Luckily for me, last Thursday was the most recent installment of Docville, a monthly series of documentary screenings hosted by the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM). The film screened,The Act Of Killing, was a remarkably unique documentary filmed entirely in Indonesia.

Largely made under rookie director Joshua Oppenheimer, but executive-produced by cinema heavy-weights Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, the documentary focuses on Indonesia’s traumatic past and present collective memory.

The film follows Anwar Congo and a few other men that were involved in the government-sponsored massacre of communists that occurred between 1965 and 1966. Previously, Indonesia’s President Sukarno had maintained authority by forming a tenuous alliance with the  Indonesian Communist Party against the right-wing military. In September of 1965, however, the assassination of a number of generals was cast as an attempted communist coup, and the military soon began a campaign to exterminate all communists in Indonesia. By 1967, somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 alleged communists had been murdered, and the Communist Party was all but non-existent.

Anwar explains that in 1965, he and his friends were promoted from “cinema gangsters” who made their money scalping movie tickets to paramilitary executioners. Over the next year, Anwar brags, he personally ended more than a thousand lives.

The film, which tells the unique story of a few in order to ask far-reaching questions about life, death, and human nature, has strong thematic similarities to Herzog’s other non-fiction work. Like Herzog’s Into the Abyss, for example, a film about men on death row, The Act of Killing looks at life through the eyes of those who kill.

Oppenheimer’s film, however, is far more bizarre than Herzog’s typical creations. For one, rather than holding Anwar and his fellow thugs accountable, the present Indonesian government celebrates the men as heroes. Indeed, the corrupt, totalitarian regime enshrines the extermination of communists as a glorious moment in Indonesian history. The state repression remains so intense, in fact, that most of the Indonesian members of the film crew appear as “anonymous” in the film’s credits to ensure their identities are protected.

Even stranger than the Indonesian celebration of mass murder is the film’s structure, which, as one critic put it, seems like a “throwaway gag from a post modern novel.” Rather than simply interviewing the former paramilitaries about their past, Oppenheimer asks them to engage in their own filmmaking process and re-enact their killings for him. The men decide to recreate their murders in the style of the classic American films they once sold tickets for, and the generic tropes for Westerns, film noirs, gangster flicks, and even musicals, become the structuring elements for the restaging of a genocide.

Many of the men’s conversations about their past occur on set during their re-enactments. Preparing to shoot, so to speak, the men stand around in cowboy hats, 1940s-style double-breasted suits, and bikinis, boasting about how many people they killed, and the ages of the young girls they raped (14 being the most desirable age, according to one).

Anwar also describes how he and his friends would go see Elvis movies and dance straight from the cinema to the paramilitary office down the street where they suspected communists were being interrogated.

“I’d give the guy a cigarette,” Anwar describes, “I’d still be dancing, laughing . . . It was like we were killing happily.”

Make no mistake: this is no Ken Burns history lesson. Rather than delivering a fact-based account of the horrors that took place, the film explores uncomfortable questions about the relationship between film, history, and personal experience.

Most importantly, perhaps, the film asks how to locate personal morality and guilt in a world that has gone mad. Anwar, despite the government’s celebration of his actions, is plagued by nightmares and second thoughts that worsen with the re-enactments. His friends, on the other hand, ostensibly feel no guilt: it’s just a “nerve imbalance,” they tell him. “You are haunted because your mind is weak.”

One of Anwar’s guilt-free pals, Adi Zulkadry, justifies his actions by noting, with disturbing accuracy, that “‘war crimes’ are defined by the winners . . . I’m a winner, so I can make my own definition.” Adi points the finger of blame back toward America when he notes that “when George Bush was in power, Guantanamo was alright. The Americans killed the Indians” he continues, “has anybody been arrested for that?”

The doc also explores the bizarre role of American film in real-life violence, and the performative nature of killing. Most unnerving, perhaps, is Anwar’s boast that he borrowed execution methods directly from violent American flicks. The thugs’ choice to re-enact the murders in the style of classic American genres is thus disturbingly fitting.

American culpability in the genocide extends far beyond its cinema, however: the CIA has admitted that, in 1965, they supplied the Indonesian military with names of communists to murder and allegedly provided them with the funding and training to do so.

The film emerges as a disturbing and disorienting mise-en-abyme of historical reality, collective memory, personal experience, and cinema. Refusing the audience any simple access to truth, The Act of Killing interrogates the documentary genre’s claim to reality, and is the most important piece of non-fiction cinema I’ve seen in years.

