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Studies in Documentary Film

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Unruly artivism and the participatory

documentary ecology of The Act of
Killing
a
Camilla Mhring Reestorff
a
Department of Aesthetics and Communication, The University of
Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark
Published online: 03 Feb 2015.

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To cite this article: Camilla Mhring Reestorff (2015): Unruly artivism and the
participatory documentary ecology of The Act of Killing, Studies in Documentary Film, DOI:
10.1080/17503280.2014.1002248

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 Studies in Documentary Film, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2014.1002248

Unruly artivism and the participatory documentary ecology of

The Act of Killing
Camilla Mhring Reestorff* iD

Department of Aesthetics and Communication, The University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark

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This paper studies The Act of Killing as an unruly art activist artivist
intervention in the contemporary aftermath of the 1965 military coup and
genocide in Indonesia. The Act of Killing notoriously films Anwar Congo and his
death squad friends reenacting their killings as scenes from Hollywood film
genres. The film confronts an ethical dilemma between commemorating the
victims and telling the story of the genocide, and situates this dilemma in a
complex participatory documentary ecosystem. The paper argues that the
genocide emerges as difficult heritage in the merging of the reenactments, the
killers attempts to remain victors and the participatory documentary ecosystem.
The reenactments generate affective conflicts, in which the killers become
troubled indexes of themselves. In the reenactments, the rhythms of the killers
past are confronted with rhythms of the participatory documentary ecology of,
what Lefebvre refers to as, presence. Ultimately, it is argued that the artivist
strategy of The Act of Killing emerges in the assemblage of multiple participants
and multiple affective rhythms that calls for as a reinvention of a proto-empathic
identification with the unrepresentable victims.

Introducing The Act of Killing

The powerful documentary The Act of Killing (2012) is directed by Joshua
Oppenheimer, codirected by an anonymous Indonesian and Christine Cynn,
produced by Signe Byrge Srensen, with Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Joram ten
Brink and Andre Singer as executive producers. The film opens onto a dreamscape
in which six Indonesian women dance out of the mouth of a building in the shape of
a fish. The dreamscape is quickly broken with a cut situating the movie between the
dreamscape and Indonesian mass murderer and it turns out that the mass murderers
were directing the dreamscape.
The film concerns the contemporary aftermath of the 1965 military coup in
Indonesia and the genocide that occurred when General Suharto initiating his
32-year presidency sanctioned the killing of approximately a million alleged
communists. The genocide happened in the aftermath of a regional and civil war in
the 1950s, sponsored in part by the USA. Following the civil war, the army and the
Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) emerged as dominant political forces and [t]he
US and UK governments, supported by other nations in the region, conducted wide-
ranging secret operations aimed at supporting and encouraging the Army-led
slaughter, providing economic and military assistance to this end (Simpson 2013, 10).

*Email: norcmr@dac.au.dk
2015 Taylor & Francis
 2 Camilla Mhring Reestorff

The Act of Killing does not provide details about the history of the genocide but
follows Anwar Congo who led the notorious death squad Frog Squad (Pasukan
Kodok) and his friends Herman Koto and Adi Zulkady and challenges them to
reenact their killings. Their reenactments serve as a testimony not only to the
murders that they themselves committed but also to the difficult heritage of the
genocide (Logan and Reeves 2009; MacDonald 2009; Knudsen 2011).
The Act of Killing is situated in the city of Medan in the North Sumatra province
of Indonesia. North Sumatra was one of the regions in which the PKI had a
stronghold and was heavily affected by the killings. Furthermore, the death squads
were particularly influential in North Sumatra because of their ties to the populist
right-wing paramilitary organization Pemuda Pancasila. In the early 1960s, Pemuda
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Pancasila took on its character mostly outside Jakarta, particularly in Medan [] a

boxer named Effendi Nasution, known as Effendi Keling as well as the Lion of
Sumatra, was recruited as Pemuda Pancasila chair (Ryter 1998, 55). Effendi Keling
was important because he controlled black market sales of movie tickets and thus
served to enroll movie theater gangsters to the organization. Pemuda Pancasila in
Medan and Achec were particularly active in slaughtering suspected communists
(Ryter 1998, 55). The gangsters (preman), who include Anwar Congo, continuously
thrived on fear and used the genocide to maintain power. And even though various
police commanders have tried to bring in the leaders of the death squad on
gambling, assault and gun charges (Ryter 1998, 46), they still boast about having
approximately three million members that include government ministers. The
affiliation with Pemuda Pancasila is one of many reasons why the death squads
have never been held to account for the genocide and are celebrated as victors. As
the film documents Anwar Congo is celebrated as one of the organizations founding
fathers. As victors they have substantial political, economical and social influence
and they do not have to answer to the victims of their crimes. As Adi Zulkady puts
it: War crimes are defined by the winners. Im a winner. So I can make my own
definition (Oppenheimer 2012, 01.07.49).
The paper will suggest that The Act of Killing can be interpreted as an unruly
artivist practice situated in a complex participatory documentary ecosystem (Nash,
Height, and Summerhayes 2014) in which different participants have conflicting
goals, all of which relate to the difficult heritage that constitutes the imagination of
the genocide. By allowing the gangsters to tell their story, the film becomes
participatory and in its enunciation it figures their conflicted interpretation of
history. This situates the film in the midst of an ethical dilemma between
commemorating the victims and allowing for the story of the genocide to be told.
The ethical dilemma is further foregrounded insofar as the gangsters reenactments
are staged as scenes from fictional films. Taking on multiple roles, for example
gangsters from film noir, the real murderers fashion and represent their original
methods of murder through the fictional lens of Hollywood. Fiction therefore serves
as an unruly strategy that simultaneously illustrates the universality of gruesomeness
and creates a complex relation between the gangsters and their past. To some extent,
fiction allows the gangsters to distance themselves from their past because they
imitate certain moods common to such genres. However, this paper will argue that
the gangsters attempts to remain victors are challenged in their reenactments
because they become troubled indexes (Schneider 2011) of themselves. Further, it is
argued that the reenactments generate affective conflicts that are closely tied to the
 Studies in Documentary Film 3

rhythms (Lefebvre [1992] 2005) of the gangsters past, as they and their bodies are
confronted by rhythms of the presence. Ultimately, it is argued that The Act of
Killing does not provide a linear narrative or straightforward representation of the
genocide. Rather, it relies on a participatory documentary ecosystem in which the
difficult heritage emerges as a contested site and in which group cognition is
reimagined in order to reinvent a proto-empathic identification (Protevi 2008) with
the unrepresentable victims.

