This ‘Look of Silence’ speaks volumes
Searching for a good film, I turned to Amazon Prime and discovered "The Look of Silence" — the sequel, better yet companion piece, to Joshua Oppenheimer's 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary "The Act of Killing." Following is the review that I wrote for Spokane Public Radio:
Life is full of contrasts. Love, for instance, is the flip side of hate, and the evolution from one to the other – at least for some people – can occur in a heartbeat. In cinema, striking imagery can mask the most insidious evil. Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 film “Triumph of the Will,” a stridently alluring exploration of the Nazi rise to power, is the classic movie example.
Documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer knows well the power of contrast. For 12 years, Oppenheimer lived in one of the most beautiful spots on Earth: Indonesia, the Southeast Asian archipelago that includes among its 17,000-odd islands the popular tourist destination of Bali.
Yet 2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of one of the world’s great genocides: the murder of between 500,000 and a million Indonesian residents. This genocide was the subject of Oppenheimer’s 2012 documentary “The Act of Killing,” and it’s a subject he revisits in his follow-up, “The Look of Silence.”
It’s not as if Oppenheimer just told the same story twice, as if he picked up “Silence” where he left off with “Killing.” His first film focuses on the men – and they were men, mostly – who were proud to re-enact on camera the murders they had committed. Not only did they stand in front of Oppenheimer and explain graphically how they sliced, strangled and beat people to death, they portrayed themselves as heroes, saviors of the Indonesian government – and as self-styled original gangsters of movie fame.
“The Look of Silence” focuses, instead, on a single man – a glasses peddler named Adi Rukun – whose older brother, Ramli – was murdered two years before Adi was born. Oppenheimer shows us Adi’s life, both with his own wife and children and with his elderly parents, whose own life was greatly affected not just by Ramli’s death but by the aftereffects – including not just the fact that they’ve lived the intervening half century in the same village as their son’s killers but also in a country steeped in the mythical storyline that the three-year process of genocide was necessary for the nation’s survival.
Adi, with Oppenheimer’s help, is intent on unveiling the past. He wants to know why his brother was murdered, how the killers feel now and why no one has ever admitted that the genocide – of not just Communists but of trade-unionists, intellectuals and even ordinary Indonesians of Chinese ethnicity – was wrong, much less apologized for it.
So we see him, fitting the interviewees with his portable vision-measuring equipment, then drawing them out, inviting them to share their own memories before divulging his own circumstances. But if he and Oppenheimer had hoped for some sort of reconciliation, they end up disappointed. Only seldom is evil ever willing to call itself out.
Instead, we’re left with the sight of Adi, sitting in front of a TV screen, watching men – killers, actually – laugh as they describe the gruesome way his brother died. And the look on Adi’s face, though carefully neutral, could mask an emotion of complete contrast.
It could be a look of quiet rage.