“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That quote from William Faulker could be the thesis of Joshua Oppenheimer’s mesmerizing documentary feature, The Look of Silence. The new film is a companion work to the Danish filmmaker’s provocative 2012 feature, The Act of Killing. Like that film, The Look of Silence addresses the murderous anti-communist purges perpetrated by the Indonesian army and its vigilante allies in 1965-66. However, while Killing focused on the psychology of the perpetrators—now living freely as powerful politicians and local folk heroes—Oppenheimer’s latest turns its attention towards the relatives of the slain.
The Look of Silence follows Adi, who was born shortly after the purges and now works as a traveling optician in his native North Sumatra. He never met his brother Ramli, who was brutally and quite publicly murdered in 1965, unlike the legions of victims who were simply disappeared. Ramli’s slaying highlights the longevity of the terror that the purges inspired: There are living witnesses to the man’s death, but his murderers walk brazenly through village streets, shielded by a repressive government that still remains in power. Oppenheimer has observed that his years in Indonesia felt as though he had “wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust, only to find the Nazis still in power.”
In the new film, Adi watches footage of the now-elderly perpetrators cheerfully recounting their crimes to Oppenheimer’s camera, even going so far as to pantomime the bloody details. Similar surreal confessions were a cornerstone of The Act of Killing, but here the focus is on Adi, who serves as a proxy for all of the families left behind and politically ostracized in the ensuing decades. Polite, soft-spoken, and possessing a youthfully smooth face, Adi is at once an Everyman and an extraordinary individual. Motivated by a mélange of grief, anger, and hopefulness, he does the unthinkable: Under the pretext of examining the vision of local gangsters and soldiers who participated in the purges, he visits these men and asks them about their crimes.
These uneasy interrogations---carried out by Adi with stunning patience, delicacy, and courage—are the heart of The Look of Silence. Oppenheimer stitches theses sequences together with vivid, almost poetic snippets of contemporary life in Sumatra, while also returning repeatedly to Ari as he silently watches the videotaped confessions of killers, his eyes damp and restless. Conceived as a de facto surrogate for his slain brother and living entirely within the repressive aftermath of the purges, Ari’s experiences are integral to the film’s character. He is at once haunted by history’s ghosts and fueled by a younger man’s fearlessness, and his presence shifts the topography of the interviews. While the murderers were shamelessly boastful in The Act of Killing, the new film captures them engaging in minimizing stratagems: blaming superiors, smearing the victims, and fatalistically dismissing atrocities. “The past is the past,” is repeated with a hand wave, as though history had nothing to do with the fearful present.
Measured against the cinematic audacity of The Act of Killing, in which war criminals enthusiastically and often bizarrely recreated the carnage they perpetrated, The Look of Silence is a much more straightforward documentary. However, while it might not be as artistically outlandish as its predecessor, Oppenheimer’s new feature represents an act of moral and mortal courage, both for Adi and the film crew. For this reason alone, Silence is a transfixing experience, but what makes the film a true achievement is its thirst for truth and its dedication to portraying the real-world complexity of terror, regret, and culpability.
The Look of Silence will screen nightly at 7:30 p.m. on September 4–6 at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium. Admission is $6 (cash only).
