My Best Dox

The history of film registers its heroes – filmmakers and works that defied gravity, veered off the tracks and catapulted themselves to the list of canonical works. And even though they no longer break the celluloid ice like they used to, it is clear why we owe an eternal debt of gratitude to Griffith, Welles, Kurosawa or Riefenstahl. It makes it even more interesting to witness in our own time to the people and films after which neither film nor we can and will net ever be the same. The Act of Killing – in which director Joshua Oppenheimer with the help of unpunished, happily integrated and privileged perpetrators (so genre-like!) re-enacts brutal mass killings in Indonesia in the mid-1960s – is a hardly bearable, but then again absolutely necessary viewing experience; a grotesque screen version of the world as a stage (i.e. a fi lm set), on which the final act of (in)humanity, murder, opens a space of redemption in terms of self-transformation into a performance. This ethical snuff , however, does not consist of a single exploitation pixel – all of it is painfully strained in a (Sisyphus’) attempt to grasp the origin of human evil, banal as Arendt would say, frighteningly low-budget.

Mima Simić