Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

[APPLAUSE]

David Pendleton  0:12 

My name is David Pendleton, the programmer here at the Harvard Film Archive. I want to thank all of you for your patience. We just put as many people as we could into B-04, next door, who are watching the film, and they'll be watching us via a live feed. I'll be very brief, since we're running a little bit late. I want to thank all of you for coming and for your patience. I think I just did that. Also, please, if you have anything on your person that makes any noise or sheds any light, could you please make sure that it's turned off? And please refrain from illuminating such devices while the house lights are down, for the pleasure and the concentration of all of us. I want to thank a number of people for helping to make this screening possible. I first saw The Act of Killing over a year ago, when it was fairly new. And I found it one of the most troubling films I'd seen in a long time. When you watch films for a living, it's often very hard, I think, to be shocked or troubled. And I was. And because I knew that Joshua was an alumnus of Harvard, of Visual Environmental Studies here, I knew that we had to bring him, had to bring the film, and had to talk about it. And it took a number of people to make that happen. I want to thank Maria Kristensen at Final Cut for Real, the production company in Denmark that worked on the film. Also, thanks to the group at the Law School that helped to make that happen. The folks at the Film Study Center and the Sensory Ethnography Lab. Lucian Castaing-Taylor, Cozette Russell and Ernst Karel. Cozette and Ernst, especially, went above and beyond for the screening. I'm very grateful to both of you for your help. And we have funding, also, for this event from the Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities at Harvard. Let's have an applause for Cozette and Ernst, who did a great deal. And for John, our projectionist, too.

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David Pendleton  1:57

Thank you, John.

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David Pendleton  2:03

I'll just cut to the bare minimum. As you'll see at the beginning of the film, there is text that explains the subject of the film. The film is about the aftermath of the mass killings in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966, following the military coup. When Communists, dissidents and other people who ran afoul of the authorities were open prey for a number of paramilitary organizations. What makes that situation remarkable is that power has not changed hands significantly in the 40-plus years since then. And so the people who were the killers, the perpetrators of that killing, are still free to talk with impunity about what they did, as well as to reenact it, as you'll see as they did for Joshua and for his collaborators. These are men who are approaching old age and who, like I said-. Well, their feelings about what they did is, I think, really the subject of the film. I won't say anymore. First of all, I have to introduce Joshua Oppenheimer. I have a special guest, one of Joshua's professors, Robb Moss, from VES, to say a few more words of introduction. To make an announcement about the-. Oh, I’ll tell you what, while that's happening, I should mention, yes, that there is another event related to the film that takes place Monday, October 7, from 6 to 7:30pm. It's a panel discussion at the Harvard Law School that involves Joshua Oppenheimer, Robb Moss, Professor Alex Whiting, Professor Mary Steedly. Please welcome Robb Moss.

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Robb Moss  3:51

I will be very brief, but it's impossible, Josh was here 15 years ago or something like that. It was wonderful to have him. He wasn't actually in our department, but there was nobody more in our department than Josh. He was a special concentrator, I think, if I'm right about that. And this energy to make films, this deep desire to know the kind of murderous other, is something that Josh has been thinking about for a very long time. Even then. And it's such a pleasure to have him then. It's a pleasure to have you back now. I couldn't let the moment pass. I just wanted to welcome you personally, Josh Oppenheimer.

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Joshua Oppenheimer  4:38 

Thank you, Robb. Thank you all for coming. I want to thank, also, one of my other mentors who's standing in the back, Alfred Guzzetti.

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Joshua Oppenheimer  4:54

I made my first films in Alfred's class. And a very, very, very important support of mine and one of my very best friends. Also standing in the back, Michael Bronski. He was one of my closest friends while I was a student here and remains so today. I don't know, there's other friends. I’m sort of gazing at the audience to see if I can see, but I can't. So I'll just leave it at that. But thank you for having me back. It is really magical to be back now with The Act of Killing, thank you. Today, you will be seeing the full director's cut of the film. It is the international festival version of the film, the main festival version of the film. It's about forty minutes longer than the theatrical cut, if any of you have seen that. It's two hours and forty minutes long. That's about an hour and ten minutes longer than your average full length documentary these days. So prepare yourselves. And pace yourselves, because you are not used to this length. And stay, if you would, for the closing credits. [INAUDIBLE] also, would you stand up?

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Joshua Oppenheimer  6:10

Stay, if you would, for the closing credits, because a final piece of the story lies there. The whole tradition of cinema is really dominated by movies about good versus evil, good guys fighting bad guys. But good guys and bad guys, of course, only exist in movies and in stories. In reality, every act of evil in our history has been committed by human beings like you and me. And we have very few films about how we commit evil, why we commit evil, and the effects of evil on ourselves, on each other, on our societies, on our common humanity. The Act of Killing is such a film. But it's also, I hope, a film about what it means to be a human being, about what it means to have a past, about how we create our world through storytelling, how we tell stories to justify our actions, how we lie to ourselves to justify our actions. It's a film about the effects of those lies and how we use those lies to escape from our most bitter and indigestible truths. I will not say, “Enjoy the film,” it may not be that kind of film. Although you are welcome to laugh. Indonesian audiences laugh more than any other audience in the world. And they come away more moved and affected than any other audience in the world as well. I wish you a powerful, even a magical, experience. And I will be back at the end to take your questions. Thank you all so much.

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David Pendleton  7:44 

Please welcome Joshua Oppenheimer.

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David Pendleton  8:05

Let me just, maybe, start by asking you one or two questions. And then we'll throw it open to the audience. When you do ask a question, watch for, there'll be microphones on the aisles so that we can hear your questions. And also so that the people next door can hear your questions as well. So please wait for the microphone, especially important tonight. I'll start with a very basic question about the origins of the film, but also particularly to talk about, because there are two people who are listed as co-directors, Christine Cynn and Anonymous. And I wonder if you could say a little bit about what their work was on the film, your prior associations with Christine Cynn, who’s someone I know you've worked with on previous films. Maybe just a little bit about that, leading into the genesis of this film.

