Top 50 Joshua Oppenheimer Quotes

What makes art powerful is a flash of recognition, a frightening encounter with something familiar about the human condition.

We can never run away from our past. The past will catch up to us because it is us. It is a part of us; it’s what makes us we are. It’s what delineates the borders of our societies.

For my part, as a filmmaker, I’ve never been a fly-on-the-wall documentarian. I have no commitment to that method. I believe it’s a lie.

In Denmark, the annual Christmas party is probably the most important cultural institution in the country.

I heard about the Holocaust before hearing the ‘Cinderella’ story or watching ‘Peter Pan.’

You see, ‘The Look of Silence’ is the first film ever made where survivors confront perpetrators who still hold a monopoly on power. It’s normally never done because it is too dangerous.

No one forgets the presence of the camera, no matter how long it’s there.

I think it’s our obligation as filmmakers, as people investigating the world, to create the reality that is most insightful to the issues at hand. Here are human beings, like us, boasting about atrocities that should be unimaginable.

I think it’s a great pity in the Anglophone world that we conflate cinema verite and Direct Cinema; they’re, in fact, ontological opposites. In Direct Cinema, we create a fictional reality with characters and pretend we’re not that.

I think Americans are aware that they are involved in all sorts of violence around the world. They normally don’t want to look at that.

We have to support truth and reconciliation and some form of justice.

For me, I’m a filmmaker because, above all, I’m an explorer. It’s my way of exploring and investigating the problems, the questions, and the mysteries about what it means to be human that vex me most, that keep me up at night, and that, when I finally fall asleep, insinuate themselves into my dreams.

Testimony always comes from people who are in some way disempowered.

Yes, it was difficult – making ‘The Act of Killing’ in particular was a very lonely process. No one really believed in it until very close to the end. But it was also a sanctuary. I was working in obscurity.

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.

From 2005 to 2010, I was exclusively shooting ‘The Act of Killing’ and then editing it.

Millions of Indonesians who live with secrets in their family who have a sense of that kind of secret that their parents never told them, want to be told about what happened so they can know where they come from.

Military rule in Indonesia formally ended in 1998, but the army remains above the law.

I think that indignation is pleasurable, and it’s pleasurable because it’s self-righteous.

I have a British and an American passport.

Waking from any fever dream, one retains, above all, impressions seared into memory.

If you film a little boy going to school, the big event in that boy’s day and all the classmates’ and teachers’ day is you being there filming, not the school.

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.

I had been working with a community of survivors who had lost their relatives and were too scared to talk about it.

The function of journalism is, primarily, to uncover vital new information in the public interest and to put that information in a context so that we can use it to improve the human condition.

I think that our task as filmmakers is to create the most insightful reality given the most pressing questions.

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.

I don’t like to eat when I watch films because it distracts me. Anything crunchy or in a wrapper is terrible.

There are committed Indonesian filmmakers who are committed supporters of ‘The Act Of Killing.’

What I’ve always been most interested in is exposing the way stories and fantasies reconstitute our everyday reality. What appears to be non-fiction is not only totally mysterious, unfathomable, and strange when you really look at what it is.

I still receive very regular death threats that make it impossible for me to return to Indonesia. I think I could get in, but I don’t think I could get out again.

I think ‘The Act of Killing’ forced people to look at the problem, but the problem is actually a state run by thugs, or a shadow state, a part of the state that’s run by thugs, and a military that enjoys complete legal – not just impunity, but immunity.

I think Direct Cinema’s trying to be insightful by looking at reality in a very close way while, in fact, much more is staged than we like to think. In cinema verite, it’s about trying to make something invisible visible – the role of fantasy and imagination in everyday life.

Films can’t change the society; they can simply open the space for the discussion which can lead to social change and can start new forms of social activism.

My background is in filmmaking, and my mentor is Dusan Makavejev, who combined fiction and documentary.

I don’t think there’s a morally perfect way to do anything in life, but I’m not a filmmaker who tries to hide my mess.

I think we are fascinated and scared by evil at the same time. I think it’s important not to suppress our fascination but to walk into it with open eyes.

In calling someone a bad guy, I reassure myself that I’m good. I elevate myself. I call it the ‘Star Wars morality’. And unfortunately, it underpins most of the stories we tell.

I didn’t really get any rigorous background in film history.

Cinema is, of course, the great storytelling medium of modernity.

I wanted to resist in ‘The Look of Silence’ making a film that ends with any kind of positive hope I feel in human rights documentaries dealing with human survivors.

If you acknowledge that filming is an occasion where people express things they might not otherwise express, that offers a much more insightful analysis of why documentaries – even of the fly-on-the-wall variety – are powerful.

I believe every time you film anybody, you create reality with that person – whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.

My first memory of cinema is my mother taking me to see ‘Silkwood,’ which is about a whistleblower at a nuclear power plant.

Fiction allows us to both evade truth and to approach it – or, rather, it’s fiction that allows us to ‘construct’ our world. It’s haunted by the unimaginable and the unspeakable.

Although we can talk about an Indonesian democracy, or we can talk about democratic elections and democratic rituals – the trappings of democracy – we can’t genuinely talk about democracy in Indonesia because there is not rule of law, and democracy without rule of law is a nonsense.

At Harvard, direct cinema was the core of the film department, and most of the students were trying to make socially conscious works, but I was trying to combine fiction and non-fiction to show how our seemingly factual world is constituted through fantasy and stories.

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.

‘The Look of Silence’ is able to have a wide public release, although still not in cinemas. It’s distributed by two government bodies, the National Human Rights Commission and the Jakarta Arts Council.

I’m against escapist entertainment.