To See Die, Again: The Act of Filming and<i>The Act of Killing</i>

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.

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The truth of reenactments: reliving, reconstructing, and contesting history in documentaries on genocide

Koch

2023

Studies in Documentary Film

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This article seeks to renegotiate the relationship between reenactment, truth, history, and the archive in documentaries on genocide. It moves away from the common binaries surrounding the supposed creativity and fictionality of reenactments as opposed to the evidentiary and static archive, and instead reads reenactments as facilitating access to truth. Through four case studies of Claude Lanzmann 's Shoah (1985), Laurence Rees's Auschwitz: The Nazis and the "Final Solution" (2005), Rithy Panh's The Missing Picture (2013), and Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012), it contends that reenactments in documentaries on genocide problematize the associations of an image's supposed indexical link to a past event with truth. Instead, reenactments confront us with the constructed nature of historical narrative and enable us to see affective, factual, and ethical truths of the past unavailable through the archive.

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To See Die, Again: The Act of Filming andThe Act of Killing

Cited by 4 publications

References 10 publications

When Anwar Congo meets Randall Collins (while George Herbert Mead lingers in the background): The Act of Killing als Inspiration für gewaltsoziologische Reflexionen

When Anwar Congo meets Randall Collins (while George Herbert Mead lingers in the background): The Act of Killing als Inspiration für gewaltsoziologische Reflexionen

Perpetrating Narrative: The Ethics of Unreliable Narration in the Act of Killing

The truth of reenactments: reliving, reconstructing, and contesting history in documentaries on genocide

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