Perpetrator Cinema

Perpetrator Cinema explores a new trend in the cinematic depiction of genocide that has emerged in Cambodian documentary in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. While past films documenting the Holocaust and genocides in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and elsewhere have focused on collecting and foregrounding the testimony of survivors and victims, the intimate horror of the autogenocide enables post–Khmer Rouge Cambodian documentarians to propose a direct confrontation between the first-generation survivor and the perpetrator of genocide. These films break with Western tradition and disrupt the political view that reconciliation is the only legitimate response to atrocities of the past. Rather, transcending the perpetrator’s typical denial or partial confession, this extraordinary form of “duel” documentary creates confrontational tension and opens up the possibility of a transformation in power relations, allowing viewers to access feelings of moral resentment. Raya Morag examines works by Rithy Panh, Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath, and Lida Chan and Guillaume Suon, among others, to uncover the ways in which filmmakers endeavor to allow the survivors’ moral status and courage to guide viewers to a new, more complete understanding of the processes of coming to terms with the past. These documentaries show how moral resentment becomes a way to experience, symbolize, judge, and finally incorporate evil into a system of ethics. Morag’s analysis reveals how perpetrator cinema provides new epistemic tools and propels the recent social-cultural-psychological shift from the era of the witness to the era of the perpetrator.

The present book aims to explore how the perpetrator of crimes against humanity is represented in recent documentary films in different sociocultural contexts around the world. In recent years the number of diverse forms of cultural productions focused on the figure of perpetrator has increased significantly, thus eliciting a turn toward this problematic figure. The originality of these narratives lies in the shift in point of view they propose: their protagonists, rather than being the victims of the atrocities, are instead their perpetrators. A significant number of documentary films examining crimes against humanity from the perpetrators’ perspective have been released in the first two decades of this century. This current tendency together with the growing scholarly interest in the explorations of the perpetrator underscore the timeliness of the present book. It aims to explore how the perpetrator is represented in recent documentary films in different sociocultural contexts around the world. The perpetrator documentary films’ objects of study in this book are contextualized in the following contexts: Indonesian, Cambodian and Rwandan genocides, Chilean and Argentine dictatorship, Spanish Civil War and its aftermaths, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Nazi legacy, South Africa Apartheid and USA ́s state perpetrations. Among others, the documentary films analysed are as follows: The Act of Killing, The Look of Silence, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, National Bird, Fahrenheit 11/9, Waltz with Bashir, Z32, El Pacto de Adriana, El Color del Camaleón, 70 y Pico, and El hijo del cazador. The Representation of Perpetrators in Global Documentary Film will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Filmmaking, Communication Studies, Media Studies, Visual Studies, Cultural Studies, and Sociology. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Continuum.

Holocaust movies have become an important segment of world cinema and the de-facto Holocaust education for many. One quarter of all American-produced Holocaust-related feature films have won or been nominated for at least one Oscar. In fact, from 1945 through 1991, half of all American Holocaust features were nominated. Yet most Holocaust movies have fallen through the cracks and few have been commercially successful. This book explores these trends--and many others--with a comprehensive guide to hundreds of films and made-for-television movies. From Anne Frank to Schindler's List to Jojo Rabbit, more than 400 films are examined from a range of perspectives--historical, chronological, thematic, sociological, geographical and individual. The filmmakers are contextualized, including Charlie Chaplin, Sidney Lumet, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino and Roman Polanski. Recommendations and reviews of the 50 best Holocaust films are included, along with an educational guide, a detailed listing of all films covered and a four-part index-glossary.

This volume explores the multifaceted depiction and staging of historical and social traumata as the result of extreme violence within national contexts. It focuses on Israeli-Palestinian, German and (US) American film, and reaches out to cinematic traditions from other countries like France, Great Britain and the former USSR. International and interdisciplinary scholars analyze both mainstream and avant-garde movies and documentaries premiering from the 1960s to the present. From transnational and cross-genre perspectives, they query the modes of representation – regarding narration, dramaturgy, aesthetics, mise-en-scène, iconology, lighting, cinematography, editing and sound – held by film as a medium to visualize shattering experiences of violence and their traumatic encoding in individuals, collectives, bodies and psyches. This anthology uniquely traces horror aesthetics and trajectories as a way to reenact, echo and question the perpetual loops of trauma in film cultures. The contributors examine the discursive transfer between historical traumata necessarily transmitted in a medialized and conceptualized form, the changing landscape of (clinical) trauma theory, the filmic depiction and language of trauma, and the official memory politics and hegemonic national-identity constructions.

