Journal for Cultural Research

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A critical glance into the metacinematic gestures

of The Act of Killing

Matteo Ciccognani

To cite this article: Matteo Ciccognani (2020): A critical glance into the metacinematic gestures of
The�Act�of�Killing , Journal for Cultural Research

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2020.1836979

Published online: 26 Oct 2020.

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JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH
https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2020.1836979

A critical glance into the metacinematic gestures of The Act of

Killing
Matteo Ciccognani
School of Business, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This paper investigates a productionist metafilm that exposes a singu­ Received 29 June 2020
lar organisational method: Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing. Accepted 12 October 2020
Productionist metafilms are reflexive works which display the proces­ KEYWORDS
sual dimension of filmmaking to the extent that the frontstage of Metacinema; reflexivity;
production tends to coincide with the backstage. These films empower gesture; role-playing;
participants and exalt their incisive role, commonly subordinated to the role-reversal;
decision-making power wielded by film directors. Their estranging self-examination
character is mainly due to the presence of metacinematic gestures:
film segments which exhibit cinema as a medium. This film analysis is
approached through a dissection of the notion of gesture in produc­
tionist metafilms as imbued with impersonal markers of enunciation.
The Act of Killing performs gestures which trigger forms of psycho­
analytical self-examination in its participants while unpacking socio-
cultural and organisational issues related to the Indonesian society and
the nature of the filmmaking process. Through performances of role-
playing and role-reversal, the film awakes the perpetrators’ suppressed
sense of guilt and the consequences of impunity. Finally, it outstrips the
narratives of denial and increases self-awareness of their complex
psychological and socio-cultural condition.

Synopsis
In this chilling and inventive documentary, executively produced by Errol Morris (The Fog of
War) and Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man), the filmmakers examine a country where former death
squad leaders' crimes have gone unpunished, challenging them to re-enact their real-life mass-
killings. Craving to understand the rationale behind the mass killings of Communists in
Indonesia during the 1960s, directors Oppenheimer and Cynn introduce former Indonesian
death squad leader Anwar Congo, Hermann Koto and their peers. They are asked to restage
their past crimes for the camera according to their fantasies allowing them to speak about the
memories and motivations for committing mass murder. In particular, Oppenheimer is intri­
gued by the boasting attitude being documented during these reconstructions, to the extent
of wondering whether their self-congratulatory tone was systemic or concealing more com­
plex personal strategies of memory negotiation. As Anwar and his fellows reconstruct and

CONTACT Matteo Ciccognani mc519@leicester.ac.uk

The Act of Killing: Norway, Denmark, United Kingdom, 2012, 159 min. Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Co-directors: Christine Cynn, Anonymous
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 M. CICCOGNANI

observe the various methods used to intimidate and slaughter scores of Communists, the
reality of these transgressions begins to set in and vivid nightmares emerge.

Metacinema and productionist metafilms

This paper intends to investigate a productionist metafilm that exposes a very original
organisational process: The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer & Uwemedimo, 2012). At first, it is
essential to clarify that productionist metafilms refer to a particular form of metacinema,
a category strictly bound to reflexivity. In his study, Fredericksen (1979) drew attention to
Gorin and Godard’s film Wind from the East (1970) as a prominent piece of metacinema by
stressing how the voice-over – or commentative sound – is an evident reflexive element
of the film. According to Fredericksen, cinematic reflexivity mainly epitomises a crusade
against the mystification operated by Hollywood and overtly defied by artistic move­
ments like Nouvelle Vague.
Elsewhere, Siska discussed the antithetic poles portrayed by the narrative transparency
of traditional Hollywood movies and the modernist, avant-garde strategy of embedding
films within other films, taking Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950) as the highest exemplifica­
tion of the latter approach. Siska reconsidered the common dichotomy between illusion­
ism and reflexivity. Yet he offered a twofold way of reading metacinema as a ‘modern
necessity’ in which: 1) the artist reflects upon his medium of expression, as in The Man with
a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929), and 2) the artist as creator reflects upon himself, like in 8½
(Fellini, 1963) (Siska, 1979, p. 285). Therefore, he proposed a reading of metacinema which
operates through a reflexive gaze either pointed at the medium, by presenting a certain
exposure of the cinematic machinery or bending back on the author’s enunciative
position.
Aligning to the first typology recalled by Siska, I argue that there exists a category of
metacinema in which the exposure of the filmmaking process is so radical that the role of
directors appears to be captured among the complex materiality of elements, agents and
enunciations proliferating on the movie set. With this I do not intend to say that there are
certain reflexive configurations which erase human subjectivity, as an influential factor in
the filmmaking process, but rather that in some instances cinematic reflexivity semioti­
cally speaks for the film itself, eluding any attempt of anthropomorphising its forms of
enunciation. I am therefore dovetailing with Christian Metz’s effort of situating an imper­
sonal, non-subjective logic at the heart of the cinema machine. To explain the cases in
which such radical forms of cinematic reflexivity identify a position from which the film
utters itself, Metz draws a term from heraldry, mise-en-abyme: the name given to the
effect achieved when an image contains itself, which in turn contains itself, and so on
infinitely into the abyss (abîme) (Metz, 2016, p. 27). The concept has been popularised by
Dällenbach (1977) and stems from André Gide’s idea of fragments of little mirrors, being
visible within paintings, novels and plays, which reflect on the characters and on the
status of the work itself. In cinematic terms, the mise-en-abyme is represented by the ‘film
within the film’ which reunites the filming and the filmed creating an effect of redoubling
while displaying the process of cinematic production as coincidental with the final output.
Elsewhere, I have attempted to refine this concept into the idea of productionist
metafilm. Productionist metafilms are reflexive works which expand on the processual
dimension of filmmaking to the extent that the frontstage of production tends to coincide
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH 3

