The politics of fictionality in documentary form: The Act of Killing and The Ambassador

Abstract

This essay sets out to do two related things: to investigate how the documentary films The Act of Killing and The Ambassador challenge the political and ideological ground of their audiences through radical experiments with documentarist strategies and fictional discourse. In order to carry out this investigation, the essay, secondly, presents and further elaborates a new way of approaching and making sense of fictional discourse using the concept of ‘fictionality’, an approach inspired by The Rhetoric of Fictionality by Richard Walsh and recently developed further by Henrik Skov Nielsen, James Phelan and Walsh. One of the benefits of this new paradigm is that it offers productive ways of coming to terms with the aesthetic and ethical ramifications of cultural forms that are heavily invested in current political events and issues while at the same time employing experimental uses of fictional discourse.

Keywords:

• Central African Republic
• documentary films
• fictionality
• Indonesia
• narrative
• testimony
• The Act of Killing
• The Ambassador

Notes

1. See Gjerlevsen and Nielsen (forthcoming), where fictionality is defined as: ‘Fictionality = intentionally signaled invention in communication’.

2. See Gjerlevsen and Nielsen (forthcoming).

3. It seems to us that this is different from earlier as well as recent instances of ‘new journalism’ in the sense that new journalism is primarily a style of journalism using literary techniques and emphasising the immersive and subjective aspects at the expense of the objectivity normally associated with the role of the reporter. For us, this does not amount to using fictionality or to signalling invention in communication.

4. The Ambassador has given rise to heated debates, centred mostly in a Danish context. See Reestorff (2013) for an overview of this debate as well as for a stimulating reading of the movie as an example of ‘unruly artivism’.

5. The Act of Killing has spurred a string of debates both in and out of academia. The critical reception of the movie has been remarkably polarised, with many offerings of high praise, including taking home many awards, as well as harsh critique. See The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday’s (2013) review for a notable example of the former, and Oscar-nominee Jill Godmillow’s ‘Killing the Documentary’ (2014) for a notable example of the latter. In 2013, Film Quarterly devoted a special issue to the film (67.2) with contributions from among others Bill Nichols and Janet Walker; Critical Asian Studies devoted most of a 2014 issue to discussions about the movie (46.1). See also Reestorff (2015).