For his documentary The Act of Killing (2012), the director Joshua Oppenheimer invited perpetrators of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-1966 to retell and dramatically reenact their crimes, using the conven tions of film genres that they could choose themselves.
The ensuing reenactments were a disturbing display of costumes and violence. Not all critics applauded the director’s approach. In a 2013 review in Film Quarterly, Nick Fraser called the film artificial and pretentious and argued that The Act of Killing, with its flamboyant reenactments, undercut the very promise of the documentary genre:
I’m sure that The Act of Killing could have been made in a less “out-there fashion” and still have attracted its share of audiences and prizes.
I don’t believe that so much artifice is required, or indeed appropriate. What I like most about documentary film is that anything that can be made to work should be given a chance. You can mix up fact and fiction, past and present. You can add to the cold objective look a degree of empathy. You will of course lie to participants, in particular when they wish not to divulge important pieces of information. Trickery has its place, too. But documentary films arise, surely, from the not inconsiderable belief that it is good to be literal as well as truthful. In a makeshift, fallible way, they tell us what the world is really like. (p. 22)This chapter—building on work by documentary scholars such as Bill Nichols and Stella Bruzzi—challenges the claim that the strength of documentary film resides in its truthfulness and literality. In addition to the aforementioned The Act of Killing, we discuss Waltz with Bashir (2008) and The Missing Picture (2013). All three documentaries self-reflexively employ forms of reenactment to address 20th-century histories of mass violence. In these films, reenactment can serve different purposes: it is employed, for instance, as a self-conscious exploration of how one might narrativize traumatic histories. But restagings and reconstructions are also used to reject altogether the possibility of cognitive mastery over histories of unfathomable horror. In addition, the dramatic reenactments are structured to mimic
DOI: 10.4324/9780429445668-21
Performing Violence 309 the “repetition compulsion” of the traumatized mind. What these films share is an interest not merely in history per se but in the epistemological and ethical problems inherent in any representation of a violent historical episode. Trauma is pivotal, and its centrality in these films comes with the awareness that it is not possible, or at best not sufficient, to merely document the past in a “truthful,” literal way.