with the backstage (Ciccognani, 2018, 2020). I propose that productionist metafilms reveal
and construct a self-reflexive form of cinema which distance itself from the traditional
fiction stories and operates a defocus from the centrality of film directors in favour of the
display of other elements of the process of production which become profilmic enuncia­
tions. These films reveal themselves through the exhibition of the process of filmmaking
production and, in the words of Christian Metz construct ‘very diverse configurations that
mark out the work of enunciation with varying degrees of clarity and complexity’ (Metz,
2016, p. 109). Among other material, productive elements of the movie set – camera,
lighting, props, set design etc. – these films appear to expound a co-performed produc­
tion which empowers other participants, such as actors, and exalt the potentiality of their
highly influential role, usually subordinated to the decision-making power wielded by film
directors.
We have the semi-involuntary witnessing of the cinematic mechanism, as if the gaze has been
shunted onto another track. It is not the work that grows new shoots as it shrinks, recreating
itself at its very core; rather, it is the means of expression itself, the cinema as such. [. . .] All that
we experience is the act of “opening” itself, understood as a gesture of the screen (Ibid.: 89)

I believe this precisely occurs in The Act of Killing, a documentary that presents a very
unusual ‘gesture of the screen’. The film frames the perpetrators of the massacres against
Indonesian communists and political dissidents in 1965 by staging the stories or fantasies
they self-narrated across the years. At that time, the national government was led by the
general Suharto who kidnapped and incarcerated Sukarno, his Communist predecessor,
killed six generals and established an authoritarian and military-dominated regime, the
‘New Order’ administration, that lasted for thirty years. The controversial matter resides in
the fact that the perpetrators of the ferocious anti-communist campaign have not been held
liable for a violation of the law. They have been instead shielded with legal immunity for
having ‘secured’ the violent Communists for the sake of public order (Anderson, 2013).
These individuals are approached by the American director Joshua Oppenheimer and asked
to partially take control of the filmmaking process, to devise, prepare and, in several
occasions, shoot a set of reconstructions conforming to their subjective memories of
these controversial events. The film thus opens up to a domain of impunity, but also an
imaginary world of escapism and denial. Oppenheimer had in mind to create a new form of
documentary that combines re-enactment with its preparation as a way of showing what
these events mean from an individual and sociological standpoint; a kind of documentary of
the imagination rather than a documentary of everyday life (Bradshaw, 2017).

The ‘estranging’ character of metafilms

The work under investigation crucially differs from its sequel The Look of Silence (2014)1
and other more canonical forms of documentary for it activates specific procedural
aspects which elude the expedients of filmic immersivity. The means through which
such mechanism operates make use of the narrative forms of estrangement.
The history of this concept draws back to the field explored by the Russian Formalists’ or
to what Shklovsky defined the process of ostranenie (estrangement) in which the exposure
of the linguistic artifice creates a moment of defamiliarization or denaturalisation of the
fictionalised content (Boym, 1996). The breaking of theatrical illusion occurs in Brecht’s work
4 M. CICCOGNANI

precisely through the constitution of a series of signs which emerge to remind the specta­
tors that they are truly attending a theatrical spectacle. Within the disrupting folds of
Brecht’s work, metatheatre lays bare the tools of fiction not only by putting in evidence
a virtuosic reflexive gesture, but also allowing the revelation of the ‘other’, namely the
sociological or political truth (Polan, 1974; Ciciotti, 2006). In his works, Brecht aimed to
challenge the passive reception due to the disengaged realism of mainstream theatre, to
spring up political activism and destroy the habitual way of looking at social and political
facts by revealing their inherent contradictions (Wekwerth, 1967). The estrangement effect
and its denaturalising properties put in evidence the separation between the observer/
reader and the piece of art by arresting the suspension of disbelief through a process being
activated by reflexive linguistic procedures. These theatrical applications of the concept of
ostranenie have crucially influenced the development of metacinema.
With self-reflexive films, both participants and spectators accept an active, critical role
acknowledging the various components of the productive mechanism: the film industry,
the cinematic apparatus and its institutions. Moreover, as Greene (1974) has observed, it is
precisely within this estrangement effect that the subversive potential of metacinematic
products resides.
In this sense, The Act of Killing is self-reflexive for its embodiment of the estranging
character or, as pointed out elsewhere, it is precisely this displacement that allows the
spectators an immersion not rather into the shown atrocities but into an effective
aesthetic and political act of showing (Demaria & Violi, 2020). However, it is crucial to
reinstate here the metacinematic specificity of films such as The Act of Killing, is produc­
tionist. Along similar lines, Carter (2018) has commented how metafilms expose
a materiality of the process which observes cinema as a place in which thought is at
work across movies belonging to different social and geographical contexts, clarifying
continuities and divergences among their versions of reflexive critique. Carter also
explores how these movies present a vitality which ‘eludes the control of screenwriters,
directors, production crews, and audiences, catalysing an agency that intersects with
human decision but cannot be reduced to it’ (Ibid., p. 9). Elsewhere, the analysis of another
productionist metafilm The Five Obstructions (Von Trier & Leth, 2003) unpacks the relation­
ship commissioner/artist questioning issues related to role-playing, co-performed produc­
tion and exalts the tension between the backstage and frontstage of performances in
organisational life (Ciccognani, 2020). We will see how role-playing and role-reversals
have a more than significant function in The Act of Killing too.

