WORDS AND PICTURES

Joshua Oppenheimer directed the award winning documentary The Act of Killing. The film follows a group of former death squad executioners in Indonesia as they relive their past acts.

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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 15th March 2014

RF: The Act of Killing has astonished audiences all over the world. You described it as a ”Documentary of the imagination.” It is a film about how we lie to ourselves, as individuals and as groups. But you are on record saying it is not the film you set out to make. What took you to Indonesia to make a film?

JOSHUA: I first went in 2001 to help a group of plantation workers make a film about their struggle to organise a union in the aftermath of the Suharto dictatorship; under which unions were illegal. We found ourselves on a Belgian owned oil palm plantation sixty miles from the city of Medan.

The conditions we encountered were terrible. Unions were illegal and workers were forced to spray a weed killer by this Belgian company without any protective clothing. The women had this job and the mist would get into their lungs and their bloodstream, dissolving their liver tissue and killing them in their forties. They were afraid to act because when they petitioned for protective gloves and masks, the company hired a paramilitary group called Pancasila Youth. They are at the core of The Act of Killing. They threatened and attacked the women workers, many of whose parents and grandparents had been in a strong plantation workers union until 1965; and who had been killed for it.

RF: In 1965 General Suharto came to power. John Pilger quotes Ralph McGehee, a CIA Operations Officer at the time, who said Suharto’s rise to power was a model operation, and that what happened in Indonesia in ’65 prompted the Phoenix Operation in Vietnam.

American directed death squads assassinated up to 50,000 people there. McGehee also cited it as the model for the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. He says, “You can trace back all of the major bloody events run from Washington to the way Suharto came to power. The success of that meant that it would be repeated again and again.” So Indonesia’s history matters because it is part of a much wider ideological campaign.

JOSHUA: That’s right. The Act of Killing is not a historical narrative, it’s about the present and about how a traumatic, unresolved past haunts the present. Nevertheless there is a brief historical context at the beginning stating that in 1965 a western backed military coup lead to this genocide.

That viewers never say they are confused by that opening text, shows that we know this is a pattern. Most viewers of The Act of Killing know that the United States has been involved with nefarious plots to overthrow regimes when it’s convenient and then masked violence in the wake of those coup d’etat. In addition to the examples you gave, there is also the overthrow before 1965 of Mossadegh in Iran leading to the repressive regime of the Shah, another US backed puppet.

RF: You have said we are all ”Guests at a cannibalistic feast.” We may not be as close to the slaughter as Anwar and his friends but we are at the table. The victims do not feature explicitly in The Act of Killing. They are labelled by the perpetrators as communist… a term that has covered multitudes of people. Who were the victims?

JOSHUA: Anybody who opposed the new regime. Anyone the new regime considered a potential threat could be targeted for decades of imprisonment in concentration camps, or, if they were of less high value in the eyes of the regime, killed. That included the ethnic Chinese, trade union leaders, intellectuals, independent minded journalists, doctors, people from all walks of life.

The United States provided lists of thousands of names to the Indonesian army, saying; “Kill these people, take this list, tick off who you manage to capture and kill and return the list to us when you’ve got everybody.”

The people on the list were prominent public figures. So the list served no intelligence purpose. The Indonesian army, which was deployed in every village in Indonesia, would have no trouble identifying a prominent critical journalist. But the list signalled to the army; kill everybody. Do not stop at a few; go after everyone who might oppose to the new regime. We want this job done right.

RF: It was a purge of those who supported ideas of social cohesion, of unionisation…

JOSHUA: And land reform. There was a futile imbalance of land ownership and land use stemming from the colonial era. Metaphorically futile; a colonial capitalist imbalance of debt slaves. There was a movement to reform land ownership, to make it more equitable. That lead to a lot of the conflict; to the army taking decisions over who to kill at a local level. A lot of the killing was settling old scores. There was no accountability over who was killed.

The only real racial dimension was that 50,000 ethnic Chinese were killed. That is about 5% of the total number of victims and something where the United States has considerable blood on its hands. The US produced propaganda saying the Chinese were the brains of Indonesian communism. The Chinese in Indonesia had been there for many generations, hundreds of years often. They usually did not speak Chinese. But in order to drive a wedge between the new Indonesian regime and The People’s Republic of China, the US produced this propaganda. China was not allied to the Soviet Union or with the West at the time.

RF: In your film you record a number of shakedowns. We follow self-proclaimed gangsters as they cruise their territory, extorting shopkeepers for protection money. Did they have any qualms about you going along with them on that trip?

JOSHUA: No. Herman and Safit are the two extorting Chinese market sellers. They invited me to film them at work. “We will show you what we do for a living.”  I was reluctant to go; I did not want to be an accessory to the crime. If Herman, Safit and their goons go through the market; that is frightening enough for shopkeepers. But if they go with a TV crew, that would signify “Now these men are so powerful, they enjoy such impunity they can shake people down on television.” That would perhaps make people even more afraid.

