Interview with Joshua Oppenheimer, director of “the Act of Killing” ： 映画と。

MATSUSHITA Yumi (MY) :
This film has a personal relevance to me. My family moved to Medan, Indonesia when I was three, and it’s the earliest memory I have of my life. I understand you are fluent in Indonesian – unfortunately I don’t speak Indonesian well enough to interview you in it….
When I first heard about the film, I had no clue about the killing or that it took place in Medan. Watching the film, I could tell, “Oh, it (the female dancing scenes) must have been done in Lake Toba.” Then it occurred to me that I was breathing the same air as the protagonists while I lived there. My parents remember Cinema Majestic. I could have walked past Anwar (‘protagonist’ of the film).

Joshua OPPENHEIMER (JO) :
Anwar’s cinema was the Medan Bioskop – Medan Theater, on Sutomo Street. But the Majestic Cinema had another death squad leader operating out of it named Yan Paruhum Lubis. He is known in Medan as Ucok Majestik, the Majestic Kid, because he was actually killing people out of the Majestic Cinema. But of course you were there after the killing.

MY :
Yes, I was there after the killing. Medan is quite remote and was still an inconvenient place to live back then, but as a kid it was fantastic. As you know, Indonesians are very charming and you cannot hate them. Still, it must have been tough for my father as he had to go through constant bribery and racketeering. Even as a kid I was aware that they were a part of life.
How did you get involved with Indonesia? Did it start with an interest in Indonesia, or did you have a particular interest in human rights, for example?

JO :
It was just an accident. I was asked by a friend if I would go help a community of plantation workers make a film about their struggle to organize a union in the aftermath of the Suharto dictatorship. However, I didn’t really make it. The plantation workers made it.
I’d never been to Indonesia before and knew nothing about Indonesia. So I said I couldn’t direct this film but maybe it would be interesting for the plantation workers to make a film and tell the story themselves. My friend thought that was an interesting idea, so she basically asked us to do that. And when I arrived, the conditions were terrible. We found they were working for a Belgian company that was making the women workers spray an herbicide and it was dissolving their livers and killing them in their 40’s. And then they were afraid to do much about it because when they would protest the conditions, the Belgian company would hire Pemuda Pancasila to threaten them. And they were easily threatened because their parents had been killed for being in a union.
I realized there was a very big story here, where there was a mass killing but the killers are still in power. I could see that the killers’ power was connected to a present day fear. This violence is not just taking place in Indonesia. It’s taking place where I live in Denmark and here in Japan, because if you go to the Lawson or Family Mart to buy some skin cream here, it’s made with palm oil. You pay a few yen for it, but the real cost of that skin cream is impossibly high. It was costing my friends their lives. I understood this is not just about palm oil, but it’s about everything in a place like Indonesia in the global south,
where goons and thugs like Pemuda Pancasila are used to keep people afraid, to break unions, to silence environmental protests, to kick people off their land so that factories, mines, oil fields or real estate could be built. And I suddenly realised that our prosperity in places like Japan and the West depends on the suffering of others.
So the survivors said to come back and make another film not about 1956, but about why they’re afraid today and their condition of fear now. And when I went back, the army stopped us from doing that and they said film the perpetrators. Then I heard how the perpetrators were talking and boasting, and it was both a symptom of impunity and an assertion of impunity. It was part of the regime of fear. But I also could see that it was a performance. They were performing their impunity. And who was it for? Who’s their imagined audience? They were doing it in front of their grandchildren. How do they want their grandchildren to see them? I saw this was an enormous story. The whole world is built on this kind of impunity and it’s as if though the Nazis have won. So I kind of stumbled on it, to answer your question.

MY :
I think it’s all relative. If you look at Japan, the Japanese army abused Indonesian women as sex slaves during the war. There are photographs of Japanese military men proudly raising swords that had decapitated a hundred Chinese.
When we look at the film, we think it’s a film about Indonesia or about some barbaric Indonesians – but it is not. What is chilling about this film is about how ordinary human beings could turn evil and live amongst us.

