Film screening & discussion: Academy Award nominee "The Act of Killing"

A film, The Act of Killing, a current Academy Award Nominee for Best Feature Documentary, will be shown on Monday, Feb. 24 at 7 pm in Cubberley Auditorium at 485 Lasuen Mall at Stanford University. The event is co-sponsored by Stanford Global Studies, Stanford Program on Human Rights, and the vice provost of Undergraduate Education.

 

The version of the film shown will be the director's cut (159 mins). After the showing a panel will comment on the film and open the floor to further discussion.  

 

Diane Steinberg, visiting scholar, Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) will moderate the panel.

 

She will be joined by:

 

Norman Naimark, Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor East European Studies; Fisher Family Director of Stanford Global Studies; and by-courtesy professor of German Studies   

 

Erik Jensen, director, Rule of Law Program; affiliated faculty, CDDRL; and Senior Advisor for Governance and Law, The Asia Foundation

 

Don Emmerson, director, SEAF; affiliated faculty, CDDRL; affiliated scholar, Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies; and emeritus senior fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

 

In Indonesia in 1965-66, in the course of an aborted and still-murky conspiracy, six high-ranking anti-communist leaders of the country's army were kidnapped and murdered.  A surviving general, Soeharto, took command of the army, blamed the murders on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), and launched a massively vengeful politicide that destroyed not only the PKI but the entire Indonesian left, not to mention Indonesians who were falsely accused of being on the left. 

 

The true number of victims will never be known. Guesses range from less than a hundred thousand to several million. The least implausible estimates cluster between several hundred thousand and a million. Also still debated is the authorship of the original conspiracy. Some interpret the general's murders as an intra-army affair and exonerate the PKI. Others implicate the PKI in part or in whole. For others, the question of who killed the generals has been rendered moot by the appalling enormity of the mass carnage that followed.  

 

The Act of Killing features a small cast of Indonesians in Medan, North Sumatra, who claimed to have killed, and may indeed really have killed, other Indonesians who were considered "communists." Much of the heart and shock of the film features the self-confessed killers "re-enacting" their murderous roles.  

 

As a title, The Act of Killing can be read in one or all of at least three ways: (1) All of the actors' re-enactments accurately reproduce the real acts and facts of the killings that occurred. (2) The actors were to some unclear extent performing theatrical acts and fantasies for the benefit of the film's American-born co-director, Joshua Oppenheimer. (3) What Oppenheimer filmed were acts of self-importance and self-aggrandizement attributable to psychologically damaged individuals enjoying the attention.  

 

However one may wish to judge what Oppenheimer's few informants/actors did in front of his camera, an unarguable, ongoing, and systemic immorality that the film evokes is the impunity that the original killers enjoyed throughout Soeharto's time and even now in Indonesia, where communism remains illegal. Not without reason did Oppenheimer's Indonesian co-director and film crew request and obtain anonymity to avoid the risk of being sought out and assaulted by anti-communist thugs. 

 

Not a pretty picture, for sure, but a thought-provoking one, whether or not it wins an Oscar in Los Angeles on March 2.