But I spoke to the crew and they said, “You have to go because this happens in every Indonesian market every day and it’s never been filmed…” So what I decided to do was to tell Herman and Safit after they’d collected their money from a shop to go 50 metres away and wait for me, while I got a release form signed. What I was really doing was explaining why we were really there, and more importantly paying everybody back.

RF: That they were willing to be filmed suggests they a not gangsters at all, they are state officials and they are licensed to collect these “Taxes?”

JOSHUA: In a way. People sometimes say it is a pity the film is focussed on the paramilitary “gangsters” and not on the state itself; but the paramilitary gangsters are part of the state, they are an apparatus of the state.

We see the Vice President of Indonesia say we need thugs to beat people up and do the dirty work for us. They continually call themselves “Freemen.” The word for gangster in Indonesia is “Preman” which comes from the Dutch “Free men.” The colonial state used a layer of alienated young men who didn’t have normal social ties. They euphemistically called them Free Men and employed them as thugs to do the dirty work of the colonial regime. The colonial regime could function outside of the law and at the same time retain its patina of legitimacy and lawfulness. That system had a kind of renaissance during the military coup.

RF: This is one of the most surreal parts of the film. The Vice President, Jusuf Kalla, wearing the uniform of the Pancasila Brigade, addressing an audience of members, says gangsters are people who work outside the system not for the government. If we all worked with the government we’d be a nation of bureaucrats and we’d get nothing done… It is absurd because of course this is a government minister addressing a state licensed, militarised, uniformed institution. It is double think isn’t it?

JOSHUA: Absolutely, and the term ”Free men” is the euphemism at the core of that double think.

RF: If one of those men in an orange jumpsuit changed into a purple jumpsuit and start robbing the other members they wouldn’t celebrate him for his entrepreneurship.

JOSHUA: No. That said, there are multiple colourful camouflaged uniforms in Indonesia; these groups have splintered over time. Pancasila Youth is one of the larger ones. They are deployed semi-officially by rival politicians. It is more complicated than saying these are official parts of the state. They are unofficially part of a state riven by contradiction.

RF: A lot of people were willing to show you what they had done; to re-enact the acts in 1965. At some point you chose to focus on Anwar Congo as your protagonist. Why him?

JOSHUA: I didn’t see it as a casting process. It wasn’t like Anwar was the most interesting character. He was the forty-first perpetrator I filmed. I began with survivors. After we made the first film with plantation workers, the survivors said come back and let’s make another film about why we are afraid.

The army found out what we were doing and threatened the survivors; “You mustn’t participate in the film.” The survivors said before you quit, try and film the perpetrators, they may boast. They may tell you how they killed our relatives. The survivors had been terrorised by listening to the boasting of the perpetrators for decades.

When heard how the perpetrators spoke, I felt like I had wandered into Germany 40 years after the holocaust, to find the Nazis still in power. When I showed footage of the perpetrators gleefully telling stories of mass killing, with their families smiling about it; joking in front of their grandchildren; the survivors and the Indonesian human rights communities said; “Keep filming the perpetrators. Anyone who sees this will be forced to acknowledge it, whether they are Indonesian or otherwise.”

I spent two years filming every perpetrator I could find, feeling entrusted to do so by the survivors. Every one would invite me to the places they killed and launch into spontaneous demonstrations of how they killed. There is a key scene with Anwar, at the beginning of the film. He takes me to a rooftop, shows how he killed with wire, brings along wire as a prop, without my having suggested that and then at the end of the scene, dances the Cha-cha-cha where he killed hundreds of people.

That was the first day I met Anwar. It was a typical first day except just before he dances; one of the most outrageous, surreal, absurd and grotesque metaphors for impunity that I had filmed; he says he’s been going out drinking, taking drugs and dancing to forget what he’s done. When he danced he was trying to banish the pain that he just acknowledged.

The dancing was an incredible metaphor for impunity. It was one of the most crazy images of boasting that I had encountered. But I started to wonder if the boasting I had spent two years filming was not what it appeared. Not a sign of pride; that these men are really happy with what they have done; but a sign of shame. His awareness that what he had done was wrong produced this boastful performance. The boasting and remorse were two sides of the same coin. You can’t divide the world into terrible boastful villains and good people. I saw that whole Star Wars morality; dividing the world into good people and bad people; is a lie. I lingered on Anwar to explore that.

RF: He is deeply conflicted from the start.  The process you take him through is not a complete revelation. It is reminiscent in some ways of what I have heard described as Kissinger’s Syndrome. Establishment conservatives often frowned at Kissinger’s often surprisingly honest writing. Perhaps his own sense of guilt is driving an attempt to drag everyone else down to his level. It is like the drug addict who wants all of his friends to become addicts, rather than cleaning his own act up.