The notion of gesture

Bearing in mind the estranging element of productionist metafilms, it is now essential to
highlight that the metacinematic character is essentially gestural. A metacinematic ges­
ture is a film segment which exhibits the mediality of cinema and opens up a discourse on its
technical, linguistic and organisational patterns. But the productionist variety is only one of
the possibilities. Indeed, several categories of metacinematic gestures have been already
classified: Referential, Realist, Surrealist, Experimental, the Look into the Camera and
Productionist (Ciccognani, 2018). All these categories embed some gestural qualities.
Here, gesture appears to be a constitutive aspect of those filmic segments which operate
an estrangement inviting the spectator to reflect on the technical, linguistic and
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH 5

organisational materiality of the cinematic apparatus. Gestures can render the deeply
familiar as strange, calling representation itself into question (Char & Watkins, 2015).
This connects to Benjamin’s understanding of the notion of gesture (gestus) within his
essay on Brecht’s Epic Theatre. Benjamin underlines that a property of gestures is that of
being frame-like, as interrupting actions that break the illusionistic flow of mimetic
naturalism performed by traditional drama. What makes this gestural theatre reflexive is
precisely the emergence of a dialectics to which all the others are subordinated: namely
that between recognition and education. Therefore, Benjamin suggests that the recogni­
tion of these interrupting actions or gestures is highly educational, didactic and, for me,
this is especially activated by the unveiling of the filmmaking process, particularly in the
productionist variety. This constructive mechanism enables epic theatre, but also films, to
treat elements of reality as they ‘were setting up an experiment’ (Benjamin, 2003, p. 4).
Following the words of the German philosopher:

The gesture demonstrates the social significance and applicability of dialectics. It tests
relations on men. The production difficulties which the producer meets while rehearsing
the play cannot – even if they originate in the search for effect – be separated any longer from
concrete insights into the life of society (Ibid., pp. 24, 25).

The first sequence of The Act of Killing displays one of these interrupting actions, a reflexive
gesture that unravels the difficulties of production while providing an immediate glimpse
into the ambiguous nature of the Indonesian society about to be described. The imprinting
of the film shows a gigantic, fish-shaped prop surrounded by a natural lake scenario. Six
ladies emerge from its mouth in a synchronised way, slowly dancing and posing. Cut to the
vapours of a waterfall, the camera panning down reveals two men, one wearing a black tunic,
the other one disguised as a woman. They are Anwar Kongo and Herman Koto, the two main
characters of the film, joyfully contemplating the overall scene. An Indonesian voice-over
breaks into this fairy-tale incipit disclosing the nature of what we are experiencing. ‘Peace!
Happiness! Smile! 1, 2, 3, 4! Smile! More teeth!’ The camera frames some cheerful women,
eccentrically dressed, loads of make-up, swinging their bodies across the downward slope
beside the cascade. The director’s voice-over continues ‘Don’t let the camera catch you
looking bad! Smile, 1, 2, 3, 4! Real joy, not just pleasure! And natural beauty! This isn’t fake!
Okay, peace, peace, peace!’ Abruptly, some movie set operators invade the natural stage to
hand out blankets for the drenched women. The opening gesture of The Act of Killing clarifies
the demystifying nature of the film, the debunking of a national fairy-tale invoked through
the unravelling of the filmmaking process. This is operationalised by displaying bodies in
intimate connection with the machinery of production, shown in a unitary perspective, as all
the profilmic elements fuse with the filmmaking mechanism. Many scholars have focused on
the gestural connection between body and cinema as a language of pure communicability.
For instance, this is exemplified by Laura Mulvey’s critique (Mulvey, 2015) of Marilyn
Monroe’s interrupting bodily gestures in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks, 1953). In
a specific point of her analysis, Mulvey points out how Marilyn’s gestures ‘enhance the
medium of cinema itself as process and material texture. The filmic body on display also
exhibits the cinematic machine in a fusion of the human and the mechanical’ (Ibid., p. 10). My
argument is that in the proximity of metacinematic gestures, exposing productionist fea­
tures, we are finally allowed to see how the complex network of intersubjective interactions
crucially contributes to shaping an otherwise invisible mechanics of production. This is how
6 M. CICCOGNANI

these gestures function as gateways to the organisation of production, but also individual
and socio-cultural insights. Furthermore, the gesture is
an optic that Agamben uses to view cinema not as a series of moving images but as a mode
of communication and historical transmission. Yet if gesture is the site of a potential within
cinema to operate historically, it is also the locus of a biopolitical investiture in the human
body that takes place towards the end of the nineteenth century. (Harbord, 2016, p. 14)

Agamben constructs a history of the gesture departing from the medical imaging tech­
niques of Etienne Jules Marey, passing through the photographs of Muybridge, the
studies of neuropsychiatric disorders conducted by Gilles de la Tourette. All these inter­
disciplinary contributions would signal the aftermath of a biopolitical catastrophe of
gestures. The historical genealogy traced by Agamben observes the birth of cinema as
the desperate attempt of the modern Western bourgeoisie to recapture its gestures at the
moment of their dissolution and loss (Clemens et al., 2008). In this sense, Agamben asserts
that ‘the element of cinema is gesture and not images’ (Agamben, 2000, p. 54) and then
sketches a definition which aligns with metacinema and self-reflexivity: ‘The gesture is the
exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such’ (Ibid., p. 57).
But gestures are only visible in isolated, rare circumstances when confronted with the
enormous diffusion of illusionistic, mainstream cinema. Yet, when they emerge their
effect is at times scandalous, loud and impertinent, as for the case of The Act of Killing.

