Cribb / The Act of Killing Robert Cribb, Australian National University Filmed over several years in the North Sumatra capital, Medan, The Act of Kill- ing (TAOK) is a sprawling work that encompasses three distinct, though related, stories. The core of the film consists of the reminiscences of an elderly gangster who took part in the massacres of Communists in 1965–66. Anwar Congo ap- pears early on in the film as a genial old man, but his subdued charm evaporates as he begins to recount, and then to reenact, the killings that he carried out. He takes the film crew to the rooftop where he garroted his victims with wire to avoid making a mess with blood. Using an associate as a stand-in, he demon- strates the technique of slipping a wire noose over the victim’s head and twisting it tight for as long as was needed to bring death. One of Congo’s friends describes killing his girlfriend’s father, while another recalls his rape of four- teen-year-old girls, exulting in the cruelty of the act. Pleasure in Killing The pleasure that Congo and his friends take in the memory of cruelty makes TAOK a difficult film to watch. Not surprisingly, audiences have viewed it as a courageous revelation of the darkest secrets in Indonesia’s recent past. Yet the film’s depiction of the terrible months from October 1965 to March 1966 is deeply misleading. Although the opening text tells viewers that the killings were carried out under the auspices of the Indonesian army, the military is invisible in the film’s subsequent representation of the massacres. The killings are presented as the work of civilian criminal psychopaths, not as a campaign of extermination, authorised and encouraged by the rising Suharto group within the Indonesian army and supported by broader social forces frightened by the possibility that the Indonesian communist party might come to power. At a time when a growing body of detailed research on the killings has made clear that the army played a pivotal role in the massacres, TAOK puts back on the agenda the Orientalist notion that Indonesians slaughtered each other with casual self-indulgence because they did not value human life. Bravado, Memory, and Manipulation The film makes no attempt to evaluate the truth of Congo’s confessions. Despite persistent indications that he is mentally disturbed, and that he and his friends are boasting for the sake of creating shock, the film presents their claims with- out critique. There is no reason to doubt that Congo and his friends took part in the violence of 1965-66, and that the experience left deep mental scars, but did they kill as many as they claim? At times they sound like a group of teenage boys trying to outbid each other in tales of bravado. There is no voice-over in the film. The protagonists seem to speak un- prompted and undirected. Toward its end, however, the film portrays an Robert Cribb <robert.cribb@anu.edu.au> Critical Asian Studies 46:1 (2014), 147–149. ISSN 1467-2715 print / 1472-6033 online / 01 / 00147–03 / ©2014 Inside Indonesia. DOI:10.1080/14672715.2014.867621 Downloaded by [Australian National University] at 11:58 12 December 2014