The Act of Killing · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man stands on a rooftop in Medan, on the spot where he killed, and explains in the tone of a craftsman that he switched to strangling people with wire because beating them made too much mess. He demonstrates, looping a cable around a smiling volunteer's neck. Then, pleased with himself, he does a little cha-cha across the tiles. This is Anwar Congo, and for most of The Act of Killing he is the hero of a movie he is making about his own life. Joshua Oppenheimer's astonishing wager was to hand the men who carried out Indonesia's 1965–66 massacres the means of cinema and let them restage their crimes in the genres they loved: noir gangster scenes, a Western, a cabaret number, a waterfall reverie with dancers spilling from the mouth of a giant fish. The result is a documentary built entirely out of fictions, in which the fictions tell more truth than any sworn testimony could.

That sentence is the door into Deleuze. Cinema, on the old account, signed a truth-contract with reality; documentary signed it twice. André Bazin's faith was that the camera, left alone with the world, delivers the real and does not lie. Deleuze called the great rupture of modern cinema the powers of the false — the moment when true and false stop being something the image guarantees and become undecidable, and when falsity turns productive rather than merely deceptive. Most films reach this through dream or unreliable memory. Oppenheimer reaches it through a method. By asking killers to lie beautifully about themselves, he gets them to manufacture a truth no interview would surface: not the facts of the killing, which were never in doubt, but the inner architecture by which a man lives with having killed.

Anwar is what Deleuze names le faussaire, the forger — his exemplary modern protagonist, because the forger does not report a truth, he fabricates one, shifting from identity to identity as he goes. Across the film Anwar is by turns a Hollywood gangster in a white suit, a film-noir interrogator, a victim in his own restaged murder, a dancer. He is trying selves on. And this is exactly fabulation, what Deleuze, borrowing from Bergson, calls legending: subjects caught in the act of inventing the story that lets them be the people they need to be. The film's title carries the whole idea in a pun. The act of killing is the deed; it is also the performance, the bit, the number. These men have survived their deeds by turning them into acts.

Watch how the staging eats its own object. Deleuze's term for it is the crystal-image: the point where the present and its reflection — memory, dream, the image on the monitor — can no longer be told apart, like a thing and its mirror fused. The film's recurring, devastating device is Anwar and his friends watching their own footage on a screen, the reenactment becoming the only mirror in which they can see what they did. For a long while the crystal holds and even flatters them. But this is a crystal in decomposition — Deleuze's image of an ordered, celebrated world rotting quietly from the inside. The killers are powerful, feted, untried; the paramilitary order they helped build still rules. And precisely inside that impunity, with no court to corrode him, Anwar's bravado begins to rot on its own, lit by nothing but his own production.

The corrosion is legible mostly on his face. Oppenheimer's observational camera holds on faces a beat past comfort, until a grin loosens into something its owner did not authorize. This is the affection-image at its purest, the close-up as qualisign — a feeling registered, welling, not yet discharged into any action. Nothing in these shots advances a plot. They simply let a quality surface and hang there. By the end the affection has nowhere to go but the body. Anwar returns to the rooftop, and where his words once flowed easily he now gags, retches, heaves, his stomach saying what his story spent the whole film refusing. Deleuze would call that the gest — a posture that suddenly exposes the relation a person has been living inside, the body confessing the role the voice still defends. The forgery fails not as argument but as flesh.

The lineage is exact. Errol Morris, the film's executive producer, had turned reenactment from illustration into interrogation in The Thin Blue Line, restaging a killing until the restagings exposed how slippery confession is; Oppenheimer aims that instrument at perpetrators. From Jean Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer he takes provoked vérité, the camera as a catalyst that makes people perform a truth they would not otherwise speak. From Shoah he takes the conviction that atrocity lives not in archive footage but in present-tense gesture, the returning hand re-describing the act. What he adds is the decisive turn: he lets the killers author the mise-en-scène, so that their own aesthetic choices — the cabaret, the cool, the cross-dressing comedy of Herman Koto — become the indictment.

What it did to film as an art is hard to overstate. The Act of Killing broke the documentary's truth-contract on purpose and proved that staged falsehood, openly admitted, can be a sharper instrument of the real than any claim to neutral observation. It made the powers of the false a working method for nonfiction. Watch it again and watch the seams Oppenheimer leaves showing — the lights, the makeup, the crew at the edge of frame. They are not mistakes. They are the film telling you that everything here is performed, and that the performance is the confession.