Metacinematic gestures as impersonal markers of filmic enunciation

According to Agamben, a gesture which exhibits its mediality is Guy Debord’s work The
Society of the Spectacle (1973), an unorthodox, Marxist, cinematic experiment. This work
compels us to reflect on those particular moments when we are exposed to the mediatic
bombing of various images such as those of police repression, war, devastation, eroticism,
politics, violence and toil. Debord’s creative juxtaposition of images reveals our condition
of commodified spectators passively undergoing the visual solicitations diffused to
validate the relations of power and production in our societies. Ten Bos has also pointed
out that Debord’s work stresses how the society of the spectacle transforms us into
‘solitary atoms who are merely capable of absorbing images like commodities’ (Ten Bos,
2005, p. 37) and therefore employs a language unable to instil a communal sense.
Through this lens, the political value of Debordian work is directed to emancipate the
society from the biopolitical control through a self-reflexive act. As I will expose in my
analysis, The Act of Killing operates in an analogous direction, by contrasting the diffusion
of the propaganda film G30S/PKI and debunking the socio-cultural myths surviving in the
Indonesian culture. However, gestures do not only temporarily demystify the power of
biopolitical and socio-cultural apparatuses, but they also shed light on individual sub­
jectivities, or unpack the organisational and semiotic materiality under scrutiny.
Indeed, a gesture ‘takes not immovable and rigid forms but material, bodily dynamisms
as its subjects’ (Väliaho, 2010, p. 17). That is the reason why a pure gesture flees any form
of subjectivation, but it rather elevates the materiality of the image, being caught in its
deep dynamicity. So, I argue that when the gesture is allowed to appear in a cinematic
form in the guise of such an erratic, undecidable nature, it also works against the
apparatus that generates specific identities. In The Act of Killing, this gestural element is
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH 7

particularly visible into the numerous disguises, but also in the role-playing and role-
reversals co-performed by the actors/filmmakers. These role-reversals, in particular, allow
a nomadic fluctuation from the role of perpetrators to the role of victims. However, this is
also reflected by the oscillation among the specific roles on the movies set, from acting to
directing, from the organisation of production to the direct involvement into the care of
props, costumes, lighting, make-up etc. Drawing on Metz’s words again what we experi­
ence with a film like The Act of Killing is a mise en abyme, the act of opening itself, a gesture
of the screen (Metz, 2016, p. 89).
That is why I agree with the idea that a gesture neither reflects nor speak about the
author/subject but it rather demonstrates its elusive, contingency within a unitary, more
horizontal process of production. Following Harbord’s words (2015), a gesture is the
empty space of identity, a space that cannot be inhabited as a permanent or fully-
knowable phenomenon. The missing presence of the subject in the materialisation of
the gesture would exactly represent the possibility for the author to present himself as an
ethical subject. According to Agamben (2007), the emergence of the ethical subject
derives from the ongoing and past historical confrontation through which authors have
attempted to actively resist to be reduced to the various apparatuses merged into
constructed medial languages.
In the film, Oppenheimer posits himself as an ethical subject on account of its gradual
defocus from the centrality of the process of production. In the terms used by Metz (2016)
this enables to situate an impersonal, non-subjective logic at the heart of cinema. It
precisely allows the director’s embodiment within an impersonal metadiscursive logic
that is coded into the technology of the medium itself. Approaching the final scenes,
Anwar attempts to obtain reassurance with the line: ‘Did the people I tortured feel the
way I feel here?’ Oppenheimer, in the guise of the ethical voice-over, abruptly replies in
Indonesian: ‘Actually, the people you tortured felt far worse because you know it’s only
a film. They knew they were being killed.’. This notable appearance of the authorial stance
can only be read as part of the overall metadiscursive stratum of the film which, in this
instance, is imbued with some kind of subjectivity. But again, evoking Metz, it would be
misleading to look for a humanoid marker of enunciation since ‘enunciation is coexten­
sive with film’ (Ibid.: 55) but foremost ‘the film self-designates itself because there is only
itself.’ (Ibid. 214). In this sense, an author can always be perceived behind the curtains of
a metacinematic gesture as caught in a relationship of contingency rather than in one of
necessity. It results that films like The Act of Killing also expand on a new form of ‘deposed’
authorial subjectivity, exposing a process of production imbued with reflexive, impersonal
markers of filmic enunciation, giving breadth to a whole plethora of non-intentional,
unpredictable effects.

Analysis
A few hermeneutic domains
Different productionist metafilms generate reflections illuminating various domains.
Indeed, productionist metafilms present gestures which can open up speculations on
the biopolitical, socio-cultural, psychoanalytical, organisational and semiotic territories
correspondent to the filmmaking process, its devices, practitioners and representations.
8 M. CICCOGNANI

So metacinematic gestures unravel the functioning of biopolitical and socio-cultural

apparatuses, but they also operate nomadically at the individual level – questioning
issues of authorship and psychoanalysis, yet at the level of organisational and semiotic
materiality – examining aspects of co-performed production and filmic reflexivity. The
scope of this paper is to illustrate how The Act of Killing work as an exposé, a theoretical
stance that exhibits the relationship between the self-reflexive variety selected, produc­
tionist metafilm, and the devices used, metacinematic gestures. Its gestures mainly trigger
psychoanalytical self-examination in its participants and socio-cultural and organisational
scrutiny of, respectively, the Indonesian society and the filmmaking process. We will
observe how, through sophisticated forms of role-playing and role-reversal, by staging
and observing the stories or fantasies the participants self-narrated and psychologically
negotiated, the film let emerge the suppressed sense of guilt and the consequences of
impunity. It finally outstrips the narratives of denial and increases the perpetrators’ self-
awareness of their complex psychological and socio-cultural condition.