Joshua Oppenheimer  8:50 

Sure. So Christine Cynn and I were actually collaborating back when we were here at Harvard together. We both graduated in 1997. And we were already, then, experimenting with the space between documentary and fiction, and experimenting in how fiction and fantasy makes up what appears to be our factual reality. And we then moved to London together to continue working together. And she and I were experimenting with experimental documentary methods involving performance and collaboration in London, when a friend asked in 2001, if we'd like to try and make a feature length film with those methods -- You should use this one, because I have a cold, so I don't want him to get sick. Sorry -- So we were asked to make a film in Indonesia using these methods we were developing in London, in an oil palm plantation, where we were to document plantation workers in a Belgian-owned oil palm plantation, as they struggled to organize a union. And it was a participatory film, we didn't really direct the film. We gave them cameras, and they’d devise scenes and learn the basics of shooting and editing. But while we were there, it turned out, under the Suharto dictatorship, unions had been illegal. And they desperately needed a union because the women workers were spraying a herbicide that was dissolving their livers, killing them in their 40s, because they weren't given any protective clothing. So they really needed a union. But they were afraid to organize one, because their parents and grandparents had been in a strong plantation workers union until 1965, and had been accused of being communist sympathizers for it and had been killed, a great many of them. And they were afraid this could happen to them again. And so after we made that first film, they said, “Come back and make another film, as quickly as you can, about the source of our fear.” And that's to say, not a film simply about what happened in 1965. Not an exposé of the crimes of the past, but rather how trauma from the past keeps people afraid in the present. And particularly, what it's like to live with these high ranking, or still powerful, perpetrators living around them, in these remote plantation communities. And two things happened when we returned. We went right back in 2003. Two things happened. First, the survivors. Word got out that we were interested in what happened in 1965. And when we would film with the survivors then, the army would come and stop us. Every time we would film with the people with whom we previously filmed, the army would come and stop us. The survivors were not allowed to talk about what happened to them. And they were not allowed to be-. And we were not allowed to film them. And then some of the people with whom we made the first film in the same village, said to me,”Josh, the person over there, two houses away, killed my aunt.” “The person down there,” another person said, “killed my mother. Why don't you go and see if you can talk to them and find out how they died.” In fact, they didn't even know that their relatives had been killed. They knew that they'd been taken away and had never come back. There was never a confirmation of them having been killed. So we would go to these old men's homes, not knowing if it was safe to ask about what happened in 1965 at all. We'd ask very general questions like, “Tell me about your youth?” or, “What did you do for a living?” hoping to work the conversation around to 1965. And to our horror and astonishment, these men would, all of them, open up with these grotesque, boastful, shocking stories of mass killing, that they would tell you, in front of their wives, their children, sometimes even their grandchildren. And suddenly there was this huge question of why are they boasting? For whom are they boasting? We weren't getting testimonial, sober efforts to remember. We were getting performance. And performance is somehow always oriented towards a spectator. And the question was, who is the spectator? And performance always is meant to somehow have real effects in the world. And what were the effects they were trying to achieve through these performances? So we came back with this material to the survivors. And before we even showed it to them, we all went to Jakarta to meet with the human rights community, and we showed it there. And asked the question, “What is this? What's going on here? Why are these men talking like this?” It felt like we'd scratched the surface of something horrible and enormous. And the human rights advocates with whom we met in Jakarta said, “We don't know, but whatever it is, it's terribly important. Continue to film these people. You're finding out what happened, but that's not what matters. What matters is that anybody seeing their boasting will see exactly why we're so afraid, and glimpse the dark heart of this regime. “We need a film,” one of the human rights campaigners said, “we need a film in Indonesia that comes to Indonesia like the child in The Emperor's New Clothes, pointing at a reality that we all know is there, but that we've been too afraid to discuss. And this material will do that if you keep going.” So we felt as though we've been entrusted by a community of survivors, by the human rights community in Indonesia, to do a work that they couldn't do. A work of what felt to be of historical and moral importance. So with that mandate, if you like, I filmed every perpetrator I could find across the North Sumatra plantation belt, working from plantation to plantation, from village to village, up the chain of command, from the countryside to the city. Anwar was the 41st perpetrator I filmed. And the scene on the roof, where he shows how he kills at the beginning with wire and dances the cha-cha-cha, was the very first time I filmed him. And it wasn't particularly unusual. Very often, the first time I'd film somebody, if they didn't want to talk about what happened at home because it was busy or there was something going on, they would say, “Let me take you to the place where I had killed, where we did kill him. We'll show you what we did.” And they would take me to the places where they killed, launch into these spontaneous demonstrations of how they killed, and then lament afterwards that they'd not thought to bring along, for example, a machete as a prop. Or a friend to play a victim. And the question, after a few of these people, the questions changed. From, “What happened in 1965?” More and more to, “What's happening now?” “Why are they boasting?” “For whom are they boasting?” “How do they want to be seen?” “How do they see themselves?” And so, because they were so open, I was open right back. And I would say to them, “Look, you've participated in one of the biggest killings in human history,” I was that open. “I want to know what it means to you and to your society. You want to show me what you've done. So show me what you've done, in whatever way you wish. I will film the process. I will film your discussions with your friends about what you should show, what you shouldn't show. Why you want to show what you show. And together we will make a kind of, maybe, an experiment. I don't know if it'll work, but a new form of documentary that answers these questions. What does this mean to you? How do you want to be seen? How do you see yourself?” And that's what we did. And I just say, you can see from that, that they never think they're making another film separate from the one you've just watched. And this method is not a lure to get them to open up. It is a response to their openness. It's an effort to try and understand the nature of their openness and its effects. And if I lingered on Anwar, it was because somehow his pain was right there at the surface, and I intuited, you know, at the beginning, he says he's a good dancer, because he's drinking, taking drugs, going out dancing to forget what he's done. His pain was close to the surface, and yet he was more stridently boastful than anybody else. No one else would dance where they killed people. And I think, I intuited somehow, when I saw him, that maybe the boasting is not actually a sign of pride, and not merely a sign of vanity, but the opposite, a desperate attempt to convince themselves that they know what they've done. To convince themselves that what they did was okay, so they don't have to wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and see a murderer. It's what Adi says, “Killing is the worst thing you can do, but if you do it, make up an excuse and cling to that.”

David Pendleton  17:23 

Can you talk a bit about your decision to focus on perpetrators as opposed to victims or descendants of victims? I heard Eyal Sivan, a documentary filmmaker, this summer say that he felt that the purpose of cinema should be to focus-. That the tradition of cinema had been to focus on victims, but that he thought it was much more powerful for cinema to focus on perpetrators, in part because it puts the spectator in a much more uncertain position.

Joshua Oppenheimer  17:51 

Yeah, well, I think there's several parts to this. First of all, I didn't-. In some ways, the initial-. I didn't exclusively focus on perpetrators. I'm finishing a new film now, which is about a family of survivors. And it, I hope, repudiates all of the cliches of human rights documentary, to look at how a family of survivors tries to break a silence, and confront the people who killed their son. That's coming soon. So I didn't simply make that decision. It was also impossible to combine perpetrators and survivors in the same film. The survivors would likely have been killed for it, for what we knew. And I think also, there was the sense of a moral project of exposé. Of trying to expose, hold up, being asked, in no uncertain terms, to hold up a mirror to a whole society, so that we could see. To expose a moral vacuum that is inevitable when a whole regime is built on top of mass graves. But I think, of course, also, I had the sense that we're all much closer than we like to believe, to perpetrators. Everything touching our bodies, now, pretty much exclusively everyone in this room is wearing clothes haunted by the suffering of the people who made it. All of it is produced in places like the Indonesia of The Act of Killing. Places where there's been mass political violence, where perpetrators have won, where they've kept people too afraid, like the plantation workers with which I began this journey, too afraid. To effectively get the human cost of everything we buy included in the price tag that we pay. In that sense, if Anwar and his friends are monsters, we depend on hundreds of thousands of monsters like that, so that we can live. And I think it damages all of us in pretty profound ways, actually. Not to say we're all personally, we all should be agonized with guilt, but I think we have only one chance to exist. And it is a great shame, it's more than a shame, if we do so at the expense of others. I don't have an abstract theory of why it's important to look at perpetrators, except that that's what we are. And film is about helping us confront the most-. Art, I think, is about not showing new things that we don't know. It's certainly not about chronicling atrocities so that we can then judge them. It should be somehow, I think, about inviting us, encouraging us, or forcing us to confront truths about ourselves that are particularly painful. And one thing I discovered in this journey was that, “Wait a moment. We're all perpetrators here.” And we depend-. These are the men who've done our dirty work all over the world.

