Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Westminster
The Act of Killing (2012)
A film in three versions: 159-minute director’s cut; 115-minute version; 95-minute broadcast version.
A documentary film project exploring performative methods to investigate the 1965-66 genocide in Indonesia and its current ramifications. As of 31 October 2013, The Act of Killing has won 31 awards, including the Berlinale Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary 2013; Berlinale Panorama Prize of the Ecumenical Jury 2013 and 2013 Danish Academy Award for Best Documentary (Robert Prize). The film has achieved substantial funding, including: AHRC; Danish Film Institute; Channel 4 and Norwegian Film Institute.
DVDs of the film’s three versions and further documentation of research dimensions are provided in the portfolio.
Building on the work of Claude Lanzmann (‘forensic documentary’) and Jean Rouch (reflexive provocation), the film explores the 1965-66 Indonesian genocide as a case study. Practice-based research updates these earlier methods to a contemporary framework by deploying them to explore the Indonesian genocide’s present-day legacy. The film explores how cinematic genres are directly implicated in acts of mass-violence and genocide; the use of feedback as a documentary tool to confront perpetrators of violence with their re-enactments; and the role of cinematic genres in the construction of dramatic scenes within a documentary film. The research entailed filming and analysing interviews and re-enactments with 41 perpetrators in regions where the massacres had never before been studied. From this, a film-making method was devised to analyse the remembrance and performance of mass violence, comprising five years of shooting and three years of editing, the latter to reduce 1,200 hours of material to the three versions of the film. Oppenheimer worked as researcher, director, co-producer, co-cinematographer and co-translator. This formally innovative film contributes to understandings of how individuals and groups perform, remember and recount acts of genocidal violence. It reveals the motives behind such accounts, the genres and grammars that shape them, as well as their consequences. It recovers crucial details about the genocide itself, and analyses the genres and grammars through which both political violence and its subsequent official history have been staged in Indonesia. Through the perpetrators’ re-enactments – and observational footage documenting their filmmaking process – it reveals how perpetrators wish to be seen, and how they imagine themselves and the society they have built. The Act of Killing pioneers a new approach to nonfiction film-making, and investigations of both political violence and the social imagination.
Research and production took nine years. Preliminary work produced 400 hours' footage of reenactments with 41 perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide in regions where the massacres had never been studied. From this, Oppenheimer devised complex film-making methods to analyse the remembrance and performance of political violence, revealing dynamics of impunity and effects of guilt on individuals and societies. Over three years’ further shooting and two years’ editing, Oppenheimer served as director, producer, researcher, cinematographer and translator. Post-production entailed directing two full-time editors working simultaneously to shape 1,200 hours’ footage into three different versions of the film (festival, theatrical and broadcast).