A participatory documentary ecosystem

As argued by Nash, Hight, and Summerhayes emerging documentary platforms are
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situated within a complex media environment in which digital technologies, modes,

platforms and infrastructures offer the potential for new ways of conceptualizing the
documentary project and new means for audiences (as viewers, navigators, users
or collaborators) to engage with these forms (Nash, Height, and Summerhayes
2014, 2). This media ecology entails that we must reconsider the relationship between
the documentary film, its subjects, platforms and audiences. Documentary films are,
as any other media practice, adapting to the participatory practices that for more
than a decade have been invested with high hopes for democratic empowerment of
noninstitutional voices (Jenkins et al. 2006; Bruns 2008; Gauntlett 2011). The
participatory development suggests that ecological thinking involves looking at the
big pictures, at the whole assemblage of agents that constitute documentary
ecosystems (Dovey 2014, 11).
By focusing on The Act of Killing as a participatory documentary ecosystem, I
understand the film as an assemblage of various agencies, participants and
conflicting takes on the genocide. The analysis must therefore account for at least
four agencies: the gangsters, the director, the anonymous Indonesian codirector and
the 49 other anonymous crewmembers, the victims and the extended audience that
partake in the distribution and circulation of the film. These four agencies all
influence the ecosystem that constitutes the film and they work across platforms and
distribution systems. However, despite its participatory character the film is also
embedded in a hierarchical system in which the different agencies do not hold equal
access to influencing the final outcome.
Sandra Gaudenzi has suggested that documentary films often apply participatory
strategies as means to gather content and that this leads to co-creation but not to
co-authorship, since the latter require a degree of intervention in the overall concept
(i.e. form) of the product (Gaudenze 2014, 130). The participants are therefore
rarely involved in the architecture of the project and the film remains embedded in
hierarchical structures:

It is still extremely rare for contributors to be allowed to act at a concept level hence to
influence the very proposition of the documentary. [] Problems of ownership and
narrative coherence would probably arise, but more than anything else, authorship
would have to be shared. (Gaudenze 2014, 144)

By suggesting a distinction between co-creation and coauthorship Gaudenzi follows

a normative tradition of participation research that emphasizes the emancipatory
and nonhierarchical character of participation. This tradition stems from Sherry
 4 Camilla Mhring Reestorff

Arnstein, whose ladder of participation distinguishes between nonparticipation

(manipulation and therapy), tokenism (consultation and placation) and degrees of
citizen power (partnership, delegated power and citizen control) (Arnstein 1969).
Research and reviews of The Act of Killing tend to follow the normative
understanding of citizen power and focus either on the victims lack of participation
or the gangsters participation. However, in order to understand the films
participatory ecology it is necessary to approach it as a complex framework of
diverse forms of participation.
The gangsters participation is obviously important. If we follow the concept of
citizen power, their involvement in The Act of Killing does not qualify as
participation. This is because the director delegates power and allows them to
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script, produce and perform scenes and maintains the right to frame the scenes that
actors conduct. The production becomes a film inside a film and in that sense the
participation of the gangsters is manipulated. This manipulated participation has
also been noted in critiques of the film:

The sense of manipulation is all the stronger in those scenes that present the second
story. Congo and his friends plan a film about their exploits in 19651966, and The Act
of Killing is interspersed with both excerpts from the finished film and scenes of prior
discussion and preparation for the filming. Neither the plot nor the structure of this
film-within-a-film is ever made clear. Instead we see extracts that are alternately vicious
(torture scenes and the burning of a village) and bizarre. (Cribb 2013)

The gangsters participation can thus be interpreted as nonparticipation because they

are not allowed to act at a concept level (Gaudenze 2014, 144). Furthermore, it can
be argued that the gangsters are manipulated to undergo a kind of therapy through
the reenactments and that they are only allowed to participate as a strategy of
placation. They are allowed to participate because their act of killing is hindered.
In that sense, The Act of Killing is unruly because it promises participation that it
does not deliver.
The role of the extended audience and the anonymous codirector and crewmem-
bers is often overlooked when it is argued that the victims are not represented. Jill
Godmillow has for instance argued that There is no evidence in this film and there
should be that the Indonesian people are capable of resistance to domination and
terror (Godmillow 2014). Godmillow is obviously right to be cautious about
reproductions of geopolitical constructions of firstthird world dichotomies. But she
is also too preoccupied with director Oppenheimer as auteur (Gerstner 2003).
Therefore, she overlooks the anonymous Indonesian codirector and the 49
crewmembers impact on the film. Godmillow argues that The Act of Killing

reduces its local viewers, who are implicitly in the film, to the level of not yet
democratic, not yet enlightened, and, at some level, still in need of a caring outsider to
help guide them on the path to positive change. (Godmillow 2014)

