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'The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase is an imaginative and innovative film essay which combines faux and real documentary with lyrical fiction to paint a monstrous yet beautiful portrait of America at the end of the millennium. With unflinching originality, the film meditates humorously on faith, myth, scapegoats, the idea of the alien, the end of the world, and the beginnings of redemption. The film is a playful intellectual travelogue through the abandoned remnants of the Wild West, an ex-frontier turned into a heartland deprived of its promises, gazing at the stars for signposts to a brighter future. The film reminds us that the West may share something more than barbed wire with genocide, and that history can be told through the moving image in startling new ways. Oppenheimer suggests that we may look to cinema to understand the dark secrets at the heart of the American dream. Oppenheimer asks: if we can identify with larger-than-life epics on the silver screen, why can't we see the larger-than-life history of the United States in the fringe acts of violence (motivated by the most irrational fantasies) which this country nurtures more than any other on our planet? ... Oppenheimer interviews an extravagant selection of individuals, alumni from the pages of The National Enquirer. A story of infanticide and fanaticism unfolds through interviews the inventor of the microwave, UFOlogists, and militia leaders -- we even hear from the Antichrist while his mother prepares rice in the kitchen of a Vegas trailer home. Every detail fits perfectly into si-non-e-vero-e-ben-trovato of imminent doom. As in Buñuel's dogless Andalusian Dog, there is no textbook history and no Louisiana in The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase. Examining hallucinatory stories told by religious and political eccentrics, he shows how they, broken existentially and orphaned by a corporation-state and its laissez-faire praxis, use their closed minds as a last shelter, as their Andalusian doghouses. ... Oppenheimer's monstrous yet charming 'history of my country' is written by a poet, sweet and dark, joyous as the wet rats who save themselves from drowning in the film's last sequence. And the film never loses sight of the rats' wealthy cousin, that most famous mouse from the West Coast. The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase is a pioneering and innovative work. It opens a genre of film as revelatory and intelligent dream, stimulant of social memory, and means for re-examining the relationship between fact and fiction, historical truth and social myth.' Dusan Makavejev, Director of WR: Mysteries of the Organism

"This vital new DVD release... this is a disquieting and essential set from Second Run... which help to complete the full, grotesque fresco of Oppenheimer's meteoric rise"

"The chief pleasure of Second Run’s new collection of twelve early films by Oppenheimer lies in seeing the director develop, to watch the precedents to a work that initially seemed to be unprecedented... Films do not need to fit the categories we put them in, he realised – if you’re documenting a complex phenomenon, you should be allowed to make complex work"

"Show a director finding his voice with remarkable speed... Yes, these are apprentice works but they're never less than intriguing and sometimes much, much more."

"Joshua Oppenheimer may just be the most interesting and radical documentary-maker you've never heard of... This collection of a dozen of his earliest films won't change that, but they're important waymarkers and, taken together, add up to a considerable body of work... Once seen, never forgotten."

"It took me back to a time when I too was thrilled by the possibilities of film and video as a medium for artistic exploration and expression... This is experimental cinema at it's thoughtful, risk-taking and politically committed best, and has added weight to my conviction that Oppenheimer is emerging as one of the most important and committed documentary filmmakers of the modern age.

... Impressively presented, as ever, by Second Run, this is an absolute must for anyone already wowed by Oppenheimer's groundbreaking features and especially those of us who believe that film can be every bit as adventurous an artistic medium as painting or sculpture."

"A phenomenal set of early films from the director of The Act of Killing, available for the first time anywhere"