Documentaries: Indonesia

This bone-chilling documentary opens with a quote from Voltaire ("All murderers are punished, unless they kill in large numbers, and to the sound of trumpets"), which gives way to the sight of dancers emerging from a giant fish, a black-clad priest and man in garish electric-blue drag conducting some ecstatic service at the foot of a waterfall, while a directorial voice commands: "Smile! Don't let the cameras catch you looking bad!" The film ends with the sound of someone retching up their tortured soul, an awful, growling, vomitous howl, like an anguished demon being wrenched from a fragile body. In between, we find ourselves looking long into an abyss in which unspeakable horror and utterly mundane madness are thrown together in the existential equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider – fact and fiction meeting head on with quietly earth-shattering results.

In the wake of a failed coup in Indonesia in the mid-60s, more than a million people were murdered in a bloody anti-communist cull. Many of the killings – and the persecutions that followed – were carried out by gangsters who have not only escaped prosecution, but are now heralded as local heroes. Attempting to understand the open-ended legacy of such unpunished atrocities, film-maker Joshua Oppenheimer not only interviewed the killers (whose actions are anything but hidden) but asked them to stage dramatic reconstructions of their (non-)crimes, to "create scenes about the killings in whatever way they wished". His title, "The Act of Killing", encapsulates this duality, not only examining the awful reality of murder, but also staging its re-enactment. Like some horrendous real-life version of Man Bites Dog, we spend the next two hours in the company of laughing, joking mass-murderers, blithely revisiting their blood-drenched past in a manner that is at once insanely surreal and distressingly domestic.

"It was as if we were killing… happily," says the elderly Anwar Congo, recalling the heyday of legitimised slaughter, demonstrating the easiest way to strangle a man with a length of wire and a piece of wood. Decapitations are re-enacted with cheap make-up and gory props, livers fed to gawping dead heads. Movies are a constant topic of conversation, with the techniques and fashion tips of Hollywood's outlaw icons providing perverse inspiration for hustlers whose mantra is that "gangster" means "free man". Video playback prompts complaints that a killer would never have worn white trousers on the job, and a discussion of the influence of sadistic movies that these would-be film-stars promise to surpass.

Most shocking of all is the recreation of an attack upon a village in which families were burned out of their homes and butchered, during the filming of which one subject jokes about the rape of children in off-hand terms that defy either description or repetition. At this point, we appear to have reached the nadir of the human condition, the very heart of darkness. Yet in the midst of this horror, something begins to dawn upon the killers; the idea that what they are doing might be wrong. Crucially, it all begins with appearances. "We shouldn't look brutal," says the leader of the Pancasila youth, after watching a baying mob whipping themselves into an axe-wielding frenzy. "We shouldn't look like we want to drink people's blood – that's dangerous… for the image of the organisation." Slowly and inexorably, the power of drama, and of the moving image, start to take hold. "I never thought it would look so bad," says a witness who barely flinched at real murder, but who is visibly shaken by this fictional recreation. Role reversals add to the impact, with killers playing their victims, stumbling toward something resembling empathy, seeing their own actions as if for the first time – finally real, only when unreal.

Interspersed with such harrowing footage are the surreal musical sequences in which the ghosts of the dead appear at the foot of a waterfall to thank their killers for sending them to heaven; even in his most hallucinogenic moments, Alejandro Jodorowsky himself could not have dreamed up images to match such eeriness. At times, these sequences look like outtakes from Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, while an excerpt from a television chat show gaily applauding massacres rivals the most outlandish media satires of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. The stamp of approval lent by executive producers Errol Morris (who brilliantly dissected the fog of war) and Werner Herzog (who once told me that "I am not afraid of anything"), is significant, their names jointly personifying both the stark realism and poetic metaphysics of the unflinching documentary form.

This is never an easy film to watch, not least because of the apparent complicity and co-operation of those who wreaked such inhuman havoc – the word "Anonymous" appears frequently (and ominously) in the credits. Yet perhaps those fleeting, dawning moments of self-realisation are justification enough, the nagging voices of self-doubt offering a glimmer of hope: "We murdered people and were never punished"; "Even God has secrets"; "Not everything true is good"; "Have I sinned?" From the sea bed of this vast sickness rises the infinitesimal voice of self-awareness – the distant echo of some long-forgotten conscience, captured on camera at the moment of its birth. After two hours, I was left dumbfounded

Arwa Mahdawi

Columnist, Guardian US

We watch video of the two men, around 10 years after it was shot, in the company of Adi Rukun, a soft-spoken ophthalmologist whose brother Ramli was killed by the Komando Aksi, a paramilitary organization in the Aceh Province of Indonesia. Mr. Rukun was born in 1968, and he is haunted less by traumatic memories than by their terrible absence. His mother recalls the day of Ramli’s disappearance with unbearable clarity and undiluted sorrow, while his father, who is frail, mostly blind and over 100, drifts in and out of awareness.

Mr. Rukun sets out, along with Mr. Oppenheimer and a film crew, to confront his brother’s killers. Sometimes he conducts eye exams while asking questions, his professional bearing blending with his gentle, insistent manner of interrogation.

The encounters are, for the most part, unnervingly calm and decorous. For half a century, survivors have lived among those responsible for the deaths of their loved ones. Political authorities, neighbors, even relatives and friends have blood on their hands, and acknowledge as much. A few go further, telling of how they drank their victims’ blood, a practice they credit with saving them from the madness that afflicted some of their colleagues.

Amid the laughter, the boasting and the superstition, there are some of the expected evasions and excuses. The killers were only following orders, or targeting bad people, or caught up in the chaos of the times. It was so long ago, Mr. Rukun is told. Why stir up bad memories?

Even when specific atrocities are admitted — or bragged about — ultimate responsibility is pushed away. Death squad members say they were fulfilling the mandates of the military, while politicians insist that the slaughter was the spontaneous expression of popular will. It’s suggested at one point that the “Communists” offered themselves up, asking to be killed as punishment for their transgressions.

With a single exception — an old NBC news report from the mid-1960s — Mr. Oppenheimer avoids the archival footage and explanatory material that usually fill out historical documentaries. His approach is more like Claude Lanzmann’s in “Shoah,” which surveyed the Holocaust by rigorously focusing on the faces and words of witnesses, survivors and participants.

The mood of “The Look of Silence” is tranquil. Its settings — modest houses and sun-dappled gardens, far from the urban bustle of “The Act of Killing” — are peaceful, and Mr. Rukun is a quiet man, contemplating his family’s tragedy more in sorrow than in anger. But this atmosphere has the effect of making the violence at the film’s heart all the more shocking. Movies have helped make even extreme brutality seem banal (that was part of the message of “The Act of Killing”), but hearing a simple, factual account of an atrocity can be almost unbearable.

“After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” T. S. Eliot asked that question, in his poem “Gerontion,” almost a century ago, and it has hovered over much subsequent history. Mr. Oppenheimer and his collaborators pose it with renewed urgency and poignancy, and also suggest the ways that, in Indonesia, forgiveness is still premature. The silence they discover is not a failure of acknowledgment, but the refusal of apology.