Born in 1964, Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh grew up in the midst of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal reign of terror, which claimed the lives of many of his relatives. After escaping to France, where he attended film school, he returned to his homeland in the late 1980s and began work on the documentaries and fiction films that have made him Cambodia’s most celebrated living director. The fourteen essays in The Cinema of Rithy Panh explore the filmmaker’s unique aesthetic sensibility, examining the dynamic and sensuous images through which he suggests that “everything has a soul.” They consider how Panh represents Cambodia’s traumatic past, combining forms of individual and collective remembrance, and the implications of this past for Cambodia’s transition into a global present. Covering documentary and feature films, including his literary adaptations of Marguerite Duras and Kenzaburō Ōe, they examine how Panh’s attention to local context leads to a deep understanding of such major themes in global cinema as justice, imperialism, diaspora, gender, and labor. Offering fresh takes on masterworks like The Missing Picture and S-21 while also shining a light on the director’s lesser-known films, The Cinema of Rithy Panh will give readers a new appreciation for the boundless creativity and ethical sensitivity of one of Southeast Asia’s cinematic visionaries.

Focusing on films from Chile since 2000 and bringing together scholars from South and North America, Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World is the first English-language book since the 1970s to explore this small, yet significant, Latin American cinema. The volume questions the concept of "national cinemas" by examining how Chilean film dialogues with trends in genre-based, political, and art-house cinema around the world, while remaining true to local identities. Contributors place current Chilean cinema in a historical context and expand the debate concerning the artistic representation of recent political and economic transformations in contemporary Chile. Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World opens up points of comparison between Chile and the ways in which other national cinemas are negotiating their place on the world stage. The book is divided into five parts. "Mapping Theories of Chilean Cinema in the World" examines Chilean filmmakers at international film festivals, and political and affective shifts in the contemporary Chilean documentary. "On the Margins of Hollywood: Chilean Genre Flicks" explores on the emergence of Chilean horror cinema and the performance of martial arts in Chilean films. "Other Texts and Other Lands: Intermediality and Adaptation Beyond Chile(an Cinema)" covers the intermedial transfer from Chilean literature to transnational film and from music video to film. "Migrations of Gender and Genre" contrasts films depicting transgender people in Chile and beyond. "Politicized Intimacies, Transnational Affects: Debating (Post)memory and History" analyzes representations of Chile’s traumatic past in contemporary documentary and approaches mourning as a politicized act in postdictatorship cultural production. Intended for scholars, students, and researchers of film and Latin American studies, Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World evaluates an active and emergent film movement that has yet to receive sufficient attention in global cinema studies.

No Jurisdiction interweaves autobiography and analysis to explore how a disabled American of French-Arab descent justifies his love for the (super)heroes who destroy brown people like himself. Framing Hollywood genre films as a key to understanding a crisis-filled world shaped by the global War on Terror, Fareed Ben-Youssef shows how, in response to 9/11, filmmakers and lawmakers mobilized iconic characters—the cowboy, the femme fatale, and the superhero—to make sense of our traumas and inspire new legal landscapes. The competing visions of power produced in this dialogue between Hollywood entertainment and mainstream politics underscore genre cinema's multivalent purpose: to normalize state violence and also to critique it. Chapters devoted to the Western, film noir, superhero movies, and global films that deploy and comment on these genres offer compelling readings of films ranging from the more apparent (The Dark Knight, Sicario, and Logan) to the more unexpected (Sin City, Adieu Gary, The Broken Circle Breakdown, and Tokyo Sonata). Through narratives of states of emergency that include vaguely defined enemies, obscured battlefield boundaries, and blurred lines between victims and perpetrators, a new post-9/11 film canon emerges. No Jurisdiction is a deeply personal work of film scholarship, arguing that we can face our complicity and discover opportunities for resistance through our beloved genre movies.

Through analysis of the complex discourse surrounding trauma and loss, this book provides a necessary examination of temporality and ethics in Israeli film and television since the turn of the millennium. The author examines posttraumatic idioms of fragmentation and incoherence, highlighting the rising resistance towards generic categories, and the turn to unconventional and paradoxical structures with unique aesthetics. Maintaining that contemporary Israeli cinema has undergone an ethical shift, the author examines the revealing traumas and denied identities that also seek alternative ways to confront ethical question of accountability. It discusses the relationships between trauma, nationalism, and cinema through the intertwined perspectives of feminism, queer theory, and critical race and postcolonial studies, showing how national traumas are constructed by notions of gendered, sexual, and racial identity. This innovative text highlights the complexities of discourse surrounding trauma and loss, informed by multiple categories of difference. Across each chapter various elements of Israeli film are explored, spanning from strategies used to critically examine victim-perpetrator dynamics, co-existence in temporal space, women’s cinema in Israel, displacement, and queer communities and identity. Beyond its direct contribution to cinema studies and Israel studies, the book will be of interest to trauma and memory studies, postcolonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, Jewish studies, Middle Eastern studies, and cultural studies.