Yet, the anonymous codirector exactly identifies as someone who acts and protests:
I was one of thousands of students who stood face to face with riot police in 1998,
urging the New Order military dictatorship to go (http://theactofkilling.com/
statements/). The anonymous codirector has worked with Oppenheimer on the
project since 2004 and argues that
 Studies in Documentary Film 5

I worked with Joshua to make The Act of Killing in order to help myself, other
Indonesians, and human beings living in similar societies around the world, to
understand the importance of questioning what we see, and how we imagine. How
else are we to envision our world in a different way?1

It is prudent to recognize the importance of the codirector not only because the
codirector contradicts the argument that The Act of Killing only represents
Indonesians as not yet democratic, but also because the codirector provides an
additional element to the question of participation. The fact that the anonymous
codirector must remain anonymous, for now, because the political conditions in
Indonesia make it too dangerous for me to do otherwise (http://theactofkilling.com/
statements/) entails that he/she represents the victims and survivors, who have to
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remain silent. Furthermore, the anonymous codirectors participation is exactly of

the kind that Gaudenzi deems rare, namely a type of participation in which
contributors are allowed to act at a concept level and in which authorship is shared.
Due to the anonymous codirector and crewmembers, the question of participa-
tion becomes complex and the film cannot simply be dismissed as an instance of
nonparticipation. This complex participatory ecology is made even more multi-
faceted when the distribution of the film is taken into account. Due to a fear that
government censors would ban the film it was not released in movie theaters in
Indonesia, instead private screenings were held for the public and special interest
groups including historians, journalists and human rights agencies. Since the
International Human Rights Day on 10 December 2012, the film has been screened
over 270 times in Indonesia, and in more than 90 cities across that country (Hrsman
2013). Not all of these screenings have been successful. In some cities, the organizers
decided to stop their private screening due to a lack of interest or because viewers
walked out as the screening was in progress. Others had mistaken it for a film
celebrating the 1965 killers! (Heryanto 2014, 165). Nonetheless, the numerous
screenings indicate a strong local mobilization in which the participation is
embedded in [n]ew infrastructures of distribution, which change the scale and terms
on which symbolic production in one place can reach other places (Couldry 2003,
44) (Hands 2011, 68). The new infrastructure of circulation is furthermore evident in
particular globallocal scaling. The film was made available for free online
download geo-blocked and available only in Indonesia through a partnership
between the global media company VICE, the integrated digital platform VHX and
the Danish film production company Final Cut For Real ApS. The localglobal
collaboration between the companies facilitating downloads and screenings and the
extended audience who partake in the local Indonesian distribution of the film is
obviously not participatory in sense that of coauthorship. But I would argue that
such participation nevertheless qualifies as a peculiar form of citizen power because
it contributes to the generation of a participatory distribution system that connects
localglobal impulses of circulation.
As this indicates, The Act of Killing is difficult to decipher as a clear-cut, or
normative, distinction between participation and nonparticipation. The participatory
processes that constitute the ecosystem are simply too diverse. In the case of The Act
of Killing participation is not an aim in and of itself. Rather, participation is a
deliberate strategy aimed at challenging societal structures. Thus whereas the
distinction between participation and nonparticipation understands participation to
 6 Camilla Mhring Reestorff

primarily benefit the participants it is clear that participation is now expected to

have an effect on the structures, institutions, organizations, or technologies in which
one participate (Kelty 2013, 24). Participation is therefore not simply a question
coauthorship for all participants. Kelty et al. suggest a broad definition in which
participation concerns collective actions that form something larger so that those
involved become part of and share in the entity created (Kelty et al. 2014, 5).
Following this definition, The Act of Killing constitutes an assemblage of multiple
forms of participations and participants that share the entity that generates the
participatory documentary ecology.

Unruly participation
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According to Nick Couldry, ethics is a normative discourse focused on the good

and dispositions aimed at the good (virtue) (Couldry 2013, 14). The Act of Killing is
embedded in an ethical dilemma and the good never seems to present itself.
Oppenheimer explains that when he began developing the film in 2005, he had been
filming for three years with survivors of the 19651966 massacres and, indeed, initially
the film was to be about survivors who confront the killers (http://theactofkilling.com/
statements/). Yet, the production proved to be difficult:

For instance, when we tried to film a scene in which former political prisoners rehearsed
a ballad about their time in the concentration camps (describing how they provided
forced labour for the British-owned plantation, and how every night some of their
friends would be handed over to death squads to be killed), we were interrupted by the
police seeking to arrest us. At other times, the management of London-Sumatra
plantations interrupted the films shooting, honouring us by inviting us to a meeting
at plantation headquarters. (http://theactofkilling.com/statements/)

This left the filmmaking process in a dilemma: Not only did we feel unsafe filming the
survivors, we worried for their safety. And the survivors couldnt answer the question
of how the killings were perpetrated (http://theactofkilling.com/statements/).
Ethical dilemmas are often reduced to a moral temptation, which is merely a right-
versus-wrong situation (Baker 2009). However, the dilemma in The Act of Killing is a
true ethical dilemma, but one that cannot be described through Sherry Bakers
terminology as a right-versus-right situation. The Act of Killings dilemmas can be
framed, rather, as a wrong-versus-wrong situation. On the one hand, one wants to
ensure that the voices of the victims and survivors are heard and respected, but if they
testify their lives are in danger. On the other hand, one wants to document the genocide
and the fact that the gangsters remain in power, but by allowing them to testify one
risks reproducing the power structures that silence the victims and survivors. Thus, no
matter which strategy one chooses in the quest of representation, the misrepresentation
or silencing of the victims and survivors of the genocide is present.
Situated in the mist of this ethical dilemma The Act of Killing can be
conceptualized as an art activist artivist documentary practice. It engages with
the ethical dilemma and the political contexts that make up the contemporary
understanding and framing of the genocide. The strategy is artivist because it uses
vigorous actions, participation and aesthetic strategies such as documentation and
fictionalization as means of enabling dialog and achieving political goals. However,
the participatory documentary ecosystem makes it difficult to identify the artivist
 Studies in Documentary Film 7

