The Culprit of the Image. Genealogy of the act of putting forth a culprit to witness the horror in cinema

Abstract

In 1945 the battalion where the future filmmaker Samuel Fuller was serving entered the concentration camp at Falkenau. Upon discovering the horror, the American captain ordered Fuller to hide in order to film how the soldiers taught German civilian villagers a lesson by forcing them to face the piles of corpses. The gesture of placing a culprit in the foreground in order to be able to look at the void of meaning caused by the horror in the background is a defining mark of two controversial contemporary documentaries that deal with the genocide of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (S-21, Rithy Panh, 2003), and the mass killings of the dictatorship in Indonesia (The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer, 2013). This article suggests a possible genealogy of the gesture, also showing the critical rereading developed by modern cinema regarding the possibility of producing such images.