Framing a state of impunity

The grim fascination around The Act of Killing consists in how it displays the different
approaches through which the murderers have psychologically negotiated tolerable
fantasies to mitigate the violent images indelibly weighing on their minds. In that, the
relationship commissioner/artist is here pushed to its ethical extremes. Oppenheimer asks
the murderers to perform and restage their past atrocities with the hope to generate
some insights about storytelling, fantasy and guilt, in relation to what happened during
the brutal seizure of power operated by Suharto's military regime in the 1960s. Yet, what
the film is truly concerned with is how human beings, both the onlookers and the
murderers, deal with the sense of guilt (Lusztig, 2013) and perform their imaginary
drama. For instance, the sense of guilt is perceived by murderers in spatial terms. This is
fairly evident from the sequence in which Anwar, a man believed to have slaughtered
hundreds of people, together with a camera operator and a sound recordist, access the
roof in which most of his killings have been executed. Joshua reported that Anwar leaned
against the wall and declared ‘the terrace belongs to the dead, that’s not our space’ (Ibid.,
p. 51). This statement highlights how murders and crimes are tightly embedded within
the spaces in which they have been committed. The psychic territory is thus connected to
a physical space. That is probably why Anwar firmly declares its extraneity from the roof of
murder, in the desperate attempt, perhaps, to disentangle himself from the burden of
responsibility weighing on his consciousness. Although the film focuses more on the
perpetrators than the survivors, it situates the whole community in the position of the
traumatised witness, a standpoint which will be extensively explored in the sequel The
Look of Silence.
One of the very first reflexive gestures of the film concerns Anwar Congo and Herman
Koto, gangsters and paramilitary leaders, framed in the act of scouting possible actors to
play the persecuted Communists. The scene ends up with a simulation of the incursions in
the Communists’ houses, with the paramilitary leaders threatening to kill everyone and
the people of the neighbourhood desperately screaming and running for their lives. So,
from an enunciative standpoint, the main characters present themselves as the
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH 9

proponents of the restaging project. At the same time, we know from the credits that the
overall project was supervised by Joshua Oppenheimer and his strict collaborators.
Significantly though, the adoption of a narrative approach of internal focalisation,
allowed the director to subtract himself from the position of the primary agent of the
representation. But we should not forget that the high degree of reflexivity of the film
absorbs these subjective presences into an overall constellation of metacinematic imperso­
nal markers of enunciation. Indeed, the director’s enunciative displacement ends up facil­
itating a more direct form of expression in the participants. With regards to Anwar Congo,
the director declared: ‘I asked him to dramatize whatever he wished’ (Sperling, 2013).
Oppenheimer assumed that acting would have probably represented an effective way for
murderers to distance themselves from the very act of killing and hence could perform what
assailed their imagination through the filter of popular culture, audio-visual products and
cinema. ‘I try to forget these things by listening to good music, dancing’, Anwar declares on
the roof after he has shown how these killings were committed. It is worth to remind that he
often made use of alcohol and drugs to keep the very core of guilt under control. The sought
inebriation and the continuous references to Hollywoodian products induce to think that
Anwar and his fellows constantly aspire to surface an edulcorated version of these facts.
However, further considerations should be made around the two main poles of this
process of enunciation, Anwar and the perpetrators on one side and Oppenheimer and
his collaborators on the other. As pointed out elsewhere, ‘the gangsters re-enact whatever
they wish and can imagine, but they cannot control what “their” film will be like in the
end. Oppenheimer is a conundrum’ (Anderson, 2013, p. 36). They would not have any
power to amend the final output as Oppenheimer will inscribe his meaning through the
final editing. In this sense, there would be a significant degree of manipulation of these
murderers’ reconstructions. Contrarily to what Anderson claims, the point here is not to
establish the extent to which Oppenheimer has been loyal to his participants’ intentions,
but foremost that these actors directing themselves knew to be observed participants
within an unorthodox experiment. In a nutshell, they were altogether absorbed within the
reflexive configuration of the film itself, creating a powerful short-circuit with the selected
tropes for the reconstructions (Hollywood style restaging, cross-dressing, role-reversals,
role-playing). This aspect has possibly influenced their choices in the direction of some
exhibitionist sensationalism.
However, Oppenheimer, as a western auditor, is in a way a source of discomfort that
obliges Anwar and his peers to adopt strategies to mitigate their ‘evil’ appearance. I argue
that they might have exploited this factor to resolve some of their internal struggles too.
The unpredictable results of such a convergence of intentions and uncontrolled drives are
screened before the spectators’ eyes.
Besides the exhibition of their edulcorated fantasies, the killers start to perform
a boasting attitude about the massacres. This aspect opens up a scenario in which
pride and guilt coexist. The function of the perpetrators’ on-screen boasting reaffirms
the impunity and the history of the political system in which the performance of a power
infused with hubris is symptomatic (Ten Brink & Oppenheimer, 2012).
At this stage, it should be pointed out that the Suharto regime produced its official film
of these events in 1984, called Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI, or Treachery of the September 30th
Movement/PKI. It is a propaganda film which mystifies what happened in 1965 (Morris,
2013). The film depicts the invented killing of six generals operated by Communists.
10 M. CICCOGNANI

