Browse Month

February 2016

Misc 3

Listening to
Watching
  • The Act of Killing by Joshua Oppenheimer. This is a good review on amazon:

    “In 1965 the Indonesian military responded to an attempted coup with the massacre of at least 500,000 people. They employed local gangs to help carry out these murders, transforming young idling street toughs into death squads who killed without abandon or regard to the political pretense of eradicating the alleged communist threat.

    Anwar Congo is one of these killers, a flamboyant man with a penchant for the gangster movies he once stood outside scalping tickets to. Anwar has never been charged for his crimes. To the contrary, his atrocities have made him somewhat of a minor celebrity in his hometown of Medan, a large city in Sumatra. He believes he is responsible for murdering about a thousand people; mostly by strangling them with piano wire, the way gangsters did it in the movies.

    Joshua Oppenheimer met Mr. Congo traveling through Indonesia while working on another project. He was struck by Congo’s zeal in recounting his horrific acts like an aged athlete recalling his bygone glory days, acting out his crimes and providing little asides on the most efficient methods of killing a large number of people quickly and cleanly.

    Oppenheimer proposed filming and financing re-enactments of Congo’s crimes starring the murderer himself, his surviving accomplices, and his young lackeys. As inexplicable as Oppenheimer’s proposition to help a mass murderer make a film is, Congo’s decision to recreate his transgressions through an array of genres – horror, musical, war, westerns and, of course, gangster – is even more baffling. Oppenheimer’s documentary, The Act of Killing, is the collision of Congo’s bizarre scenes realized, chilling interviews, and fly on the wall observation.

    The fact Congo maintained final cut gives the documentary its occasional perverse comedy. Laughing at these men’s lack of sophistication is double-edged; it’s this same absence of self-awareness that made them capable of killing thousands of people and recall their actions with little of no sense of remorse. So when one young lackey engages in a quixotic run for public office, explaining how much easier it will make shaking people down for bribes, it feels almost as absurd as something off of NBC’s Parks & Recreations, while providing a prime example of what makes Indonesia so hopelessly corrupt.

    This sort of ironic detachment takes an even darker turn when a man recalls the murder of his father during the ’65 genocide. The man suggests the story would make a good addition to the film. One would think Anwar would recognize this thinly veiled confrontation by a victim, or perhaps feel some tug of guilt for his participation in events that led to the death of this man’s father. But Congo is unable to see past his film, and dismisses the idea, characteristically, without thought.

    And yet, The Act of Killing does catch glimpses of some semblance of remorse in Anwar Congo. On several occasions, local citizens are solicited to act the part of Communist dissidents. Most decline, visibly terrified of being mistaken for Communists. Yet a few do concede (likely for what is to them a great deal of money), and as they are mock beaten and murdered their children fall into hysterics, not understanding what is going on. One woman appears to slip into shock from the experience.

    It’s at moments like these that something like regret appears in Congo’s face. There are also admissions of terrible nightmares that have plagued him for years, quieter conversations with accomplices about coping with memories, and a final fifteen minutes which are almost unbearable to watch.

    But while watching all of this, I couldn’t help wonder if Oppenheimer had discovered and crossed some line of ethics with his film. Yes, we sit in judgment of Congo, but he himself is blissfully unaware of this. All he sees is the medium provided to glorify his actions. Even since The Act of Killing was released, Congo’s complaints are detached from the crimes, instead focusing on his feeling of being misled in terms of the type of film he was making.

    But most troubling, is it ethically sound to make a movie that causes participants trauma or puts lives in danger? My knee jerk reaction is to say such a film should not be produced. But this feeling is countered by the powerful visceral reaction viewing this film stirred in me.

    The Act of Killing, is many things: sober documentary, meta-film within a film; exploitative, surrealist, funny and always deeply uncomfortable. I can safely say I have never seen a movie like it, and that my thoughts returned to its characters and images in a way only a few documentary films have. It is a unique and troubling masterpiece.”
 
Links I liked
  • When I went to Accra for Christmas, policemen and women were peppered across city corners, waving down cars, asking for “Christmas gifts”.  People often say that higher pay would cut corruption. Apparently, it doesn’t. 

Africa in the news

I deactivated my Facebook account two months ago because of a certain hypersensitivity and social media activism that I don’t fully understand, but appears healthy to opt out of. Another way of putting it, Facebook became the internet and knowledge equivalent of this exercise.

Now, I call people if I want to connect. I email my friends when I want to see pictures of their babies. And I read the New York Times to feel hypersensitive.

There are multiple presidential elections going on in Africa. How does this story make the front page of the New York Times?

Below are pictures from one of many voodoo ceremonies I sat in on. They are way more pleasant than going to mass and achieve the same objectives: a special time to pray for the health of your family and loved ones and to make gestures to keep the God(s) happy. I never heard an outlandish claim about tax cuts.

Benin’s presidential elections

Benin’s electoral campaign kicked off yesterday. The actual presidential election is March 6th. There are three candidates that have a shot, but the front-runner is the current Prime Minister, Lionel Zinsou. Zinsou is a massively polarizing figure because he was born and raised in France. In fact, he only came to Benin last June to become the Prime Minister.

I’ve heard the same question over and over: who would vote for a chef d’etat of their country who never actually lived there? When the perceived level of public sector corruption is as high as it is in Benin (tied with China and Colombia for 83rd out of 167 countries in the 2015 Corruption Perception Index), the answer appears to be: most people.

My favorite snippet related to yesterday’s electoral campaign kick off:

“Announcing the beginning of the electoral campaign ahead of the March 6 presidential election, La Nation noted that most candidates did not wait for the official campaign to begin before holding meetings and distributing gifts.”

Misc Stuff 2

Reading
I finished Ta-nehisi Coat’s Between the World and Me in a few days. It brought me back to late night conversations outside Butler library and Hartley lounge with black friends who were articulating a reality I didn’t understand at the time and still don’t. Lines I liked:
  • There were little white boys with complete collections of football cards, and their only want was a popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison oak.
  • I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me.
  • I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined.
  • My working theory then held all black people as kings in exile, a nation of original men severed from our original names and our majestic Nubian culture. Surely this was the message I took from gazing out on the Yard. Had any people, anywhere, ever been as sprawling and beautiful as us?
  • I shared with him a healthy skepticism and a deep belief that we could somehow read our way out
  • There was no nobility in falling, in being bound, in living oppressed, and there was no inherent meaning in black blood. Black blood wasn’t black; black skin wasn’t even black.
  • My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.
  • I am black, and have been plundered and have lost my body. But perhaps I too had the capacity for plunder, maybe I would take another human’s body to confirm myself in a community.
  • Hate gives identity.
  • So much of my life was defined by not knowing.
  • And so there was, all about her, a knowledge of cosmic injustices, the same knowledge I’d glimpsed all those years ago watching my father reach for his belt, watching the suburban dispatches in my living room, watching the golden-haired boys with their toy trucks and football cards, and dimly perceiving the great barrier between the world and me.
  • Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
  • Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth.
  • History is not solely in our hands. And still you are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life.
  • To yell “black-on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.
  • And godless though I am, the fact of being human, the fact of possessing the gift of study, and thus being remarkable among all the matter floating through the cosmos, still awes me.
  • When I was a boy, no portion of my body suffered more than my eyes.
  • In America I was part of an equation—even if it wasn’t a part I relished.
  • And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.
  • She could not acknowledge any discomfort, and she did not speak of herself as remarkable, because it conceded too much, because it sanctified tribal expectations when the only expectation that mattered should be rooted in an assessment of Mable Jones.
  • The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.
Listening to
Links I liked