The Act Of Killing
Every critic out there has fawned over this film unabashedly stating that it is a masterpiece garnering it with high praise and generally insisting that everyone with eyes see it for themselves.
So is it that good ?
Yes. Yes it is, and then some. There is no way to describe how many levels this film works on. It's unflinching, it's humane, honest, gripping, galling, baffling, enlightening and challenging. At it's core it's utterly original, totally unforgettable and even on a purely theoretical cinematic level it manages to break a few inches of new ground. This isn't just the best film of the year it's the best film of the last 10 years. It's the kind of film that Werner Herzog would eat his whole wardrobe to champion (He doesn't have to because he's the films executive producer. Maybe he did anyway, it is Werner we're talking about). Nothing is perfect but this is as close as I could ask for.
Lets start over.
Documentary features were once a sort of after thought. The cinema going public's relationship with the documentary was one of admiration if not love for it's practitioners. An issue was always one of financial failure. The box office as such never fully engaging with the format. Sure it's admirable that you want to tell the truth, but it's lies that bring in the bucks. And so in spite of some great films being made (See - Heart's And Minds, The Thin Blue Line, Little Dieter Needs To Fly and Gates Of Heaven, Hoop Dreams for example) it wasn't really until 2002 when Michael Moore (of all people) managed to break through a sort of glass ceiling and really make documentaries a viable box office commodity with Bowling For Columbine.
Now, whether or not that's a good thing remains to be seen but since then it's fair to say that the practice of documentary making has undergone turn toward experimentation which has been embraced by film goers and lets face t having documentary features playing in your local megaplex is no bad thing. Documentary makers have embraced the aspects of regular fictitious film making. Most notably documentarians started to use the conventions of feature film narratives to great effect. Recently, Man on Wire for example is to all intents and purposes a heist movie, The Impostor is film noir and Bowling for Columbine or The Queen of Versailles are essentially black comedies. Secondly documentary makers like Herzog and Erroll Morris (who's also an executive producer here) managed to use the camera and the act of making fiction, or re-enacting the truth so to speak and aspect of the documentary. In a way The Act Of Killing is the masterpiece that may come to define this particular era.
Firstly lets get the cinematic theory part out of the way. Joshua Oppenheimer asks perpetrators of genocide are asked to re-enact their crimes. In doing this the film explores cinemas ability to use fiction to shed new light on the fact. Through creating a fictitious version of history the subjects are forced to re-evaluate their past actions. Films like 12 Years a Slave or Zero Dark Thirty play out entirely in this relationship between fact and fiction but this is the first time outside of Gillian Wearing's brilliant video installation Bully, That I've ever seen the participants in an event relate directly to the event through fiction. It's not an easy one to explain but The result is surprising and unsettling, raising the question of veracity versus verisimilitude. Suffice to say you could easily write an entire thesis on one scene here.
Did I mention that this is a brilliant film by the way ?
The reason that this works so well is because as an audience we are spared nothing by Oppenhiemer or by Anwar Congo - the films main subject. Emotionally this is as draining for the viewer as it is for the subjects. This is a film about trauma, horror, debasement, the suspension of morality through indoctrination and the suppression of memory and guilt as a defensive mechanism.
In the end this is a film about humanities darkest extremes and excesses and it manages to present the full horror of trauma as part of the human condition for both the victim and the transgressor.
A difficult, surreal, baffling and disquieting film that won't be for everyone. Something you can't unsee.
Highly recommended.
Every critic out there has fawned over this film unabashedly stating that it is a masterpiece garnering it with high praise and generally insisting that everyone with eyes see it for themselves.
So is it that good ?
Yes. Yes it is, and then some. There is no way to describe how many levels this film works on. It's unflinching, it's humane, honest, gripping, galling, baffling, enlightening and challenging. At it's core it's utterly original, totally unforgettable and even on a purely theoretical cinematic level it manages to break a few inches of new ground. This isn't just the best film of the year it's the best film of the last 10 years. It's the kind of film that Werner Herzog would eat his whole wardrobe to champion (He doesn't have to because he's the films executive producer. Maybe he did anyway, it is Werner we're talking about). Nothing is perfect but this is as close as I could ask for.
Lets start over.
Documentary features were once a sort of after thought. The cinema going public's relationship with the documentary was one of admiration if not love for it's practitioners. An issue was always one of financial failure. The box office as such never fully engaging with the format. Sure it's admirable that you want to tell the truth, but it's lies that bring in the bucks. And so in spite of some great films being made (See - Heart's And Minds, The Thin Blue Line, Little Dieter Needs To Fly and Gates Of Heaven, Hoop Dreams for example) it wasn't really until 2002 when Michael Moore (of all people) managed to break through a sort of glass ceiling and really make documentaries a viable box office commodity with Bowling For Columbine.
Now, whether or not that's a good thing remains to be seen but since then it's fair to say that the practice of documentary making has undergone turn toward experimentation which has been embraced by film goers and lets face t having documentary features playing in your local megaplex is no bad thing. Documentary makers have embraced the aspects of regular fictitious film making. Most notably documentarians started to use the conventions of feature film narratives to great effect. Recently, Man on Wire for example is to all intents and purposes a heist movie, The Impostor is film noir and Bowling for Columbine or The Queen of Versailles are essentially black comedies. Secondly documentary makers like Herzog and Erroll Morris (who's also an executive producer here) managed to use the camera and the act of making fiction, or re-enacting the truth so to speak and aspect of the documentary. In a way The Act Of Killing is the masterpiece that may come to define this particular era.
Firstly lets get the cinematic theory part out of the way. Joshua Oppenheimer asks perpetrators of genocide are asked to re-enact their crimes. In doing this the film explores cinemas ability to use fiction to shed new light on the fact. Through creating a fictitious version of history the subjects are forced to re-evaluate their past actions. Films like 12 Years a Slave or Zero Dark Thirty play out entirely in this relationship between fact and fiction but this is the first time outside of Gillian Wearing's brilliant video installation Bully, That I've ever seen the participants in an event relate directly to the event through fiction. It's not an easy one to explain but The result is surprising and unsettling, raising the question of veracity versus verisimilitude. Suffice to say you could easily write an entire thesis on one scene here.
Did I mention that this is a brilliant film by the way ?
The reason that this works so well is because as an audience we are spared nothing by Oppenhiemer or by Anwar Congo - the films main subject. Emotionally this is as draining for the viewer as it is for the subjects. This is a film about trauma, horror, debasement, the suspension of morality through indoctrination and the suppression of memory and guilt as a defensive mechanism.
In the end this is a film about humanities darkest extremes and excesses and it manages to present the full horror of trauma as part of the human condition for both the victim and the transgressor.
A difficult, surreal, baffling and disquieting film that won't be for everyone. Something you can't unsee.
Highly recommended.
