Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory and Violence
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KILLER IMAGES KILLER IMAGES Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence 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. This edited anthology brings together a range of newly commissioned essays and interviews from the world’s leading academics and documentary lmmakers, including EDITED BY JORAM TEN BRINK & JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER EDITED BY JORAM Benedict 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 nonction lmmaking methods that facilitate communities of survivors to respond to, recover, and redeem a history that KILLER IMAGES sought to physically and symbolically annihilate them. Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence JORAM TEN BRINK is professor of film at the University of Westminster, London, where he is also the director of Doc West, the Centre for Production and Research of Documentary Film. His previous publications include, as editor, Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch (2007). JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER is a filmmaker based in London and Copenhagen. His most recent film is Free Men (2012). He is a founding member of the filmmaking collaboration Vision Machine. He is the co-editor of Acting on AIDS: Sex, Drugs and Politics (1997). ISBN 978-0-231-16335-4 WALLFLOWER PRESS 7802319 163354 EDITED BY JORAM TEN BRINK & JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER cover photo: Waltz with Bashir (2008) © Bridgit Folman Film Gang Killer_Images_cover_revspine.indd 1 19/9/12 22:20:50 KILLER IMAGES killer_images_pages.indb 1 18/9/12 16:51:42 Nonfictions is dedicated to expanding and deepening the range of contemporary documentary studies. It aims to engage in the theoretical conversation about documentaries, open new areas of scholarship, and recover lost or marginalised histories. General Editor, Brian Winston Other titles in the Nonfictions series: Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties by Dave Saunders Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice edited by Alan Grossman and Aine O’Brien The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture edited by Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television by Timothy Boon Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch edited by Joram ten Brink Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain by John Wyver Chavez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised – A Case Study of Politics and the Media by Rod Stoneman Documentary Display: Re-Viewing Nonfiction Film and Video by Keith Beattie The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film by Laura Rascaroli The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary by Alisa Lebow killer_images_pages.indb 2 18/9/12 16:51:42 KILLER IMAGES Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence EDITED BY JORAM TEN BRINK & JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER WALLFLOWER PRESS LONDON & NEW YORK killer_images_pages.indb 3 18/9/12 16:51:43 A Wallower Press Book Published by Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York • Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © Joram ten Brink & Joshua Oppenheimer 2012 All rights reserved. Wallower Press® is a registered trademark of Columbia University Press. A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-231-16334-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-16335-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-85024-7 (e-book) Design by Elsa Mathern Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 killer_images_pages.indb 4 18/9/12 16:51:43 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Notes on Contributors ix Introduction 1 Joram ten Brink & Joshua Oppenheimer (DE)ACTIVATING EMPATHY Publicity and indifference: Media, Surveillance and ‘Humanitarian Intervention’ 15 Thomas Keenan Shooting with Intent: Framing Conict 41 Alisa Lebow Immersion (2009) 63 Harun Farocki Anaesthetising the Image: Immersion, Harun Farcocki 67 Kodwo Eshun Revisiting Rocha’s ‘Aesthetics of Violence’ 80 Michael Chanan MEMORY OF VIOLENCE: VISUALISING TRAUMA Ça va de soi: The Visual Representation of Violence in the Holocaust Documentary 97 Brian Winston Screen Memory in Waltz with Bashir 120 Garrett Stewart Animating Trauma: Waltz with Bashir, David Polonsky 127 Joram ten Brink Spaces of Violence: History, Horror and the Cinema of Kiyoshi Kurosawa 136 Adam Lowenstein On Historical Violence and Aesthetic Form: Jean-Luc Godard’s Allemagne 90 Neuf Zéro 152 Daniel Morgan v killer_images_pages.indb 5 18/9/12 16:51:43 BATTLE FOR HISTORY: APPROPRIATING THE PAST IN THE PRESENT Subverting Dominant Historical Narratives: Avenge But One of My Two Eyes, Avi Mograbi 169 Joram ten Brink Re-enactment, the History of Violence and Documentary Film 176 Joram ten Brink Interpreting Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave 