Quarantine is a word that has a completely different connotation for me than it did a month ago. The emotional tenor of these past few weeks has made the fear and confusion surrounding this virus a palpable reality– a reality similar to that of cold war America. The only difference, though, is that this reality exists more prominently in the domestic sphere– at home. Don’t get me wrong, seeing Times Square completely empty is an unprecedented– and alarming– indicator of something gone wrong, but the focus of the “flatten the curve” rhetoric has been centered around staying home in isolation from others. Therefore, my days are dedicated to finding unconventional ways of feeling productive as a means to put the threat of destruction evoked from COVID-19 on the backburner.
One way that I’ve been able to drown out all the chaos surrounding the virus is through film. In movies, realities are created and, at the same time, destructed to make the viewer comfortable, or uncomfortable, with the fact that our lives resemble or diverge from the reality shown on screen. In many ways, the documentary masters the art of “creating” and “destructing” realities.
I recently watched The Act of Killing– a documentary directed by Joshua Oppenheimer that brings light to Indonesia’s complicated history of executing “communists.” Here, Oppenheimer is seen to follow the contemporary lives of some of Indonesia’s most infamous “communist” executioners of 1965-66. This documentary elicited a number of emotional responses for me, but the biggest thing I took away was the way these executioners framed history and therein imposed their own reality on others. Oppenheimer gives Anwar Congo and Herman Koto– two of Indonesia’s most lethal executioners– a second chance in telling their side of the story and the result is more disturbing than you could imagine.
Throughout the film, Oppenheimer tasks Congo and a few of the other Indonesian executioners with making a “movie” aimed to depict the brutality of the murders they took part in 50 years ago. Here, it is revealed to the viewer the way that not only the executioners have become desensitized to death, but also the way that the word “communist” has become stigmatized and used to characterize anyone that is a threat to the larger Indonesian state. This reality built around the “communist” as being the biggest threat to civilization has many resemblances with Vietnam war America where a similar attitude toward communism was made palpable by writers like Joan Didion, Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Herr. Therefore, this film reveals the distorted “reality” around “communism” and contextualizes it to the global narrative.
In many ways that Portrait of Jason disturbed me, so too did The Act of Killing. In addition to the documentary’s ability to expose this distorted reality, it also raises the same ethical questions around the director’s intention in documenting this reality in the first place. For Shirley Clarke, I could understand why she was passionate about filming Jason in the beginning, but toward the end I was left questioning her motive. In the same way, I was left questioning the motive and intention of Joshua Oppenheimer after he voluntarily allowed the Indonesian executers to create their own film depicting what they remember about the 1965-66 mass executions which seemed primarily to just glorify death and execution while further stigmatizing “communism”– which really just meant being conceived of as a threat in the eyes of the state. Nevertheless what Oppenheimer’s intentions were, the film does an incredible job of exposing a distorted reality that we cannot revert back to… I guess one of the costs of telling any story is to challenge the storyteller’s motivation behind telling it in the first place.
Anyways, please add this documentary to your quarantine watch list
Stay safe
–Sam Elbedeiwy
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