After making his
monumental Holocaust documentary Shoah in 1985, Claude Lanzmann spent
the rest of his career revisiting the same territory, sharing more of
the stories that he collected while making that film and finding new
angles on the horror. Joshua Oppenheimer has taken a similar approach
to the issue of the anti-Communist massacres that took place in
Indonesia in the 1960s. His 2012 film The Act of Killing was an
extraordinary picture, in which those responsible for these murders
were invited to share their stories and recreate their actions, an
invitation they gleefully accepted. It was an audacious move that
reaped powerful rewards, presenting us with an unforgettable portrait
of evil, madness, denial and guilt.
Oppenheimer's latest
film is called The Look of Silence, and instead of posing the
questions himself, the director has given a man named Adi the
opportunity to investigate his traumatic personal history. An
optician and family man, Adi was born in 1968, two years after his
elder brother Ramli was brutally murdered. Even if this event took
place before his birth, it weighs heavily on Adi's shoulders, both
through the knowledge that he was seen as a replacement for the dead
son, and the fact that his 100 year-old parents – the mother still
frank and sharp-witted, the father ailing in body and mind – never
got over his death. Adi is quiet and impassive, but he proves to be a
disarmingly effective interviewer as he confronts the men who lead
the death squads a half-century earlier. “You ask much deeper
questions than Joshua ever did,” one rattled veteran complains
before telling Oppenheimer to stop filming.
Such fractious
encounters are littered throughout a film that is more
conventional and sober in its construction than The Act of Killing, but
no less powerful for it. In fact, that silence is one of
Oppenheimer's most potent weapons, as he lets the camera rest on the
faces of his subjects while they size each other up. It's fascinating
to watch the way these interviews unfold, with the killers freely
discussing their role in the purge until they learn that Adi is
asking these questions as the brother of a murdered man. Some of the
men try to deflect responsibility and claim they were only following
orders, some get angry and accuse him of unnecessarily opening old
wounds, while another in a grimly amusing moment suggests “Can't we
all just get along, like the military dictatorship taught us?” One
Komando Aksi squad leader begins asking Adi where he lives and what
his family name is when his realises that his brother was a victim,
information that Adi refuses to divulge. The men responsible for the
purge are still in power in Indonesia, a fact that emphasises just
how courageous people like Adi are for daring to ask questions.
Many of the people Adi
speaks to wonder if he is looking for revenge, but that's not the
case. He is simply seeking some sense of understanding and closure,
and he is even willing to offer forgiveness if those responsible for
his brother's death show signs of remorse. As we have already seen in The Act
of Killing, however, these men are more inclined to boast of their
exploits than to regret them, and one piece of footage Oppenheimer
frequently returns to shows two elderly death squad members, Inong
and Amir, retracing their steps down to Snake River, where many
murders were committed. They are happy to play-act and demonstrate
how they dragged terrified victims through the woods and sliced off heads and penises, and
they pose for photographs, smiling at the scene of their crimes. Amir
even wrote a book telling his story, adorned with graphic
illustrations “so our descendants will remember us.”
History is written by
the victors, and the stories being passed down to the next generation
in Indonesia are giving them a skewed sense of their nation's past.
In a classroom we see Adi's son being told about the cruel behaviour
of the communists and the heroic actions of the military that
destroyed them, a perspective that Adi later tries to correct, and
this is one reason why Oppenheimer's films are so vital. The Act of
Killing and The Look of Silence are attempts to fight back against
propagandist rhetoric and engage with the past in a direct and honest
manner, and taken together the two films represent a staggering
achievement. I don't know if Joshua Oppenheimer will return to this
story again or if he feels that his work here is now done, but one
hopes his many brave collaborators – almost all of whom are
credited here as 'Anonymous' – will succeed in their pursuit of
truth, and will one day find peace.