Don’t take my word for it though – Morris and Herzog became the film’s executive producers only after they saw and were blown away by Oppenheimer’s finished product.

Herzog, upon viewing the film, said “I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade,” calling it “unprecedented in the history of cinema.”

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While this is a pretty accurate reflection of my views on film, I can’t help feeling like I’m being a tad unfair. After all, out of the tens of thousands of Hollywood films out there, there must be one or two good ones, right?

These suspicions were confirmed last week after I found a copy of Johnny Guitar, a 1954 Hollywood Western that I’d been hankering to get my hands on. I had read that before he went on to direct Rebel Without A Cause, Nicholas Ray had managed to slip some genuine subversion past the American Motion Picture Production Code censors in the guise of this generic cowboy flick. Last week, two years after I first started searching, the film finally cropped up in the library catalog, and was even more unique than I had expected.

The subject of the film is Vienna, played by Joan Crawford, a tough-as-fuck saloon owner who’s as comfortable in an evening gown as she is in jeans and gun holsters. The story begins when Vienna’s former lover Johnny Guitar, played by Sterling Hayden, rides up to her saloon after a five-year absence. Shortly after their reunion, however, a murder is committed on the outskirts of town. The murdered man’s villainous sister Emma is desperate to pin the crime on Vienna and a group of her friends, all of whom are innocent. Vienna and Johnny are forced to fight it out with Emma and a posse of townsfolk, first with rhetoric and then with pistols.

Despite the film’s title, Vienna is clearly the star of the show, with more lines and screen time than any other character. A commanding, heavily masculinized female character like Vienna would be uncommon in any genre of that era, but was completely unheard of as the lead in a Western. While the 1960s and 1970s were full of disruptive, challenging Westerns, the all-American genre was at its all-American height in 1954, and initial reviews trashed Crawford as sexless and romantically forbidding, telling her to leave the saddles and Levi’s for someone else.

As well as taking a badass gun-toting woman for its lead, Johnny Guitar powerfully condemns the repression and persecution of the McCarthy era. It subtly suggests that the reason Emma wants Vienna hanged is not for her brother’s murder, or even plain bloodlust, but homoerotic lust, a desire Emma is unable to name and therefore must destroy.

More striking is the film’s allegorical denunciation of the McCarthy witch hunts, as the villainous mob that falsely accuses Vienna quickly becomes a stand-in for anti-communist hysteria. The posse, clad  in black, vividly resemble a mob of puritan witch hunters, and they use the very same interrogation techniques that the House of Investigation of Un-American Activities (HUAC) used to identify Communists in the film industry. Emma promises Vienna’s friend Turkey that if he testifies that Vienna is guilty, he will go free, mirroring the way in which members of the film industry were intimidated into naming names.

The real-life identities of Ward Bond, who plays the sheriff that legitimizes the posse, and Hayden, bring an unnerving realism to the allegorical content. Bond had been active in the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, the main purpose of which was to fight communism in the film industry. Hayden, on the other hand, was briefly involved in the Communist Party, and as a result was grey-listed and then subpoenaed by HUAC, and forced, like Vienna’s companion, to name names.

Despite the initial negative reviews and challenging content, the film opened to great success at the box office. Pretty soon the snooty film folk caught on, and François Truffaut was hailing it as an “intellectual Western,” a “delirious, hallucinatory Western,” and a “triumph of the heart.” Despite its Hollywood home, Johnny Guitar manages to be a bizarre dissident of a Western, a refreshing piece of proof that films can be both subversive and extremely entertaining.

L. G. H. is a U3 Cultural Studies student. Forays Into Film is a bi-weekly column about alternative films. Email her at foraysintofilm@mcgilldaily.com.

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This week’s column, however, has nothing to do with the Academy. For us snooty folks who are more interested in alternative, political films, engaging with the Oscars tends to be a relatively masochistic pastime. It’s not that I don’t love a good blockbuster from time to time – some of my best friends are blockbusters – but watching people who are already swimming in money and recognition get heaped with more of the same, while independent filmmakers struggle to get projects off the ground, is sometimes more than I can bear.

Instead of working myself into a frenzy of impotent rage over the red carpet, I decided to focus on something more positive. Last Thursday, Toronto became the first city in Canada with a formal policy allowing undocumented immigrants access to municipal services like shelters and healthcare without fear of being deported.

