This article analyses the ethics of unreliable narration in Oppenheimer's 2012 documentary The Act of Killing, in which perpetrators of the 1965-1966 Indonesian massacres of supposed communists reenact their crimes. By showing the perpetrators' gleeful depictions of their murderous histories, Oppenheimer breaks with numerous conventions of representing genocidal perpetrators to spectacular effect and much critical controversy. The documentary relies on a sophisticated toolset to expose the perpetrators' narratives as unreliable. I argue that the unreliability we encounter in the film is not focused on the axis of facts, as many critics discussing the supposed fictionality of the reenactments contend, but on the axes of perception and, most importantly, ethics. The conventions of representing genocidal perpetrators have been formed in post-genocidal contexts in which the perpetrators have been condemned (most dominantly the Holocaust), but in Indonesia these perpetrators still wield power with impunity. This circumstance demanded a new filmic approach. I argue that The Act of Killing exposes the perpetrators as unreliable narrators in an Indonesian socio-political context that celebrates them and shows the deeply troubling ethics of these narratives.

This article explores Paul Celan's poetics of the image. Beginning with a close analysis of his text ‘Edgar Jené. Der Traum vom Traume’, the article seeks to demonstrate that Celan's conception of the image is informed by a long theological and philosophical tradition of thinking about the image as constituted by ‘Urbild’ and ‘Abbild’. The article then traces attenuated elements of this discourse, as reformed by Celan's translation of the painter Jean Bazaine's writing on painting, and his own readings of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, in his later poetological writings on the image surrounding his ‘Meridian’ speech.

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This article discusses Paul Celan’s conception of the image through a close reading of his poem “Wortaufschüttung.” It reveals Celan’s engagement with allegory and baroque notions of the image as a sign which can only signify the absence of that which it presents. Yet Celan does not confine himself to such a negative, apophatic mode of expression. Thus, for Celan, poetry can testify to an originary speech that goes beyond mere negative signification. While the article concentrates on the image in Celan’s “Wortaufschüttung,” the introduction and conclusion suggest that the notion of the image discussed extends beyond the poem’s boundaries and informs Celan’s poetry and poetics more generally.

This article seeks to renegotiate Walter Benjamin's conception of allegory as an image that is a “fragment [… in which] the false appearance of totality is extinguished” ( 1998 , p. 176) in the context of Welles's The Trial. According to Benjamin, the allegorical image embodies its own limitations, displaying where its visuality falters. This article lifts Benjamin's notion of the allegorical image from its specific German Baroque discursive context and superimposes it onto the moving images of Welles's film. Welles's images in The Trial seem to perennially question their ability to meaningfully capture or represent the nature of the law. The faltering of the image is also apparent in Welles's use of cinematography, when offscreen space irrupts into Welles's images in unforeseeable ways, suggesting the powerlessness of the image over what is imposed upon it. In their displaying an absence of representation, Welles's images seem allegorical in Benjamin's sense.