Joshua Oppenheimer gives perpetrators room to stage their own stories, with disturbing results. We strongly recommend The Act of Killing, while wanting more of the history beyond the men’s accounts.
Fi1m perspective
In The Act of Killing (2012), the men responsible for mass killings choose the film genres in which to restage their crimes. Oppenheimer gives them room to enjoy the exercise, and their enthusiasm makes accusation almost unnecessary. We were disturbed by their eagerness to turn what they had done into entertainment. They want to be watched, and his method makes us uncomfortable about continuing to watch. It is forceful documentary-making, with a serious gap in the history it provides.
His interest in invented and recorded behaviour was there in the early short The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase (1997), which mixes real and faux documentary material. Work with plantation workers on The Globalisation Tapes took him to Indonesia in 2001–02, leading to nearly a decade spent on The Act of Killing. His collaborators include co-directors Christine Cynn and an anonymous Indonesian colleague, alongside producer Signe Byrge Sørensen. The willingness to let subjects shape their own appearance is central to what makes his method work.
In The Act of Killing, that freedom lets us see how the perpetrators understand themselves, rather than merely hear what they did. Their wish to make an appealing screen appearance is recognisable, which is part of the discomfort; it does not make their crimes forgivable. But Oppenheimer stays so close to their imaginations that he leaves too much unexplained about the circumstances that enabled the killings and protected the killers afterwards. We need more than their accounts to understand the Indonesian killings of 1965.
The Look of Silence (2014) shifts attention towards a survivor confronting perpetrators and the lasting effects on victims’ families. For his first narrative feature, The End (2024), he turns to a post-apocalyptic musical about a wealthy family in a bunker. Guilt and self-deception remain his subjects. Begin with The Act of Killing, and seek a fuller historical account alongside it.
Biography
Joshua Oppenheimer is an American and British film director. He was born on 23 September 1974 in Texas, USA, and is based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He studied filmmaking at Harvard College, where he received a BA summa cum laude, and later earned a PhD from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, as a Marshall Scholar.
Oppenheimer is best known for the documentaries The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), both concerning the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66. His narrative feature debut, The End (2024), is a post-apocalyptic musical that he also co-wrote. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2014 and has won a BAFTA and other major awards.
