This companion piece (rather than sequel) to Joshua Oppenheimer’s devastating The Act of Killing is more formally traditional than its predecessor, but no less distressing. Optometrist Adi travels from house to house, performing eye-tests, and interviewing elderly locals involved in mass slaugher during Indonesia’s “anti-communist purge” of 1965-66. Among their victims were Adi’s older brother Ramli, whose torture and dismemberment is graphically depicted in a book written and illustrated by one of the film’s subjects. As before, Oppenheimer’s focus is not so much the past as the present – the spectre of mass murderers who drank the blood of their victims now living alongside the families of those they butchered, unpunished and unashamed. While The Act of Killing specifically eschewed geopolitical context, The Look of Silence acknowledges America’s role in the horror (one killer suggests that a US cruise would have been a fitting reward), but does not focus on it.
Instead, its gaze is held by the spectacle of Adi looking and listening as the guilty recount their actions proudly on video interviews conducted by Oppenheimer from 2003 to 2005, then more evasively (and sometimes threateningly) in the presence of this quietly dignified young man. “You ask deeper questions than Joshua ever did,” complains one death-squad member; another tells Adi to “keep going” if he wants to risk seeing violence rear its head once more. There is clear and present danger here: as before, several of the Indonesian film-makers are credited simply as “Anonymous”. Most importantly, after the surreal nightmares of Act of Killing, this gives voice to the victims, not only in the interviews with Adi’s bereaved mother and father, but also in the loud silences that punctuate his conversations with the killers. Astute sound design heightens the gaping void in which this awful legacy lives on, while the tools of Adi’s trade draw our attention to eyes behind which we hope, but struggle, to find signs of remorse.
