Perpetrating Narrative: The Ethics of Unreliable Narration in the Act of Killing

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On the history of these killings, see Geoffrey Robinson (2018), Melvin (2018).

2 Originally Oppenheimer attempted to focus on the victims, but because of difficulties and dangers to the victims he decided to shift focus on the perpetrators instead. After TAOK Oppenheimer also directed a film focused on the victims: (Oppenheimer 2014).

3 See Morag’s examination of Cambodian documentaries on genocide—which themselves are unusual relative to Western representations of genocide (especially the Holocaust)—in which victims confront perpetrators: Raya Morag (2020).

4 Oppenheimer himself avows that his film is “a documentary of the imagination” (Oppenheimer 2015).

5 For a further source framing the film in terms of fiction vs nonfiction, see Demaria and Violi 2020, 5–7.

6 See the second and eighth thesis in Nielsen, Phelan, and Walsh (2015, 64).

7 For an overview, see the corresponding chapter in Kroon and Voltolini (2019).

8 Most accounts of knowledge characterize it in terms of belief, see Ichikawa and Steup (2018).

9 See discussions of unreliability in: David Bordwell (1985, 60–61); Buckland (2020, 94–104). A notable exception here is Chatman, albeit he prefers to speak of cultural rather than purely ethical norms. Seymour Chatman (1980), 148–149, 233–237).

10 I shy away from using the notion of “implied author” here (or also from the notion of a singular narrator of the film’s overall L1 narrative), for the reason that the “implied author” as a single entity obscures the complex production contexts of films, involving directors, cinematographers, editors all of which will project authorial entities to varying degrees. Yet every film is a structured “set of cues for the construction of a story,” and thus I will mostly talk of the film’s (L1) “narration” or “narrative” whose reports, interpretations, or evaluations of events contrast with those of the perpetrators (L2). On “narrator” as opposed to narration as well as for the citation, see Bordwell (1985, 62). Nonetheless, I will make it clear whenever it is the reporting, interpreting, or evaluating of Oppenheimer himself (especially in his function as interlocutor) which is contrasted with that of the perpetrators.

11 I should mention here that, based on these three axes, Phelan distinguishes between a total of six kinds of unreliability: misreporting and underreporting (on the axis of events), misreading and underreading (on the axis of perception and knowledge), as well as misregarding and underregarding (on the axis of ethics). The difference between the prefixes “mis-” and “under-” is to do with the degree of unreliability on the respective axis, where “mis-” characterizes a greater degree of unreliability than “under-”. Given the blatant unreliability of the perpetrator-narrators, I don’t think it necessary to include these fine nuances in my account of unreliability here, and I will focus on the distinction of unreliability between the axes rather than within them. Phelan (2004, 51–52).

12 Other criticism of The Act of Killing on a factual basis seems to be in part derived from a more general, reductive understanding of the documentary medium. Thus, Fraser asserts that for documentary films “it is good to be literal and truthful,” implying that The Act of Killing is not. Fraser (2013, 22). In a similar vein, Tyson charges the film for heavily featuring perpetrator Congo’s “foggy recollections” and their “anecdotal” evidence and that the film in fact did not feature a representative and large enough sample of perpetrators, as if the documentary should be judged by methods from social sciences or academic history. Tyson (2015, 182–84). Measured in this way, nearly all documentaries would have to fall short and rather than, say, watch Shoah, one should read Hilberg’s monumental The Destruction of the European Jews.

13 The film thus shares this assumption with fictional works written from the internal narrative perspective of genocidal perpetrators. On this tacit assumption of a cultural context that condemns genocide as well as the potential dangers of ideological identification with the perpetrators on part of the viewer, see Erin McGlothlin (2016, 265). Nonetheless, The Act of Killing makes arguably fewer demands on the viewer to carefully parse for the ethical position of the implied “author” (Oppenheimer and his crew) and detect the perpetrators’ narrational unreliability than said perpetrator fiction, which can get away with being less explicit in its condemnation of its subjects due to its focus on the Holocaust as the most known and comprehensively condemned genocide (“the crime of the century,” “the worst crime in human history” etc.).

14 For my purposes here, the differences between, say, histoire, fabula, and story are not of interest.

15 The literature on this distinction is immense. For a recent discussion with regard to film, see Buckland (2020).

16 I agree with Wieringa’s criticism here that TAOK could have made it clearer how the perpetrators’ own gender politics (their misogyny is unambiguous and omnipresent throughout the film) connects to the Indonesian New Order’s violent repression of the feminist Gerwani movement. S. E. Wieringa (2015, 20–21). The gendered dimension of the 1965–66 massacres is more apparent in Maj Wechselmann’s near contemporaneous documentary: Maj Wechselmann (2013). The anti-feminist discourse of emasculating communist Gerwani women sexually mutilating innocent army generals is vividly present in the Indonesian propaganda film Pengkhianatan Gerakan 30 September/PKI, see Katharine E. McGregor (2007, 100); Wieringa (2015). The Museum Penghianatan PKI (“betrayal of the Indonesian Communist Party”) repeats and restages these myths which the West happily gobbled up at the time, see S. Wieringa (2002, 320–21).