David Pendleton  20:42 

Do you think that cinema has a particular power in enforcing that? I ask because of the participatory nature of the documentary. We see Anwar and Herman watching the footage. And particularly at the end, Anwar seems to have this real moment of epiphany, almost, watching the footage. I’m reminded, of course, of something like, you know, the beginnings of cinéma-vérité, and Chronicle of a Summer. And I'm wondering if there's a tradition that you're drawing from, in doing participatory cinema?

Joshua Oppenheimer  21:13

Yeah, absolutely! I'm standing on the shoulders of Jean Rouch. I think that the method was a kind of elaborate-. That was the starting point, in that you could say we would film a scene, Anwar would watch the scene, we'd film the next scene. Sometimes people say, “Why don't the other characters change in the way Anwar changes?” It's because this was Anwar's process. Anwar was the only person going through the whole process. And the method was very simple, right? Back to the first scene on the roof. He dances where he shows how he kills. Dances in the place where he kills. And it was obvious that to dance where you've killed hundreds of people, you have to be in total denial of the moral meaning of what you've done. They're not in denial of the facts, but in denial of the meaning of those facts. And I felt, “Okay, if I show this back to him,” certainly inspired by Rouch. “If I show this back to him, will he somehow recognize himself in the mirror of the movie?” And I screened it back to him. It's an early scene in the film. And he looks very disturbed. I think he's very disturbed about what he did on that roof. And he dares not say so. He doesn't even dare say, “This is going to make me look bad,” because to say either of those things would be to admit that what he did was bad. He's never been forced to say that, so instead, he says his trousers are wrong, his acting is wrong. And so begins this process of embellishment, a five year process of embellishment that generated 1,200 hours of material. Each scene was somehow his effort to run away from, and negate, the pain.  And yet, also, somehow to tame, I think, the pain that was imminent in the previous scene. And we would never plan two scenes at once, three scenes at once. We would just shoot one thing, he would watch it. We’d shoot the next thing, he'd watch it, we'd shoot the next thing. It was like someone painting their own portrait. Painting a little, stepping back, looking at the canvas painting a little more. And if you think of it, what was sort of fueling the whole process from the outset, I think, was somehow Anwar’s conscience. In that, what's leading him to each embellishment is to run away. It's kind of another manner of ratcheting up of denial that's there, when he's dancing on the roof. Or in the next stage, when he says that he should change his costumes. And we proceed from one tasteless reenactment to another. Each becoming more tasteless, each becoming a greater kind of more effective fodder for my mission, which was to expose a regime of impunity. And he, for his part, is, I think, trying to somehow run away from his pain by building up a kind of cinematic scar tissue around it. You know, he's haunted by these nightmares, this kind of miasmic horror. And he's trying to replace it with these relatively banal movie scenes. And, of course, each one bears the horror of what he's running from. It's like a man chasing his shadow. I think this tension, between his project and my project, animates the whole film, in the sense that we walk this tightrope between empathy and repulsion. Empathy for a man trying to run away from his pain and struggling with horrible guilt. And repulsion for everything he's done and what that society has become. I think I’ll just say one other thing, which is that the cinema is the storytelling medium of modernity, somehow. And this is a movie about the stories we tell ourselves. And so it was very serendipitous when we reached Medan, that the army-. It turns out suddenly, and it was a total coincidence that the army in Medan had recruited its killers from the ranks of these gangsters hanging out in cinemas, who loved American movies. And I had to hear Anwar say, maybe five, ten or fifteen times, a lot of times, that he was coming out of the cinema and killing people in ways inspired by whatever movie he’d just seen. The way he says about the Elvis Presley musical. I had to hear it many times before I really understood he means this quite literally. And so there was this kind of melding of form and form, and content and form. I think we could have made this film without the genre of Hollywood film fans. But, of course, it would have a very different form.

David Pendleton  25:49 

I'm wondering, well, the other thing, it seems that even the reenactments are already becoming cathartic in some ways for Anwar, but they seem to be traumatic for other people. And that was the part at which, watching the film the first time, I think, that upset me the most. I started to wonder about your role in this process as well. Particularly the very curious man whose stepfather was murdered, who then presumably willingly plays the role of a victim in that one reenactment in the soundstage. He gets really upset. With the children after the village massacre. I'm wondering what your reflections were on what else was going on with those reenactments or what was happening to other people around.

Joshua Oppenheimer  26:29 

I think real pain and trauma was, of course, coming to the surface. You can't walk into a place where a million people have been killed, where the survivors are not allowed to talk about it, where the perpetrators are in power and keeping everybody else afraid, and somehow not be totally overwhelmed. And not assume that, sort of, there'll be a kind of groundswell or kind of a tsunami almost that will overtake the entire production process. No matter how much as a filmmaker you want to remain in control. There's sort of three moments in the film that are troubling. Two of them, I think, are genuinely troubling. One of them, I think, is sort of cinematic artifice. Although there is real trauma in all three. One is when they go through the market and extort money from the Chinese shopkeepers. There, it was very important to me that we not be accessories to these men's crime and make the shopkeepers even more afraid, because suddenly, they have their own TV crew. But also, my Indonesian crew, especially, my anonymous Indonesian crew said, “There’s no way you can't film that, Josh! This is happening every day, in every market in Indonesia. You have a responsibility to film it.” So what I decided to do was to tell Safit and Herman to move on from each person they filmed. Go back, wait for me 50 yards away, go back and get a release form signed. And what I was really doing was explaining why we were there, and paying everybody back. And of course, it was an expensive day out, because we actually filmed -- there's three of those encounters in the film. We filmed 30. And each time it was about $50, on average, they were giving.  It was an expensive day out in a cheap, otherwise cheap market. The other scene with the stepson of the Chinese-. Or maybe I'll talk about the massacre first. The massacre scene. I think the children-. There was no Hollywood psychologist. There was no child psychologist standing by, the way there would be in a Hollywood film when children cry. But they are the children and the grand-. There's nobody who, in that set, apart from the stepson of the Chinese man, there's no one on that set who was not the child, or child, or grandchild, or wife, of a perpetrator or a high ranking paramilitary leader. Or themselves, a low ranking paramilitary member. So it's all perpetrators and their families. And the children have been auditioned for their ability to cry. If you see the shorter theatrical cut of the film, you see that scene. It's in the shorter version. It's one of the few scenes that's in that, that's not in this. And I think the children are the only people on that set who don't know what this is about. Think the violence looks fake. It's sort of like this -- sorry -- it kind of looks like this. And it’s shot with long lenses and through fire and with wobbly cameras to obscure its falseness. And the takes would last 30 seconds to a minute, and we’d call, “Cut!” And it would be mayhem for a moment and the kids would be comforted. And if they wanted to do it again, they would do it again. If they didn't, they wouldn't. But there's one woman who faints, and she looks-. Or, Indonesians would recognize that she's not fainted. She's kerasukan, or possessed. And whether you believe in ghosts or not, it's some kind of expression of an experience, of a trauma, of a pain. We'd been shooting on this set for five days. There were rumors of a mass grave at the end of the lane. And that pain, I think, came to the surface. And somehow, I think, we as viewers feel a kind of nauseating vertigo, some of us in that scene, because we're used to screen violence. In screen violence, normally, the real world reference is totally absent. But here, it's there. It's haunting every frame. Because it's the real killers, it might be the real location, and real pain is being remembered. And finally, the story of Suryono, the stepson. Anwar’s neighbor. That's a genuine error. I'm not a filmmaker who will stop at nothing to get what I want. When we were shooting in those big soundstages, it's the state television soap opera studios, we would have two or three cameras shooting at once. I was shooting something with Adi, in another part of the studio. And my cinematographer, who's Colombian and doesn't speak Indonesian, was covering what was happening around that table and filming that scene. And I didn't hear Suryono’s story. And I didn't hear it for months, because we came back from that four months shooting period with 500 hours of footage. It takes a long time to get through it. It was just a side conversation at lunch, it didn't seem-. It was the kind of thing you go through last, to make sure you're not missing something. And when I heard it, I was horrified and thought, if I heard that, I would have absolutely taken him outside and said, “What are you doing here? In fact, don't tell me, just stay behind the camera for the rest of the day. And tomorrow, you should say you have a cold or a flu and don't come back.” And when we put the film together, I felt very tainted by his presence. I felt compromised. I felt embarrassed by it, because it's not something I would have allowed. I called his house to see, to ask him. I was puzzled. Why is he there? His wife answered and said that he died of diabetes six months before my call. And I asked, “Did he ever talk about why he was in the film?” She said, “Yes, he talked about it often. He was waiting for the film to come out. He was in the film because he had been through this horrible experience and wanted to express that pain and that part of the reality, and thought your movie would be a good way to publicize that.” And in that sense, he succeeded in his mission. And he's made the film more powerful for it. But if I could do it over again, and I heard that story, I would still remove him from the film. He has no business being there.

