MC: Stefan Iversen: Broken Narratives: The works of Joshua Oppenheimer (GCSC)

Different subfields of narrative studies have recently taken interest in what some call broken narratives: narratives that fail to adhere to or deliberately subvert established personal and cultural procedures of story-based sense-making. In this masterclass, we will bring these interests in broken narrative into dialogue with the oeuvre of filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, more specifically the highly acclaimed and highly controversial films The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014). Both films challenge what some call the only new genre of the 20^th century – the witness testimony – by inventing groundbreaking documentary techniques to explore broken narratives as well as narratives of the broken. The films thereby give rise to pertinent and difficult questions about the strengths and the limits of narrative coherence, of fictionality, of memory cultures, and of art. Participants are expected to have watched the films prior to the masterclass.

// Prof. Stefan Iversen (Aarhus University)