Suharto, the military leader guiding the coup d’état against the red menace, is presented
as a hero and all those opposing to his will to re-establish order in the country are seen as
the weeds to be snipped from the national garden. The following murder of at least half
a million people stays hidden and ‘yet it is this unspoken terror that provides the film with
a certain mystique, a frisson and fascination’ (Oppenheimer & Uwemedimo, 2012, p. 335).
The persuasive power of Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI is so strong that Anwar confessed about
the film to be ‘the one thing that makes him feel not guilty’ (Ibid.). However, when
discussing this aspect with his peer and former murderer Adi, the latter outlines how
the film does not mitigate his sense of guilt as it deals with a bunch of lies: ‘It’s easy to
make the Communists look bad after they’re destroyed’. Then, Anwar suddenly erupts:
‘But we shouldn’t talk about this, Adi. We should talk about our film. We shouldn’t say bad
things about the other film to outsiders. What matters is our film’ (Ibid.). It is blatant how
there is only apparent disagreement about the lacking truthfulness of G30S/PKI, but rather
contrasting intentions on what to disclose about this in Oppenheimer’s film; a work they
are feeling to be in control of.
In the light of this, The Act of Killing intriguingly positions itself as a demystifying counter­
part of G30S/PKI, destined to unveil the narrative falsehood reproduced by the national
discourse and the suppressed inward conflicts of its executors. Furthermore, the film’s
comparative reflexive gesture contrasts the biopolitical project of life administration under­
gone by the Indonesian authoritative institutions, letting emerge the obscene hidden truth.
As later commented by Oppenheimer: ‘I started to intuit that all this boasting, which
seems to be a sign of pride, may in fact not be a sign of pride; it may be the opposite’
(Roosa, 2014, p. 415). Nonetheless, Oppenheimer has significantly selected a considerable
number of scenes to this domain of self-gratification. The governor of North Sumatra,
Syamsul Arifin, brags about the tremendous success of the mass slaughter of communists
with Anwar. He and Koto describe how, getting out of the cinema, they were bringing the
fantastic scenarios just watched on the screen right into the near paramilitary office in
which interrogations, tortures and killings were enacted: ‘It was like we were killing
happily’, Anwar declares.
In sum, the reflexive gesture presenting these perpetrators in command of the produc­
tion frames an unusual filmmaking method which proposes a form of organisational self-
management enacted by its participants. Since its onset, the aesthetic formulation of this
work adopts an internal focalisation which occludes the cumbersome presence of the
director. This mechanism appears to ignite a process of psychoanalytical self-examination
and deep analysis of the socio-cultural implications of individual and collective impunity.
This process operates alongside the gradual demystification of the political truth imposed
by the propaganda film G30S/PKI. The Act of Killing, its obscene, mocking supplement, is
bound to eviscerate some of the untold stories suppressed by the Indonesian national
discourse. Nonetheless, it has to be reminded that Oppenheimer’s selection of numerous
self-gratifying scenes has crucially contributed to enhancing these contrasts.

Staged fantasies: a path towards self-sabotage

In the shot/countershot displayed in Figure 1, a significant reflexive gesture of the film
occurs when Koto and Anwar watch the first ‘roof of murder’ scene on the screen. The
comments made by Anwar are directed to assess his performance and whether or not his
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH 11

Figure 1. Shot/reverse shot of Herman, Anwar and their relatives watch the dailies in which they
restage the killings.

ideal murderer’s behaviour matches the chosen outfit and external appearance. ‘My
acting has to be violent, and maybe I should dye my hair black’, he comments. Then,
Anwar and Koto start speculating on how they would configure a better restaging of the
killings and explain to the camera: ‘We watched so many sadistic movies. We were
influenced by them [. . .] I was influenced by films starring Marlon Brando and Al
Pacino . . . these were my favourite stars, or John Wayne, in westerns’.
As it has been already commented, Anwar ‘looks at the footage as if he can just fix the scene
aesthetically, maybe he can make it better for himself morally too’ (Swimmer, 2014, p. 61). This
aesthetic decoration operates as a semi-conscious form of expiation or therapeutic strategy
through the accurate restaging of the violence edulcorated by gangsters’ costumes, caricatural
behaviours and theatrical performance. The main point here is that these staged performances
subconsciously aspire to a self-redemption sought through the means of an imaginary
aestheticisation of the acts of killing. The very core practice enabling this subtle mechanism
is evident in the scenes in which the killers dress up as gangsters, like in Hollywood movies, and
prepare themselves to shoot a fictional restaging of the interrogation to Communist prisoners.
I argue that this ensuing ironic distance of the camouflage results in a gradual disconnection
from their narratives of denial. It concretely destabilises them and enables a successive
immediate experience of the moral and emotional core of these violent acts.
Furthermore, the sequence in which the restaging is performed in front of the popula­
tion highlights the ironic distance precisely because we can distinctively hear the roar­
ing laughs of the children surrounding the film set. Later, when the other members of the
community get actively engaged within the farce, we see children crying and shouting in
the foreground gripped by the intensity of their acting performance and other people
giggling in the background (Figure 2). On a similar note, it has been argued that The Act of
Killing provides an attempt to imaginatively mediate between the aftermath of terror and
the ongoing survivors’ trauma (Crichlow, 2013).
During his metacinematic reflection, Anwar states that spectators watch James Bond
movies to see action and films about Nazis to experience power and sadism.He also insists
on the fact that they can make something even more sadistic because it is not fiction, they
truly did it in real life. This awareness of the self-reflexive nature of the documentary does
not only empower the participants with a substantial degree of creative self-management,
but it also reinforces their status as generators of the imaginary distorted images. But the
crucial aspect of this film rests on the idea that the participants underwent a subtle process
12 M. CICCOGNANI

Figure 2. Here the participants perform the role of victims while the crowd appears cheerful in the
background.

