Output details

Killer images: documentary film, memory and the performance of violence

The output submitted comprises Oppenheimer’s co-editorship of these collected essays and interviews, one co-authored chapter, a co-authored introduction, and two extended interviews that he conducted and edited. This research was developed alongside Oppenheimer’s film production work (Outputs 2 and 3), as part of the AHRC-funded Genocide and Genre research project (2008-11). Crucial to the book’s development were public symposia and screenings that Oppenheimer co-organised, featuring three filmmakers: Harun Farocki (19/2/09), Rithy Panh (7/2/09), and Peter Watkins (4/6/09). Unlike most studies of cinema and violence, which focus on representation of violence in film and television, Killer Images interrogates complex mutual implications of cinema, on the one hand, and the performance and remembrance of mass-violence, on the other. If the cinematic image and mass violence are among the defining features of modernity, the former is significantly implicated in the latter, and the nature of this implication is the book's central focus. Oppenheimer’s co-authored chapter ‘Show of Force’ (originally published in Critical Quarterly, 51:1, 2009) offers his own close reading of performances by two perpetrators whom he filmed at the earliest stage of his project on the 1965 Indonesian genocide. Oppenheimer and Uwemedimo focus on footage of two death squad members’ visit to the site where they helped the army kill 10,500 people. The perpetrators’ re-enactments are analysed as performance, opening a critical space to investigate the generic codes and conventions that structure such performance, as well as the performative effects of such boasting, on Indonesian society. Oppenheimer also contributed two extended interviews (as analytical discussions) with filmmakers whose work investigates the use of moving images in the execution and cover-up of violence (Morris); who have developed filmmaking methods to recover embodied memories of violence (Panh, Morris); or whose films articulate and intervene in discursive and imaginative structures justifying violence (Morris).