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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of understanding current realities rather than solely focusing on past events.
Joshua Oppenheimer's quote highlights that while 'The Act of Killing' may be perceived as a historical documentary about the events of 1965, its deeper aim is to shed light on the ongoing culture of fear that persists in society today. By doing so, it encourages viewers to recognize and confront present injustices rather than merely reflecting on historical ones.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the importance of acknowledging ongoing social issues.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No man has a more perfect reliance on the alwise and powerful dispensations _x000D_ of the Supreme Being than I have, nor thinks His aid more necessary.
Arms and laws do not flourish together.
Synergy is the highest activity of life; it creates new untapped alternatives; it values and exploits the mental, emotional, and psychological differences between people.
We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus!
War's a profanity because, let's face it, you've got two opposing sides trying to settle their differences by killing as many of each other as they can.
Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.