of alternated identification with – and disconnection from – their own fantasies. As pointed
out elsewhere the metatheatrical reproduction of these reconstructed scenarios of murder
rather self-reflexively foregrounded a form of linked separation, a critical detachment which
allowed an unshielded immersion into the traumatic kernel of these atrocities (Willis, 2019).
While Oppenheimer’s gesture is to renounce to his privileged status of the primary agent
and to be, consequently, subservient to the morally ambiguous participants’ creative desire,
the re-enactments are later performed through role-playing and role-reversal. This represents
the very turning point of the mise en abyme for these re-enactments allow a virtual identifica­
tion with the victims and therefore sabotage the pre-constructed illusion of torture as
a playfully harmless activity. For instance, Anwar asks Herman to play the role of a pregnant
woman chased and beaten by the persecutors. The experience of violence through cross-
dressed role-playing and role-reversals has a toll on the performers and after their immediate
caricatural effect, it ends up producing a series of intense political and moral reflections.
This element arises during a make-up session in preparation for one of the scenes
where Adi and Anwar are about to play the role of the victims. In this scene, we observe
how they are suddenly bold enough to admit that the Communists were not necessarily
the cruel ones but that they, as perpetrators, could have been the evil side of the dispute.
A clear sign of how the role-reversals triggered the detachment from the fantasies is also
attested by the discourse made by Adi. In a few scenes following the make-up sessions
Adi, interrogated by Oppenheimer, quite surprisingly expresses critical accounts about
the USA endorsement of Saddam Hussein’s regime and his subsequent fierce dismissal in
the Iraq War. He stresses the turncoat character of the instrumental ideology exerted by
the USA through an aggressive foreign policy. Yet, he continues ‘War crimes are defined
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH 13

by the winners. I am a winner, so I can make my own definition’. Here, Adi suggests that
the acceptability of their violent actions have not only been psychologically negotiated by
the single perpetrators, but it has also been socially constructed to transmit a public
image which promoted broad support among the Indonesian population. In all earnest,
we cannot know with absolute certainty whether such a sharp take on international affairs
has always been in Adi’s mind or not. Still, his bold exposure is strangely coincidental with
the aftermath of his role-reversal performances.
The self-reflexive gesture of another sequence completes the picture. It frames Herman
Koto’s role-playing while he performs possible disguises for imaginary political campaigns
in view of his future candidacy to the Indonesian Parliament. Here, we observe Herman
posing in a room where a TV shows the image of USA former president Barack Obama
(Figure 3). More broadly, Oppenheimer has argued that his film also expands his criticism
towards the moral vacuum of boasting about tortures perpetrated by Americans in Iraq,
hinting at the worldwide scandal of Abu Ghraib (Oppenheimer, 2016). Yet, the film seems
to allude at the indirect American responsibility for having diffused anti-communist
ideologies and having so contributed to building up this scenario of impunity.
In this section, the reflexive gestures concerning the restaging of the killings crucially
include performances of role-playing and role-reversals. It is suggested that, at a preliminary
stage, these reconstructions allowed the perpetrators’ alignment with an edulcorated
version of these acts. However, this is the moment in which the consequences of impunity
and the suppressed sense of guilt make inroads within their consciousness. The following
staged identification with the victims sets in motion the sabotage of the personal reassuring
fantasies and the attendant narratives of denial. This unpredictable effect generates political
reflections which undermine the prior boasting attitude and leaves space to a rethinking of
the individual and collective moral responsibility for the violent purge. It is indeed fascinat­
ing how accessing this critical threshold has instilled a re-evaluation of the American indirect
but essential contribution in circulating anti-communist ideas and assisting Suharto’s coup
d’état.

Self-awareness – ‘They Knew They Were Being Killed’

As central in the narrative economy of the film, the focus on Anwar’s condition suggests
the emergence of a metanarrative which presents the cinematic device as an imaginary

Figure 3. Herman Koto posing in a room where a TV shows the image of former President Barack Obama.
14 M. CICCOGNANI

instrument of self-examination (Sinnerbrink, 2015). Approaching the end of the film,

a sequence shows the destruction of an entire village of Communists and Anwar, for
the first time, expresses some pitiful feelings towards the children he made orphans of
their parents. The emerging sense of guilt finds its catharsis in the consecutive scene
where Anwar watches a restaging that presents him as the victim being tortured by the
perpetrators. In the grip of an exhibitionist drive or an expiatory need, he summons his
grandchildren to show them his touching role-reversal. He gets beaten up and cruelly
humiliated by his persecutors. The kids’ half-shocked expression imposes their grandpa to
assuage them with the paternal advice that what they are watching on the screen is just
fictional and they should not be scared. Then, the children flee and Anwar addresses
himself and the camera: ‘Did the people I tortured feel the way I feel here?’ (Figure 4).
Precisely at this critical moment, Anwar desperately begs for psychological relief and
Oppenheimer, in the guise of the ethical voice-over, abruptly replies in Indonesian: ‘Actually,
the people you tortured felt far worse because you know it’s only a film. They knew they were
being killed.’ Here the reflexive gesture hits its unpredicted or unintended target. The narra­
tives of denial have been ultimately outstripped, with all their sweetening ornaments, and
Anwar finally experiences the core of his suppressed ghosts with the encouragement of
Oppenheimer’s timely answer. In this scene, we participate in the performance of
a sentiment assisted by the concomitant exposure of one of the restagings being made.
This psychological turmoil reaches its climax when Anwar goes back to the roof which he
already presented as one of the main places used for the executions. This time, though, Anwar
does not appear to be at ease as the first time. It’s night, and he seems more absent-minded
than usual. He stresses the fact that he knew it was wrong to torture and murder these people
but that he ‘had to do it’. Then, the camera follows his hesitant steps over the roof.
Unexpectedly, he starts retching, approaches one of the fences and bends down in the
attempt to vomit out all his anguish (Figure 5). The problem is that we can only hear the
retching noise, but the main impression is that Anwar does not manage to vomit at all. The
instinct of self-preservation has never truly allowed him to fully experience and, thus, to
exorcise the pain that has haunted him until that very instant. The ultimate explosion of
Anwar’s traumatic kernel seals The Act of Killing as an estranging, productionist metafilm
endowed with the discussed reflexive gestures. This directly relates to Agamben’s reading of

