Slightly slouched over as he walks down Dunster Street, Joshua L. Oppenheimer '96-'97 looks like a slinky. His shoulders, acting in unison with his hips, wave back and forth as his whole body sways with each step. Wearing a tattered, green tweed blazer, Oppenheimer hardly looks the part of a master illusionist.

But then again, Oppenheimer lives in a different world. It is a fantastical, non-linear universe where he is in complete control of images and ideas that, above all, move fast.

The Anti-Christ. Aliens in the Capitol. Microwaved babies. Cowboys. 1950s suburban living.

Oppenheimer's trick, which is the beauty of his Hoopes Prize-winning film, "The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase," is making sense of confused images, putting them together to paint a compelling portrait of America and its heartland.

Conversation with Oppenheimer, like his film, centers around images and ideas that are rarely constrained by linear time.

In one moment, Oppenheimer talks about dressing in drag at a protest to make a point and describes how he infiltrated a neo-Nazi group by pretending he was an alien abductee. Then, it's on to his year off as modern day troubadour in Calcutta and the filmmaking he will pursue while on his Marshall Scholarship next year.

The achievement of Oppenheimer's storytelling--whether in film or in person--is that it challenges preexisting perceptions. He succeeds because he has a natural talent for spitting out images in raw form.

In one scene from his movie, a mother casts her baby out to sea in a visual retelling of Moses in the bulrushes, replete with rats and sunken trailer homes. The image is set against a stark, gaping landscape reminiscent of Oppenheimer's native New Mexico.

Dusan Makavejev, a visiting lecturer and a well-known international filmmaker who advised Oppenheimer's film thesis, explains that scenes like the baby in the ocean and the more striking image of a baby "burning" in a microwave succeed because Oppenheimer's storytelling is intriguing but not overly "bookish."

Oppenheimer first approached Makavejev two years ago and asked to join the professor's advanced film class. Makavejev turned the inexperienced student down, but within months, Oppenheimer developed a project that Makavejev agreed to advise.

"He was already more dynamic than most other students," Makavejev says. "He moves well; he moves fast."

Oppenheimer, an affiliate of Dudley House, was raised in a politically-charged family in his hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico. His mom Carol, a labor lawyer, says politics is standard fare for dinner-table conversation. (Oppenheimer's step-father is also a labor lawyer, and his father is a professor of political science.)

"We've always talked about politics in our home and tried to figure out the best way to make changes," says Carol Oppenheimer. "There has never been any question that we live at a time when poor people have not been given the rights they are entitled."

Outside of film circles, Oppenheimer's public image has been shaped by his flamboyant protests and his public squabbles with the administration.

For nearly two years, Oppenheimer (along with Moon Duchin '97) was The Crimson's posterchild of gay activism. Oppenheimer's shaved head and black combat gear--and his affinity for biting quotations--made him conspicuous on this carefully-groomed, moderate campus.

He was at the center of the protest in a government class the fall of 1995, when he dressed in drag to rail against Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. '53 for his anti-gay comments at a prominent Colorado trial, his disdain for women's studies and his support of the controversial The Bell Curve.