Page - 66 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

66 | Freek L. Bakker www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 63–77 become such dreadful murderers. This is Ruzowitzky’s first question, to which he then adds many other questions, thus gradually making his point. The movie is divided into 19 chapters. Many chapters begin with scenes show- ing German soldiers as extracts from letters they wrote home are recited. This start is followed by comments from experts and sometimes elements of already published research, in particular from On Killing by David Grossman.4 Some ex- perts are Jewish, scions of the people that the soldiers tried to exterminate. Oth- ers are not, as in the case of a Polish Roman Catholic priest. An important detour is taken with Bibrika, a chapter about a town of that name in Ukraine. This chap- ter relates how normal life was in this city and how this normality was ended by the murderers. Because of the large number of Jews in the district in which these killing campaigns took place, the area was called Jiddishland. In some plac- es Jews were even in the majority. The film starts by showing images of some of the accused at Nuremberg declaring “not guilty”, and it ends with images of the conviction of all the accused at this trial, followed by pictures of some of these mass killings and an indication of the numbers murdered in these campaigns. The structure of The Act of Killing is completely different. After the quota- tion of Voltaire a big metal fish emerges on the screen, located in a heavenly land- scape. A row of men and women come out of the fish’s mouth performing an Indonesian dance in the splashing of a waterfall. They appear like angels clothed in red and white, the colours of the Indonesian flag, and among them we find An- war Congo, the main protagonist of this film. He too is dancing. Subsequently the story of the film unrolls. The filmmaker interviews proud murderers, Anwar Congo and Herman Koto, and proposes to them that a film be made of the killings so that Hollywood will be able to witness their great actions. I skip over the details here. It is not long before Congo starts to tell about his nightmares. After a scene in which they show how they set fire to houses in a village, Congo is increasingly silence. The heavenly scene returns once, when a victim thanks his murderer for enabling him to go to heaven sooner. At the end of the film, Congo is completely silent. He vomits because of what he has done. It hits him severely. A little later he leaves the place where, at the beginning of the film, he had proudly started to recount his great deeds. He walks through the shop below. His pride is entirely gone. The different cinematic approaches mirror the huge differences between the historical circumstances on which the works draw. Das radikal Böse is a filmic collage about German soldiers, particularly the special death squads (Ein- satzgruppen) that operated in Eastern Europe. They were in a foreign country. They were not killing Germans. Time after time they explain in the film that they had killed Jews to prevent the Jews from killing them. They had to kill the wom- en and the children, because “they”, the propaganda stated, “would do exactly 4 Grossman 1995.