ADirected by Joshua Oppenheimer Review by Jon Kissel |  |
The second of Joshua Oppenheimer’s landmark documentary duo on the 1965 Indonesia leftist purge, The Look of Silence flips the perspective from those who did the killing to the relatives of those who were killed. In Oppenheimer’s earlier Act of Killing, he gets some of the perpetrators, responsible for the deaths of somewhere between 500,000 to a million Indonesians and presently celebrated as national heroes, to recreate their deeds under the guise of a mythic film. Bragging to a foreigner about what they did in that very strange and chilling film is one thing. There’s a level of distance that Oppenheimer creates that allows the killers to be completely free in what they say. With Look of Silence, Oppenheimer brings along a man whose brother was killed and lets him do the talking. These two films, each inseparable from the other, are required viewing for any thinking citizen. Darkly compelling and deeply human, Look of Silence is the antithesis to the hellish upside-down world of Act of Killing, a world that dominates Indonesia but festers with barely-contained rot and resentment.
The Act of Killing’s end credits were filled with Anonymous titles. It was too dangerous for these likely Indonesian citizens to openly associate themselves with Oppenheimer’s work. In Look of Silence, a formerly anonymous man steps in front of the camera. Adi Rukun is an optometrist by trade, able to achieve a professional life despite being tainted with the massacres. His brother was swept up in the raids and murdered before Adi was born, an act perpetrated by the people his elderly mother still regularly sees in her daily routine. Adi accompanies Oppenheimer to the grand homes of the former gang leaders who did the killing, many of whom contributed to Act of Killing or one of Oppenheimer’s other Indonesian projects. In between getting these men and women fitted for glasses, Adi plays them the footage of them bragging about all the throats they slit or heads they cut off and asks questions. Look of Silence takes its title from the many awkward pauses in these conversations as each man waits for the other to start talking, despite there being little to say once it’s clear where each stands. They imply that Adi would’ve been tortured and killed if he had asked these questions of these people only a handful of years earlier; take that not happening as evidence of Indonesia being a fairer place. Meanwhile, Adi’s mother still struggles with nightmares and a simmering hatred for her neighbors while others like her have long been blackballed from state employment or benefits.
What Act of Killing shares with Look of Silence is a disturbing frankness about the massacres. The killers talk about not just the workmanlike drudgery of killing thousands of people, but the brutal diversions they engaged in to spice things up or ward off insanity. What makes Look of Silence distinct is the added element of the killers’ families, who were mostly absent from the earlier film. For some of their adult children, they’ve never heard these details, and Oppenheimer watches their faces in the exact moment that they recalibrate their relationship with their father or their uncle. It’s one thing for the state to valorize murderers: every state does essentially that in one way or another and makes excuses for them in textbooks and national mythmaking, a process that Adi’s son encounters in school. It’s something else when a family is directly confronted with what their patriarch is capable of. It becomes a lot harder to put one’s infant child in the lap of a man who nonchalantly describes what the other side of a dismembered breast looks like.
For the viewer, dwelling in all this recrimination and pain makes for a tough sit, or it would if not for the resilient charm of the film’s subjects. Adi’s father is 103, blind, and barely mobile, but his comic timing is still sharp. His son asks him to sing a song, and of all the songs the father could’ve sung, he immediately belts one out about how sexy he is, while Adi’s mother rolls her eyes in the background. Adi’s young daughter inherited her grandfather’s talent for comedy, imitating her dad and displaying a mastery of fart humor. These moments of a family entertaining each other are a must. They don’t fully alleviate the sick feeling that permeates the film and perhaps the subjects’ own lives, but there’s rarely been a film in more need of a brief respite from all the real-life horror.
The Look of Silence’s grand utility as a historical document is in how it ticks all the boxes of delusional, counter-factual storytelling to cover up nakedly evil crimes on a national scale. The psychological and rhetorical tricks the killers use to elevate their deeds and convince their fellows of how those deeds were necessary must be known by as many people as possible, thus serving as an inoculation against their future recurrence. An endlessly galling part of living through the last five years of American history is to see all the signs and the tricks, and watch them work on rabid, cheering throngs. An initial viewing of Act of Killing had a more naïve version of myself wondering what was wrong with Indonesia that they could act this way, but a more savvy current version recognizes this insanity in every Confederate flag, to say nothing of the US’s own well-established manipulation and direction of the Indonesian massacres themselves. That country is no more fucked up than any other, and the unfucking will happen thanks to heroes like Adi who eschew revenge in exchange for truth and understanding. Of course, he now travels with a security team while his brother’s murderers strut around without a care in the world, perpetuating injustice every time they wake up in the morning. The scale of all of it, alongside the intimacy of both the killers and the victims, brought to grim light by Oppenheimer and his team of Anonymous filmmakers, is one of the greatest documentary accomplishments of all time. A
What Act of Killing shares with Look of Silence is a disturbing frankness about the massacres. The killers talk about not just the workmanlike drudgery of killing thousands of people, but the brutal diversions they engaged in to spice things up or ward off insanity. What makes Look of Silence distinct is the added element of the killers’ families, who were mostly absent from the earlier film. For some of their adult children, they’ve never heard these details, and Oppenheimer watches their faces in the exact moment that they recalibrate their relationship with their father or their uncle. It’s one thing for the state to valorize murderers: every state does essentially that in one way or another and makes excuses for them in textbooks and national mythmaking, a process that Adi’s son encounters in school. It’s something else when a family is directly confronted with what their patriarch is capable of. It becomes a lot harder to put one’s infant child in the lap of a man who nonchalantly describes what the other side of a dismembered breast looks like.
For the viewer, dwelling in all this recrimination and pain makes for a tough sit, or it would if not for the resilient charm of the film’s subjects. Adi’s father is 103, blind, and barely mobile, but his comic timing is still sharp. His son asks him to sing a song, and of all the songs the father could’ve sung, he immediately belts one out about how sexy he is, while Adi’s mother rolls her eyes in the background. Adi’s young daughter inherited her grandfather’s talent for comedy, imitating her dad and displaying a mastery of fart humor. These moments of a family entertaining each other are a must. They don’t fully alleviate the sick feeling that permeates the film and perhaps the subjects’ own lives, but there’s rarely been a film in more need of a brief respite from all the real-life horror.
The Look of Silence’s grand utility as a historical document is in how it ticks all the boxes of delusional, counter-factual storytelling to cover up nakedly evil crimes on a national scale. The psychological and rhetorical tricks the killers use to elevate their deeds and convince their fellows of how those deeds were necessary must be known by as many people as possible, thus serving as an inoculation against their future recurrence. An endlessly galling part of living through the last five years of American history is to see all the signs and the tricks, and watch them work on rabid, cheering throngs. An initial viewing of Act of Killing had a more naïve version of myself wondering what was wrong with Indonesia that they could act this way, but a more savvy current version recognizes this insanity in every Confederate flag, to say nothing of the US’s own well-established manipulation and direction of the Indonesian massacres themselves. That country is no more fucked up than any other, and the unfucking will happen thanks to heroes like Adi who eschew revenge in exchange for truth and understanding. Of course, he now travels with a security team while his brother’s murderers strut around without a care in the world, perpetuating injustice every time they wake up in the morning. The scale of all of it, alongside the intimacy of both the killers and the victims, brought to grim light by Oppenheimer and his team of Anonymous filmmakers, is one of the greatest documentary accomplishments of all time. A
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