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.
Without music, life would be a mistake... I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance.
I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe.
Gear is the least important part of the equation. Having a vision and being able to articulate an idea visually are much more important.
Serious art has been the work of individual artists whose art has had nothing to do with 'style' because they were not in the least connected with the style or the needs of the masses. Their works arose rather in defiance of their times.
I always feel that art in general and acting in particular should make the audience a little uncomfortable, to slap them and wake them up.
Performing live in front of an audience is such a matter of will - all of those things you can do just fine in your basement, suddenly you have to do them in front of hundreds or thousands of people, and it becomes a different matter entirely.
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