The Look of Silence

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) astonished audiences with its inventive approach to the documentary form. To create the film, the director not only conducted personal interviews with many of the perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide of the 1960s, he also worked with them to stage stylized cinematic re-enactments of the atrocities they committed. The combination was striking and deeply surreal.

The Look of Silence is a follow-up, or, more accurately, a companion feature, to that film. While The Act of Killing exposed the murderers and explored their motivations and psychologies, The Look of Silence revisits their crimes through the perspective of the survivors of the genocide. It's an unprecedented film about discovering and revealing past official government wrongdoing in which a victim meets with the perpetrators of a holocaust not in a courtroom or a jail, but while those war criminals are still in power.  Oppenheimer shot The Look of Silence after The Act of Killing was completed but before it was released. He knew that once the first film screened in Indonesia, he would never again have access to the former assassins who currently hold political office and other positions of authority in the now (ostensibly) democratic nation.

The film follows Adi, an optometrist in an Indonesian village whose older brother, Ramli, was killed during the anti-communist purge of the mid-60s, two years before Adi was born. Oppenheimer spent 12 years in Indonesia conducting interviews with people who lived through this genocide. He befriended Adi while researching the mass killings, sharing with him much of the interview footage he filmed with the perpetrators. While Oppenheimer didn't originally intend to make a second film about Adi and his family, he saw Adi’s search for understanding about the circumstances of Ramli’s death as a compelling alternative way to explore the atrocities documented in the first film. Almost all the men accused of Communist loyalties in Adi’s community were taken away, jailed, murdered out of sight, and dumped in a local river. But Ramli, after escaping from prison, was executed in the street in sight of many of his fellow villagers. This makes it difficult for the community to view this specific act of killing as an impersonal and faceless historical event—the way most of them regard everything that occurred during that unfortunate time.

Neither Oppenheimer nor Adi experienced the genocide directly—Oppenheimer because he's an American, and Adi because he was born two years after it ended. Both men have questions about how the government-sanctioned mass murder could have happened so easily and without retribution. But both Oppenheimer and Adi want only to understand, not to accuse, shame, or punish. This is a film about humanity, knowledge, and forgiveness, not gotcha-journalism. The former gangsters and executioners responsible for Ramli's death were aware that Oppenheimer was shooting a film with some of the highest-ranking officials in their government, and so they consented readily to talk on camera with him and Adi, resulting in some very tense conversations between people with incredibly divergent perspectives.

While The Look of Silence may not be as shocking or groundbreaking a film as The Act of Killing, it’s a superior documentary in its own quiet way. This measured, lyrical movie is less about the filmmaker’s novel approach to form and subject, focusing instead on the actual content of the interviews and the behavior of those asking and answering the questions. Adi and his parents and neighbors all live in a society in which survivors of genocide have been terrorized into silence, consenting tacitly to a collective denial. The community seems to think that pretending the mass deaths of the past were necessary and all happened for good reasons will enable them to move beyond the unthinkable history they all share.

But Adi's search for understanding forces the audience—Indonesian, American, or otherwise—to confront profoundly troubling questions: what must it be like to send your young children to school to be taught by the same people who brutally slaughtered your older children? Is it better to avoid challenging repugnant lies if doing so keeps the members of your community safe? What kind of society is built on a foundation of mass death and revisionist history?

In just over an hour and a half, we see extremes of honesty and falsehood, dignity and shame, providing a better understanding of the causes of the Indonesian genocide than the longer and more sensationalistic The Act of Killing did. This makes the modest The Look of Silence more profoundly moving than its much-lauded predecessor. Adi’s search for answers and admissions represents what truth and reconciliation looks like on an intimate and personal level. That Oppenheimer managed to make these two films at all is astonishing, let alone the fact that millions of Indonesians saw them. One can only hope his work leads to healing, understanding, and a stronger Indonesian democracy.