goals because it is an assemblage and therefore we do not have one measure of value
but many ways of enacting value in a complex web of significance (Dovey 2014, 18).
Whereas the director and codirectors aim to investigate the mechanics and mind-sets
of people who conduct genocide and facilitate changes in the political imaginary,
both in Indonesian politics and internationally, the gangsters seek to remain victors.
In a musical scene from the film within the film, the dead victims perversely award
Anwar a medal and thank him a thousand times for executing me and sending
me to heaven (Oppenheimer 2012, 02.22.4802.24.26). The different participatory
agencies thus represent conflicting goals that are confronted in the assemblage. The
difficulty of delimiting a singular goal in the participatory documentary ecology is
one of the reasons why the film is unruly. It is usually expected that activist and
artivist practices not only have identifiable goals, but goals based on an ethics aimed
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at the good (Couldry 2013, 14).

Claire Bishop has discussed the ethics of participation. She argues that in a context
of participatory art an ethical turn has emerged in which an artwork is evaluated on
the degree to which artists supply a good or bad model of collaboration (Bishop
2012, 19). She argues that [e]ven if a work of art is not directly participatory,
references to community, collectivity (be this lost or actualised) and revolution are
sufficient to indicate a critical distance (Bishop 2012, 12). This emphasis on good or
bad models of collaboration is certainly predominant also in the appraising of co-
creation (Boswijk, Thijssen, and Peelen 2007), DIY media (Knobel and Lankshear
2010) and DIY culture (Gauntlett 2011). These concepts describe a general shift in
cultural production that privileges nonprofessional contributions and is often seen for
its particular democratic potential. Aaron Delwiche, for instance, distinguishes
between repressive uses of media and emancipatory uses of media. Repressive uses
of media are defined as centrally controlled programs and specialist productions, the
emancipatory use of media is decentralized and its collective production exercises
social control by self-organization (Delwiche 2013, 16).
However, as Grant Kester argues any participatory practice that aims to
collaborate and work together carries with it a counter-meaning: a warning, so to
speak, of its ethical undecidability (Kester 2011, 2). This ethical undecidablity is
foregrounded in The Act of Killing because the participatory documentary ecosystem
relies on the active participation of the gangsters. As already mentioned, the
participation of the gangsters is controversial because it can be perceived as
manipulation and because it can be questioned whether or not they would have
participated had they known how the outcome of the film would be framed. In The
Act of Killing it is often the gangsters participation manipulated or not that is
perceived as unruly. Nick Fraser has, for instance, called the film Porn for liberals
and he dislike[s] both the aesthetics and the moral premise of The Act of Killing
(Fraser 2014, 21). This turns the ethical turn upside-down. The main concern is not
lack of participation and central control, but rather that the emancipation of
participants the gangsters are the voices that we do not want to hear. In The Act
of Killing, it is the participation and not the lack hereof that is unruly.
There are many ways in which a documentary can qualify as unruly artivism. As
indicated by Claire Bishop, there is a demand for good models of collaboration. The
film and the filmmaker can qualify as unruly by providing bad models of
collaboration, but also by for example breaking the law, challenging or subverting
codes for ethical behavior, challenging or subverting norms for artistic and
 8 Camilla Mhring Reestorff

participatory practices and/or challenging dominant discourses and power structures.

When an artwork or a film is criticized for being unruly, it is often due to the
behavior of the artist or filmmaker. Yet, the unruly structure of The Act of Killing is
complex. The filmmaker and the film can be conceptualized as unruly, but part of
this unruliness stems from the actions of the gangsters, who are obviously unruly
because they are mass murderers. Their reenactments testify to such a gruesome
history and the film, in part, inherits their unruliness simply by allowing them to
reenact their actions.
Despite being murderers the gangsters are not universally perceived as unruly and
law breaking. Even though murders are most often perceived as a breach of both
ethical and state laws, a murder can be sanctioned by the state; for instance through
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death penalty or war. The gangsters in The Act of Killing have henceforth not been
punished because their murders, to some extent, have been seen as a service to the
state. In the film, former vice president of Indonesia, Jusuf Kalla, praises the gangsters:

Gangsters are people who work outside the system not for the government. The word
gangster comes from free men. This nation needs free men. If everyone worked for the
government wed be a nation of bureaucrats. Wed get nothing done. We need our
gangsters to get things done! (Oppenheimer 2012, 00.35.4900.36.21)

In this quote, the vice president emphasizes that it is necessary to stand outside the
state system. For him free mens unruliness is necessary for the state to move
forward. This inscribes the gangsters in a political discourse that legitimizes the
killings. Therefore it is, to some extent, only in the participatory ecology in which the
gangsters confronted with and embedded in the assemblage of the directors, the
victims and the audiences will become unruly.
The participatory documentary ecology is unruly for four reasons: first, because
the participatory documentary ecology renders it difficult to delimit a singular
artivist goal; second, because the gangsters participation despite being a part of the
documentary ecology is manipulated; third, because the film includes the gangsters
in the assemblage and thus inherits their unruliness in its representation; and finally
because the gangsters dominant discourses and power structures are disturbed in the
assemblage of participants.
The unruly character does, however, not disqualify the film as an artivist
practice, but it does resituate this practice. One of the critiques often raised is that
The Act of Killing does not provide information and education. According to Nick
Fraser, the film does not enhance our knowledge of the 1960s Indonesian killings
(Fraser 2014, 22) and Jill Godmillow argues, [g] ood filmmaking comes down to
education education of the senses, including the sixth sense, as the Buddhists would
have it, the mind (Godmillow 2014). As a strategy, however, information and
education might not advocate for change. Following Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers
(1991) Ariel Heryanto argues that even if individuals know the ugly truth their
information level does not necessarily change their approach to the regime
(Heryanto 2014, 164). They may consent due to number of reasons and in Indonesia
and its neighboring countries, cold war authoritarian repression ran in tandem with
sustained economic growth, industrialization, and an expanding desire for global
consumerism (Heryanto 2014, 166). The Act of Killing thus confronts a challenge. If
the target audience already has the information, how do you change their approach
 Studies in Documentary Film 9

