Gangster Film: Cinematic Ethics in "The Act of Killing"

Dr Robert Sinnerbrink (Macquarie University)

This paper is part of a project on ‘cinematic ethics’: the idea of film as a medium of ethical experience, one with the power to evoke critical reflection through emotional engagement and aesthetic involvement. Although film can be used for moral pedagogy (or for political propaganda), it can challenge our moral assumptions, dogmatic beliefs, and ideological convictions, forcing viewers to see their world in more psychologically nuanced, socially complex, and ethically confronting ways. This ethical capacity of cinema is particularly evident in the documentary or non-fiction film. Far from assuming a transparent or veridical relationship between cinematic image and documentary evidence, contemporary filmmakers have explored the possibilities of non-fiction film to include fictional elements, to question the constructed nature of images, and to explore the complex complicities in the dialectic between filmmaker, subject, and spectator.

All of these elements are at play in one of the most confronting and original non-fiction film in recent years, Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing. It explores the ongoing legacy of Indonesia’s state-sanctioned death squads, who killed over a million alleged Communists and ethnic Chinese following the military coup of 1965. An extraordinary fusion of reflexive ‘perpetrator documentary’ and cinematic investigation of the traumatic effects of political violence, The Act of Killing focuses on the perspectives of a number of ‘gangster killers’ involved in the 1965-66 massacres, men who are not only treated as heroes by their community, freely boasting about their past, but are filmed making their own fictional movie re-enactments of their crimes. Its provocative, self-reflexive exploration of the intersection between cinema, violence, and politics, makes Oppenheimer’s metacinematic documentary experiment a uniquely challenging case study in cinematic ethics.