David Pendleton  32:40 

Let's take questions from the audience, because I'm sure there are many. There's a gentleman over here. Kevin, if you can come around and get the-. Keep your hand up, sir, with the red. And if you look to your left, there will be a microphone coming.

Audience  32:52

[INAUDIBLE. SPEAKING WITHOUT A MICROPHONE]

Joshua Oppenheimer  32:57

Yeah, that is indeed-.

David Pendleton  32:58

Let me just repeat the question, because I don't think-. The mic’s not working. The question is whether the voice that we hear off camera, that seems to be speaking Indonesian, whether that was you and whether that was Indonesian.

Joshua Oppenheimer  33:05

That was me. And that was Indonesian.

Audience  33:10

And then secondly, in the scene later on, where Anwar goes back to the patio where he did the killing, and he's gagging? Did you get the sense that he was acting for the camera? Or was that real? Was he trying to, you know, purge something from his body or something?

Joshua Oppenheimer  33:26 

I'm certain he's not acting for the camera. But-.

David Pendleton  33:29 

Let me repeat the question. The question was about one of the final scenes where we see Anwar gagging and seeming to lose control of his body. Whether he was acting or not in that scene.

Joshua Oppenheimer  33:39 

I think we have a misunderstanding of documentary, which has really not been helped by our misuse of the term cinéma-vérité in the United States and in the UK. What we call cinéma-vérité is direct cinema, and it creates this whole set of lies, that what we do is we document reality as it unfolds. And we therefore have this sort of sense that either people are aware of the camera, and it's fake, and they're acting, or they're unaware of the camera, and it's authentic. Of course, in that scene, I asked Anwar to go back. It was the very last shoot. It was the very last time I was going to be there. I asked him to take me back to where we began the film, and to tell me what happened. To walk through quietly and say, “This happened here. This happened there.” ‘This’ being stories that he told me over the intervening five years of filming. And that's exactly what he's trying to do. And then I think, totally blindsided, totally caught unawares, something happens to his body, for which he has no words. For which, maybe, we all have no words. And I think if he's thinking anything consciously in that moment, I'm sure he doesn't want to find words for what's going on with him. I think if he's thinking anything consciously in that moment, it may just be, perhaps, “Josh can cut this part out and still have the scene that he needs.'' So of course, he's aware of the camera. But in that moment, I think, I had this awful desire in that moment to -- in our foolish optimism that is a sort of a trait of us Americans -- I wanted to put my arm around him and say, “It's going to be okay.'' And I thought to myself, “Oh, no. Of course it's not going to be okay. That's what's going on here. This is what happens when it's not okay.” And I wanted-. I sort of had this feeling that he's trying to vomit up the ghosts that haunt him, only to find that nothing comes up, because what haunts-. The ghost is himself, because we are our pasts. And he is his past. He is his self. That is him. So of course, nothing comes out.

David Pendleton  35:48 

And, I mean, I was thinking-. I mean, again, I was thinking of Rouch, forgive me. I was thinking of Les maîtres fous. And thinking, to the extent that it might be a performance, it's also his way of sincerely performing the kind of horrible remorse that he feels. Or disgust at himself.

Joshua Oppenheimer   36:05 

I think it's not a performance, what's happening with his body there. But it is an-.

David Pendleton  36:10

Right. But maybe not a conscious performance.

Joshua Oppenheimer   36:14

Well, “not a conscious performance” is no longer really a performance. But when we have a-. I think that maybe a more helpful way of thinking about how nonfiction film really works, is that we create a series of occasions for people. We create occasions for people to prolong an argument, for people to make a confession. For people to feel safe enough. that somehow unconsciously, god knows what takes hold of their throat, or their loins, or their guts, and leads to a scene like that. So it is, in the film, it is an occasion, in that moment, that allows something to happen. And it's interestingly telling, Anwar’s reaction to the finished film. When he saw the finished film, he was very moved. He was tearful. He was silent for a long time. But when he was watching that scene, he didn't quite choke in the same way, but his throat was making very much the same kind of gyrations. And when he finished watching the film, he was silent,  as I said, for a long time. It was a very painful moment for him, but also for me. And then finally, he said, his words were, “Josh, this film shows what it is like to be me. And I don't know if it's a good film or not. I don't. But it shows what it's like to be me. And I'm glad I finally had the chance to express, or show, what this has meant for me, after years of being basically forbidden from doing so.” And he and I remain in touch every three to four weeks, which is pretty often. It’s often as I'm in touch with my sister, for example, whom I really love!

[LAUGHTER]

Joshua Oppenheimer   38:04

As Charlie knows. And more often than I'm in touch with my brother, whom I also really love. So, we're in touch every three to four weeks, and we're probably working something through by staying in touch. And I think we will stay in touch for, maybe in some level, for as long as we are around. Because we've been through five years of a very, very intense and very, very painful, and transformative journey together.

David Pendleton  38:33 

There's a gentleman there, in the green t-shirt. And then we’ll come up here.

Audience  38:47 

I guess I have a-. I don't know if it's a comment or a question. But I just thought it was very shocking, like the aesthetic value of the film was surprising to me. Like how aesthetic you made framing, the way you framed the shots and the way that the colors and everything. I don't know if you could talk about how you view a film aesthetically. And also, I wanted to know, have you seen the film Enemies of the People?