to the regime? The solution of the unruly artivist is to situate the film in the midst of
an ethical dilemma and rely on the participatory documentary ecology. This entails
that the unruly politics of The Act of Killing does not follow the educational regime,
where consensus exists between a mode of sensory presentation and a regime of
meaning (Rancire 2010, 144) but rather exists as a disagreement between multiple
participatory agencies.

Difficult heritage and reenacted killings

Throughout The Act of Killing the gangsters explore, discuss and boast about the
genocide that they conducted. This is (most likely) exceptional for the gangsters, but
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even outside the North Sumatra region the anticommunist sentiment is strong. This is
seen in propaganda films such as Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (Noer 1984). The
gangsters disagree about the film. Whereas Anwar feels reassured when watching the
film is the one thing that makes me feel not guilty (Oppenheimer 2012, 00:42:08)
Adi recognizes it as a clear case of falsification of the events surrounding the 30
September Movement: I think it is a lie (Oppenheimer 2012, 00:42:25). Pengkhia-
natan G30S/PKI depicts the official history in which the PKI (Partai Komunis
Indonesia) is described as a group of bloodthirsty killers who torture army soldiers and
cut off their genitals. The film was televised annually as propaganda and screened as
mandatory viewing for students during Suhartos presidency. Accordingly, the dead
squads actions were embedded in a national imagination in which communists were a
national threat. This depiction of the communists as a threat is obviously the reason
the film reassures Anwar. It legitimizes his and the death squads killings by framing
them as a service to the state.2
The Act of Killing reflects this as the conflict of history. For example, in one scene
the gangsters discuss how a reenactment that they are about to film will impact
history. Adi recognizes the importance of the public imagination in constructing
history:

It is not about fear. It is about image. The whole society will say: weve always
suspected it. They lied about the communists being cruel. It is not a problem for us. It
is a problem for history. The whole story will be reversed! (Oppenheimer 2012,
01.04.5901.05.27)

Adis reflections about the imagined history of the cruel communists indicates that
the genocide constitutes what Sharon Macdonald has termed difficult heritage.
Difficult heritage signifies a heritage that the majority of the population would
prefer not to have (Macdonald 2009, 9). For Macdonald, difficult heritage is a past
that is recognized as meaningful in the present but that is also contested and
awkward for public reconciliation with a positive, self-affirming contemporary
identity (Macdonald 2009, 1).
In The Act of Killing we are dealing with a genocide, which obviously ought to
constitute difficult heritage, and throughout the film the gangsters guide us, and tell
us where, when and how their murders were conducted. The heritage and the
genocide are certainly awkward for the director who holds a positive, self-
affirming contemporary identity but the gangsters, the paramilitary group
Pancasila, the political leaders and the journalists all celebrate the genocide.
 10 Camilla Mhring Reestorff

The reason why the gangsters and the politicians do not acknowledge the difficult
past is that they use the genocide to maintain power and, in this sense, their past is
not yet history. Thus, it becomes the artivist project to turn the present into difficult
heritage: something disturbing from the past rather than as part of a continuity.
The gangsters celebration of the genocide is in opposition to Macdonald, who
argues that difficult heritage is unsettling and awkward, rather than [] celebrated
(Macdonald 2009, 1). The celebration of the genocide is possible because the
gangsters have accumulated power and because the imaginary perception of a
communist threat is maintained. Therefore, the general population cannot openly
acknowledge that the genocide is a heritage that they would prefer not to have. The
participatory documentary ecology is crucial because it is in the assemblage of
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different agencies that the heritage emerges as difficult. In a scene in which the
gangsters star in a television show on Televisi Republik Indonesia (TVRI) they are
celebrated for developing more humane methods for killing communists. The host
declares that:

Anwar and his friends developed a new, more efficient system for exterminating
communists. It was more humane, less sadistic and avoided excessive violence. But you
also just wiped them out! (Oppenheimer 2012, 01.47.0201.47.20)

She obviously does not recognize the genocide as a difficult heritage. However, as
this celebration occurs the film cuts to four people behind the camera. They discuss
Anwar:

How many people did he kill?

About 1000
How can he sleep? Isnt he haunted?
A lot of them went crazy
Yeah
No, they got rich
Yeah
Rich from stealing
But killing all those people made them crazy, too. (Oppenheimer 2012, 01.47.2401.47.49)

The cut between what is being performed for the public by the news host, Anwar and
the politicians with the responses from the four people behind the camera makes
evident that the murders are not so simply celebrated. Behind the scenes political
minorities and descendants of the victims lurk and in this sense the difficult heritage
threatens to break through into the present in disruptive ways (Macdonald 2009, 1)
via the ecology of this participatory documentary.
The contested character of the difficult heritage is also tied to the complex site-
specific character of the film and to its many reenactments. The gangsters often act
as tour guides and show the directors and the viewers where, when and how they
committed the killings. As such they provide a knowledge that, following Britta
Timm Knudsen, relates to and establishes a dialog with the past that activates lived
or prosthetic memories in order to become part of the social making of these places
(Knudsen 2011, 57). In a conversation between Anwar and Adi the latter tells about
how he killed numerous Chinese people, including his girlfriends dad, and he
provides information about where his killing spree took place.
 Studies in Documentary Film 11

