HISTORY AND HISTRIONICS deals with the massacres that swept Indonesia between 1965 and 1966 and is fascinating material for anyone with an interest in emergent uses of visual media, public memory, video making, image advocacy, or human rights. Michael will be presenting works in progress from Vision Machine, so the event will take the form of interactive discussion on the creation and use of the footage, rather than just a final Q&A.

Vision Machine are working with both survivors of the violence and its perpetrators. The aim is to develop a film form that can adequately figure both the operations and the imagination of the genocide. Moving beyond simple
documentary, the film offers re-enactments of the aggressors' versions of events and gives victims a new way of dealing with their memories. In this way,
film and re- enactment become a working method for survivors and victims to give voice to traumatic memories and histories that, in situations of political violence, would otherwise remain repressed and beyond recovery.

Each part of the film involves increasingly stylised performances. More-or-less conventional interviews lead into to in situ historical recreations, performed by the historical actors themselves. Each subsequent treatment is increasingly elaborate, leading eventually to a singing & dancing studio-shot musical version, something like a Javanese opera in which the proceedings are disturbed by the visitation of ghosts.

For more information on the screening, contact:  alicia.blum-ross@anthro.ox.ac.uk
For more information on Vision Machine, visit: www.visionmachine.org