Joshua Oppenheimer   39:15

Yeah.

Audience 39:16

By Jean Rouch? And I wanted to know if that had any connection to your film, or influence. I know it was filmed about the same time. But I just thought there was a lot of parallels between, like, working with the perpetrators and making them reenact the acts of killing.

Joshua Oppenheimer  39:30 

One principle, I think, it's really important to me, that-. In some ways, I'm quite orthodox, and I really have a deep-. My understanding of what is cinematic is connected to Bazin’s notion of what is cinematic. That it's moments in the world that are somehow captured, that are unfolding, that can be analyzed. And what's interesting about nonfiction filmmaking is you intervene in the world. To set up, as I said earlier, these occasions where telling things happen. So we have relatively long takes. And I'm interested, I suppose, one of the principles I want -- maybe this is all I'll say to answer that question. One of the principles in making this film was that Anwar’s scenes should be as powerful as possible. If Anwar wanted a film noir scene with low key lighting, we should make that to the best of our ability. Even though we were a small documentary crew. We should, if he wanted to burn down a village, we should build the village, and we should burn it down. To be as haunting as possible. And even the waterfall scene, which could look like a cheap karaoke video, we wanted it-. And it remains kitsch, of course. But I think it is also unlike a cheap karaoke video, which would imply a sneering at what they're doing. It is undeniably, I hope, majestic. And what that allows, for the film's form, is extremely important here. Because this is a movie that starts as a documentary but doesn't end as a documentary, I don't think. It remains nonfiction. But we start in these scenes that are in the observational documentary mode, where we’re finding out about a political regime, we're finding out about a filmmaking method, we're watching them making scenes. But gradually, as Anwar starts to go into his nightmares, the fiction scenes and the documentary material starts to meld. Their film and our film meld into one apocalyptic kind of vision. And one apocalyptic intervention. In the case of Indonesia, it would be interesting to talk about how this film has been received in Indonesia. So it becomes, it sort of starts as a documentary and ends as a kind of surreal fever dream. I know tomorrow, they’re screening The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase here, which was my thesis film at Harvard. I haven't seen it in years, and I don't think I dare. But I'm not saying it's not worth seeing, so come if you're interested.

[LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton  42:13

And it has a relationship to this.

Joshua Oppenheimer  42:14 

And it has a relationship, in that it starts as a kind of documentary and turns into a fever dream in its midpoint. But this, what that means in this film is that we get lost with Anwar in his nightmares. We get lost in this horrifying space. An experience that somehow is something way beyond the specifics of the 1965-66 genocide, as a kind of universal horror. I think Enemies of the People is a fine film. I saw it when I was nearly done with this film. And I admire it. A film that I saw earlier in this journey, and I was more conscious of, is Rithy Panh’s S21, which is an extraordinary film as well.

David Pendleton  43:02 

I think Thet-. Is Sambath here? The director?

Joshua Oppenheimer  43:05

Is Thet Sambath here?

David Pendleton  43:02

Maybe he's not, or maybe he's not identifying himself. There was a question up here in the front, yeah. Kevin will come down and bring you a mic if you'd look for him. And then we'll get to some more people there, towards the back.

Audience  43:20 

I went to the Cambodian premiere of both Lost Loves, a genocide film, and also Enemies of the People. And over half of the audience was foreign. And the directors were present at both premieres. At the end of each film, almost every Cambodian would be in tears. And there would always be the question, “Why are there so many foreigners here?” “Where are the rest of my countrymen?” And, “Thank you for telling my story.” And I'm curious as to who has gone to see this film when it's played in Jakarta, what kind of emotional response it’s elicited, and your role as a foreign filmmaker telling another country's story.

Joshua Oppenheimer  43:58 

Well, first of all, you'll notice this film -- I didn't mention, I didn't get to it earlier -- this film has an Indonesian-co director, who's anonymous. He was my production manager, my assistant director, he's my second camera person. He was there on every shoot. But above all, he was my main creative sounding board. And so throughout the process, I feel that because of that conversation we had, this film has been welcomed in Indonesia as a thoroughly Indonesian film. I've sort of been adopted by the Indonesian film community, as an Indonesian filmmaker. But that's been very, very important, I think, to the film's impact in Indonesia. It's not been seen as a foreigner’s view of Indonesia, a stranger’s eye view of Indonesia. It's interesting, at the Cambodian premiere of The Act of Killing, I participated via Skype at the Rithy Panh Bophana Center and in fact, it was also almost all foreign. And it was really shocking and disappointing to me. In Indonesia, it's a different story. Indonesia bans films dealing with human rights violations committed by Indonesia. And we knew that if we wanted the film to come out in cinemas the way it does everywhere else in the world, we would have to give it to the censors. And the censors would ban it. Or, might ban it. And we certainly didn't want to risk provoking a ban, because if a film's banned, it becomes a crime to show the film at all. And that in turn is an excuse for Pancasila Youth, or for the Army, or for other thugs to physically attack screenings, and with impunity. And that would, of course, make it dangerous for people to watch the film, make it frightening for people to watch the film, and have a chilling effect on the whole conversation that we hoped this film would catalyze. What we did, therefore, was we knew that we had to build up serious support for the film at pretty high levels of Indonesian society, before we could start really screening the film. So all last autumn, we held screenings at the National Human Rights Commission in Jakarta, for Indonesia's leading filmmakers, celebrities, movie stars, journalists, historians, artists, writers, educators, human rights advocates. You could say that everyone who saw the film at those screenings was really touched by the film and everyone came away saying, “Every Indonesian needs to see this film.” And so all those people who saw the film in the autumn took the movie back to their communities, to their networks, their communities, on International Human Rights Day last year. That was the 10th of December. They held 50 screenings in 30 cities on that day. The screenings averaged in size of 200 people each, which was maybe, is that the size of this room? A little bigger? About  the size of this. That means that 10,000 people saw it on the first day. Then there were more screenings that grew and grew. As of this summer, we've had over 1100 screenings in 118 cities, I think, is the latest count. As of September 30th, which was the anniversary of the start of the atrocities, the film became available for free download for anyone logging on in Indonesia. If you go to theactofkilling.com, the first thing you see is an option to download the film. And the media, in particular, had a really important response to the film. The editor of Indonesia's leading news magazine, and probably leading news publication, Tempo magazine, called me after he saw the film and said, “Josh, there was a time before The Act of Killing. Now there's a time after The Act of Killing. And I don't want to grow old, having seen this film, I don't want to grow old as a perpetrator, like these men. And we have censored hundreds and hundreds of articles about 1965. We can't do that anymore; in the history of our magazine. And we're going to break our silence about what happened. And we're going to do so in a way that supports your film by showing that it is a repeatable experiment, that this could have been made anywhere in Indonesia, that Anwar is perhaps one of 10,000 men of his position in Indonesia. That the problems that the film exposes are systemic problems.” And so they, what they did was, they sent 60 journalists around the country and in two weeks, they gathered something like almost a thousand pages of boastful storytelling by perpetrators from all over the country. They edited it down to 75 pages. Published another 25 pages about the movie: essays, reviews, interviews. And came out with a special double edition of the magazine on the first of October, last year. It sold out at once. They reprinted it, it sold out again. They reprinted it, it sold out a third time. Because Indonesians were astonished, that suddenly, this issue that they've all known had sort of happened, there it was in this magazine! And the rest of the media started producing their own reports. Nothing quite that substantial. Varying. And the film has come to Indonesia like the child in The Emperor's New Clothes, creating a space for people to talk about something tha-. Talk about a whole series of problems: corruption, impunity, thuggery, but also, of course, the killings. Problems they've sort of known about, or had a sense were there, but had been too afraid to discuss. Yeah, I'm fine.

