Once you recognize that all documentaries are performance, it's not a matter of 'if' they should be performance. They are performance, and they are performance precisely where people are playing themselves.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the inherent performative nature of documentaries, suggesting that they blend reality with performance.
Joshua Oppenheimer asserts that documentaries, often perceived as objective representations of reality, are actually forms of performance art. This perspective invites viewers to recognize that when individuals present their lives on screen, they are not merely being authentic but are engaging in a crafted performance that reflects personal and societal narratives. Thus, understanding documentaries as performance challenges traditional ideas about truth in media and emphasizes the role of subjectivity in storytelling.
In practice
In a film studies class, while discussing narrative techniques, this quote can emphasize the artistic elements of documentaries.
If we don't accept the uncomfortable proposition that every perpetrator of virtually every act of evil in our history has been a human being like us, then we actually foreclose the possibility of understanding how we do this to one another and therefore make it impossible to figure out how we might prevent these things.
In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.
My father's family was mostly obliterated in the Holocaust, and I grew up very much with the sense that the central moral and political question is how do we prevent these things from happening again.
I went looking for embodiments of pure evil, but found ordinary people.
We are constantly - in order to cope with painful realities - shuffling through third-rate, half-remembered fantasies taken from movies, from TV, from people we admire. We do this individually, we do it collectively - we tell stories to escape our most painful truths.
People may assume 'The Act of Killing' is a historical documentary about what happened in 1965. But our purpose was to expose a present-day regime of fear for what it is.
You can’t bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I’m hardly speaking in metaphor. It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that?
Performing is a profound experience, at least for me. It's not as if I sit down and play 'Fire and Rain' by myself, just to hear it again. But to offer it up... the energy that it somehow summons live takes me right back, and I do get a reconnection to the emotions.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the public's relationship to art has been weakened by a profound institutional reluctance to address the question of what art is for. This is a question that has, quite unfairly, come to feel impatient, illegitimate, and a little impudent.
I am very happy to design haute couture. It's a love story between couture and me.
Fashion keeps me designing: the love of change, the idea that the next one will be the right one, the nonstop dialogue
What art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern; the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men, the useful has succeeded to the beautiful.
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