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The Dialectic of Truth and Fiction in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing
The Act of Killing is a documentary film on the Indonesian genocide that took place between October 1965 and March 1966, during which time an estimated 500,000 to 2.5 million accused communists, including landless farmers, unionized workers, labour organizers, intellectuals and ethnic Chinese Indonesians, were killed. However, much of the film is dedicated to fictional re-enactments of the 1965–66 killings. Oppenheimer’s approach is to bring into relief the contours of the extermination of communists in Indonesia by inviting former death-squad leaders and paramilitary gangsters to re-enact the killings in whatever ways they choose. They opt at times for a realist aesthetic and at other times for genres as diverse as Hollywood westerns, film noir gangster movies, and glitzy musicals. The text explores the aesthetic and political consequences springing from this modality of representation while comparing the film to other representative testimonial documentaries of genocides and extermination.
On the Act of Looking
This collection of essays by film scholars, art historians, historians, political scientists, philosophers, Indonesian human rights activists and creative writers look at Joshua Oppenheimer's diptych The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence as a cinematic event that opens up a host of interrelated questions on historical memory, truth and reconciliation, and the limits of documentary filmmaking. Featuring a new interview with Joshua Oppenheimer himself, On the Act of Looking affirms Oppenheimer's use of fiction and manipulation as a technique to expose, contrary to the classic documentary form, not so much a reality behind the appearance of things, but how appearance as such can become a site of intervention, or truth-telling. The collection answers, from multiple perspectives, why the film not only has received near universal praise and admiration but also why this praise is often qualified by surprise and fascination.
Killer Images
Cinema has long shaped not only how mass violence is perceived but also how it is performed. Today, when media coverage is central to the execution of terror campaigns and news anchormen serve as embedded journalists, a critical understanding of how the moving image is implicated in the imaginations and actions of perpetrators and survivors of violence is all the more urgent. If the cinematic image and mass violence are among the defining features of modernity, the former is significantly implicated in the latter, and the nature of this implication is the book's central focus. This book brings together a range of newly commissioned essays and interviews from the world's leading academics and documentary filmmakers, including Ben Anderson, Errol Morris, Harun Farocki, Rithy Phan, Avi Mograbi, Brian Winston, and Michael Chanan. Contributors explore such topics as the tension between remembrance and performance, the function of moving images in the execution of political violence, and nonfiction filmmaking methods that facilitate communities of survivors to respond to, recover, and redeem a history that sought to physically and symbolically annihilate them
The Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Film and Media
The chapters contained in this handbook address key issues concerning the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of violence in film and media. In addition to providing analyses of representations of violence, they also critically discuss the phenomenology of the spectator, images of atrocity in international cinema, affect and documentary, violent video games, digital infrastructures, cruelty in art cinema, and media and state violence, among many other relevant topics. The Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Film and Media updates existing studies dealing with media and violence while vastly expanding the scope of the field. Representations of violence in film and media are ubiquitous but remain re...
Introduction to Documentary, Fourth Edition
The fourth edition of Bill Nichols's best-selling text, Introduction to Documentary, has been vastly altered in its entirety to bring this indispensable textbook up to date and reconceptualize aspects of its treatment of documentaries past and present. Here Nichols, with Jaimie Baron, has edited each chapter for clarity and ease of use and expanded the book with updates and new ideas. Featuring abundant examples and images, Introduction to Documentary, Fourth Edition is designed to facilitate a rich understanding of how cinema can be used to document the historical world as it is seen by a wide variety of filmmakers. Subjectivity, expressivity, persuasiveness, and credibility are crucial fac...
Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture
This book responds to the failures of human rights—the way its institutions and norms reproduce geopolitical imbalances and social exclusions—through an analysis of how literary and visual culture can make visible human rights claims that are foreclosed in official discourses. Moore draws on theories of vulnerability, precarity, and dispossession to argue for the necessity of recognizing the embodied and material contexts of human rights subjects. At the same time, she demonstrates how these theories run the risk of reproducing the structural imbalances that lie at the core of critiques of human rights. Pairing conventional human rights genres—legal instruments, human rights reports, r...
Cinematic Ethics
How do movies evoke and express ethical ideas? What role does our emotional involvement play in this process? What makes the aesthetic power of cinema ethically significant? Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film addresses these questions by examining the idea of cinema as a medium of ethical experience with the power to provoke emotional understanding and philosophical thinking. In a clear and engaging style, Robert Sinnerbrink examines the key philosophical approaches to ethics in contemporary film theory and philosophy using detailed case studies of cinematic ethics across different genres, styles, and filmic traditions. Written in a lucid and lively style that will engage both specialist and non-specialist readers, this book is ideal for use in the academic study of philosophy and film. Key features include annotated suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter and a filmography of movies useful for teaching and researching cinematic ethics.
Guilt
"The book investigates the role of guilt in the global discussion over locally specific legacies of mass violence and injustice. Guilt is an indispensable element in human social and emotional life that surfaces as a central phenomenon in the cultural politics of memory, transitional justice, and the aftermath of violence. The nuances and complexities of various national and historical guilt configurations fosters insight into guilt's transformative possibilities. The book interweaves specific case studies with broader theoretical reflections on the conditions that turn the emotional, legal, and cultural phenomenon of guilt into a culturally transformative dynamic that repairs relationships,...
Contesting Torture
This edited volume seeks to contest prevailing assumptions about torture and to consider why, despite its illegality, torture continues to be widely employed and misrepresented. The resurgence of torture and public justifications of it led to the central questions that this inter-disciplinary volume seeks to address: How is it possible for torture to be practiced when it is legally prohibited? What kinds of moves do agents make that render torture palatable? Why do so many ignore the evidence that torture is ineffective as an intelligence-gathering technique? Who are the victims of torture? The various contributors in the book look to history, the practices of interrogators, artistic represe...
A Medium Seen Otherwise
"Having undergone profound material, aesthetic, and institutional transformations since the arrival of digital technologies, photography and film frequently intersect in the processes of convergence (the shared technological basis of diverse media in digital code) and remediation (the mutual reshaping of old and new media). However, the foundational relations between film and photography have a long history extending well back into the nineteenth century. This history includes many acclaimed practitioners who have worked in both media, such as Albert Kahn, Helen Levitt, Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, Robert Frank, Wim Wenders, Abbas Kiarostami, and Fiona Tan, but it also involves a range of intermedial forms that combine elements of both media, such as the film still, the film photonovel, and the photofilm. These hybrid forms were long neglected critically because they were considered marginal forms of paratextuality or deviations from medium specificity-the idea that a medium must be deployed according to its own specific capacities compared to other media"--