David Pendleton  49:36 

There was a young woman way in the back, I think. Yes, that's you. And then you, in the middle there.

Audience  49:43 

Thank you. I'm from Indonesia and I've been watching this movie for, I think this is my fourth time. And my question is, since you have been keeping in touch with Anwar and maybe the other persecutors, did you hear anything that maybe they got threatened from, whatever, Pancasila or from the intelligence body in Indonesia or whatever? So what did you hear from them?

Joshua Oppenheimer  50:12

Well, could everybody hear the question? Well, the question was, since I'm in touch with Anwar, have I heard that any of the men in the film have been threatened by Pancasila Youth, for participating in the film. Or by the government, for participating in the film? To be honest, that's one of the reasons that I'm so regularly in touch with Anwar in this period, is to just see that he's okay, that he's not being threatened. A year has gone by, a little over a year, since its premiere, and since it became a big story in Indonesia. He hasn't been threatened. And Pancasila Youth, up to now, has blamed me for the film and not blamed him. And that's a good thing. Herman Koto has said that he's going to hold an open screening of the film, in Maden. [COUGH] Excuse me, I have a flu, or cold, or something. So forgive me. Holding an open screening of the film in Maden, this week. Herman's an interesting man, because he became very disillusioned with Pancasila Youth, making the film. There's actually a change in him. I think it's because, you know, he's a tool. He's a low ranking paramilitary leader. He's been used. His power rests on fear. And he's spent five years with me and this man who he’s admired, digging into the source of that fear, and found this horrible, rotten festering mess underneath it all. Something he knew about, but had the film not been made, he would not have lingered to imagine. And I think, somehow, that's made him very angry at Pancasila Youth. So him holding the screening in the next week is something I'm a little worried about, and I'm in touch with him about, because I'm nervous about him taking the public stance against Pancasila Youth, without support.

David Pendleton  51:57 

There's a question in the middle of the back row. And then we'll come to a couple of questions here.

Audience  52:09 

The scene in the car, when Adi is talking about the Hague. Like he said, “Take me to the Hague and you will make me a star.” I was wondering what did you feel then? Because like, you could have maybe thought about maybe you're giving an occasion to this person to actually to live his dream, which is, like, more than what he has done before, with the killing. And then, the same thing, he is arriving to the newspaper, when Anwar is arriving, he’s bintang, bintang. He's a star. He’s the real star. So in a way, I thought maybe you could also face that problem. To actually creating an occasion for living that dream. And Anwar later says, “I would have never been able to create something so great,” when he’s standing by the waterfall and it's so beautiful.

Joshua Oppenheimer  52:56 

Well, absolutely, the film was for them, a little bit -- I feel so well looked after. You keep refilling my water and Kleenex. You know, but I appreciate it. Genuinely! -- I think that, of course, there is a way in which making a film was a fulfillment of a dream for Anwar. But I think that it became also a ruse, a rationale. Something that allowed him moments of doubt to proceed when he didn't necessarily, when he was otherwise, losing faith. So, you know, I was never worried about giving them a platform to glorify themselves on. I didn't have that moral worry, because I knew, I don't think the film has glorified them at all. And those scenes don't exist for anything other than this film, apart from the talk show, where, of course, that was really broadcast and would be frightening and intimidating for the survivors who may have seen it. And that is a kind of moral imperfection that exists. But I don't feel that they have a stage. I think the Adi comment is a little, isn't exact-. I don't think that it is a platform on which they've glorified themselves. And I don't think there's anyone in this room, or who's ever seen this film, who's thought they appear glorious from it. And when Adi says, “Take me to the Hague,” I don't think he really means it. In fact, the next line, and I hope most people don't think that he means it. I think what you really feel is he knows he's not going to be brought to the Hague. And the next line in the rushes, but I didn't include it in the film, is, “Come on, Josh, you know, I'll never be brought to the Hague, because it's in nobody's interest to bring this up in The Hague.” But the film is, of course, part of a common moment in our history, as a kind of tragic, farcical history as a species. It's part of a common moment of reality television. It's not reality television, in that I never knew what was going to happen in these scenes, in these spaces that we would set up. But one of the kind of aspects of this moment is that vanity has been transformed from a deadly sin to some kind of almost a, you know, necessary virtue. And, of course, this film is a film about vanity. There was one other part of your question that I don't think I answered. Did I?

David Pendleton  55:32 

There. Yes, the gentleman there. And then you, raise your hand. Yeah, one of you guys pass the mic to him.

Audience 55:45

I've repeatedly seen Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah. And he would often talk about how while it's one thing to document and show how the Holocaust happened, he believed it was almost impossible or obscene to explain why it happened. To explain the why of the Holocaust or the why of Hitler. I was wondering what you thought about that. And maybe if you thought, if you have any insight into why, you know, the worst sort of things like this could happen.

