The Fever Dream of Documentary a Conversation with Joshua Oppenheimer Author(S): Irene Lusztig Source: Film Quarterly, Vol
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The Fever Dream of Documentary A Conversation with Joshua Oppenheimer Author(s): Irene Lusztig Source: Film Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Winter 2013), pp. 50-56 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2014.67.2.50 Accessed: 16-05-2017 19:55 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film Quarterly This content downloaded from 143.117.16.36 on Tue, 16 May 2017 19:55:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE FEVER DREAM OF DOCUMENTARY: A CONVERSATION WITH JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER Irene Lusztig In the haunting final sequence of Joshua Oppenheimer’s with an elegiac blue light. The camera tracks as she passes early docufiction film, The Entire History of the Louisiana a mirage-like series of burning chairs engulfed in flames. Purchase (1997), his fictional protagonist Mary Anne Ward The scene has a kind of mysterious, poetic force: a woman walks alone at the edge of the ocean, holding her baby in wandering alone in the smoke, the unexplained (and un- a swaddled bundle. It is dawn and the scene is suffused explainable) lyricism of the flaming chairs, the intensely saturated color of 16mm film. This dreamlike cinematic fragment is a fitting introduction to Oppenheimer’s work, a consummate example of what Oppenheimer himself calls the fever dream that has been at the core of his filmic explorations along the edges of documentary and fiction. Born in Texas in 1974, Joshua Oppenheimer was raised between Washington, DC, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Oppenheimer’s early works, the black-and-white dreams- cape These Places We’ve Learned to Call Home (1996)—in which Oppenheimer passes himself off to militia group members as an alien abductee—and the above-mentioned Louisiana Purchase—an exuberantly inventive, hallucina- tory blend of performance, documentary interview, staged Super 8 home movies, B-movie monsters, and archival footage—were both projects that emerged from years of infiltration-based creative practice in which Oppenheimer penetrated right-wing militias, white-supremacist groups, UFO abductee groups, and cults. Indeed, infiltrative work, both the performance of the infiltration itself through the use of aliases and alter egos and the extensive documentary material generated from these processes (recordings of phone conversations, militia meetings, and interviews with group members), became in Oppenheimer’s early projects a profoundly affecting means of engaging in a phantasma- goric collective portraiture. It yielded a meditation on the dark heart of our political consciousness. Taken together, these two early projects provide an Joshua Oppenheimer behind the camera on location in early glimpse into Oppenheimer’s inspired methods of Indonesia. working across boundaries of fiction and documentary— a looseness very much influenced by and in conversation Film Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 2, pps 50–56, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. with the pioneering work of Oppenheimer’s mentor, Ser- © 2014 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content bian filmmaker Dusˇan Makavejev, with whom he trained through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http:// at Harvard. In both These Places and Louisiana Purchase, www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2014.67.2.50 fictional narratives are deployed to activate a heightened 50 WINTER 2013 This content downloaded from 143.117.16.36 on Tue, 16 May 2017 19:55:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms and intensely performative documentary space, one that exceeded the bounds of realism to form a new topography of the human imagination. In 1997, Oppenheimer left the United States. He lived for many years in London, where he completed a practice- based PhD in filmmaking at Central Saint Martins Uni- versity of the Arts and was a founding member of the Vision Machine Film Collective, and then relocated to Copenhagen, where he is now based. In 2002, Oppenhei- mer and his filmmaking collaborator Christine Cynn were commissioned to create a film project in Sumatra for the International Union of Food and Agriculture Workers. Living for months outside of Medan in a village of palm oil plantation workers, Oppenheimer and Cynn ran inten- sive workshops in filmmaking and globalization studies with plantation workers, who became the collective authors of the profoundly collaborative film project that resulted. Initially envisioned as a case study-based training film for other food and agriculture workers worldwide, The Globalisation Tapes (2003), a self-proclaimed film ‘‘by workers for workers,’’ draws generatively from the meth- ods of Jean Rouch and from Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed to create a work that transcends its agitprop origins. In retrospect, the project feels very much like a laboratory for the ideas, methods, and themes of The Act of Killing: it invites its subjects to participate in the making of the film and uses tactics that are now staples of Oppen- Joshua Oppenheimer documents the restaging of heimer’s working method, as seen for instance in a startling a village massacre by paramilitary death squads for scene of plantation workers staging an ironically upbeat The Act of Killing. commercial for Gramoxone, the toxic pesticide that is lit- erally poisoning them. a great pleasure to reconnect with Oppenheimer over Most significantly, The Globalisation Tapes reveals Skype for this interview. Oppenheimer’s earliest meeting with a genocide perpetra- tor, Sharman Sinaga, who casually describes his killing Irene Lusztig: Primo Levi talks about perpetrators techniques in front of his enthusiastic wife, blase´ grand- as primary witnesses, the only ones who have a daughter, and Oppenheimer’s tellingly shaky camera. It is real understanding of the system that allows gen- this cinematic encounter that critically signals the genesis ocide to happen—a point that your film makes 1 of what has become the singular mission of Oppenheimer’s as well. extraordinary work of the last decade, work that has gen- Joshua Oppenheimer: We first filmed with perpetra- erated both The Act of Killing and a forthcoming compan- tors while making The Globalisation Tapes for one reason: ion film portraying Indonesian genocide survivors. survivors told us that ‘‘this neighbor was a death squad It has been my own good fortune to have known leader, and he might have information about how our loved Oppenheimer for the past seventeen years, since meeting ones died.’’ Because all that the survivors knew was that as undergraduates studying film at Harvard. I was briefly their relatives had been taken away and never came back. in Sumatra in 2002 to help with field editing on The They never got a confirmation that they had been killed by Globalisation Tapes, and since that time I have followed the state. In using paramilitary civilian death squads, the with fascination (and occasional worry) the progress, state was trying to pretend it was not involved—this was completion, and extraordinary international reception a way of outsourcing the killing. If you want to study kill- of the project that has become The Act of Killing.Itwas ing, you have to look at the people who do it. FILM QUARTERLY 51 This content downloaded from 143.117.16.36 on Tue, 16 May 2017 19:55:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms In Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), too, the perpetra- empathy and repulsion: empathy for human beings who tors are the ones who know what happened. In Shoah,the are likeable, repulsion for the horrible things they’ve done, bystanders only have glimpses, and everybody who pro- but also empathy for a man who is tormented by what he vides details about what happened is either a perpetrator has done but lacks the courage and the space to express or a slave laborer forced to participate in perpetrating the it ... Holocaust. Lanzmann draws a red line around the ques- tion of why the perpetrators did what they did. I don’t Lusztig: The strongest moments in the film for draw that line. By approaching them as human beings, I me are the reenactments in which people’s bodies try to understand how. Through the question of how they are overtaken by something that’s outside of their live with what they’ve done, how they narrate what they’ve control, outside of their performative intention: the done, how they want to be seen, and how they see them- arm that can’t stop twitching in the film noir scene is selves, I then try to glimpse why they did what they did at almost a kind of psychosis, where history comes up in the body. the time. Lanzmann famously said that it’s obscene to ask that question ‘‘why.’’ I utterly disagree. I think if we want Oppenheimer: I’m always looking in the shooting for to understand how human beings do this to each other— the moments where the mask falls. Film is a terrible because every act of evil in our history has been committed medium for words—it’s a medium for subtext. It’s great by human beings—we have to look at the people who do it when people don’t believe the words they are saying, and if as human beings and understand how and why they do you can see that in any way on their face.