ABSTRACT
In his short experimental film MUZAK: A Tool of Management (2003, 3 min.), Joshua Oppenheimer interviews a former leader of one of Indonesia’s 1965-1966 death squads, which killed hundreds of thousands of people in the anticommunist purges that brought President Suharto’s government to power. Sharman Sinaga is initially reluctant to recount his actions, exclaiming ‘he [Oppenheimer] might tell people’ and ‘it’s a secret!’ – disingenuous statements, to be sure, given that Oppenheimer is witness to the scene as a film-maker. Indeed, Sinaga soon follows his wife’s urging to ‘tell him again how you killed the communists’, as their granddaughter looks on: ‘I’d just cut their throats [. . .] cut off their heads. Sometimes I’d rip their throats out like this. Mostly, I’d hold them upside down like this and crush their skull with my foot’. One of the first of 41 interviews with perpetrators that Oppenheimer conducted over a two-year period displays what would become a pattern of willing, oftentimes boastful mock demonstration of the physical movements and psychological gymnastics required to kill Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) members, suspected sympathizers, unionists, students, intellectuals, landless farmers, and ethnic Chinese at the behest of the state. These interviews provided the seeds for Oppenheimer’s two recent films, Academy Award nominees for best documentary, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014). The two films interrupt the legacy of silence around the mass murders that is imposed by an oligarchy founded on corruption and fear. By rendering apparent the violent underbelly of Suharto’s New Order government (1965-1998) and the continued impunity and privilege of those who have retained power since his ouster, the films create the conditions for the emergence of human rights discourse where none has existed over the 50-plus years since the murder campaign occurred.