Joshua Oppenheimer  56:20 

I suppose, I think that's a defeatist and silly orthodoxy. It's nonsense. And it's limiting, of what we can explore and look at. And it plays a stupid game. I like Shoah a lot. And I admire Claude Lanzmann’s work, but this is kind of, it plays a stupid language game of kind of appealing to what you can and cannot say, and drawing sort of red lines around certain kinds of inquiry that are, in this case, really counterproductive. I think one of the things that I, one of the challenges-. The first perpetrator I filmed, after I went home -- it was in this plantation village -- I went home to my house, which was just across this dirt lane. And a few minutes after I went home, his wife came and knocked on the door and brought me a plate of fried bananas, as a gift. I took the plate, politely said, “Thank you so much.” She left and I threw the bananas away. And I felt, “I won't eat from her kitchen.” And afterwards, it really disturbed me that I did that. And it came back a lot of times. Because here's this woman, she's made bananas for me. She's done something nice. And she's not her husband. She hasn't killed anybody. She wasn't even married to him at the time of the killings. And I had somehow treated her kitchen, her food, her gesture of kindness -- even if it was a self-serving, obsequious gesture, I don't know -- I treated it as radically other and I closed the door to her. And I was determined, I thought about that a lot as I met more and more perpetrators working my way up to Anwar. The first 40 that I met. And I thought, I will never make the leap from saying, “These men have done something monstrous,” to “these men are monsters.” Because the moment you do that, you can no longer understand how human beings do this to each other. You can simply catalogue how something happened. And that can be important and interesting and scientific. And then all you can do is say, “So it happened.” And you can judge it, which is what most human rights documentaries do to offer some kind of catharsis or resolution. And that's it. And I think somehow, we have an obligation to look at why we human beings do this, given that we keep doing it again, and again. The message of The Shoah was, of course, “Never again.” And unless you interpret that in the narrow and tragic and stupid meaning of “Never again to us,” it keeps happening again and again and again. And so we obviously have an obligation to explore that question that Lanzmann has apparently drawn a red line around. One of the things I discovered by seeing Anwar as human, something I believe I've seen in the film and feels true, is that when a whole society, the national level, commits an atrocity, gets away with it, makes up a story to justify what they've done, the maintaining of that lie, that moral lie, lying about the meaning of what they've done, demands ongoing sacrifice, and further evil. Because now you have to blame the victims for what happened to them, because it's part of the excuse, “they deserved it.” You have to continue to dehumanize them, because it's much easier to think you killed people who weren't fully human. And that, somehow, [COUGH] -- excuse me -- that you have to continue to dehumanize them. And that allows you to steal from them in marketplaces, it allows you to steal their land, because they aren't fully human. And you have to kill again. Because if you've killed one group of people, got away with it, and told yourself, clung to the lie that it was right, then the army says, “Now kill this group over here,” for much the same reason that you killed the first group. If you refuse the second time, it's tantamount to admitting it was wrong the first time. And so there's this inevitable spiral, from the first corrupting act of killing, there's an inevitable spiraling downwards into a moral vacuum of ongoing corruption. And the irony here is that the cause of that is not because the killers are evil and monsters and don't learn from their mistakes, but because they're human beings, and being human beings, they are moral beings, and they know what they've done is wrong. And they're trying desperately to avoid the traumatic guilt that comes from that. And that whole, if you look at the history of sort of new order Indonesia, there's, and even today, there's ongoing human rights abuses, ongoing since 1965. There was this, basically, the killing of a third of the population of East Timor. There is still human rights abuse in West Papua. And it's this ongoing downward spiral into corruption and evil. I couldn't have seen that. I couldn't have expressed that to you. I think you all felt that, even though, before I articulated it, you sort of knew it from having watched this film. You wouldn't have had that experience if all I had done is if I had not tried to understand the why. And the how -- or the why. Because Lanzmann, you said, was looking at how. And I think I tried to actually show-. I think we can see elements of why they committed the original violence, as we see them carry out the reenactments of the violence. There's traces of why they did the original crimes in their motive for participating in the movie.

Audience 1:02:14 

Thank you.

David Pendleton  1:02:17

There's a-. Yes, this woman right here. Hi.

Joshua Oppenheimer  1:02:20

I'm sorry. [INAUDIBLE]

Audience  1:02:23 

Hi. Actually-. [SPEAKING IN INDONESIAN]. I have so many questions, I can't even count them.

Joshua Oppenheimer  1:02:38

Try with one. And in English.

Audience  1:02:39

And I can't even decide which one to ask. No, that's what I said. So I've been involved in Indonesian music, history, culture since, like, 1970. Teaching it and going there. I've interpreted for Pramoedya Toer. I've read so much stuff about the people who survived, and nothing ever about the people who did it. And I'm so grateful to you for making those people real. I've never, in all the years I've been studying this country, I've never encountered anything that let us see these people. And this version is so much different from the theater version. It just lets us see literally much more of Anwar’s insides. Like, you know, when they're being eaten. It's like, “Oh, those are his insides being eaten.” So it's a great service. When I taught my class last spring, I had a film of five families who had survived the massacres. And each family told their story. So I'd asked my students to listen to each of the five families and then write a response, you know. And then the last question was, “How would you feel if this happened to your family?” They could not even imagine it. They don't. I mean, to think of a government that can do that to their people. It's just beyond imagination. So this makes another amazing contribution to that. I’m not actually even asking you a question.

David Pendleton  1:04:23

That’s ok. Thank you for your comment.

Joshua Oppenheimer  1:04:25

It was much appreciated!

Audience  1:04:27

Well, when I saw the other-. I remember, I met you outside.

David Pendleton  1:04:28 

Do you have a question that you're getting to is-.

Audience  1:04:33

Well, okay, yes. Actually I do. Okay. I’ll make it into a question.

David Pendleton  1:04:35

Because there are other people here-. Okay.

Audience 1:04:35 

Because I'm fluent in Indonesian I don't have to read the subtitles, right? I can just listen, which is a lot of fun. Not fun. It’s interesting. So in the scene where he says, “Gee, maybe this is how the people felt, you know, when I was about to kill them.” And then this voice says, “Oh no! This is much, much, much more different, because they knew they were going to die.” So, that was a voice off camera. And Josh said he said it in Indonesian. So what you said in Indonesian, this is [SPEAKING IN INDONESIAN]. It's like, “Really, really-.” But then the subtitles just said, “This is really different.” And to me that had a very different feeling. So I guess that could be the question, is: how do you compromise your understanding of the depths and intricacies of the language with what you have to do with subtitles?

Joshua Oppenheimer  1:05:37 

That's a great question, in fact. Film is a terrible medium for words, I think. And I think people who make nonfiction film, in our insecurity, that we're inferior to fiction filmmakers in our ability to tell a story. As if telling a good story is really the aim of what we do. That's a little sad, but I think we try very often to control, to kind of achieve a three act structure by controlling the words. And that's a pity because, as I said, film is not a good medium for words. It's a good medium for silence. It's a good medium for doubt. It's a good medium for subtext. It's a great medium for people who say something that they don't believe, if you can see any trace of that on their face. And if there's a thread that holds this movie together, it is the evolution of Anwar’s doubt. And that is a crucial moment in the film. And it's amazing how just a couple extra words in a subtitle means you’re reading it for just a second or half a second longer, and you miss what's going on on the face.

Audience  1:06:55

[INAUDIBLE. SPEAKING WITHOUT A MICROPHONE]

Joshua Oppenheimer  1:06:57

Yeah, but I think we see that in his face. And if you're reading it, in general, you have one third the words and subtitles than if you were to transcribe the film. It means you're cutting out two thirds of the words, and you're rephrasing things. And that's to create space for the viewer to have a cinematic experience. An experience of silence, of doubt, of pause.

David Pendleton  1:07:24 

Okay, we'll take one right here. There were some people in the back that had hands up earlier. Okay, we'll get to you next.

Audience  1:07:29 

I have a question about Herman. Where did those incredible fantasies come from? And the cross-dressing? The images? I mean, the ridiculousness of the human being that comes through. Were they just making that all up and producing that for you? Where did they get those costumes? You know, does it come from waria? I mean, this whole tradition of cross-dressing. Anyway, can you, you know, unfold that for us?