Figure 4. Anwar watches with his grandchildren a restaging showing himself being tortured with his
grandchildren.
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH 15

Figure 5. Anwar painfully retches in the darkest corner of the ‘roof of murder’.

gesture as ‘the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such’
(Agamben, 2000, p. 57).
Here, exhibiting the mediality of cinema and its process of production translates into
an internal focalisation which deposes the director from his position of power. All these
subjective presences are in turn subordinated to the exposure of a filmmaking process
imbued with reflexive, impersonal markers of filmic enunciation. It is precisely this mise en
abyme that characterises the film as an instrument of self-examination.
In light of this, I have demonstrated how the role-playing and role-reversals in the first
reconstructions have gradually contributed to neutralising the boasting attitude and
edulcorated fantasies. This mechanism allowed spacefor the emergence of the sense of
impunity that has triggered political and moral reflections about the dynamics of the
slaughter. But Anwar’s observation of the undergone tortures brings this process of self-
examination to a deeper level. It makes the whole process personal as the images of his
torture finally humanise the condition of the victims. This mechanism generates
a psychoanalytical short-circuit with the images and their attendant human component,
outstrips Anwar’s narratives of denial and produces a ‘non-mediated’ self-awareness of
the suppressed traumatic knots.

Conclusion
Several commentators and reviewers have contended that the film presents a lack of
historical-political context, it neglects the standpoint of the victims (which will be explored
by the sequel: The Look of Silence), displays an unethical use of the documentary process
(Fraser, 2014) or a manipulation of the participants (Cribb, 2014). With this analysis,
I presume to have addressed some of these critical points. When the Indonesian govern­
ment accused the ‘foreigner’ Oppenheimer of encroaching in their private affairs, the press
attacked by pointing out that there was an Indonesian credited as co-director and sixty
compatriots participating in the film (Kiang, 2015). Some Indonesian spectators felt touched
and argued that the younger generations had to see this film. Others felt betrayed by the
government lies or even repelled Oppenheimer’s decision to give the killers free rein and
contested the truthfulness of Anwar’s final repentance (Bjerregaard, 2014). It will probably
16 M. CICCOGNANI

not be possible to ever know the extent to which Anwar’s final ‘retching scene’ has been
‘performed’ or not. Perhaps, it is not even of vital importance to verify it. As claimed by Errol
Morris, it is not a matter of evaluating the degree of historical accuracy or absolute
truthfulness expressed in the film but rather the resulting examination of the nature of
memory and history (Morris, 2013). Whether this eventual re-enactment calls the truthful­
ness of the whole film into question or not, it inscribes the whole process into an enclosed
system of signification which reveals historico-political acts through the disclosure of the
filmic apparatus. I have demonstrated how The Act of Killing is a productionist metafilm
whose gestures mainly trigger psychoanalytical self-examination in its participants and
socio-cultural and organisational scrutiny of, respectively, the Indonesian society and the
filmmaking process. In that, the degree of self-reflexivity ignited by the performed resta­
gings enabled a detachment from the pre-existent narratives and the consequent exposure
of the participants’ moral inconsistencies. This explains why at the moment when Anwar
Congo enters the same space once deprived of his shielding narratives, we can access
a glimmer of his ‘non mediated’ inner turmoil. The final experience of the ‘roof of murders’,
whose matter, angles and interstices, so replete of the enduring memories of the past
atrocities, has abruptly penetrated the weakened barriers of Anwar’s mind, allowing us to
witness the very core of his interiorised horror. This scene completes the narrative arc of the
film bridging the first fairly-tale scene and the last terrifying reality-check. The demystifying
effect is finally served.

Note
1. After The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer embarked in a new project giving voice to the
victims, The Look of Silence (2014), this time without the assistance of Christine Cynn and their
anonymous, Indonesian collaborator. The second documentary opts for a more confronta­
tional approach. Indeed, it poses a family that survived the massacre before the men who
killed one of their members. The Look of Silence acts as a complementary piece to the earlier
documentary. Both films are to be intended as part of a representational diptych in which The
Act of Killing deals with the imaginary transfigurations of historical facts and The Look of
Silence more directly observes the killers through the uncompromising standpoint of one of
their victims.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Dr. Matteo Ciccognani is currently a Teaching Fellow at the School of Business of the University of
Leicester. He was awarded his PhD with a thesis entitled:Metacinematic Gestures, An Investigation of
The Productionist Aspect of Self-Reflexive Films. The thesis investigates the difference between
illusionistic and self-reflexive cinema, attempts to provide an outline of the concept of metacine­
matic gesture, produces a grid of intelligibility of distinct metacinematic gestures, and finally
proposes an analysis of a circumscribed cross-section of movies among the sketched category of
“productionist metafilms.” His research currently expands on cinema and surveillance, reflexivity in
Social Media, and organisational performance in narratives and films.
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH 17

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