JO :
Well, the film is about human beings. And the most uncomfortable truth that the film exposes is the killers are not barbarians or monsters. They’re human. And if we want to understand how human beings kill, we have to listen and talk to the human beings who do it. Survivors can’t tell you about killing. They can tell you what it was like to have their relatives taken away and never return, and to live with fear for decades. But they can’t tell you about the act of killing because they never did it. And the fact that the killers are human beings is something we have to deal with if we want to understand how human beings kill.
I don’t know how to make a film about another human being in all of his or her complexity without being close to them. I can catalogue the crimes of somebody and denounce them from a distance. But to understand how they live with what they’ve done and how they’ve lied to themselves for decades to justify what they’ve done because they’re human, because they know what’s right and wrong…

MY :
If they knew…

JO :
No, they do know. If they didn’t know that it was wrong, they wouldn’t have to lie to themselves about it and could just say, “I killed. It was terrible.” Otherwise, because they’re human, they’re vulnerable to guilt.

MY :
They need to put up a façade….

JO :
Exactly. So that they can live with themselves. And ironically, one of the most painful things that the films witnesses is the fact that the killers need to, that they are human, and being human they’re moral beings. They know the difference between right and wrong, and being moral beings they have to justify their actions. One of the most terrible things the film witnesses is how the justification of atrocity inevitably leads to further evil and to further corruption. And the film is about the corrupting effects of the lie that the killers impose on the society in the form of the victor’s history.
This would have been particularly true when you lived there, when there would have been hundreds of thousands of political prisoners still in prison all around you.
In Medan, you would have been passing some of the political prisons when you were going around by tricycle without knowing it. It leads to an ongoing downward spiral because now they have to blame the victims because the propaganda says it was their fault and the victims deserved it. They have to dehumanize the victims because it’s much easier for them to live with themselves if the victims are not seen as truly, fully human. And they have to kill again, because if the army says to Anwar, “Now kill this other group of people for the same reason that you killed the first group,” he has to do it. Because if he doesn’t, it’s tantamount to admitting it was wrong the first time.

MY :
You mentioned in the interview that it’s not in the interest of the West to bring all these thugs to the International Court of Justice. If you cannot bring them to The Hague, I thought it was your idea to orchestrate the Oppenheimer Court of Justice.

I am very much intrigued by the methodology of the film. Did you always have in mind for it to take the form of a film, or that it’s the best medium to portray the whole event?

JO :
For me, filmmaking is my means of exploration. It’s my means of posing and asking questions, and trying to answer them in cinematic terms. It is not about finding an interesting story and telling it. Maybe some fiction filmmakers do that, and journalism is that. But for me, filmmaking is about asking the most urgent questions of a situation and finding a way of exploring those questions in cinematic terms.

MY :
In a way, the subject came to you rather than you looking for the story.

JO :
It was a decision to go to Indonesia and make that film with the plantation workers. I thought that would be interesting because I thought right now people are starting to understand all over the world what globalization is about and the violence that underpins globalization. And I’d been asked to go document that in a community that has a violent history that is inseparable from globalization. They were brought as contract coolies, or kuli kontrak as said in Indonesian, a form of almost slave labour from Java in the Dutch era. So there their whole history of selling, creating, and planting agricultural products for export for the Dutch is a history of globalization. So I thought that was interesting.
I went looking for that story, you could say. But what I did when I arrived was explore. I wasn’t researching or finding a story thinking, “Okay, how do I tell this story?” and assembling the scenes that would allow me to tell that story to an audience. I think that’s why the film has this feeling of evolving as you watch it. You’re watching something unfold in unexpected ways, which is not how all film works. You have a sense of where it’s going with a lot of film and a sense of clear direction. Here I think you have fascination, and that is the motor. You’re fascinated with what’s unfolding. You’re disturbed empathizing but don’t know where it’s going.

MY :
When my father was working in Medan, he was dealing coffee, prawn and timber. When I was a kid I had no clue, but when my parents went back for the second time I began to question them, and just started to act like a little Socialist. I’d say things like “it’s bourgeois to hire maids”, and “you are taking all the good prawns and sending them to Japan or elsewhere so the locals are left with crappy prawns.” Then as I got older, I realised it’s the trading house my father worked with that paid for my education and living. It took me a little while to come to terms with it. One can never come to terms with it because the problem is continuing on all levels.
*Some trading houses have a strong presence in countries where they have branches and have employees that are familiar with the local matters, and often play diplomatic roles which are not possible on the government level. They also have various scholarships and support programmes without strings attached.

