In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.
Interpretation
Documentary filmmaking often portrays victims in a way that serves the filmmaker's emotional needs rather than truly representing their stories.
In this quote, Joshua Oppenheimer critiques the common practice in documentary filmmaking of focusing on victims' stories. He suggests that filmmakers frequently adopt a patronizing perspective, using the narratives more to comfort themselves and affirm their own moral standing rather than sincerely engaging with the realities of those they depict. This reflection reveals the complexities of storytelling in documentaries, where the motives behind representation can influence the authenticity and depth of the narrative.
In practice
This quote can be used in a panel discussion about ethics in documentary filmmaking.
If we don't accept the uncomfortable proposition that every perpetrator of virtually every act of evil in our history has been a human being like us, then we actually foreclose the possibility of understanding how we do this to one another and therefore make it impossible to figure out how we might prevent these things.
My father's family was mostly obliterated in the Holocaust, and I grew up very much with the sense that the central moral and political question is how do we prevent these things from happening again.
I went looking for embodiments of pure evil, but found ordinary people.
We are constantly - in order to cope with painful realities - shuffling through third-rate, half-remembered fantasies taken from movies, from TV, from people we admire. We do this individually, we do it collectively - we tell stories to escape our most painful truths.
People may assume 'The Act of Killing' is a historical documentary about what happened in 1965. But our purpose was to expose a present-day regime of fear for what it is.
I think 'The Act of Killing' forced people to look at the problem, but the problem is actually a state run by thugs, or a shadow state, a part of the state that's run by thugs, and a military that enjoys complete legal - not just impunity, but immunity.
I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.
Wearing clothes should be a personal narrative of emotion. I always respond to fashion in an emotional way.
These, too, seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.
Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world.
Photography is a response that has to do with the momentary recognition of things. Suddenly you're alive. A minute later there was nothing there. I just watched it evaporate. You look one moment and there's everything, next moment it's gone. Photography is very philosophical.
When I have worries, fears or a love affair, I have the luck of being able to transform it into a poem.
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