A Comedy of Killing: In Search of the Origins of the Comic in The Act of Killing

In his documentary The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer focuses on the politically motivated killings of the alleged Communists between 1965 and 1966 in Indonesia.The film protagonists’ use of re-enactment, in which they themselves act out the killings they committed, is in effect comic, which is why we use the theory found in Henri Bergson’s legendary essay “On Laughter” to establish the role of comedy in the documentary, and then pair it with Georges Bataille’s concept of the transgressive to further uncover the meaning and the role of the protagonists’ acting out of the comedy in the film.

The integral (Slovenian) version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!