JO :
Well, Sukarno was trying to put together a model of economic development that was not export driven. It was the vision of the intellectuals in Sukarno’s government at the time that were overthrown and killed by Suharto to create an economy and develop so that the best prawns would not go to Japan, the rainforests would not be chopped down and the timber sent away.
You had a poignant position here because you’re saying you recognized you depended for your life on that exploitation. We all do in the West. You just were aware of it at a young age and in a powerful way.
And I think it damages us. Just as Anwar at the end of the film, you mentioned earlier that in some ways the film shows that Anwar escapes but the film is almost like a court. It’s almost like the court and justice that he’ll never see. But not because I’m a judge, and not because the film is a court. The film gradually layer by layer reveals that Anwar may have escaped justice, but he has not escaped punishment because the film shows that he already has destroyed himself by what he’s done.
I think that just as the act of killing has damaged Anwar so terribly, and even Adi, who says he sleeps well at night and has no problems, I think he’s become a hollow shell of a human being in order to cope with what he’s done.
I think we also hollow out, in part, because we know that we for our living depend on the suffering of others. We think, “Oh, that’s too disturbing to think about.” We stop empathizing with people and close ourselves off.

MY :
We cannot constantly check, “Is this fair trade?”

JO :
And we’re not going to save the world even with individual consumers purchasing fair trade.

MY :
It may be good for our self-satisfaction….

JO :
Yes, yes. But that’s not only different from improving the conditions systemically, it’s also probably opposed to it because it creates the illusion that we’re helping when we’re not.

MY :
There are those who are credited as anonymous, such as the co-director and others who helped you. We can know so little about them, but you gave voice to the people who could not otherwise. Is there anything we can do to help them not remain anonymous?

JO :
Well, I think we have to demand that our governments reassess their relationship with Indonesia. Until now, our governments have enthusiastically supported the genocide and participated in it. They provided weapons, money, lists of thousands of names of Indonesian journalists, trade unionists and other public figures who the U.S., in particular, in providing these lists said, “Kill these people. We want them all dead because they’re potential enemies of the new regime.” And then, Dewi Fujin, Sukarno’s widow, talked to me about how Japanese Prime Minister Sato personally gave his own private money to the death squads as a sign of support. She’s someone you might want to interview about that, because I didn’t know that detail of support.
We not only supported the genocide, we also have supported the regime of the killers ever since and continue to do so until today. We have to demand that Indonesia acknowledge what happened was wrong. We have to reassess our relationships to the Indonesian military which continues to exist in total impunity and continues to torture, kill, and make Indonesians protesting for their civil rights disappear. But we cannot do that without being dismissed by the Indonesian public as hypocrites until we also acknowledge our own role in these crimes and our own role supporting the regime of the killers ever since. So we must demand of our own governments that we come clean transparently about what we did and how we supported this.
Fifty years is long enough for us to get comfortable with our role in the genocide. The International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction over this crime because it happened before the court was committed, and the court is only allowed to deal with crimes committed since it was constituted. So in order to have an international tribunal, there would have to be an act of the U.N. Security Council to set up an international tribunal like there was for the former Yugoslavia, or there is currently for Cambodia. That will not happen so long as two permanent members of the Security Council, the U.K. and the U.S., are perpetrators of this crime and unwilling to say, “This is what we did.” So we need to demand that our governments actually take responsibility for what they did in this crime.

MY :
Do you think that is the reason why this film, which deserved an Oscar in my opinion, didn’t get it? Because the U.S. supported the perpetrators?

JO :
I don’t know.

Edited by Gregory RHAME

日本語版に戻る

 

MATSUSHITA Yumi writes for Kinema Jumpo magazine, ‘Asian Film
Forest’ book, et al. She is a producer, curator and moderator/interpreter for film promotions and festivals.
https://twitter.com/MatsushitaYumi

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“The Act of Killing
”
Directors: Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn (co-director), Anonymous (co-director)
Producer: Signe Byrge Sørensen
Executive producers: Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Andre Singer, Joram Ten Brink
Music: Elin Øyen Vister
Cinematography: Anonymous, Carlos Arango de Montis, Lars Skree
Editing: Niels Pagh Andersen, Janus Billeskov Jansen, Mariko Montpetit, Charlotte Munch Bengtsen, Ariadna Fatjó-Vilas Mestre
Running time: 121 min.
Norway, Denmark, United Kingdom co-production
Language: Indonesian
(c) Final Cut for Real Aps, Piraya Film AS and Novaya Zemlya LTD, 2012
Official website: http://theactofkilling.com
Japanese website: http://www.aok-movie.com