Chronicle of a quest : silence after killing

After the “flamboyant fever dream” and ontological experimentations of The Act of Killing (2013), Joshua Oppenheimer’s latest film, The Look of Silence comes as something of a shock. A poetic, intimate film, it relies on more traditional documentary styles, interviews and observation in particular. At the same time, the film illustrates the challenges of documentary testimony, both practical (in terms of collection, credibility and deployment) and existential (as a hybrid of truth and fiction). The challenges and oscillation offer a way of expressing the conditions of the survivors, caught between a past they know to be true and the amnesiac historiography that surrounds them. Although such strategies produce a similar destabilization of ontological and epistemological certainty akin to those found in Killing, there is nonetheless a departure as the sobriety confers a moral authority that enables this film to be deployed in social justice projects.PostprintPeer reviewe

KONY 2012 - Anatomy of a campaign video and a video campaign

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Alienated labor's hybrid subjects : Sorry to Bother You and the tradition of the economic rights film

Leshu Torchin uses Sorry to Bother You, Boots Riley's genre-defying take on race, slavery, and capitalism in 21st century America, as a launching pad for a broader discussion of what she terms the “economic rights” film. Often global in scope, these films argue for rights to sustenance, shelter, education, health, and labor while mapping out the myriad systems that impede access to these rights. Torchin suggests that Sorry's playful hybridity, combining science fiction, performance art, and even corporate-video mockumentary to invoke recent experimentations in black American media, belies a preoccupation around labor that positions the film within the “economic rights” film's robust legacy.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Mediation and remediation : La parole filmée in Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture (L’image manquante)

In L’image manquante/The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh, 2013), Rithy Panh continues his exploration of the Cambodian genocide. Combining Khmer Rouge propaganda films, contemporary video footage and painted clay figurines in stunningly crafted—often multimedia—dioramas, the documentary couples ruminations on mediation, trauma, and history with Panh’s personal story. However, the film reaches beyond individual narrative and reflection, functioning as cinematic witness as it counters silences, fills historical gaps, and provides a testimony that is polyphonic and collective. And through his deployment of clips from his former films, Panh creates a sedimented text, suggestive of a past that refuses to stay past and of the magnitude of history, where any production of memory can both preserve and veil the lives of others.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Transgression and Limits in Euripides\u27 Alkestis

This paper seeks to understand Euripides\u27 Alkestis in the terms of the transgression described by both Michel Foucault and Longinus. The first section explores transgression as a process that erases the prior limits in order to reconstruct and redefine them. During this process, limits and boundaries are stripped away. A period of horror and liminality ensues in which the meaning of boundaries comes into question. The second section examines the positionality of death as the primary limit that frames the events of the tragedy. The third Section explores the deteriorating functionality of the gender roles held by Admetus and Alkestis. During this time, other structures dependent upon adherence to this categorization as well as the characterization of death also fall apart. The final section works to determine Herakles\u27 role as an embodiment of transgression demonstrating how this figure of liminality re-establishes the lost limits of the drama

Rates of exchange:human trafficking and the global marketplace

Since 1992, the world has witnessed significant geopolitical shifts that have exacerbated the permeability of national borders. In the wake of these changes, there has been a resurgence of human trafficking films that visualise the many unseen movements associated with the surge of globalisation. Many of the popular fiction films center on the movement of people and through a lens of criminality, dramatize the management of the new unruly body. However, as corrective, documentaries call attention to other flows—technological and financial. In doing so, they animate the complexities of economic globalization, and highlight the injustices that take place in the interstices—those zones where licit and illicit economies overlap and test human trafficking’s definitional borders. Documentaries achieve this complex cartography not only through their subject matter, but also through fundamentally unstable and hybrid character as representations of the real dependent upon tactics of fiction. Thematically and formally, then, these films call attention to the instabilities of border control, lifting the topic of human trafficking from a frame of pure criminality, placing it within the flows of the contemporary global economy, and encouraging a much needed shift in perspective