ABSTRACT
As lm titles go, the one for Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing (2013) is as offputting as it gets: robust, shocking, direct, and unpoetic. But it is also a double-entendre, referring both to the deed of killing and its theatrical representation-to doing and performance. It documents how scenes of the past, buried in an uneasy mix of pride and guilt, are re-created and reenacted in a stunning mix of contemporary, local popular culture and Hollywood gangster style. The lm thus documents how, as Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik argued, memory is generated, brought into the present, ‘in the act of performing it’ (2013, p. 3). Reenactment, one of the stock-features of the type of ‘expository’ documentary (Nichols, 2001) focused on presenting past events in a didactic way, is the lm’s central idea and feature: Past acts of killing such as they happened nearly ve decades ago in a prolonged post-coup purge in Indonesia are reenacted in seemingly endless variation. However, the didactic element usually associated with the expository mode (such as the BBC History of World War II series (1989-2005)) does not prevail in these reenactments. Rather, as I shall argue, the theatrical stagings of The Act of Killing border on the grotesque. They provoke both horror and laughter,1 an affective response of the lm’s audiences often summarized as ‘surreal’ (Horeck, 2014, p. 157). Played out openly in contemporary Indonesia and involving lots of participants who at least initially are willing and enthusiastic, the reenactments lay bare the participants’ lack of shame or repentance about these war crimes of the past. Only when the lm is well on its way and when the reenactments become ever more grotesque do feelings of unease and discomfort concerning that past slowly emerge for the lm’s participants. Conforming to what Schneider (2011, p. 54) sees as an essential feature of reenactments, this past is not nished or sealed off, and it continues into the present moment.
