Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence is the stunning follow-up to his 2012 documentary The Act of Killing, that staggering investigative experiment in what can only be called movie situationism. It is about the mass murder of a million supposed communists in Indonesia, after the 1965 Suharto coup: in TAoK, the director tracked down the ageing and unrepentant perpetrators and persuaded them to re-enact their crimes in the styles of their favourite films. I wrote about this second documentary on the subject during last year’s Venice film festival, and since then the consensus has emerged that this film’s objective is to shift the focus from the perpetrators to the victims. It is actually more complicated than that. What Oppenheimer has done is cede the prerogative of asking questions to the victims’ families – or rather, one symbolic representative. Much of the time, the focus still remains on the culprits, but the way they are challenged has a remarkable new dimension.
The first film was a brilliant political provocation. This second film withdraws the element of irony, and it enters the realm of tragedy. At its centre is Adi, a quietly spoken, fortysomething ophthalmologist whose elder brother Ramli was brutally butchered in this horrendous era. Amazingly, Adi interviews the murderers themselves, one or two directly responsible for Ramli’s torture and death, and even gives some an eye-test – the imagery of willed blindness is inescapable. They are part of a gerontocracy of tyranny: they and their comrades and descendants are still in power, and make it clear that such a slaughter could easily be repeated. Adi’s dignity and calm is remarkable, and I don’t think I have ever seen a recent documentary so visually beautiful – and there can hardly be one with such a heartbreaking backstory: Adi’s parents appear on camera, both over 100 years old, his father blind (that image again) and Adi’s poor, stooped mother dedicated to looking after this tiny little figure. It is as if they are cursed to live for ever with their pain. These two films, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, are a really unmissable pairing.
