Joshua Oppenheimer
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TIFF 2024: Cloud, The End
Waiting for Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud to start, I wondered how much time I’d spent over the years watching his signature warehouses, offices and apartments. The man loves a purpose-built soundstage set, the drabber the better but counterintuitively showcased under unrepentantly artificial lighting—one rung down from “Lynchian” in terms of overt ominousness but similarly ready to radiate menace. Those sets’ simplicity offsets his films’ often elevated eccentricity levels, though by Kurosawa’s standards Cloud is comparatively sedate insofar as it has a fully explicable plot: Online reseller Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) offloads one too many shoddy knockoff goods, attracting the ire of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 11, 2024 -
Corrective Lens
While promoting The Act Of Killing — his punchy, audacious, madly performative, deeply troubling masterpiece about the legacy of genocide in Indonesia 50 years later — Joshua Oppenheimer didn’t much let on that there was a second, complementary feature in the works. While editing the first film, and before his secondary subjects in the government and paramilitaries knew what a bold, damning document he had fashioned, Oppenheimer shot a round of elegant, formally restrained interviews with his earlier subjects through the offices of his collaborator, Adi Rukun, an optometrist whose older brother had been murdered. Among a range of substantial […]
by Ray Pride on Jul 23, 2015 -
Act Naturally
“Giving the movie its comic and poignant dimension is Brennan’s performance as Brennan.” In the wake of Albert Maysles’ death in March, I returned to this intriguing reference to “performance” in Vincent Canby’s 1969 review of Salesman, Albert and David Maysles’ landmark work of direct cinema. Canby was, of course, referring to Paul Brennan, affectionately known as “The Badger.” Brennan’s performance — if we can call it that — is indeed astonishing. A man of unremarkable looks, he holds the screen with an enthralling intensity. Of course, Brennan isn’t an actor but rather a “real person,” a documentary subject of […]
by Jesse Moss on Apr 28, 2015 -
Dispatches from CPH:DOX and Borscht 9
International Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival – CPH:DOX 2014 by Pamela Cohn There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains. They are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way. Our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves, the stories we continually re-categorize and refine. This sort of sharing — this communion — would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified and seen as private, exclusively ours. —from Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s film The 50 Year […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2015 -
Trailer Watch: Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence
Formally exacting where The Act of Killing was dazzlingly brazen, The Look of Silence is no less staggering of a feat than its talked-about predecessor. Joshua Oppenheimer’s unflinching look at the victims behind the Indonesian genocide will not hit theaters until next Spring, but the documentary continues to ride a nice critical wave from the fall festival circuit, where it picked up the FIPRESCI prize in Venice, amongst other plaudits. I, too, was wowed by the film’s unflinching probe of military and neighborly antagonization at my NYFF viewing, and look forward to revisiting it in the coming months.
by Sarah Salovaara on Oct 22, 2014 -
NYFF ’14: Heaven Knows What, Eden, The Look of Silence
Josh and Benny Safdie’s filmmaking sensibilities are perhaps best summed up by the finale of 2009’s Daddy Longlegs. Unable to hire movers for their spur of the moment decamp to Roosevelt Island, Lenny (Ronald Bronstein) tasks his sons with hoisting their refrigerator onto his back, bootleg straps in hand. Atop Lenny’s spine, the near industrial-sized fridge is then caught between the closing doors of the tram, culminating in a moment that is hilarious, pitiful, and unexpectedly affecting. For years, the Safdies had been perfecting this brand of physical comedy, verisimilitude, cheeky humor and creeping sadness, all rendered on film with a handheld long lens, until 2012’s Lenny Cooke coaxed them outside their comfort […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 30, 2014 -
Down in the Boondocs: The NYFF’s Go-To Films (I)
The expansive New York Film Festival is no longer the greatest-hits affair of three decades back when it was built around 20-25 titles, a majority of which were what had been on display at the previous Cannes. The arrangement was a gift and a curse: manageable, for both journalists and completists, but limited. I remember what a production it was when the fest dared to add a lowbrow Hong Kong movie by one Jackie Chan. Now there are lots and lots of strands, which cover a variety of genres and niche audiences — followers of the avant-garde and new technologies, […]
by Howard Feinstein on Sep 26, 2014 -
A Place for Research and Discovery: The Venice Film Festival
Even the rain knocked down the Lions. When a storm hit the Lido island around the central-weekend turning point, delegates could be seen gleefully snapping pictures of the overturned statues outside the Casinò, a simplistic metaphor for the Venice Film Festival’s shaky status in recent years. You’d think the bronze lions themselves would be tired of hearing stories about Toronto and the shrinking circuit space for awards-season launchpads. However, with the Toronto/Telluride battle over world premieres turning nasty and some bolder picks than usual from the NYFF, Venice director Alberto Barbera was wise to renounce the star-chasing madness and to […]
by Tommaso Tocci on Sep 17, 2014 -
DJ /Rupture Releases a Mixtape Tied to Harvard Friend Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act Of Killing
Yesterday Pitchfork Media posted a downloadable mixtape created as a “musical response” to Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act Of Killing by the rightly well-regarded DJ /Rupture. Stage Boundary Songs is a terrific 53 minutes and 50 seconds of (largely) Indonesian music old and new interspersed with poetry by Wiji Thukul, a poet believed to have been “disappeared” by the Suharto regime in 1998. Last December, Rupture (aka Jace Clayton) wrote a brief blog post cheering on Killing, noting that acclaim for the film was “particularly delightful” because “Josh and I went to college together, and for a year or two we […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 29, 2014 -
Ecstatic Truth: 15 Years Of Hybrids Rising
Speaking April 30, 1999, at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, Werzog Herzog laid down 12 edicts on the pursuit of “ecstatic truth” in the documentary. “The so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité,” Herzog proclaimed in his “Minnesota Declaration,” announcing instead his devotion to “poetic, ecstatic truth” accessible “only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” He was speaking specifically about his 1992 masterwork Lessons Of Darkness: unfaked, awe-inspiring footage of Kuwait’s oil fields on fire after the Iraq War, framed by a made-up Pascal epigraph and narration from the perspective of an alien intelligence baffled by what it’s seeing. Herzog unrepentantly […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 28, 2014
