of jumping. He even claimed that the presence of the crew had saved lives. To me, the film seemed horrendously exploitative and certainly tasteless. In the UK it was consequently given short-shrift by critics but I don't think it's a bad film.  Whilst I may be deeply uncomfortable with the filmmaker's approach, I came away from the experience emotionally drained, but with a deeper understanding and compassion for the film's subjects than I might have gained from a more conventional approach. I'm not saying I approved but rarely has a film lingered longer in the mind.

Like The Bridge, The Act of Killing is a tasteless film but one for which I am prepared to stand up more wholeheartedly. The film focuses on Anwar, an apparently genial man who, we discover at an early stage, was responsible for the murder of over 1,000 suspected Communists in 1960s Indonesia. He explains that back in the 1960s the Communists wanted to ban western style movies but he was one of the 'gangsters' who guarded the cinemas against such incursions. When the Communists were ousted in a 1965 coup, the cinema gangsters were recruited to seek out and kill as many Communists as they could. This link with western cinema is the starting point for Oppenheimer's film. Anwar and his gangster friends are invited to re-enact the killings they carried out in the style of their favourite movie genres. In the course of the film we see them in cowboy hats, dressed as gangsters, and, most bizarrely of all, in a musical number. It is about as tasteless as tasteless gets but the process of making these odd little movies reveals a great deal about the way people build construct their own narratives to justify who they were in the past and who they have become.

In the course of the film we see how the cinema gangster version of events is accepted as the mainstream narrative of Indonesia. Even the vice-president of the country openly refers to them as the heroes of the nation. However, the process of re-enactment does have some effect on the gangsters as we see some begin to doubt their own myths. At the end of the film even Anwar sees the need to dramatically express doubt about his crimes (although I felt he was not a good enough actor to pull it off and was really unrepentant).

Perhaps Nick Fraser is right in his assertion that this is not a film that reveals a great deal about the Indonesian death squads. Maybe the film is exploitative but I like to think it is more exploitative of those who have committed terrible crimes than anyone else. I certainly don't think it indulges Anwar and his cronies in such a way as to generate much in the way of audience sympathy.

Like most good films, whether fiction or documentary or whatever lies between, The Act of Killing is about much more than its stated subject. It's a study into the charisma of evil, the potential of human beings to do terrible things, believe in cruel myths, and turn on their fellows. It is also a very cinematic film about cinema's profound but not always positive influence on people.

Back in the 90s I worked in crime prevention and community safety and one night I was talking to some young people about why they were involved in violent crime. They claimed that two key influences were violent action films and video games. It was a shock to the system for this liberal, anti-censorship thinker. When I got these young people to elaborate, I was taken aback by the lack of sophistication in their answers, by their capacity to make a role model out of a two-dimensional character in a martial-arts movie or demonise someone they didn't like by reimagining them as an exploding pixellated game character, and by their willingness to admit that this kind of stereotyping affected the way they interacted with people in the real world. Their victims were not real people but labels, one-dimensional enemies, the uncool. In The Act of Killing we see the devastating consequences of that kind of thinking (or lack of thinking) taken to absolute extremes. It's a tasteless story told in a tasteless way but that's the film's strength, not a weakness and I strongly recommend it.

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