Fifty years and two documentaries since the Indonesian coup
October 1, 2015 6:50 AM   Subscribe

It has been fifty years since the attempted coup in Indonesia which kicked off a series of events that led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians. The reprisals, urged on by the West, mainly targeted the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), the largest non-ruling Communist Party at the time. Documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer has made two powerful and haunting films about this episode, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014).

In The Act of Killing, a participant in the massacres reenacts the events in front of the camera, exposing the escapism and the fantasies of the killers.
Trailer
Interview with Oppenheimer

In The Look of Silence, a relative of the victims confronts the perpetrators to try to find answers about what happened to his family. Adi, the protagonist of the film, has been relocated for his own safety. Many of the Indonesian film crew remain anonymous, for the same reason.
Trailer
Interview with Oppenheimer
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles (14 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
 
"So, how was the United States involved? Speculation abounds over the US role in the 1965 military takeover, though there's no concrete proof in the public record that America had a direct hand in it. However, investigations by..."

Clear and concise reporting there.

I suggest Peter Dale Scott's book of poetry on the subject.
posted by clavdivs at 7:15 AM on October 1, 2015 [2 favorites]


Thanks for this post. That massacre is one of the least-known of the previous century's horrors, and attention must be paid.
posted by languagehat at 7:28 AM on October 1, 2015


The Year of Living Dangerously is a great film about Indonesia during this period (but not about the massacre, specifically). More of a focus on Western influence there. Superb performance by Linda Hunt, and also by Mel Gibson.
posted by young_simba at 7:44 AM on October 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


Joshua Oppenheimer recently wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times: Suharto’s Purge, Indonesia’s Silence
“This anniversary should be a reminder that although we want to move on, although nothing will wake the dead or make whole what has been broken, we must stop, honor the lives destroyed, acknowledge our role in the destruction, and allow the healing process to begin.”
posted by Fizz at 7:50 AM on October 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


I've commented in AskMe a number of times recommending The Act of Killing. It is the most powerful and disturbing movie I've ever seen. If you're going to watch it be sure you're in a good, healthy space mentally.
posted by odinsdream


I couldn't watch it. I got through maybe 30 minutes? It was far too disturbing seeing the utter disregard for humanity -- nay, the delight -- these men took in reenacting their crimes. Sickening. I felt terrible for giving them an audience.

Since you were able to finish the movie: does one get past that?
posted by fiercecupcake at 8:36 AM on October 1, 2015


I started watching TAOK in a light hearted way, figuring "hm, here's an interesting slice of history that I know nothing about".

It was a captivating and haunting movie. I was touched, moved, and inspired. If these men, who have done terrible things in their past, can achieve redemption for their crimes, perhaps there is hope for each and every one of us.
posted by theorique at 8:39 AM on October 1, 2015


It is definitely worth watching in its entirety, if only for the single moment when one of the killers seems to actually come to emotional grips with what he had done. It was one of the most impressive moments I've ever seen.

It's been suggested that that moment is as much a performance by a man worried about how he might come across in the documentary as his gleeful performances reenacting his brutal murders. I had not considered that on my first viewing.
posted by unsupervised at 10:09 AM on October 1, 2015


If you must watch only one, watch The Act of Killing. The Look of Silence is also very good, but The Act of Killing is completly insane, it's very difficult to watch but it's one of the best movie of last 20 years.
posted by SageLeVoid at 11:14 AM on October 1, 2015


IIt was one of the most impressive moments I've ever seen.

I thought this was the most depressing part of the movie, watching someone so jaded to atrocity wring out a few measly tears for a mountain of corpses.
posted by benzenedream at 11:44 AM on October 1, 2015 [2 favorites]


western complicity is something oppenheimer also draws out in this interview here making the connection explicit with the 'winners' ' impunity:*
...perpetrators of mass political violence normally win and then normally take power. And that's why they perpetrate the violence. If every time it happened or most of the times they have their comeuppance, they wouldn't do it anymore. And then all that's unique in Indonesia perhaps is the boasting of the perpetrators. That's an allegory for the rule; a metaphor for the rule. And the reason they boast is simply, it's not just that they won -- and this is where it implicates all of us -- it's because the rest of the world, at least the western world, supported them at the time of the killings and have supported them enthusiastically ever since. And they know that. So when they meet a foreigner with a camera, they don't think this is something they should be ashamed of, they boast and they boast openly.
here's benedict 'imagined communities' anderson:
The Indonesian economy effectively collapsed in 1964-65, as a result of hyperinflation, corrupt military management of the huge nationalised sector and the autarchist policies of Sukarno; and the collapse in turn was a key factor in creating the psychological atmosphere in which a vast pogrom against the legal, unarmed Communist Party of Indonesia and its allies took place between October 1965 and January 1966 – costing at least half a million lives, and the incarceration, without trial but often with torture, of hundreds of thousands of others for many years. (As late as 1978 there were still tens of thousands, including the country’s leading writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, in Indonesia’s gulag; executions of Communist leaders who had been on death row for more than two decades continued into the late Eighties.) The removal of the radical-populist Sukarno, a bugaboo for Washington, followed soon afterwards. The ghastly destruction of the Communist Party, at a time when American forces were sinking into the Indochina quagmire and the military power of the Soviet Union appeared to be rapidly growing, earned the director of the massacres, General Suharto, the immediate support of the United States. In the spring of 1966, Indonesia’s first ‘hot’ Cold War regime was installed in the wake of the terror.
posted by kliuless at 3:33 PM on October 1, 2015 [3 favorites]


The Act of Killing is surreal. It's like a bunch of old high-school buddies trying to reenact the Big Game.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 6:44 PM on October 1, 2015


I started watching TAOK in a light hearted way, figuring "hm, here's an interesting slice of history that I know nothing about".

Yeah, that's the highway to sleepless, nightmare filled nights. Much better off reading dry academical works on horrors like this.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:05 PM on October 1, 2015


The Act of Killing is surreal. It's like a bunch of old high-school buddies trying to reenact the Big Game.

If the "Big Game" involved strangling thousands of communists with wire, yeah. It really is one of the movies of the past couple of years that's stayed with me the most. Very uneasy feelings.
posted by theorique at 5:29 AM on October 2, 2015


I keep meaning to watch The Act Of Killing, and I can't.

I will always lament that one of my university tutors was the (as I recall) subject of The Year of Living Dangerously, and even if we had understood what it was all about and what his experience was, we never got to ask him about it.
posted by Mezentian at 8:56 AM on October 2, 2015


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