Remember the Crush the Chinese Campaign in 1966? You gave me the list of Chinese
communists. All along Sudirman Street I killed every Chinese person I met. I stabbed
them! I dont remember how many, but it was dozens. If I met them, I stabbed them. All
the way to Asia Street, where I met my girlfriends dad. Remember, my girlfriend was
Chinese? Crush the Chinese became Crush my girlfriends dad! So I stabbed him,
too! Because he was Chinese! (Oppenheimer 2012, 00.50.5000.51.35)

As this indicates the gangsters provide information that contributes to the acknowl-
edgment of the difficult heritage even if they themselves do not acknowledge it as
difficult. The Act of Killing does, however, not only use onsite location, but combines
these with locations deliberately built for the film. For instance, a village is built so
that it can be set on fire. These variations in site-specificity matter deeply, for it is in
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and through this work of historically informed but creatively realized re-inhabitation
that the film helps cultivate a new sense of space and place (Walker 2014, 18).
The creatively realized re-inhabitation of space is further mirrored in the use of
fiction in the reenactments of the killings. Mads Daugbjerg, Rivka Syd Eisner and
Britta Timm Knudsen collectively argue that

Re-enactment as activity and concept implies a number of challenges to conventional

understandings of heritage and many of the taken-for-granted qualities and assump-
tions usually associated with the term, such as fixity, conservation, listing, ownership
or authenticity, to name but a few. (Daubjerg, Eisner, and Knudsen 2014, 681)

They understand reenactments as performative processes embedded in a complex

temporality in which the reenactment is both bound by the past, obliged on the
sceneries and scripts it seeks to recreate, and also necessarily forcing participants to
experience that past from the position and reflexive hindsight of the present
(Daubjerg, Eisner, and Knudsen 2014, 682).
The performative character and the complex temporality of reenactments are
certainly evident in The Act of Killing. The reenactments that the gangsters perform
are inscribed in fictional frames through the use of genres such as western, noir,
mafia, musical, etc. The use of fiction entails that The Act of Killings reenactments
invent an archive, rather than performing obedience to one (Schneider 2011, 10). The
invention of the archive is complex because the recognizable Hollywood genres
interrupt the search for the original event, the genocide. The impossibility of
reaching the original has, by Elizabeth Freeman and David Romn, been termed
respectively temporal drag (Freeman 2010, 59) and archival drag (Romn 2005,
137). Romn applies his notion of the archival drag to read the gangsters as setting
out to reembody or revive a performance from the past (Romn 2005, 140). But the
performance from their past is their own, which creates a peculiar cross-temporal
connection that can be further developed via Freeman. She argues that within the
lost moments of official history, queer time generates a discontinuous history of its
own (Freeman 2010, xi). The cross-temporal connection performed by the gangsters
exactly gives access to such an alternative history.
The alternative history is introduced through the complex temporality, but also
through a very concrete archival drag. While Herman reembodies his own past, he
often also wears drag costumes. The archival drag creates ruptures in the history
that the gangsters attempt to communicate because it becomes very obvious that
even Herman who committed the murders cannot access the original event.
 12 Camilla Mhring Reestorff

In one reenactment, Herman chops off the head of a doll that looks like Anwar,
drinks the fake blood and laughs. When Herman and Anwar discuss the scene, the
queerness of the cross-temporal connection is confirmed:

But Anwar youre dead in this scene because I cut your head off. So if this is the
beginning it must be someone elses head that gets cut off, not yours.
Thats not true because this scene is set in a time tunnel. (Oppenheimer 2012, 01.42.40
01.43.07)

The archival drag not only describes the queered relation to the original but it also
describes the gangsters queered relation to themselves. They navigate between their
indexical character and the archival drag and this might disarm the index. In another
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scene, Anwar reenacts the way in which he would murder, placing the head of the
victim under a table leg then sitting on the table. Herman gives Anwar a pink hat to
wear while reenacting the scene: This one is for the Big Boss. Yep. Its perfect for
me (Oppenheimer 2012, 00.29.2200.29.25). The use of fiction and the queerness of
the cross-temporal connection might serve a purpose for the gangsters: they delimit
their own indexical character. But the queerness of the cross-temporal connection
also entails that the viewer is confronted with an alternative history. The gangsters
representation of themselves as heroes is ruptured by a discontinuous history in
which their testimony cannot be trusted.

Affect and the rhythms of killing

Through the reenactments the gangsters become troubled indexes of themselves
and their past. When Anwar watches a reenactment in which he is the victim who is
being tortured and killed the troubled index becomes clear:

Did the people I tortured feel the way I do here? I can feel what the people I tortured
felt. Because here my dignity has been destroyed and then fear comes right there and
then. All the terror suddenly possessed my body. It surrounded me and possessed me.
Actually, the people you tortured felt far worse because you know it is only a film. They
knew they were being killed. But I can feel it, Josh. Really I feel it. (Oppenheimer 2012,
02.27.2402.28.26)

As noted by Rebecca Schneider, any act of reenactment can be recognized exactly as

a reenactment (Schneider 2011, 32). This is what Oppenheimer does. He points out
that not only is this a reenactment, but Anwar is the index a troubled index not
of the victim, but of the killer.
The disconnection between past and present and between self and actor that
manifests in the troubled index has been seen as an indication of Anwar suffering
from posttraumatic stress disorder (e.g. King 2013). Others reject Anwars bodily,
somatic experience of being surrounded and possessed by terror and argue that
Anwar is merely performing (e.g. Fraser 2014; Cribb 2013). I will, however, follow
interpretations of Anwar by both Janet Walker and Oppenheimer and argue that
Anwar is simultaneously performing and having a somatic experience (Walker 2014,
14). Accordingly, my interest is not to investigate the trueness of Anwars
performance, but the ways in which different affective states collide.
 Studies in Documentary Film 13

