Waltzing with Bashir: perpetrator trauma and cinema (original) (raw)
Related papers
Witnessing the perpetrator: testimony and accountability in current Israeli documentary film
Routledge eBooks, 2023
The article critically examines the ethical stance taken by two Israeli documentary films dealing with perpetrator-victim positions: Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Avi Mograbi's Z32 (2008). These films, we argue, are seeking for new aesthetic strategies of representing past traumatic events as well as critically and innovatively exploring the ethical position of the perpetrator. At the same time, these films challenge the traditional distinctions between documentary and fiction, reference and representation. The films seek, both aesthetically and ethically, to raise questions regarding the representation of the perpetrator during the First Lebanon War and the Second Intifada without offering a redemptive narrative for Israelis. Through their use of testifiers and testimonies these documentary films challenge the traditional opposed positions of victim/perpetrator.
With the diptych that comprises the films The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), Joshua Oppenheimer and his collaborators create a full portrait of present-day Indonesia, where the ghosts of the genocide that took the lives of more than half a million people still linger. The filmmaker asserts that neither of his films attempt to represent the genocide. Instead, they explore the vestiges that Indonesia’s traumatic past has left in an ailing present, through two strategies: first, The Act of Killing examines the stories, fantasies and false myths that the perpetrators create to be able to live with their heinous past, and how they see themselves and want to be seen; and then, The Look of Silence uses the perpetrators’ testimonies to instigate a kind of political intervention in Indonesian society that would allow the victims to finally confront the killers. It is a dual story that poses various dilemmas for the spectator, ranging from the ethics of the filmmaker to the ontology of the documentary making itself.
La production cinématographique italienne s’est nettement emparée, depuis la fin des années 1990, de la période dite des ‘années de plomb’, avec des ambitions et dans des registres divers, du film noir à la fresque historique, en passant par le drame intimiste. L’objet de cet article est d’examiner spécifiquement, et en particulier dans les œuvres les plus récentes, comment une parole singulière, celle du terroriste, peut être portée à l’écran, et ainsi s’articuler avec les aspects historiques, psychologiques et narratifs du récit. Aussi, de la rhétorique de la confession à l’ambiguïté du repentir (La Meglio Gioventù, 2003, Arrivederci amore, ciao, 2006), le cinéma peut-il apparaître comme une manière paradoxale de verbaliser les crises politiques, de mettre en mots, par le biais de la mise en images. En donnant par exemple la parole à des héros, d’ailleurs le plus souvent des anti-héros, qui commentent leur propre chute dans la violence ou la contestation armée (Prima linea, 2009), c’est en effet bien un discours que l’on construit, sur les formes légitimes ou illégitimes de la contestation, sur le sens et la portée de l’action individuelle dans une conjoncture politique, mais aussi et surtout sur la signification d’une histoire politique encore douloureuse. Que le cinéma puisse ainsi permettre de dire, ou de faire dire, doit toutefois nous conduire à interroger les finalités de ce didactisme, parfois explicite (Mio fratello è figlio unico, 2007 ; Una storia italiana, 2010). Car si l’on attend du terroriste une parole de repentir, c’est d’emblée qu’on lui ôte la dimension d’un témoignage historique, ou d’un choix politique : le cinéma renoue ici avec ces racines tragiques, puisqu’il se fait alors mise en scène de la faute, et de son expiation.
Identification with Victimhood in Recent Cinema
Two recent political films: Steven Spielberg’s Munich and Hany Abu-Assad Paradise Now connect violence with the logic of identifying with the victim. This is the opposite of the well known dynamics of identifying with the aggressor. In the latter, the victim mentally transports herself to the position of power and enjoys her humiliation and suffering from over there. Conversely, identifying with the victim allows the perpetrator of violence to enjoy the moral superiority of the victim and so justify her own aggression. I contrast this dynamics with the rhetoric’s of heroism, and claim that in the Israeli-Palestinian context, the conflict in the public sphere is a conflict over the status of victimhood.
European Journal of Cultural Studies
Oppenheimer describes The Act of Killing as a ‘documentary about the imagination. We are documenting the ways we imagine ourselves, the ways we know ourselves’. This research analyses the documentary films The Act of Killing (Director Oppenheimer, co-directors Christine Cynn and anonymous 2012) and The Look of Silence (director Oppenheimer 2014), and the documentary imaginary. The research combines normally separate sites of analysis in production and audience studies in order to understand the power of documentary and the spectrum of social stories we inhabit. The article asks: how do the films document and imagine fear and impunity in memories of the genocide, and how do audiences engage with this documentary imaginary? Particular focus is paid towards the endings of the two documentary films and how audiences in this study reflect on the absence of justice for the victims of the genocide. Through the empirical research, we take a journey with the director and his film making proc...
Diffractions, 2023
This essay is a direct result coming after an immersive and collaborative experience at the Documentary Summer School that took place in 2022 in Switzerland, a joint effort between the Università della Svizzera italiana and the 75th edition of the Locarno Film Festival. As such, it aims at collecting a few impressions about the state of the art of documentary production, particularly when concerned with modes of narrating violence. Besides the thematic sections that may group the films together, a few general points regarding different documental procedures will be teased out, to engage with scholarly research on themes such as trauma and catastrophe and thus give room to further academic exploration. The films analyzed are: The Hamlet Syndrome, The River is not a Border, It Is Night in America and Matter Out of Place.
Terror films: The socio-cultural reconstruction of trauma in contemporary Israeli cinema
Images, 2019
The public discourse in Israel regarding events such as the Holocaust, war, or terror attacks mostly failed to embrace the trauma caused by such events, and to integrate their effects in the collective memory. According to trauma theoreticians, the location of trauma in the discourse is related to the character of trauma as a non-narratable memory, since personal trauma exist in the void, thus marking a missing memory. This paper explores the notion of trauma in contemporary Israeli cinema as it was reconstructed during and after the Second Intifada (2000–2008). The paper focuses on feature films reflecting on experiences of terrorist violence, among them Avanim (2004), Distortion (2004), Frozen Days (2006), The Bubble (2006), 7 Minutes in Heaven (2009). These films embrace parallel elements structuring a worldview, in the private as well as the collective sphere, thus shaping the surroundings as a mirror of the self and the subjective traumatic experience as a reflection of a complex social reality. A particular focus of our analysis will also be on aesthetic strategies that cinematically express rupture and distortion of terrorist violence and trauma, especially moments of suddenness and disruption in contrast to duration and circular repetition, elements of a specific temporality of trauma that also shaped the narration and style of recent Israeli war films, such as Waltz with Bashir (2008) or Beaufort (2007).
Perpetrator Trauma as a Possible Solution for Cultural Trauma: The Case of Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), 2022
The present article analyzes Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentaries The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014) from the perspective of trauma. The aim of this study is to give new approaches that could allow a deeper understanding of such a complex sociopolitical situation as the one that is taking place in nowadays Indonesia. First, I will introduce the term cultural trauma to explain the situation of the victims of the 1965-66 mass killings that took place in Indonesia. Then, I will make use of the concept of the political taboo to better understand how the official narrative imposed by the government has worked, and still works, as some sort of unquestionable myth. Afterward, I will point out that these two concepts give birth to a vicious cycle from which escaping becomes highly unlikely. A possible solution I propose here comes from studying another type of trauma, that of the perpetrator, since, in an indirect way, it can lead to an improvement of cultural trauma. By approaching trauma in a non-moralistic sense, allowing the perpetrator the status of a victim, I intend to highlight the importance of empathy and understanding in the process of healing of not only perpetrator trauma, but also, and more importantly, cultural trauma.