17 For an extensive account of this construction of the past, see McGregor (2007); Wieringa and Katjasungkana (2019, esp. introduction).

18 There are two releases of the film, the cinematic and the director’s cut. The cinematic release of the film does not feature excerpts from the propaganda film and the discussion between Congo and fellow perpetrator Adi Zulkadry about the film’s lack of truthfulness is left out as well. I discuss both cuts here and will make it clear throughout the text which cut I am talking about if a scene is not present in both.

19 I am thus quite doubtful about Meneghetti’s claim that Oppenheimer “has framed [the film’s] reception for Western audiences” Meneghetti (2016, footnote 8). In a sense, it speaks to Meneghetti’s own situatedness within Western discourses if he only reads the film in reference to “longstanding polemical dialogues within the history of Western documentary filmmaking” (Meneghetti 2016) without considering any Indonesian media and propagandistic contexts.

20 Roosa (2006) estimates the movement to be in total about 4130 personnel strong, 46.

21 Throughout the film we only encounter one person denying complicity in or knowledge of the mass murder taking place (in this case on the rooftop of his work place, a newspaper office): the journalist Soaduon Siregar.

22 While TAOK is predominantly focused on the perpetrators (unlike its sequel: Joshua Oppenheimer,The Look of Silence, Documentary (Dogwoof, 2014)), Wandita’s charge that the story of the victims is “blacked out” is rather uncharitable in light of Suryono’s testimony in the film. Galuh Wandita (2014, 169).

23 It should be noted that (contrary to the type of victim he plays in the reenactment) Suryono was persecuted for ethnic, not for political reasons (the ethnic dimension of the killings is absent from the perpetrators’ re-enactments but briefly acknowledged in the film by Zulkadry).

24 My readings of the perpetrators’ perceptual unreliability here are quite close to what Camilla Reestorff calls the perpetrators’ becoming “‘troubled indexes’ of themselves and their past” in those moments in which they acknowledge or even celebrate their violence while also evincing a clear unease about their pasts (e.g. nightmares). Camilla Møhring Reestorff (2015, 21).

25 On the role of Oppenheimer’s voice, see Demaria and Violi (2020, 13–15). Nonetheless, I disagree with Demaria and Violi that the film itself offers no “moral evaluation,” lacks a “value frame,” and uses meta-cinematic references in their place (p. 15). Not only is it unclear how such meta-cinematic references can replace a moral value frame if they in turn do not imply a value frame, but the film’s interventions in various forms, including Oppenheimer’s interrogating the perpetrators from the off, clearly presuppose an ethical value system, as I argue in this article.

26 Further criticism, not exclusively negative, focuses on this scene: Heather McIntosh (2017, 379–94); Katharina von Kellenbach (2021, 185–204); Saira Mohamed (2015, 1157–1216); Robert Cribb (2014, 147–48); Tyson (2015, 191).

27 Given this interpretive attitude, those most critical of the film first give much weight to this scene in an assessment of the film’s overall success and then consequently doubt that Congo is truly remorseful: Meneghetti (2016, 46); Cribb (2014, 148); Godmilow (2014); (although Tyson’s criticism is less dependent on the evaluation of this scene, he too doubts its truthfulness): Tyson (2015, 191). Interestingly, these critics’ view is not shared by audiences, as Hill demonstrates in her assessment of international audience responses to TAOK, who were left frustrated by the ending’s lack of resolution and believable remorsefulness on part of Congo, despite the fact that some audience members explicitly desired a redemption story, which critics like Meneghetti claim the film foists onto an ugly reality of impunity: Annette Hill (2021, 807–11).

28 The film’s main editor Niels Andersen sees the film, much as myself, as focused on the “mechanisms of deceitful storytelling”—a fitting assessment given the important role of editing in showing Congo’s unreliability in this scene which is so central to the overall film. Niels Pagh Andersen (2021, 115).

29 Few critics seem to have noticed the return of Congo’s paradisiacal redemption scene at the end of the director’s cut following his supposed rooftop redemption. Mohamed is an important exception: “At the end of the film, Anwar Congo has not taken full responsibility for his crimes [….] [W]e see his attempt at catharsis fail: There is nothing there. The film closes with another glimpse of Anwar’s bizarre redemption fantasy: giant fish, blue skies, green grass.” Mohamed (2015, 1199).

30 For a different reading of the denial of catharsis in TAOK, see: McIntosh (2017).

31 Given these contexts, including the propagandistic contexts outlined earlier in this article, Tyson’s assertion that “there is no national silence” seems nigh on cynical. Tyson (2013, 183).

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Notes on contributors

Julian Johannes Immanuel Koch

Julian is a Marie Curie postdoc at the University of Copenhagen. His project examines the representation of genocidal perpetrators in documentaries. Julian is also an expert on the poetry and poetics of Paul Celan and André du Bouchet and has published a book and numerous articles on the two poets.