Laissez-Faire Storytelling: Fictionality, Post-Factuality, and the Filmic Voice in Joshua Oppenheimer’s Documentary The Act of Killing (2012)

ABSTRACT Based on a rhetorical-narratological analysis of Joshua Oppenheimer’s film The Act of Killing (2012), this article identifies a specific use of the filmic voice which it defines as ‘laissez-faire storytelling.’ The laissez-faire voice is a rhetorical stance that serves documentary filmmakers to reconfigure their narrative position toward actors who espouse a ‘post-factual’ worldview. Directors who employ this stance strategically grant their actors a considerable amount of freedom in the making of the documentary. Ultimately, however, their technique exposes a problematic rhetoric in which the borderline between fictionality and non-fictionality is obliterated. The article concludes that the laissez-faire documentary resonates strongly with current attempts in both theory and art to restabilize the precarious boundaries between fictionality and non-fictionality—a reorientation that is decidedly ‘post-postmodernist.’