전쟁이나 집단학살과 같은 역사적 트라우마를 다룬 2000년대 이후 다큐멘터리 영화에서 ‘가해자 중심 서사’의 부상은 전 세계적으로 주목할 만한 현상이 되고 있다. 이 글은 최근 가해자를 사건의 주요한 서술자이자 목격자로 내세울 뿐만 아니라 가해자의 트라우마를 시청각적으로 충실히 재현해 논쟁을 일으킨 <바시르와 왈츠를>, <아르마딜로>, <액트 오브 킬링>를 중심으로 최근 전쟁 다큐멘터리의 새로운 경향을 살펴볼 것이다. 흥미롭게도 이 영화들은 소재와 서사적인 측면에서 윤리적인 논쟁을 야기하는 가해자를 주요한 목격자로 내세우고 있을 뿐만 아니라 가해자의 주관적인 내면과 시점을 묘사하기 위해 가장 잘 알려져 있는 전통적인 다큐멘터리의 규범을 넘어 허구와 비허구의 경계를 흐리면서 감독의 적극적인 개입을 주저하지 않고 주관적이고 표현적인 재구성에 많은 부분을 투여하는 공통점을 갖는다. 각 영화들은 애니메이션, 일인칭 슈팅(FPS) 비디오 게임의 시점, 공포, 뮤지컬, 느와르, 갱스터 같은 허구적 장르를 차용한다. 본고는 위의 세 영화를 통해 가해자 중심 서사화를 둘러싼 쟁점들, 즉 가해자와 피해자의 이분법적 경계가 흐려지는 양상, 다양한 양식과 장르를 활용한 고통과 트라우마를 스펙터클하게 시각화하는 다큐멘터리 재현, 대학살과 전쟁을 다루는 다큐멘터리 영화의 윤리적 태도, 정보의 급증으로 인한 서사의 무한경쟁 등을 탐구한다.
This essay proposes a new regime of representational aesthetic in the recent documentaries which tell the traumatic events such as war or massacre: the perpetrator as a primary witness of the tragic events. Narrations driven by a perpetrator as a primary witness allow the viewers to look into the perpetrators’ internal or psychic aspects such as a sense of guilty, emotion and memory, trauma, or perception. As a matter of fact such representation had seemed to be a kind of taboo or the unrepresentable in the Holocaust representation of documentary because it might bring about some moral controversies by leading audiences to be identified with perpetrators or uncritically accept his or her perspectives and excuses. However, this essay suggests that this current shift from victims to perpetrators as a primary witness is emerging under a new condition of identity politics, visual culture and narrativization. In other words, overlapped and complex identities, more complicated and networked social structure, a disappearance of meta-narratives, the loss of the indexical bond in the digital age and so on have an effect on the emergence of a new war-documentary film driven by a perpetrator as a primary witness. Such tendency can be especially found in three internationally successful documentaries: Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), animated documentary about Israeli veteran’s lost memory of Sabra and Shatila Massacre, Armadillo (Janus Metz Pedersen, 2010) about Danish soldiers in the war in Afghanistan, and The Act of Killing (Janus Metz Pedersen, Christine Cynn, 2012) about the gangsters Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry who were promoted from selling black market movie theatre tickets to leading the most notorious death squad in North Sumatra, as part of the Indonesian killings of 1965–66. These documentaries commonly break the distinction between a victim and a perpetrator, between fiction and non-fiction, between the past and the present time, between here and there, between subjectivity and objectivity, between the personal and the collective, between the fantasmatic and the real and so on. In doing so, they ask some political and aesthetic questions in today’s condition: what is (un)representable, what a condition of narrativization in a catastrophe representation such as war or massacre is, and whether the trauma of the perpetrator indeed exists.