Joshua Oppenheimer  1:08:02 

So, I think Herman, first of all, plays a really important role in the film. And it's a particularly important role in this cut of the film, where his relationship is more-. You see the function of his relationship. You see the function that that relationship played in the shooting of the film. And what you see is that somehow, Herman becomes this sort of force of truth. He draws Anwar back to the pain when Anwar is starting to run away from it, starting to doubt it. Ah, that was the thing I forgot to say earlier, which was when Anwar says the waterfall -- this is a good example of what I mean. The waterfall is such a beautiful scene, it expresses such deep emotions. You asked, “Do I think I'm giving him just a platform for realizing his dreams?” The answer is, I would say, this is a great example of a moment where he doesn't believe his own words. We don't believe his words. He's lying to himself. And Herman plays the role of kind of dragging him back to the truth when he starts to lie to himself. So for example, he rubs his face in the horror of what he's done when he plays the mother. And Anwar turns it around in the most grotesque way when he says, “This is what we do to people who bribe us with their children.” Well, Herman wasn't trying to bribe him with the child. And this kind of blaming of the victim, because remorse has made Anwar-. Remorse, guilt has made Anwar suffer and so he gets angry at the victim. That's actually what lands Anwar in the victim's chair at the end. And then Herman drags him through the mud by torturing and killing him. Herrman plays this role as a kind of force of truth. Kind of, as actually Werner Hertzog has said, a kind of “goddess of revenge.” And it came from Anwar’s nightmare. And it came from anti-, sort of came from misogynist fantasies that the regime has told about communist women. In Anwar’s nightmare scenes Herman plays a communist woman who takes revenge on Anwar, for Anwar having killed his father. You don't know that whole story, it doesn't matter. But that's the backstory. And it's a kind of recycling of gross images of communist women from that propaganda film. Kind of absurd 19 -- I don't know -- 1930s, 1950s, I don't know, Mardi Gras that Anwar loved. So it comes from them. Herman in drag has its own little story. The paramilitary troops had a theater troupe until 2003. And I arrived in 2005. Being a paramilitary theater troupe, all of the roles were played by men. Like in Shakespeare's Globe. Herman played a kind of matronly storyteller. Anwar thought it was very funny, and thought, “Oh, this is a great time to revive that role!”

[LAUGHTER]

Joshua Oppenheimer  1:10:56

And I think it was also a useful opportunity for Anwar to indulge in one of his favorite pastimes, which is picking on Herman. Which gives Herman the kind of no-brainer reason for dragging him through the mud. So we don't have to think that Herman has gone through some kind of big awakening to start playing this kind of force of nature role that he plays, and ultimately, has changed him. You know, this morning I was on a panel about the film and someone said it's sort of so Felliniesque, some of the images. But what makes Fellini Felliniesque is actually there's a darkness that Fellini puts in these otherwise decadent images. It's the decay inside of decadence. And somehow here, you know, what these images that Anwar is trying to create are pure Vincente Minnelli, not Fellini. But Anwar himself, in his person, as someone who's committed mass murder, and the whole moral rot of this regime, provides the darkness that transforms Vincente Minnelli into Fellini in those surreal tableaus. Maybe I'll just say one thing about the fish. The fish? Yeah, The Fish was a seafood restaurant in the 1990s. It closed down in the Asian economic crisis. And in a way, it's this kind of an artifact of optimism and human fantasy that just sits there, persisting. After it closed down I guess villagers nearby plundered it for materials, building materials. It got more and more shabby. There were two musical numbers that we shot for this film. One is “Born Free,” which you've seen in its entirety. And you've seen the sync sound rushes in the opening sequence of the film. The other is “Is That All There Is?” by Peggy Lee, which is Anwar’s favorite song. It's about disappointment. Anwar was always disappointed that he never became the wealthy, powerful political leader like all his friends had become. And that song is these little spoken verses about episodes from life that have been disappointing, like going to the circus and falling in love. Anwar replaces that with the first time he steals a bicycle, the first time he killed, the first time -- the only time -- he made a movie. All of it, disappointing. And we were driving looking for locations for this, these two scenes. And we came around a bend and there was this enormous goldfish on the hillside. And one of the lessons that I've never forgotten, it was perhaps one of the simplest things I learned as a film student here at Harvard, came from Dušan Makavejev. And he said, “Locations are so important. The location of every scene should be an important character in that scene.” If you see the end of his film W.R., it's this fantastic moment on the Danube. In Belgrade, recently, when I went to show the film in Belgrade, I was with Dušan. And I said, “That's where you filmed the end of W.R.!” Because it hadn't changed. And because I remembered it, because it's such a vivid location. So, that was a digression. But when I came to that spot, what Dušan taught me was, if you have any competence as a filmmaker, you pull over at such a moment, and you stop, and you look at the location, if you see a four story high fish on a mountain.

[LAUGHTER]

Joshua Oppenheimer  1:14:36

So we went out, we got out. Anwar said, “It's fabulous. It's so sad. It's perfect.” We used it for that scene. I didn't use the musical number in the film because it was too thin and it didn't have the density of everything else in the film. But there were these moments of pure poetry about how we get lost in our stories and our fantasies in the ongoing kind of human folly, despite kind of the moral abyss that I loved. And so I used that to mark chapters in the film. And there's one really, maybe the most important thing about that fish is not in the film at all. And it's about the lake behind the fish. It is Lake Toba. That lake is the single most important spot in our history as a species. You probably think I'm crazy. But it is. That was a super volcano that erupted 75,000 years ago. At that time human beings had been on earth for around 925,000 years, or something. And there were millions of us everywhere. And it killed everybody, the volcanic winter from that eruption, apart from some small band of between one and 6,000 people living in isolation somewhere. And the way we know this is when you do-. If geneticists were to look at the DNA of everyone in this room, or everyone on Earth, they would find that we have only 75,000 years of evolutionary divergence between us. And the only thing that can account for this, in the fossil record, is this thin layer of ash that you can see everywhere in the world from the Toba super catastrophe, as it's known, which precipitated the Toba bottleneck. The human species almost went extinct and regenerated it as a bottleneck. Just as if we were to regenerate, repopulate, the African savannas with black rhinos, from the few that are not in this kind of death museum that you see in the movie. That would have been a human generated evolutionary bottleneck. So in that sense, in the very final shot of the film, when they're dancing with the lake behind them in the storm, they really are dancing this kind of, their Danse Macabre at the very edge of the void. Yeah, bring it on! When people start dropping off I’ll stop.

David Pendleton  1:16:58 

There's a couple questions back there, maybe then we'll-. Yes, you.

Audience  1:17:04 

Hi. As I was watching the film, I was really reflecting on the role of the perpetrators’ families. You keep reflecting back on Adi’s family, and you see the daughter and they're going shopping. But also, when Anwar is sitting there, and he wants his grandsons to see some of these scenes. There are no interviews of family members, really. There's no dialogue with family members, with daughters or sons. Or grandchildren. I was wondering if you'd reflected on that side of the perpetrator? And, perhaps, your thoughts on why you didn't include it? Yeah, what the role of them was in the film.

Joshua Oppenheimer  1:17:42 

This is a film -- I'll make this very short, because I'm seeing lots of people leave and I'll wind up too -- but this is a film about them, and about how they cope with what they've done. And there'd be very interesting films to be made about the family members. But it, I think, would be a different film.

David Pendleton  1:18:02 

There was one question here and then one question here.  Oh, that was the end?

Joshua Oppenheimer  1:18:08

That was the end!

[LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton  1:18:09

I’m sorry, I've kept Josh up here. He's very ill. Thank you, Joshua! Josh Oppenheimer!

[APPLAUSE]

© Harvard Film Archive

A failed coup in Indonesia was blamed on the country’s Communist party and led to military rule in 1965, as well as organized death squads that targeted the country’s leftists. Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer profiles two of the leaders of a Sumatran death squad who boast of their crimes and are eager to re-enact them for the camera. This screening will feature the “director’s cut” of The Act of Killing, more than half an hour longer than the version released theatrically, which represents, in Oppenheimer’s words, “the film in its most terrifying, dreamlike, and intimate form.”