Jan 30
International Film Forum: THE ACT OF KILLING
The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012, UK/Denmark/Norway, 115 min.) - Daniel Groll
Carleton welcomes Micah Lott, Professor of Philosphy at Boston College, to introduce the film and to lead a discussion after the screening.
Combining testimonial interviews, reconstructions, and even fantasy musical sequences, The Act of Killing is, according to its director, “a documentary of the imagination.” The film examines the death squads that rooted out Communists, leftist sympathizers, and ethnic Chinese in Indonesia during the early years of President Suhatro’s “New Order” government. Yet instead of interviewing just the victims, Oppenheimer discovered that the perpetrators of the mass killings were not only willing to talk about their deeds but enthusiastic to have their story told.
“This audacious, horrifying, boldly experimental plunge into the mind-set of murderers and the culture of impunity breaks so many rules of documentary decorum that it virtually creates its own genre: investigative improv, perhaps. Or, better yet, Brechtian nonfiction. Whatever you call it, The Act of Killing is a must-see. Using blunt stagecraft, probing psychological insight, elegant interrogation of narrative truth and characters steeped in a particularly terrifying brand of self-mythologizing, director Joshua Oppenheimer has succeeded in turning The Act of Killing into both a sharply confrontational vehicle for bearing witness and a craftily layered meditation on the cinematic medium itself” (Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post).