Joshua Oppenheimer Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Joshua Oppenheimer:

Like all art, nonfiction film should invite, seduce, or force us to confront the most difficult, frightening or mysterious aspects of what it means to be human.

I am always a little surprised when anyone sees anything I make, so being nominated for the Oscar is beyond amazing - what a tremendous honor.

Joshua Oppenheimer

The filmmakers have a story they want to tell, and they go get the material they need for it. The film either exceeds or fails to meet up to their expectations or it's different.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

I think, if you're in the United States, we've seen people trying to speak out in different ways and trying to make themselves heard about the United States' failure to move on generationally, given the long-festering wound of our history around race.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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.

Joshua Oppenheimer

I don't drink in the cinema because I have a bladder the size of a hummingbird.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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.

Joshua Oppenheimer

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller. A great storyteller, in control of her craft, must be the same person when she finishes telling a story as she was at the start. But I want to be transformed by my filmmaking, by the journey I take.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

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.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

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.

Joshua Oppenheimer

I came across the Indonesian genocide in 2001, when I found myself making a film in a community of survivors. They were plantation workers, and it turned out they were struggling to organize a union.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

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.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

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.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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.

Joshua Oppenheimer

'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.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

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.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

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.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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.

Joshua Oppenheimer

We all identify with the people we see, and in a good documentary, we are not just reading an account of the world, we're seeing and hearing our world.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

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.

Joshua Oppenheimer

I think fundamentally, I had to make a decision really on whether this was a film about the past or the present. And 'The Act Of Killing' is a film about the present.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

You finish a film not in the editing, but in the conversations that audiences have with themselves - and in that sense, every viewer is making a slightly different film. And that's wonderful.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

In terms of so-called fly-on-the-wall documentaries, there's a claim that the camera is a transparent window into a pre-existing reality. What really is happening is that the film crew and the subjects are collaborating to simulate a reality in which they pretend the camera is not present.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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.

Joshua Oppenheimer