Silencing Opposition in The Act of Killing (2012) & The Look of Silence (2014)
After spending a number of episodes in the past, today we're jumping to the 2010's. We're looking at two documentaries from Joshua Oppenheimer; The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014). These docs reveal two different aspects of the chilling aftermath of Indonesia’s 1965-66 anticommunist massacres, one looking at the perpetrators and one looking at the legacy of the victims. We also draw on Vincent Bevins’ book The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World for our discussion on how the Washington-backed violence helped install a regime where the perpetrators not only won but shaped the official history ever since. Through state-sponsored propaganda, like Treachery of G30S/PKI (1984), and the active erasure of victims’ stories from cultural memory, the truth went largely unaddressed within broader Indonesian society for decades. What makes these films deeply unsettling isn’t just the brutality (although that is unsettling), but also the lessons they carry for the present. The rhetoric of the need to annihilate political opposition, once used to justify state terror in Indonesia, echoes in today’s right-wing American discourse, where the constant invocation of civil war and the erasure of history are frighteningly familiar. Follow us at: Patreon / Instagram / Letterboxd / Facebook
--------
1:05:52
--------
1:05:52
The Third Generation (1979) & Other Instruments of State Sponsored Terror
After examining Robert Kramer’s Ice (1970) fictionalize America in our last episode, we shift to West Germany to explore another cinematic portrayal of resistance to fascism in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979). Set against West Germany’s postwar society, Fassbinder sharply exposes how insincere revolutionary acts can become hollow gestures, exploited to justify expanded state control and surveillance. Though rooted in 1979, the film eerily anticipates our contemporary world: a society numbed by constant surveillance, manipulated by capitalist tech moguls profiting from manufactured crises, and how citizens are caught in a struggle against the technocratic elites. Additionally, Fassbinder’s overwhelming audio landscape mimics the relentless noise of the modern internet, capturing the exhaustion and confusion of today’s digital age. Drawing connections to our episodes that covered Uptight (1968), Children of Men (2006), and How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022), we ask: what does resistance look like when liberal democracy itself seems to pave the road to authoritarianism? Fassbinder’s vision resonates with our current dark historical moment, where our capacity to imagine alternatives is shrinking, and the internet serves as both a battlefield and a drain on the soul. Follow us at: Patreon / Instagram / Letterboxd / Facebook
--------
48:28
--------
48:28
Urban Guerrillas vs The State in Ice (1970)
On this episode we wanted to see a depiciton of people resisting fascim, so we're looking at an Robert Kramer's Ice (1970). It's our first American film in this series and the resistance we're seeing comes from a cell of New York Urban guerillas. They are fighting a dystopian version of the Nixon administration and its illegal war of imperialism in Mexico. Kramer's film is less a straightforward dystopia thriller than a raw document of the fractured leftist movements trying to organize within the belly of U.S. empire in the late 1960's. Kramer's handheld, on-location shooting style and use of non-actors offers a time capsule not just of American radicalism in 1970, but of filmmaking that rejects Hollywood polish for a Cassavetes style immediacy. Ice is uniquely embedded in the struggles it portrays; Kramer and his peers were activists themselves, not just chroniclers. The result is a film that forgoes easy allegory or procedural clarity and instead immerses viewers in the skepticism, paranoia, and possibility of revolutionary change at a time when history felt radically contingent. Follow us at: Patreon / Instagram / Letterboxd / Facebook
--------
49:14
--------
49:14
Bearing Witness in Gwangju with A Taxi Driver (2017)
On this episode, we're leaving the 1960's behind and jumping to South Korea in 1980. In Jang Hoon's A Taxi Driver (2017) we get a wild sampling of genres in a remarkably well balanced film. It's an action film. A single father supporting his daughter story. It’s dramatic and also quite goofy. It’s based on a actual events, but it’s also highly fictionalized. It documents political history while being oddly apolitical at times. And it's a journalism film too. International treasure Song Kang-ho stars as a Seoul cabbie who's transporting a German journalist to cover what is rumored to be a student protest. They both become unlikely witnesses and participants in the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and the massacre at the hands of governemnt forces. If you're up for a marathon of South Korean films, here is the five film lineup Aaron mentions that covers the politics and events from 1979-1981: The Man Standing Next (2020) The President’s Last Bang (2005) 12.12: The Day (2023) A Taxi Driver (2017) The Attorney (2013) Follow us at: Patreon / Instagram / Letterboxd / Facebook
--------
57:17
--------
57:17
Army of Shadows (1969) & the Weight of Impossible Choices
On this episode, we're staying in the late sixties for one more film as we watch Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows (1969). A haunting portrayal of the French Resistance during the early days of World War II that serves as an existential reflection on what it really takes to fight an occupying force. Melville's muted color palette and precise framing underscore the suffocating atmosphere of occupied France, while also highlighting the moral complexity faced by those fighting fascism. The film presents a sobering look at the personal costs of opposing tyranny and forces the viewer to confront the often futile nature of resistance in the face of overwhelming oppression. The film was dismissed as Gaullist propaganda (which is fair) when it was first released in 1969, but received a much warmer welcome when it was restored and rereleased in 2006. It hits even harder in 2025 America. Follow us at: Patreon / Instagram / Letterboxd / Facebook
Films are cultural artifacts. There is a political and artistic message in every one and we're here to document.
On each episode we pick a film; sometimes current and sometimes from the riches of world cinema’s 100+ year history, and take a deep dive into what the film is really saying about the world. Both overtly and covertly.
Ireland