190 Alice Correia Remediating Genocidal Images into Artworks: The Case of the Tuol Sleng Mug Shots 206 Stéphanie Benzaquen Screening the 1965 Violence 224 Ariel Heryanto PERFORMING VIOLENCE Perpetrators’ Testimony and the Restoration of Humanity: S21, Rithy Panh 243 Joshua Oppenheimer The Killer’s Search for Absolution: Z32, Avi Mograbi 256 Joram ten Brink Impunity 268 Benedict Anderson Show of Force: A Cinema-séance of Power and Violence in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt 287 Joshua Oppenheimer & Michael Uwemedimo Misunderstanding images: Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris 311 Joshua Oppenheimer index 325 vi killer_images_pages.indb 6 18/9/12 16:51:43 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The genesis of this volume is the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council- supported research project ‘Genocide and Genre’, awarded to us through the Uni- versity of Westminster. At the core of the project was the making of the lm The Act of Killing (2012) which, alongside the present volume, examines cinema’s unique position in exploring both the routines of violence as well as the rhetoric and imagination that begets violence. The lm and the critical reections in turn grew out of the explorations of the lmmaking collective Vision Machine Film Project. To Vision Machine collaborators Christine Cynn, Andrea Zimmerman and Michael Uwemedimo, words cannot express our debt. Also, deserving special mention is The Act of Killing’s lead producer, Signe Byrge Sørensen. At the University of Westminster, special thanks must be offered to Rosie Thomas and Peter Goodwin who have been a reliable source of encouragement and guidance throughout. We owe special gratitude to Alisa Lebow, who, in addition to contributing to this volume, offered numerous useful suggestions about its form. We are grateful to innumerable colleagues – academics and lmmakers – for their support, inspiration and advice over the three years we have been preparing this book. We would also like to thank the Goethe Institute in London and Birk- beck College of the University of London for hosting several of the events that contributed to the production of this volume. We cannot praise enough the hard work and dedication of Lia Na’ama ten Brink in transcribing and editing the interviews in this volume through the dif- ferent stages of the book’s development. She offered endlessly inspiring and wise insights throughout the process. It is fair to say there would be no book without vii killer_images_pages.indb 7 18/9/12 16:51:43 her help. We would also like to thank the tireless efforts of Yoram Allon and Jodie Taylor of Wallower Press in bringing this book to print. And, of course, last but not least, to all the contributors to this volume, for their insight, original research and patience, a very, very special thank you. Joram ten Brink & Joshua Oppenheimer September 2012 viii killer_images_pages.indb 8 18/9/12 16:51:43 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS BENEDICT ANDERSON, Aaron Binenkorb Professor of International Studies, Emer- itus, Cornell University. Citizen of Ireland. Specialist on the history and politics of Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. Banned from Indonesia between 1972 to 1999. Author of Java in a Time of Revolution (1972), Imagined Communities (1983), Language and Power (1992), The Spectre of Comparisons (1998), Under Three Flags (2005), among other works. Founder and long-time editor of the journal Indonesia. JORAM TEN BRINK is a lmmaker and Professor of Film at the University of West- minster, London, where he is also director of Doc West, the Centre for Production and Research of Documentary Film. His lms have been broadcast and theatri- cally released internationally, and his work has been screened at the Berlin and Rotterdam lm festivals and at MoMA in New York. His previous publications include, as editor, Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch (2007). STÉPHANIE BENZAQUEN is an art historian and curator. She is currently a PhD can- didate at the Centre for Historical Culture, Faculty of History and Arts, Erasmus University Rotterdam. She gained her MA in Art History at the Sorbonne Uni- versity in Paris. Since 1999, she has organised projects and exhibitions in Israel, Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, France and Thailand. MICHAEL CHANAN is a documentarist, author of numerous books on both lm and music, and Professor of Film & Video at the University of Roehampton, London. In the 1980s, he shot a number of lms in Cuba and Latin America, most of them ix killer_images_pages.indb 9 18/9/12 16:51:43 for Channel Four, and published the first edition of his history of Cuban Cinema. He first became involved in Latin American cinema when he curated a retrospec- tive of new Chilean cinema in London in 1976, and recently renewed his interest in that country with ‘Three Short Films About Chile’, shot in 2011.