John Protevi has studied the role of affect and precognitive killing in infantry
combat. Infantry combat and the genocide are obviously different both because of the
methods of combat and because infantry combat are sanctioned by the legal
procedures of a state apparatus. Whereas infantry combat attempts to avoid close
combat, the gangsters in The Act of Killing conduct their killings up close.
Nevertheless, there are similarities in the strategies applied to handle the affects or
following Protevi the proto-empathetic identification, which produces psychological
trauma at the sight of the blood and guts of the killed enemy (Protevi 2008, 405). In
The Act of Killing the gangsters and politicians are continuously dehumanizing the
communist and seeking to establish the killings as sanctioned by the state. Further-
more, even though the gangsters were killing up close, they partly distanced themselves
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from their killings. This distance can be seen in the use of fictional genres as entry
points to the killings. Anwar and Herman explain:

When wed watch happy movies, like Elvis movies, wed leave the cinema smiling,
dancing to the music. Our hands Still dancing Still in the mood of the film. If girls
passed wed whistle. We loved it. We didnt care what people thought. Here was the
paramilitary office, where I always killed people. Id see the guy being interrogated. Id
still be dancing, laughing. It was like we were killing happily. (Oppenheimer 2012,
00.16.1700.17.16)

They use fiction as a training ground and as a certain mood that impacts the way of
killing. It is the mood, borrowed from fiction films, that serves to distance them
from the sight of the blood and guts of the killed enemy. A similar strategy is
present in the reenactments. By reenacting the killings through the frames of fiction,
they borrow moods and at least partly to avoid confronting their past and
rehumanizing the victims.
Following Zahavi (2005) and Gallagher (2005), Proveti argues for a distinction
between agency and ownership of bodily actions. Ownership is the sense that my body
is doing the actions, while agency is the sense that I am in control of the action, that the
action is willed (Protevi 2008, 408). Even though both are aspects of subjectivity, the
distinction indicates an affect program that skip[s] subjectivity and directly conjoins
larger groups and the somatic (Protevi 2008, 408). The gangsters in The Act of Killing
alternate between ownership, and agency, of their bodies and actions. They often
invest their actions with agency, for instance when Adi Zulkady, as mentioned, brags
about killing his girlfriends father. Nevertheless, their actions can be qualified in
terms of an ownership in which they directly conjoin larger groups and the somatic.
The question of ownership, group relations and the somatic is tied to the question
of rhythms: soldiers are acculturated to dehumanize the enemy by a series of racial
slurs. This acculturation is especially powerful when accomplished through rhythmic
chanting while running, for such entertainment weakens personal identity to produce
a group subject (McNeil 1995; Burke 2004) (Protevi 2008, 410). Rhythmic chanting
is crucial. Rhythms of music and dancing impacted the ways in which the gangsters
killed and it plays a role in both the reenactments and their stories about the killings.
When Anwar explains his favorite method of killing rhythms appears:

Theres [sic] many ghosts here, because many people were killed here. They died
unnatural deaths. They arrived perfectly healthy [Anwar is mime-walking] [] We have
to reenact this properly. This is how to do it without too much blood [pulling the steel
 14 Camilla Mhring Reestorff

wire]. Ive tried to forget all this with good music Dancing. Feeling happy. A little
alcohol A little marijuana A little What do you call it? Ecstasy. Once Id get
drunk, Id fly and feel happy [animated movements of the body]. Cha cha [Anwar
continues to do the cha cha]. (Oppenheimer 2012, 00.06.2600.11.13)

These rhythms, the movement of the body and the cha cha are important.
Although Anwar expresses agency in his act of the killing, he also conjoins himself to
a different rhythm, the music, and it is by following this rhythm that he is oscillating
between agency and ownership and approaching the somatic.
According to Henri Lefebvre, we easily confuse rhythm with movement
[mouvement], speed, a sequence of movements [gestes] or objects (machines, for
example) (Lefebvre [1992] 2005, 5). Thus, Anwar might only be moving, vibrating
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and attached to the music. In his vibrations affect is expressed rhythmically through
relationships, reciprocations, resonances, syncopations and harmonies (Henriques
2010, 58). But Anwar is not only following the vibrations of the music, he is
appropriating the mood of the music to escape the proto-empathetic identification
with his victims. However, this escape is not possible. Rhythms are not only a matter of
vibrations, music and movements: No rhythm without repetition in time and space,
without reprises, without returns, in short without measure [mesure] (Lefebvre [1992]
2005, 5). Accordingly, the reenactments can be interpreted as repetitions in time and
space, and the gangsters use of music interpreted as an attempt to repeat the rhythms
of the past. Lefebvre writes that [t]he present sometimes imitates (stimulates) to the
point of mistaking itself for presence; a portrait, a copy, a double, a facsimile, etc., but
(a) presence survives and imposes itself by introducing a rhythm (a time) (Lefebvre
[1992] 2005, 23). Thus, even if the gangsters attempt to imitate the rhythms of the past
there is always something new and unforeseen that introduces itself into the repetitive:
difference (Lefebvre [1992] 2005, 5). In the reenactments something new occurs, new
rhythms and competing affective programs.
The introduction of difference and competing affective programs is evident in the
gangsters reenactment of the massacre of the village Kampung Kolam. In this
reenactment, the deputy minister of Youth and Sport, Sakhyan Asmara participates.
The minister is there to motivate the people from Preman Pancasila, who participate in
the reenactment. Quickly the scene becomes intense and the participants are screaming:
Kill! Kill! Kill the communists! Slaughter them! [] Exterminate them to their
roots! Chop off their heads! Burn them! Kill them! (Oppenheimer 2012, 01.53.23
01.54.27). The participants imitate the rhythm of the past and they affect each other;
they conjoin larger groups and the somatic. They are, in the words of Brian Massumi,
primed to the same collective event. However the intensification and somatic character
of the event disturbs the minister and he addresses Oppenheimer and the crew:

