The Island Where the Nazis Won (In Praise of The Act of Killing)

The Island Where the Nazis Won

By Cameron Byerly

Published in St. John's College The Gadfly, December 21st, 2015

The Act of Killing is the most brilliant documentary I have seen in my entire life. It has no close second.

It also happens to be the most nauseating experience I have forced myself to sit through since its release in 2012. It is painfully difficult to watch. I add this as a warning, because despite a deep sense of guilt with recommending it, I have been desperate since my first viewing to convince as many people to watch it as I can.

Allow me to explain.

In 1965, the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military.

Anybody opposed to the military dictatorship could be accused of being a communist: union members, landless farmers, and the ethnically Chinese.

In less than a year, and with the direct aid of Western governments, over one million ‘communists’ were murdered.

The army used paramilitaries and gangsters to carry out the killings. These men have been in power - and have persecuted their opponents - ever since.

The film, made nearly fifty years after the murders, follows the director Joshua Oppenheimer as he finds these elderly, respected men with grandchildren, and tells them a lie. He employs them as writers and actors for a fake film. A grand, heroic movie of their killings for their country, he says. They believe him, and begin sorting through their heroic history to a film worthy of their past. This is what the documentary is; the behind the scenes, the discussions between, and their reasoning behind the making of this false film.

Nothing can truly capture how foul it is to see an old man, with grey hair and a wry smile, explaining with no guilt or true moral awareness the methods he used to kill hundreds of strangers individually. When asked about the killings, he does not for a second consider the question ‘why’. He begins to explain ‘how’. If you shuts your ears and looks at the visuals alone, you could easily guess that this smiling old man looking down his glasses was explaining gardening. It’s through his words that you realize he is explaining how clothing wire was the most effective means of killing on this rooftop, so that the blood would not stain his best clothes.

I am not recommending the film as an exercise in discomfort for discomfort’s sake; this is a masterful societal and human study presenting what happens to the individual, and history, when victors tell the stories. Watching these men slowly make this fake film, and showing their grandchildren these atrocious acts they did with pride, is staggering. No creative writer has ever captured the charcoal black humor of this documentary, the unscripted juxtaposition of these men pausing their reenactment of racial murder in order to participate in evening prayers. The varied response from the three main characters having to perform and experience the killings again is the most fascinating social experiment I have ever seen or heard.

One could watch the film and talk for hours alone on the fascinating relationship these old men have with the young, who do not question what their grandparents did, but cry when exposed to the reality of the murders. Or the importance of American movies to these killers, and how terrible it is that they explain their ‘sense of self’ during these killings being molded by what they saw on the screen. The disgusting sexism and casual rape discussed by celebrated men. The unscripted balance between the three main characters as they discuss their pasts. The vice-president of Indonesia himself appears in the film and is fascinatingly open with the perpetrators of the genocide. There is not a single moment in this experiment that is wasted.

The documentary is more than the sum of its parts. This is saying something awe-inspiring, because its parts say more than any documentary I have ever seen. It is a process in itself, an event that happens to the viewer as real as any breakup, or vacation, or party one can experience. We talk about film as stories, as carefully constructed architectural creations, perhaps with nice lighting and dialogue. It is rare that we participate in cinema that makes us feel that we have gone through an experience ourselves. To watch these musicless scenes all presenting the complete incomprehension of these celebrated men is physically stomach-churning.This film is not merely the ‘lesson’ one can pluck from it, like most stories with a clear moral take-away. It isn’t that simple a documentary. It isn’t anything near its summary. It is about the experience itself, the process of having to face this for so long and to make one's mind try to understand theirs, that makes the movie so important to experience. I have never forgotten this film. I have yet to fully understand how it has changed my thinking, even after three years.

Joshua Oppenheimer, the film’s director, stated in an interview years ago that he ‘...started to feel as though I’d walked into Germany forty years after the Holocaust to find the Nazis still in power, and I wanted to understand….’

This is the other side of the holocaust stories you’ve been hearing your entire life. This is what happens when genocide succeeds.

I feel the need to share this film with every world leader, every world citizen, just to try and understand the extreme of what the human mind and human society can create. I want females and males to watch this to explain what they see to each other. I want soldiers to watch this, I want politicians, and older generations, all to sit in a circle and try to understand what we could possibly do to prevent this from ever happening again. One finds discussions of war, sexism, past generations, even political lingo are changed drastically when one realizes how they are handled in a post-genocidal Indonesia. The more important question festers, with a seemingly worthless answer; how many times has this happened before?

I can only hope to advertise, with praise and vain attempts to explain what the film shows so subtly, what will be one of the most enlightening three hours of anyone’s life; The Act of Killing.

“Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.”

- Oscar Wilde