The Look of Silence (M). Director: Joshua Oppenheimer. 100 minutes
Joshua Oppenheimer's 2013 epic The Act of Killing was a gruelling exercise in art as interrogation. It employed the artifice of filmmaking both to illuminate facts for his audience, and to challenge on every level — intellectual, emotional and moral — its subjects, the perpetrators of genocide in Indonesia in the mid 1960s. With its sprawling running time and surreal flourishes, it is a film that grows more vivid and horrifying on reflection, as Indonesia continues to contend with this dark period of its history (as do the Western countries that turned a blind eye to it) while many of those in power there prefer not to know.
The Look of Silence is a companion film to The Act of Killing, and while it is tighter in both its focus and mode of delivery, it is equally as rivetting, and resonant. In The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer told Consequence of Sound in August, 'every sequence culminates in an abrupt cut to silence. These are moments where the perspective of the film shifts from the perpetrators to the absent dead ... in The Look of Silence I wanted to take the viewer into any one of those haunted silences that punctuate The Act of Killing and make you feel what it's like to live there ... to have to live afraid for half a century.'
He does so by taking us into the home and life of Adi, a middle-aged optometrist who was born after the atrocities but whose older brother Ramli was killed during them, at the Snake River massacre site. The film spends considerable time observing Adi's home life, including his mother's tender care for his frail, blind and deaf father (both are centenarians), and Adi's interactions with his own young children. We also see him watching Oppenheimer's filmed interviews with the perpetrators of Ramli's murder, before accompanying him as he confronts and questions them, on the pretext of performing an eye exam.
These encounters are emblematic of a new generation of Indonesian seeking enlightenment from a former generation who find it less painful, or more beneficial, to forget. The men Adi confronts committed hideous acts, yet have lived half a century without consequences. They are the embodiment of the propaganda wool over a nation's eyes, that many Indonesians wish to cast aside for good. They are the representatives of a deep wound that festers still in