Joshua Oppenheimer
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Filmography
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They gleefully orchestrate and perform peacefully symbolic movements in nature, before a giant waterfall to the strains of “Born Free.”
The key sequence is Congo’s big musical number, “Born Free,” staged in front of a waterfall, with Congo in priestly garb and Koto in an elegant blue gown.
The movie is almost a very, very acid and absurdist comedy, especially as the talk of torture and murder is juxtaposed with the gangsters' taste for sentimental karaoke ("Born Free" is a favorite).
And they say they have the perfect song to bring it all together – “Born Free.”
In the film’s opening scene, a verdant musical sequence in praise of Anwar Congo set to the tune of “Born Free,” we overhear a director barking at his female dancers: “Natural beauty!
Nowhere is that more evident than in the film’s signature musical sequence, in which elaborately-costumed murderers sing “Born Free” in front of a waterfall.
The Zone of Interest (2023)
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
influenced by The Act of Killing (2012), The Look of Silence (2014)
Themes Visuals
It's this emphasis on keeping the Holocaust unsaid and unseen yet always heard is what makes The Zone of Interest an undeniably powerful yet unique cinematic experience that lines it in the tradition of films like Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) and Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012) – a coughing fit evokes Anwar Congo from the latter.
Later, after a coughing fit that evokes memories of Anwar Congo in “The Act of Killing,” Glazer suddenly introduces an even more dramatic break from the film's established style — one that returns us to the dialectic between depicting an atrocity and tracing the chalk outline of one.
Glazer’s approach in these grander moments is especially powerful near the end of the film, as Rudolf has what seems to be a moment of self-awareness akin to the ending of Joshua Oppenheimer’s incredible documentary The Look of Silence, spliced together with a vision of…
For example, last year's shocking documentary The Act of Killing, a Denmark/Norway/UK production directed by American Joshua Oppenheimer, combined bloodletting and farce in its account of unrepentant paramilitary killers boasting of their slaughter of Indonesian "communists" in the 1960s.
Though directed by a filmmaker from Wales, Gareth Evans (who has just done the new Godzilla film), the Raid series is set in Indonesia, the location for the recent documentary The Act of Killing, about memories of murder.
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Directed by Wes Anderson
influenced by The Act of Killing (2012)
Visuals
Perhaps the best known is S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine [see Klawans, “Band of Insiders,” June 7, 2004], which foreshadowed Joshua Oppenheimer’s method in The Act of Killing by having the murderers re-enact their deeds on-site.
Only God Forgives (2013)
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
influenced by The Act of Killing (2012)
Visuals
When you recall that a similar technique was choreographed in “Only God Forgives” for the sake of aesthetic suavity, Refn’s film becomes still harder to defend; and yet Oppenheimer’s work is itself subject to bizarre embellishment.