Abstract

The psychoanalytic clinic has defined the phenomenon of acting out as a scene on the scene led to the Other by the analysand, in which something that escaped the symbolizationis shown. What the Other rejectsto symbolize returns in the form of an acting out, calling the other to symbolize what was left out of speech. There is a kind of cinema that has the same aims: acting out calculated by the director, in which something that wasn’t symbolized by the social Other finds a way to be in the scene, thus becoming a hinge of the real in a call to itssignification. Of this nature are Joshua Oppenheimer’sdocumentaries: The act of killing and The look of silence. These exceptional films are not reduced to a documentary record of complaint (in this case, the genocide perpetrated in Indonesia between 1965 and 1966). The realization of the films is an act of intervention in the horrific and misrepresented past that document, an ethical singularity which aims to produce an effect in the real and in the subjects involved in the film, in the effort to provide meaning to a genocide which, 50 years after its completion, is still a trauma nowadays.

Keywords: genocide | memory | trauma | ethics | responsibility