Recensioni de* critic*

What makes the three-hour-long The Act Of Killing disturbing and yet engaging is the way the story is told... The film asks [the killers] to re-enact their homicidal practices for the camera, and pushes the blood-drunk further into the realm of phantasmagoria, complete with musical numbers and horror soap operas. The effect is like watching two murderers in a confession box at an asylum.

Oppenheimer calls his film "a documentary of the imagination." I'd call it a brilliant intervention, and it's no accident that two other pioneering interveners, Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, executive produced both The Act of Killing and Oppenheimer's upcoming companion piece, The Look of Silence.

While Oppenheimer's film has been praised for its self-reflexive demonstration of cinema's tortured relationship with truth – self-reflexivity having long ago been elevated as the hallmark of cinematic sophistication – its meta-cinematic gestures in fact serve the opposite purpose, underscoring the deceptions of fiction film in order to valorize the naive documentary image.

Having suffered through the 169-minute "director's cut" of The Act of Killing twice, I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that the media's validation of mass murderers and relative lack of interest in their victims is by now too well ingrained in our cultural reflexes to be irrelevant to the appeal of Oppenheimer's film.

The Act of Killing feels neither like a confessional nor a historical film, and more like an intellectual exercise, one seemingly constructed for Western viewers who have had scant knowledge of the events that took place in Indonesia almost fifty years ago... Ultimately this strong, perplexing film is more about performance than history.

There is eliminated any sense of distance between the past and the present, past participants and a new era of images, guilt, victimization, and complicity... Yet never for a minute can we forget the horrible crimes these men are guilty of, and which they revel in, which re-invests the hackneyed-blasé attempts at "staging" an unclarified muddle of memories/history/revisonism/critique/fantasy with the most sinister implications.

In the vigorous pursuit of a seeming greater good, logic can lead inexorably to delusion – this is one of the uncomfortably simple truths at the center of Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing, a startling documentary that dares to dig out the roots of humanity behind heinous genocide.

While The Act of Killing packs a visceral wallop, it's equally draining psychologically. Listening to these old men fondly remember stories of mass suffering is almost too difficult, especially considering their paramilitary organization is still one of the strongest in modern Indonesia. Oppenheimer's formal approach stays focused despite the unsettling subject matter. It's this directorial patience that makes The Act of Killing... such an essential cinematic treatise on the banality of evil.

The visual and aural rhythms of this one feel as if Oppenheimer is slowly, carefully climbing a mountain of lament and shame, each footfall made with absolute certainty that there's solid, (if jagged and painful) rock underneath. When we arrive at the top, the view is majestic in its sadness. From this vantage point, the last half hour of "The Act of Killing" surveys a divinely art directed stretch of hell.

The cumulative impact is devastating, and very far from a simple Western condemnation of another country's brutality. In forcing viewers to hear the boasts of genocide's perpetrators, "The Act of Killing" puts a harsh spotlight on all celebrations of bloodshed, from Hollywood to the op-ed pages.

The Act of Killing subverts the conventional ways of documenting evidence of persecution; it imagines a daunting, performative new method for the representation of barbaric massacre, as its playful title insinuates.

The Act Of Killing never loses sight of its core subject. As Congo becomes more and more comfortable around him, Oppenheimer begins dropping in questions about guilt and accountability; whether Congo feels remorse becomes the central mystery of the film. By tackling one man's sense of right and wrong (or lack thereof), Oppenheimer is ultimately tackling human nature.