In honour of this historic legislation, this column will focus on In This World, a 2002 docu-drama about undocumented immigrants, directed by British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom in the same year he made 24 Hour Party People. Angered by the post-9/11 atmosphere and its increasing xenophobia toward undocumented immigrants, Winterbottom made a film about two Afghan refugees who make the overland journey to London.

The film begins in Peshawar, Pakistan, to which Afghan refugees were first displaced by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970s and 1980s. After American involvement in the early 2000s, a voice-over tells us, the number grew to over one million. Here, we meet the protagonists, Jamal Udin Torabi and Enayatullah, refugee cousins whose uncle arranges their trek to London. On a journey increasingly fraught with danger, Jamal and Enayatullah are forced to shed their native language, clothes, and culture in hopes of establishing a better life.

Though ostensibly a work of fiction, In This World is in many ways a documentary. Winterbottom went to Peshawar and found non-professional actors to play the roles of Jamal and Enayatullah. Not only were the actors themselves Afghan refugees, they also shared the names of Winterbottom’s subjects. Winterbottom and his crew then took Jamal and Enayatullah – the actors – on the exact same route taken by the film’s protagonists for the shoot. As the actors had never left Peshawar before, and the film was largely unscripted, their responses to new places like Tehran, Istanbul, and Italy are genuine. Furthermore, Winterbottom’s filming crew was often missing the necessary documents to get the actors across borders, and much like the smugglers in the film, had to resort to bribes and lies. At one point, a member of the Iranian border guard discovers Jamal and Enayatullah and sends them back to Pakistan. In fact, the Iranian border guard was playing himself – Winterbottom offered to pay him to demonstrate what he would do if he discovered Jamal and Enayatullah were illegal.

In addition to using non-professional actors, shooting on location, and relying heavily on improvised dialogue, the film’s cinematography and editing are entirely  in documentary style. The intense commitment to realism, though it sacrifices development of Jamal and Enayatullah’s characters, lends an emotional urgency to the plight of refugees that extends beyond the film and into the real world. By putting a human face on perceived ‘outsiders,’ In This World works as a powerful rebuttal to the xenophobic sentiments that first inspired it.

At the end, when Jamal finally arrives in London, the film seems to suggest that his future there, as an undocumented immigrant with no friends or family, is highly uncertain. Indeed, for many migrants without papers, the end of a dangerous journey is only the beginning of a new struggle. Toronto’s new legislation means that for hundreds of people in Ontario without documents, that struggle will be a little bit easier.

L.G.H. is a U3 Cultural Studies student. Forays Into Film is a bi-weekly column about alternative films. Email her at foraysintofilm@mcgilldaily.com.

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With the presidential inauguration and the State of the Union address approaching, however, my Twitter feed will once again fill with quotes of the hope, strength, and spirit of the American people.

This weekend, to give my tender stomach a rest, I decided to skip out on schmaltzy new releases like Lincoln. Instead, I saw director Kelly Reichardt’s latest film, the pseudo-Western Meek’s Cutoff (2010), which, despite its low budget, boasts big names like Michelle Williams and Paul Dano.

Reichardt’s previous features, River of Grass (1994), Old Joy (2006), and Wendy and Lucy (2008), all deal with protagonists that are lost in life in present-day America. Characters seek freedom and redemption on the mythological American highway or frontier, only to find that it no longer exists.

Meek’s Cutoff, in contrast, deals with characters that are literally lost in America. The film follows a band of settlers and their guide, Stephen Meek, as they attempt to cross the High Desert of Oregonin 1845, but become hopelessly disoriented in the infinitely shifting, starkly beautiful landscapes of the West.

Now, Westerns are usually the stuff that American political rhetoric is made of. In its classical form, the Western dramatizes and resolves the conflict between two oppositional values within American ideology: on the one hand, civilization, community, and family; and on the other, individualism and freedom of the frontier. Obama similarly attempted to resolve this conflict in his acceptance speech, saying, “while each of us will pursue our individual dreams, we are an American family and we rise or fall together.”

Luckily for me, Meek’s Cutoff belongs to a group of films called Revisionary Westerns, which, since the 1960s, have been breaking down American ideology faster than politicians can rebuild it.

