Robert Greene’s Bisbee ‘17 is obviously indebted, at least in part, to Joshua Oppenheimer’s generation-defining The Act of Killing. Yet it is far from a delayed echo of a masterpiece. In The Act of Killing, artistic generation signals a deeply ambivalent, forever-incomplete form of moral reckoning, one that offers no reprieve from past wrongdoings and only tenuously implies anything like real acknowledgement of complicity. But the film is absolutely about the desire to atone, or at least one’s desire to believe one has a desire to atone. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, artistic self-fashioning – one’s capacity to relive one’s most horrible acts – becomes a grotesque purgation of one’s past. The evacuation of self, the spilling of the soul, suggests a need to believe in indemnity if not a genuine willingness to engage with and confront the consequences of one’s actions. The characters at the center of The Act of Killing want to believe they can escape their past, even as they seek it, and celebrate themselves through a past they vaguely seem to despise themselves for.

Bisbee’ 17’s literal and figurative fault-lines are much more diffuse and, in some ways, more complex. The effects of a reprehensible incident and a moral failure seep through the cracks of a town over a full century, and they trickle into every crevice of its being, but it is much harder to get a bead on what any one in the film wants to think about it, let alone whether they should be affected by it at all. This is not an account of individuals believing they are coming to terms with something who are, in turn, coming to terms with the dubiousness of their coming to terms. Bisbee asks us a perhaps harder question: are these people responsible for anything at all? With the sense of blame unmoored from typical Enlightenment-derived notions of individual culpability, we are forced to question how we are supposed to feel toward any of these people, and, indeed, whether we even want to care about a form of reckoning that, the film suggests, may merely just be cashing-in on a legend.

Still, while culpability is displaced through the generations in Bisbee ’17, both films ask similarly prickly questions about the value of historical confrontation and the limits of artistic witness. Each film examines the ghostly after-image of a horrific incident as it metastasizes in the mind of its perpetrators, or their lineage, and as it evaporates into the sheer raggedness of history. In both cases, cinema is tasked with saving the present from its unacknowledged past and recovering the past from the present’s refusal to acknowledge it.

Most of all, though, both films task cinema with meditating on its own capabilities. When we leave either film, we are hardly sure that anything has been achieved, or that any past has truly been acknowledged. What film itself can do, in the face of abject horror, is a serious question mark in both texts, one that each film recognizes will gnaw down those who ask too hard. For The Act of Killing, the question was national, genocidal, and deeply historical, an awful grandness that warps an entire country’s history – the entire world’s history – by insisting on humanity’s capacity for brutality, and humanity’s ability to seek forgiveness for that brutality in the eyes of others without actually wanting to fully wrestle with it. For Bisbee ’17, the question seems much smaller. The event in question was more localized, and there’s little sense that anyone outside its direct descendants ever heard of it. But for the people who come and go in this film, it has the capacity to become everything. Like an underwater whirlpool, it’s both invisible and gravitational, a century-old violence that is both a chthonic tragedy to confront and a taxidermied memory to curate and ornament. The people of Bisbee seem all too willing, in a manner less overtly reprehensible but no less troubling than the mass murderers of The Act of Killing, to remember the violence only insofar as it suits them.

The event in question may seem like a historical footnote, but it radiates outward into the very essence of the American expanse. As a mining town, the Bisbee of 1917 helped fuel the engine of empire until the empires ravaged one another. World War I was a boon to American industry, but its sudden end meant the demise of manufacturing and decreasing wages, as well as the chickens of colonial expansion coming home to roost on American soil. When the workers, refusing their submission to the forces they were subjected to, struck rather than accepting their diminished earning power, the town’s legal arm simply rounded up the strikers, many of whom were of Mexican and East European descent, and forcibly deported them to the other side of the border. The law not only left these principled dissenters to fend for themselves within an unforgiving desert wilderness but extended a long history of industrial colonialism wreaking havoc on the lives of people brought under its boot heel. As they were deemed, essentially, un-American, they found themselves on the wrong side of the churning thresher of American Manifest Destiny, a machine dressed up in divinity that the esteemed scholar of settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, called a “structure, not an event.”

