On the Act of Looking: Reading Joshua Oppenheimer's Diptych: The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence

by David Denny (Editor), Rex Butler (Editor)

Overview

This collection analyzes Joshua Oppenheimer's diptych The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence as a cinematic event that invites interrelated questions on historical memory, truth and reconciliation, and the limits of documentary filmmaking.

Featuring a new interview with Joshua Oppenheimer himself, On the Act of Looking affirms Oppenheimer's use of fiction and manipulation as a technique to expose, contrary to the classic documentary form, not so much a reality behind the appearance of things, but how appearance as such can become a site of intervention or truth-telling. Contributors to this collection, including film scholars, art historians, historians, political scientists, philosophers, and Indonesian human rights activists, answer why Oppenheimer's documentary films not only have received near universal praise and admiration, but also why this praise is often qualified by surprise and fascination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501347900
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	06/26/2025
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Rex Butler is Professor of Art History in the Faculty of Art Design and Architecture at Monash University, Australia. He is the author of the following books: An Uncertain Smile (1996), Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (1999), A Secret History of Australian Art (2000), Slavoj Zizek: Live Theory (2005), Borges' Short Stories (2010), Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy? (2015), A History of UnAustralian Art (2016). Butler is also the editor of What is Appropriation? (1996), Radical Revisionism (2005), The Zizek Dictionary (2012), Lars von Trier's Women (2016) and The CityCat Project (2017).

David Denny is Associate Professor of Culture and Media Studies at Marylhurst University, USA. He has published in the jourbanals International Jourbanal of Zizek Studies, Theory and Event, Elohi Gadugi Jourbanal; and is co-editor of Lars von Trier's Women (2016).

Table of Contents

Introduction
Rex Butler (Monash University, Australia) and David Denny (Marylhurst University, USA)

1. Impunity - Reflections on the 1965 Massacre in Indonesia and its Legacy
Benedict Anderson (Rochester University, USA)
2. Kidnapping all but One
John Roosa (University of British Columbia, Canada)
3. Suharto's Regime
Jeffrey Winters (Northwestern University, USA)
4. Abuses of Human Rights and Censorship in Contemporary Indonesia
Prodita Sabarini (editor of The Conversation, Australia)
5. Sexual Politics in Oppenheimer's Films
Tunggal Pawestri (writer for Jakarta Post, Indonesia)
6. Reflecting on The Act of Killing
Martin Aleida (Jourbanalist, Indonesia)
7. On The Act of Killing and the Modern Trend of Privatising Public Space
Slavoj Žižek (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)
8. The Ethics of Making and Looking at The Act of Killing
Robert Sinnerbrink (University of New South Wales, Australia)
9. Ethics in The Look of Silence
Matthew Abbott (Federation University, Victoria, Australia)
10. Participatory Documentary Ecology
Hilary Neroni (University of Vermont, USA)
11. Psychoanalytic Aspects of Witnessing Violence and Death
Steven Miller (Buffalo University, USA)
12. Mise-en-abyme, like Hamlet
Rex Butler (Monash University, Australia)
13. The New Documentary Form
David Denny (Marylhurst University, USA)

Interview - Joshua Oppenheimer
Bibliography
Index