Online Response 2

Documentaries such as The Act of Killing and Night and Fog touch on very serious topics such as genocide, war, and murder. The history behind Night and Fog documented Jews sent to Auschwitz and suffered at the hands of the Nazis. The Act of Killing showed former Indonesian gangsters who committed thousands to millions of murders to preserve their freedoms and are hailed as heroes in their country. But what makes these two documentaries similar to one another?

In Indonesia, communism became popular in the 1960s to the point of panic in their society. Gangsters within that country formed a resistance to expose and murder anyone who was considered Chinese or a communist. The documentary itself recorded the process of making a film with former gangsters to reenact how they treated and killed their political adversaries. Throughout the documentary, viewers will notice that though their intentions were good, there are some similarities between them and the Nazis in Night and Fog.

Night and Fog showed actual footage of naked Jews walking around the concentration camp along with what they went through as victims. If you compare what you see to The Act of Killing, you will notice that far right wing ideology may sometimes not be any different from far left wing ideology. The Jews were victims who were taken against their free will and choice to suffer while the Indonesian communists’ lives were taken after harsh interrogations. When it came to genocide, both groups had different tactics. The Nazis placed the Jews in concentration camps and half starved them to the point of dying from malnutrition, disease, or the gas chamber. The gangsters personally hunted down each communist, questioned them, twisted their statements in newspaper articles, and executed them when they were no longer needed. So is their genocide any different? If you notice the enormous piles of Jewish women’s hair, they represented each life lost, and if you compare to the millions of communists killed in Indonesia, you will notice that no matter how it is done, genocide will always be genocide.

As for the topic of war, both have similarities. Night and Fog made it clear that their supposed enemies were the Jews while The Act of Killing stresses that their enemies were the communists.

I feel that both documentaries take a twist on the expository mode. Night and Fog had captions that explained what the old buildings of Auschwitz used to be and juxtaposed the footage of the Jews in the past to the present day to show that what had happened there will always remain a dark history as long as the sight is preserved. The Act of Killing had the people they filmed talk directly at the camera in certain settings as if they were formally addressing us the audience as they uncomfortably talked about how they went about trying to defend their freedoms in their own unique way then also juxtapose their thoughts with the movie they made based on their history to show that their actions still left a significant impact on their lives and in society. Thus we can see that even though both groups had different ideas about to treat their enemies, they were quite similar.