JOSHUA: I think Anwar, and every perpetrator I filmed, is conflicted by what they’ve done. Adi Zulkadry, the other killer in the film, is the most like Kissinger. Kissinger is notable because he would speak very nakedly about the self-interests and the realpolitik concerns that were motivating the violence he endorsed over his career. Adi, the other surviving member of Anwar’s death squad, speaks very openly about what was really motivating them.

He seems able to live with himself without clinging to lies, celebrating what they had done as heroic. There is a moment where they talk about a government propaganda film celebrating what they did. Adi says; “This film is of course a lie,” and Anwar says, “It may be a lie, but it’s the one thing that makes me feel better about myself.” Kissinger is closer to Adi there. He is able to say we do this because it’s in our interests.

RF: The Indonesian state was often in the background but it comes to the fore in the TV studio; a show called Special Dialogue.

JOSHUA: That show is as jaw dropping for Indonesians as it is for non-Indonesians. Indonesian state television had reported the extermination of communists as something heroic; but they would never go into details. They would never make explicit that exterminating communists meant mass murder.

But the north Sumatran studio of Indonesian state television saw some of the most powerful men in the province; the Governor; the head of the paramilitary organisation; members of parliament; the publisher of the leading newspaper; Anwar Congo, a notorious executioner; because we’re making a film together, they have a story. They may have felt they had been too cautious in their coverage of these events. After all, if these men are happy to talk openly, shouldn’t they celebrate their achievements? So they produced that talk show mid-way through the production of The Act of Killing.

The show is an artefact of the distortion of the local discourse caused by The Act of Killing. This institution, which hitherto had served as a mask for the regime, was suddenly unmasking it. Indonesians watched with a mixture of tears and delight; delighted laughter because the propaganda organ of the state unmasks the regime so damningly.

RF: But not intentionally.

JOSHUA: No. Rather naively the people in the studio figured; “If the leaders are speaking this way and we are their platform, we should make this show.” Not realising how shocking it would be to the people across the country.

RF: Its may just be the film edit, but it seems the first question the presenter asks is; “What is the origin of the word gangster?” It feels like a liturgy.

JOSHUA: The show was an hour long and was cut to about four and a half minutes , so I’m sure that wasn’t her first question. But she is a nice woman. She is a smiling, beautiful woman and her job is to hype things. She can hype a new amusement park one week and a genocide the following week. She’s doing her job. The film is an indictment of an acute superficiality which is the source of so much evil. She is guilty of nothing apart from that acute superficiality.

We do cut to the control room and meet some of the only people not connected to the perpetrators in the film. They give voice to feelings that we as viewers have. That these men are thugs, who have enriched themselves from plunder; and that they must have a terribly difficult time sleeping at night. We identify with the people observing in the studio’s control room and what is confusing and interesting is that those people are actually making this monstrous programme.

So far from being innocent bystanders, they are collaborators, they are making this show and unwittingly helping to unmask the regime. But they have built careers serving as spokespeople and helping to build the image of the regime.

RF: Nobody in that room would consider themselves to be anything more than employees and family people. But they are all in some way complicit.

JOSHUA: The show has perhaps the strongest explicit statement of impunity in the film, where Chitri, the host asks Ali Usman, one of the paramilitary leaders, “What about reconciliation?” He said; “There will be no reconciliation.” The story had to go that way. There was no reconciliation.

RF: She also asks why the children of the victims have not tried to take revenge. Anwar says, “It’s not that they don’t want to take revenge, it’s that they can’t.” And one of the brigade members in the audience shouts; “Because we would exterminate them all.” Which… cue cheering and canned applause. It is one of the most chilling parts of the film because it seems very alien; but we hear comparably mindless, violent braggadocio aimed at terrorists or Russia or the Chinese; in our societies in Northern Europe and America all the time.

Do we filter it differently because there is a national boundary in the way? It seems more chilling to us to watch the conversation in Indonesia because it is happening inside a country; but that is really not an important moral distinction.

JOSHUA: No. And the United States is championing extra judicial killing of American citizens now through drone strikes! In Congress and the Senate they are talking about killing Americans, without arrest; put on trial only as a pre-emptive measure, not because they have committed a crime but because they might commit a crime.

That is a chilling position to have arrived at in a so-called democracy. We do hear these things in our countries. In the United States a large part of the political spectrum spent many years celebrating the government’s policy of torture.

Listen to Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh; they are not just defensively justifying torture, they celebrate it. The grotesque threat; “We will exterminate them all,” is a part of our society. It is here, at home. We depend on men like Safit Pardede who shouts that; he is the same man who talks of raping 14 year old girls. We depend on men like him to do our dirty work all over the world. Just as the Indonesian Vice President says.

