The Act of Killing · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Oppenheimer's film crystallizes around documentary's most uncanny achievement: making the actual and the virtual indiscernible. When Anwar Congo returns to a rooftop where he once strangled prisoners with wire and demonstrates the technique for the camera — then watches the playback and pronounces it cinematic — we encounter the crystal-image in its most vertiginous form. The historical crime and the genre performance have collapsed into each other; Anwar himself can no longer tell where the killer ends and the actor begins. This indiscernibility is the film's engine, not its scandal. Running alongside it are the powers of the false: the perpetrators' self-staging is a sustained act of false narration — gangster heroics, musical fantasy, Hollywood cool pressed over mass murder — yet Oppenheimer wields this falseness as a precision instrument. The lie digs until it strikes something the liars cannot manage, most devastatingly in the neon-soaked noir sequences where Anwar casts a fellow paramilitary as a victim and visibly trembles as the fiction turns back on him. The close-up work throughout carries this load: Carlos Arango de Montis's camera lingers on Anwar's face one beat past composed — exactly what the dossier calls performance curdling into something unguarded — and the affection-image, Dreyer's register of pure feeling suspended before action, arrives here as horror rather than empathy. The presiding ancestor is Errol Morris, Oppenheimer's executive producer: from The Thin Blue Line, he inherits the idea that the repeated, stylized reenactment interrogates testimony rather than illustrates it; what he adds is the catastrophic innovation of handing the killers the camera.