Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Act of Killing
2012 · Joshua Oppenheimer · The Act of Killing on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the men design their own costumes and film sets. (staging)
The perpetrators choose their own genres, noir suits, cabaret numbers, a waterfall tableau, casting themselves as heroes in stories they control.
Payoff: Watching them build these fantasies shows exactly how they have learned to live with what they did. In the reading: fabulation / legending. The reading calls this fabulation: people caught inventing the story that lets them be who they need to be.
Watch how long the camera holds on a face after it smiles. (camera)
The observational footage lingers a beat past comfort, so a performed grin sometimes loosens into something its owner did not intend to show.
Payoff: That extra beat is where the film catches the men off guard, however briefly.
Listen for the cheerful music under the staged musical numbers. (sound)
Songs like Born Free play behind reenactments of real killing, diegetic and upbeat, never shifting into a horror score.
Payoff: The mismatch between the music's cheer and what it accompanies is left for you to feel, not signaled by the film.
Notice the crew, lights, and makeup left visible in frame. (setting)
Oppenheimer keeps the apparatus of moviemaking in view rather than hiding it behind the fiction being staged.
Payoff: The seams remind you constantly that everything here, including the confession, is being performed.
Notice how often the men watch their own footage together. (structure)
The film keeps returning to scenes of Anwar and his friends viewing playback of their own reenactments on a monitor.
Payoff: Watching yourself as your own hero, again and again, is how these men have survived what they did.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the seams, the lights, the crew left in frame. Nothing here is neutral footage; all of it is staged confession.