Men like that break unions, attack people on strike for better conditions and keep everything we buy cheap, with our support. Just when The Act of Killing was coming out in the United States the US sold eight Apache attack helicopters to the Indonesian government for $500,000,000; despite protests from every competent NGO in the region saying they will be used to kill ordinary Indonesians protesting for their civil and human rights.

RF: We talk about 1965 as though we lived in a different world today.

JOSHUA: The film is about continuity between 1965 and the present.

RF: And that TV show highlights how the narrative of Anwar’s moral legitimacy is being aggressively reaffirmed. Has Anwar put himself at personal risk with this film or is he above retribution for the consequences of the film?

JOSHUA: I think he’s above retribution. The government has no interest in going after the perpetrators and demanding justice.

The media’s response to the film has been extraordinary. The most important news publication in Indonesia, Temple Magazine, published a double edition inspired by the film, filled with seventy-five pages of boastful testimonials from perpetrators all over the country and twenty-five pages about the film showing that The Act of Killing is a repeatable experiment. That it could have been made anywhere in the country. That there are 10,000 Anwar Congo’s out there enjoying impunity today. That fear, thuggery and corruption are systemic.

So the human rights community has not demanded Anwar personally be brought to justice. They have said the commanders of the genocide should be put on trial, even if they are dead. They should be tried in absentia.

I think the biggest risk that Anwar may have faced, and why I was in touch with him so often early in the film’s release, was that he could have been blamed by the paramilitary group for bringing disgrace upon the organisation.

But that did not happen. The paramilitary group blamed me but I was in touch with Anwar to see if he was at risk. He is of course, but the paramilitary group though hasn’t blamed him.

RF: That was my thought; the authorities may have felt he had been a weak link in the narrative chain; had broken cover and unleashed that renaissance of editorial raising new questions. That must represent a threat to the establishment.

JOSHUA: It did, but they are very aware of their image. They are aware it would look like scapegoating to go after Anwar. They depend on the support of perpetrators and their protégés all over the country so if Anwar were arrested or attacked the only way that the government could do that would be to say, that he is admitting the crimes. But that would upset a lot of other perpetrators.

The way forward is likely to be some process of truth and reconciliation. Hopefully a form of justice which permanently restores this genocidal violence to the realm of the forbidden.

RF: At the end of the film we see him retching; as some kind of catharsis. You have described, with great tenderness, how you sat with him, albeit remotely, through the screening of the film. Has he now changed? Does he still have foot soldiers running shakedowns underneath him? Or has he taken up watercolours and lettuce farming?

JOSHUA: Anwar no longer has thugs working for him. He has not taken up watercolours and lettuce farming, but close! He paints, he decorates and he tends a rich, beautiful garden in front of his house. He has lost his swagger. He no longer boasts about what he has done. But I do not see that scene on the roof as a catharsis. Catharsis implies a release. It may be a catharsis for the viewer, who is relieved even a man like Anwar has some residue of humanity.

But Anwar is being ravaged. There is no release. He is trying to vomit up the ghosts that haunt him only to find that nothing comes up; because what haunts him is his past and we are our pasts and in that sense he cannot purge himself of the trauma, of the horror; he is forever shaped by it and stained by it.

RF: By focussing on the aggressors you have made a film that has probably been seen by more people that a film about the victims might have been. Is it fair to say that a film audience finds it easier to live vicariously through a gangster who is a man of action than through a comparatively powerless victims?

JOSHUA: No. There is a hunger that Hollywood studio executives are probably not aware of, or do not want to take the financial risks involved in acknowledging it. There is a hunger on the part of audiences to experience what art is meant to do; to bring us into contact with our most important problems and the most mysterious and painful aspects of who we are.

The Act of Killing answers a need. So many human rights documentaries use survivors their and abuse to reassure us that we are saintly and like the survivors; and that can attract a small audience but viewers know it is a lie and lose interest. My next film, The Look of Silence, does focus on survivors and it will do so with sufficient power that actually it may attract the same audience.

RF: I have been amazed how few people I have been able to persuade to watch the film, that may say more about my powers of persuasion than anything else…

JOSHUA: Yes, maybe it has led to a big discussion, but I am not sure it has been seen by that many people. When we were trying to get the Academy to watch it, so it could go from nomination to a potential win, it was very hard to get members to watch.

RF: Liberal, progressive, intellectual Londoners have all grimaced at me and retreated. Can you draw any comparison between people’s relationship with uncomfortable truths in Indonesia and people in Europe and North America? It might be a more direct relationship in Indonesia.

JOSHUA: When you find you are being lied to; when you send your kids to school to be lied to every day; and a film comes along and makes that undeniable; it is harder to ignore.

But there are people who are afraid to watch the film in Indonesia. What disturbs me is the number of people who count themselves as liberal who really just want to be reaffirmed in their belief that they are good. There is a smug self-certainty which can stand in the way of us confronting our most important problems.