Joshua and crew, now Im speaking as leader of Pancasila Youth. What we just saw is
not characteristic of our organization. We shouldnt look brutal like we want to drink
peoples blood. Thats dangerous for our organizations image. But we must exterm-
inate the communists. We must totally wipe them out but in a more humane way. []
Dont erase it! Use it to show how ferocious we can be! (Deputy Minister Sakhyan
Asmara in Oppenheimer 2012, 01.54.53)

The minister reveals an uncertain relation not only to himself as an index, but also to
the affect displayed by the crowd. The crowd which has ownership but not
 Studies in Documentary Film 15

necessarily agency threatens the organizations image because it depicts the

extermination of the communists as something irrational and brutal.3 This is a clear
indication that the reenactments repetitions of the rhythms of the past are met with
competing affective programs and rhythms, hence the ministers fear that Oppen-
heimer and the crew will misrepresent his organization. Thus, an affective politics
emerges in the assemblage of the various participants and their rhythms and this
affective politics works as an art of emitting the interruptive signs, triggering the
cues that attune bodies (Massumi 2009, 6).

Conclusion
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The Act of Killing relies on unruly artivism and it confronts two ethical dilemmas.
The first concerns the representation of victims that are either unrepresentable
because they are dead or unable to give their testimony due to the gangsters power
allocation. The second dilemma concerns the film, its participatory form and its
reenactments. The film abandons the traditional human rights model the so-called
the lock-step model in which knowledge is believed to generate action. Rather than
providing a coherent narrative and information about the genocide it presents itself
as a participatory documentary ecology.
The participatory documentary ecology is an unruly strategy because the multiple
agencies in the film and its distribution make it difficult to identify a singular artivist
goal. But the film is also unruly due to questions of participation and collaboration. By
including the gangsters in the participatory assemblage, the film simultaneously
inherits their unruliness and disturbs or even manipulates the gangsters.
The assemblage of multiple participants reveals the contested and difficult
heritage of the genocide. The gangsters might not acknowledge the heritage as
difficult but through the assemblage of participants, the creatively realized re-
inhabitation of space and the use of fiction in the reenactments, their performance is
challenged. In their reenactments they emerge as troubled indexes of themselves, as
archival drags, and this creates a peculiar cross-temporal connection through which
an alternative history emerges. This alternative history depends on an affective
politics and the assemblage of the various participants and their rhythms. Even if the
gangsters attempt to imitate the rhythms of the past, something new emerge in the
reenactments and in the meeting with and assemblage of other participants rhythms.
This provides an alternative reading of the film, its ending and impact. In the final
scene, Anwar claims to realize his wrongdoings and makes vomiting sounds:

I know it was wrong [he walks around and makes vomiting sounds]. I had to kill. My
conscience told me they had to be killed. [He grabs the steel wire and a bag]. This is one
of the easiest ways to take a human life. And this. This was used to take away the
human beings we killed. [He walks around and goes to fence to make vomiting sounds].
(Oppenheimer 2012, 02.31.4102.35.22)

This ending, in which Anwar both seems to somatically realize his actions and the
humanity of his victims, has been rejected with reference to Anwar not being
truthful. However, if we maintain the focus on the participatory documentary
ecology it does not necessarily matter if Anwars performance is truthful. Because
the mere fact that he deems it necessary to perform somatic affects and grief is a
 16 Camilla Mhring Reestorff

testimony to the importance of the participatory assemblage. It has become

impossible for him to continue the repetition of the rhythms of the past and he
must acknowledge the existence of the competing rhythms, i.e. acknowledge the
genocide as difficult heritage. Therefore, it is through competing affective rhythms
that the victims become grievable. The victims are not granted a voice, even the
codirector must remain anonymous. They are, as Butler would say, derealized
(Butler 2006), already dead and therefore never mourned. But because the affective
rhythms are acknowledged the difficult heritage emerges as a contested site and a
proto-empathic identification (Protevi 2008) with the unrepresentable victims
reinvented in the participatory documentary ecology.
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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
1. Joshua Oppenheimers statement: http://theactofkilling.com/statements/.
2. In recent years, the imagination has been challenged. During his presidency (19992001),
Abdurrahman Wahid invited former PKI exiles to return to Indonesia. He proposed to
remove the ban of the communist ideology, but this was strongly opposed and caused a
rally in Jakarta.
3. Despite the affective ruptures caused by Oppenheimer and the crew the minister wants to
repeat the rhythms of the past. He wants to use the fear of the somatic and the crowd to
generate fear. His aim is thus a particular emotional work (Ahmed 2004) in which certain
objects and emotions are tied to the communists and ferocity is tied to the gangsters who
nevertheless are framed as justified due to the despicable communists.

Notes on contributor
Camilla Mhring Reestorff is an assistant professor at the Department of Aesthetics and
Communication at the University of Aarhus and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of
Melbourne. She is the main editor of Conjunctions. Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural
Participation. Her work focuses on mediatization, activism, political art and cultural participa-
tion and includes publications such as Buying Blood Diamonds and Altering Global Capital-
ism. Mads Brgger as Unruly Artivist in The Ambassador (2013) and Mediatised Affective
Activism: The Activist Imaginary and the Topless Body in the Femen Movement (2014).

ORCID
Camilla Mhring Reestorff iD http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5419-132X

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