Meek’s Cutoff juxtaposes the mythology of the Western with the grim reality of pioneering, suggesting that the freedom of the frontier only ever existed in our imaginations. Instead of offering the pioneers freedom from societal constraints, the bleak landscapes play host to the relentless persistence of cultural norms. The settlers encounter a Native man, and struggle over whether to kill or enslave him. The female pioneers are consistently relegated to scrubbing dishes and darning socks, while the men make decisions just out of earshot.

Meek’s Cutoff also specifically critiques the filmic Western, invoking its tropes only to debunk them. Meek, the iconic, ruggedly masculine cowboy, spouts as much rhetoric about American freedom as any politician. His authority is consistently undermined, however, as his claim to know the West like the back of his hand amounts to nothing, and the settlers grow more and more disoriented. When the fabled standoff occurs, it doesn’t take place between two cowboys, but between the Native man, a woman, and Meek.

Without the structuring ideology of the Western, the film’s narrative structure collapses, and the viewers become as hopelessly lost as the settlers. Meek’s Cutoff eschews traditional plot structure in favour of slow, subtle movement, so that, thinking back on the film, it becomes impossible to order the events. The seemingly directionless plot is emphasized by the film’s unnavigable physical spaces. The heavily disorienting cinematography makes austere, marker-less landscapes even more confusing for the audience than it is for the settlers.

If Reichardt’s previous films ask how to live in present-day America, Meek’s Cutoff asks how to make an American narrative film when you no longer believe in America. So if you, like me, are sick of being told to have faith in the Star-Spangled Banner, Meek’s Cutoff is just what the doctor ordered.

L.G.H. is a U3 Cultural Studies student. Forays Into Film and Feminism is a bi-weekly column about alternative films, why she likes them, and where to see them.

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The weekly cinema club, which meets at Café Le Cagibi on Monday evenings, screens a mix of cinephile favourites and rough forgotten gems. The entrance fee is “pay-what-you-can,” and the proceeds go toward acquiring films and equipment, most recently, a 16mm projector.

In an interview with The Daily, Tuck explained Cinema 17’s mandate as “if I’m not offending somebody, then I’m not doing it right.”

Tuck has, of course, been doing it right since he first began Cinema 17 in February, as a response to the Quebec student movement. Initially, the club was a platform for films exclusively about strikes.

“I thought this would be a really valuable way of mobilizing support for the strike,” Tuck said. “I was getting into arguments about screenings on the regular.”

After a few months of strike -related films, Cinema 17 broadened its mandate considerably, but continues to showcase subversive material.

“The emphasis is anything marginal, anything that will provoke political discussion, particularly along the lines of race, class, gender and sexuality,” Tuck said.

Last week, Cinema 17 showed Bush Mama, a gorgeous cinéma-vérité-style independent film about a pregnant woman living in the black ghetto of Watts, Los Angeles.

“I actually got an anonymous email from somebody calling me a racist and asking me why I feel I have the right to show this film,” Tuck said. “Of course, the only thing that would be racist is if I didn’t show the film.”

One of Tuck’s resources for films is McGill’s enormous collection of rare experimental 16mm films from the sixties and seventies, that was only recently rediscovered.

“One student in the mid-seventies, this film buff, was using McGill money to amass this collection of experimental films from the sixties and seventies,” Tuck said.

These films sat in a basement deteriorating, Tuck explained, until a member of the McGill staff stumbled upon them, and asked a film professor to come take a look before they were discarded.

The collection includes some films that had their first screenings at Cinema 16, the screening club Cinema 17 models itself after. Operating in New York in the fifties and sixties, Cinema 16 was the first to screen a number of the most important, and most controversial avant-garde films of the time.

Next week, Cinema 17 will continue to challenge its viewers with a screening of LA Plays Itself, a 1972 hardcore gay porn film.

“It was at the vanguard of pornographic film in that era, and helped usher in the period that was called porno-chic,” Tuck said, adding that Salvador Dalí and Groucho Marx were in attendance at some of the film’s first screenings.

While the subject matter may cause some to flinch away, Tuck rightly stressed the importance of gay pornography for the gay civil rights movement, as well as the importance of watching and discussing pornography in general.

“We always facilitate discussions after screenings […] I don’t want people to just come in and watch the films and be on their way without thinking about them,” Tuck said.

Cinema 17 is based on a participatory model, so even if 1970s hardcore gay porn isn’t your thing, you’re welcome to come take in the film and express your views.

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