Wolfe meant that the violence was not a single, localizable occurrence but an ongoing system of expropriation and dehumanization. In asking the living town members, most of whom are descendants of the victims, the culprits, or both, to reenact what for many is the most significant event in their town’s history, Greene recognizes, and poeticizes, Wolfe’s claim. His account of the prolonged vestiges of a system of expansion is both distantly observant and cautiously empathetic, exploring the minutiae of the town’s remembrance as it tilts between introspective pathos and expressive pageantry. Most of them react with a kind of piqued curiosity, treating it as more of an entertainment for their personal lives than a serious collective reckoning. But the sediments of history can’t be shaken away. Fernando Serrano, a young Mexican American actor who signs up to play an IWW striker, is particularly moving because he is particularly moved by those sediments as he searches for them and allows himself to be searched by them. His hesitant engagement suggests not only a historical reawakening but a political coming of age.

Serrano begins the film more intrigued by this history than consciously affected by it. He is more interested in history as an abstraction that hovers from a distance and seemingly reticent on this incident’s connection to modern questions of immigration. This is despite the fact that these questions very much haunt his own life. His mother was deported when he was a young boy, and his distance from her receives a telling echo in his character’s emotional conversation with his in-character mother, who warns him of the stakes of participating in a strike that will draw the ire of capital and the U.S. government. For Serrano, acting increasingly becomes an act of truth-making, a kind of return of a repressed history that opens his mind to a much wider canvas which he is imbricated in. Yet what seems like a political shock for him, an entirely new field of vision within which to frame the self, approximates only a “telenovela” for the actress playing his mother, Mary Ellen Suarez Dunlap. She is also Mexican American, but she seems to have little investment in the violence on which the town was founded, and on which the nation continues to tread today.

History, for Dunlap, is a theater to play in, but for Serrano, it’s a participatory exorcism, an embodied encounter with the structure that forms the self. And, for Greene, it’s a canvas on which the town can uncover itself and with which he can undercut our expectations about who will be affected by this enactment, and on what terms. While Dunlap plays Serrano’s mother in the reenactment, she is also married to the man playing one of the reenactment’s villains. Greene only exposes this reality after Serrano has uncomfortably given the man a history lesson and they’ve awkwardly joked about one of them deporting the other in the play, seemingly aware of the reverberations of their claims in the modern world but unable to, or unwilling to, acknowledge them openly. These are the relations that imbue Bisbee ’17 with such political gravity, and such narrative and interpersonal slipperiness.

Then there’s Sue Ray, who speaks of how her grandfather deported her great uncle in the way someone might show a friend a family heirloom and explain how it was passed down from your grandmother. She exhibits an obvious concern for history that also somehow feels like containment and domestication of history. In expressing a kind of delight in her children taking on the roles of their ancestors for the play, she is also turning a national schism into a fraternal brotherhood, an engagement with the past that is also a political refusal of it. She’s honored to be a part of it, but the film silently ponders if she isn’t really just treating this quandary of time as a memento to compartmentalize in a locket, or a story to tell only when it is convenient.

In exploring the vagaries of guilt and the ambiguities of atonement, in meditating on the machinations of time, Bisbee ’17 also becomes a lyrical forum for history’s indeterminacy, for the gap between fact and truth and the danger of confusing one for the other. Early on, we see a young re-enactor self-consciously comparing Bisbee’s history to the more famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, a historical event which lingers in the American imagination and which he pantomimes in his day-job. He recognizes that the Corral incident is simply so shot-through with layers of artifice and performance that it can never compare to “the real thing.” By the time we end the film, though, we’re no less sure of Bisbee’s capacity to recognize its own history beyond the performative contours that have caked onto it over time. A famous John Ford film once famously remarked that “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” and Bisbee ’17 essentially reminds us that fact can also become legend, and that the fact of its factness, its rootedness in real history, makes it in some sense even more susceptible to manipulation than something that has no basis in reality. No one in the film really has the facts of the Bisbee tale wrong, but the truth they tell with these facts is warped, slanted, mischievous, and mutated. Everyone in town knows the story, but few seem to really want to grapple with it.

Score: 10/10