The Look Of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2014) : Denmark/Indonesia/Finland/Norway/UK/Israel/France/USA/Germany/Netherlands

Reviewed by Nathan Pécout. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, at the Metro 4 Theatre.

If you have seen Joshua Oppenheimer’s previous documentary film The Act Of Killing (2012), you know what to except with this follow-up motion. The Look Of Silence is not a sequel, it is another point of view on the brutal massacres of suspected communists after the coup d’état led by the Indonesian army in 1965. After placing himself from the point of view of the killers, Oppenheimer now focuses on Adi Rukun, whose brother was killed at this time.

Adi was born a few years after the events of 1965, but he had to endure the looks of his brother’s murderers during his whole life, those murderers being neighbors of his in the small village where he grew up. During the film, he faces some of them for a casual eye therapy appointment that quickly becomes an interview about the past. And nobody here likes to move the past. Adi’s mother isn’t always enclined to recall those events. She hopes God will take care of avenging her son and her family, but otherwise she looks dead inside, like this butterfly that will never get out of the cocoon she is holding in her hand. As for the dad, he forgot about the past because of his old age. His presence emphasizes on the effects of the passing of time, fading memories away and burying the past forever. This is what Joshua Oppenheimer tries to prevent in his two films.

One powerful image during the film is the redundant close-up shot of Adi’s face (see image), staring at the television showing one of his brother’s killer evoking his actions in a laughter. Adi’s facial expression doesn’t move, it is extremely hard to see what he feels. Hatred ? Disgust ? Because the killers are, for the most part, still proud of their actions and consider them heroic, even if none of them wants to take the responsibility, there was always someone above that gave the order. Just like in The Act Of Killing, Oppenheimer shows them replaying the massacres with pride and smiles on their faces. Are they that cruel and cold-blooded ? Or is it a way for them to make the situation less dramatic ? The end of  The Act Of Killing gives more credit to this second option.

Indonesia seems to be doing well at first glance, but hides obscure parts in its past. The fear of communism is still taught in school, a legacy from the 1965 revolution supported by the US, at least ideologically (“Americans taught us to hate communists.”) and maybe more (the abundance of rubber in the archipelago could have been a motivation). But everybody there wants to forget, or deny the importance of these events. The motif of the river symbolizes the time going by, and Oppenheimer uses numerous shots on the peaceful nature to illustrate this concept of retrieved peace. But these shots are immediately followed by the narration or the re-enactement of the torture scenes that happened at Snake river, not far from Adi’s village, digging in the past and bringing back those events.

The choice of an ophtalmologist as the main character is not meaningless : neither Oppenheimer nor Adi Rukun were direct witnesses of the 1965 massacres : they want to see through the eyes of those who acted this way, to understand and show a dark page of the Indonesian history. In the same line than The Act Of Killing, The Look Of Silence is a disturbing masterpiece of  historic reconstitution and symbolism.