“Joshua Oppenheimer’s Cold War Between Thought and Expression.” Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Meeting. March 31-April 3, 2022. Chicago. Panel on “New Global Perspectives on the Cold War and Political Violence.” Fabrizio Cilento (Messiah University); Chair & Organizer. Massimiliano Delfino (Northwestern University); Co-Chair.

—-. Film Area Session. Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Annual Meeting. April 13-16, 2022. Organizers: Fabrizio Cilento (Messiah University) and Anna Weinstein (Kennesaw University).

Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentaries The Act of Killing (2012) and its companion The Look of Silence (2014) reconstruct the Indonesian killings of 1965-1966 with the help of their perpetrators, paired with an impressive theoretical apparatus displayed by the director and executive producers Errol Morris and Werner Herzog (who in turn are influential documentarians). The debate surrounding the two features at times becomes as fascinating as the actual documentaries, and was delivered via academic book collections, television interviews, newspaper editorials, pieces published on personal blogs, and the Criterion Collection DVD and Blu Ray extras. The assumption is that mass violence and its spectacularization have become a defining characteristic of the Cold War era, when it was imagined that the world was divided in three. In this context, Oppenheimer brings into circle multiple references to the history of Asian cinema, decolonization, international politics, and the American cultural and military hegemony. When film reconstructs (in ways that are always inevitably arbitrary and never fully accurate) events such as warfare and genocide, it influences not only how political abuses are perceived, but also how they are performed, with the cinematic imagination often implicated in the annihilation machinery. Such strategies of circulation bring Oppenheimer into an autofictional terrain: like his controversial subjects, he ends up playing himself in front of the camera or on the written page, with risk of jamming the critical reception of his works in the act of legitimizing them. In doing so, peripheral Cold War narratives and aesthetics become for the director a powerful expedient to fashion his authorial identity as the last epigone of his illustrious producers. 

Bibliography

Ames, Eric. Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2012. 

Altman, Jason. “New interview with Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The Act of Killing.” In Morris, Eroll, dir. The Thin Blue Line. Criterion Collection, 2015. Blu-ray. 

Oppenheimer, Joshua, and Joram Ten Brink. Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory, and the Performance of Violence. New York: Wallflower Press, 2012. 

Romijn, Peter, ed. et als. Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in the East and the West. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2012. 

Schultheis Moore, Alexandra. “Film After Atrocity: An Interview with Joshua Oppenheimer.” In Schultheis Moore, Alexandra and Sophia A. McClennen, eds. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights. London, Routledge, 2015, pp. 480-499.