ffk#37: Documentary Interventions (2024)

SYNOPSIS

Disputes within mainstream media are often a matter of entertainment and aesthetic pleasure. The documentary film The Look of Silence (2014, Joshua Oppenheimer) shows us what disputing can achieve in more serious matters. Here, 'documentary interventions' make conflicts visible, along with the contradictions that run through them. They give these conflicts an interpretation and bring out their structure — and with it the constellations of power and powerlessness that a dispute sets in play.

Oppenheimer stages encounters between the perpetrators and the survivors of the Indonesian genocide of 1965–66, and it is the staging that gives these confrontations their force. By setting the two perspectives against one another, the film proposes an unexpected interplay of the active and the passive in how we read those on either side. The familiar arrangement — the perpetrator who acts, the victim who suffers — comes apart.

What takes its place is harder to name. Perpetrator and survivor enter into a relation that fits neither role: not the active grasp of the perpetrator, not the passive suffering of the victim. The film opens a ground on which the two meet differently. It lets us see the dispute, and the imbalances of power within it, through what the idea of the medio-performative calls active and passive at once.

The talk traces the historical lineage of 'documentary interventions' and, from there, works out their potential as an artistic method today, taking The Look of Silence as its example.