I
just wanted to post a quick note here regarding a remarkable and very troubling
film which has just been released in the US. The quick IMDB synopsis:
A documentary that
challenges former Indonesian death squad leaders to re-enact their real-life
mass-killings in whichever cinematic genres they wish, including classic
Hollywood crime scenarios and lavish musical numbers. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2375605/
I
had the chance to see The Act of Killing
at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, and as I watched it I
kept returning to the idea of Hell. In particular, the film’s use of re-enactment
rang a lot of bells in my mind. Like the demonic theatre in the “Vision of
Thurkill” the stylized re-imaginings of past atrocities in the film served as
both punishment for the guilty and also as an object lesson for the viewer. This
punishment, however, only really seems to “work” for one of the murderers at
the heart of the film: Anwar Congo. I kept returning in my mind to Origen’s
idea of Hell in which the mind is tormented by the conscience, or Eriugena’s “Origenist”
assertion that the torment of Hell is really the persistence in the mind of the
images of things that have been perversely loved. Anwar Congo’s slow awakening
to his own culpability through cinematic re-enactment seemed to me to be a slow
realization that he is in fact trapped in a Hell of his own making. The
stylized portrayals of his past violence appeared to me as an externalization
of the images present in his mind. Central to his final realization is the role
of the cinematographer as tormentor. The movie’s director, Joshua Oppenheimer,
coxes the guilt out of Anwar as his subject and the viewer can’t help but feel
both righteous satisfaction as Anwar crumbles as well as some measure of sympathy.
I think that seeing this film has many of the same effects on a modern audience
as stories of visionary journeys to the Other World had on a medieval audience.
The convergence of atrocity, cinematography, and memory seemed to me to be very
medieval.
Links
with more information and reactions to the film:
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