Produced by Signe Byrge Sørensen; executive producers, Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Andre Singer; editor, Niels Pagh Andersen. Copenhagen: Final Cut for Real; San Francisco, CA: Drafthouse Films [distributor], 2014. 1 online resource (102 mins.) In Indonesian and Javanese with subtitles. Url http://thelookofsilence.com
If Oppenheimer’s earlier, world-famous documentary, The Act of Killing (2012), was a nightmarish passage into the fantasy world of génocidaires, this companion piece is more like a bracing awakening into the tragic world of the terrorized survivors who have been forbidden, like Antigone, to even mourn the dead. The first film in this diptych, judging by the commentaries on it, left most viewers stunned and overwhelmed, struggling in the subsequent days to process what they had just seen. (What was that big fish sculpture? Why was that guy dressing in drag? How could they be so brazen?…) The Look of Silence, by contrast, presents viewers with the somber, quiet dignity of the victims. Both films are set in the same region of Indonesia, North Sumatra, and address the same event, the political genocide of 1965–66, but they have completely different emotional landscapes.
It is to some extent inaccurate to call the two films “Oppenheimer’s films.” The complexities of authorship lie not just in the extensive involvement of Indonesian filmmakers and film crews who have wished to remain anonymous. Both films are the brainchildren of the protagonists who appear in them; each man uses Oppenheimer to help him make the film that he wants to make. In The Act of Killing, the film moves forward by Anwar Congo’s relentless and futile quest to land upon an adequate representation of his murders. In the Look of Silence, the film moves forward by Adi Rukun’s relentless and futile quest to find a perpetrator who can honestly tell him how and why his elder brother was killed, and perhaps even apologize for it. In his relationship with Anwar Congo and Adi Rukun, Oppenheimer has drastically altered the customary role of the documentary filmmaker.
Adi Rukun is no less haunted than Anwar Congo, but he is haunted in a different way. He was born after 1965 to parents who viewed him as a kind of replacement for his elder brother who was murdered in 1965. His parents, Javanese workers in the plantation belt around Medan, hold tightly to the memory of his brother Ramli and secretly visit his anonymous grave in the middle of an oil palm plantation two miles away. Having been yoked to the history of his absent brother, treated within his family almost as a reincarnation of Ramli, his quest to understand what happened in 1965 is a quest to understand himself. Anwar Congo was drunkenly running away from himself, unable to squarely face the horror of his deeds; Adi Rukun is running towards himself and is serious and driven.
It is excruciatingly uncomfortable to watch Adi Rukun’s confrontations with the perpetrators of the plantation belt, the counterparts of Anwar Congo, whose dirty deeds were in downtown Medan. This film may be the first documentary in which a victim is filmed conversing with perpetrators who were not part of an ousted regime. He was putting himself in great danger, talking to men who are still powerful figures in the area—men who have been remarkably successful in preventing public discussions of the killings. While they have boasted about their murders in certain contexts, such as when meeting Oppenheimer (a presumed fellow anti-communist from America), they have understood that a curtain of silence was supposed to separate the general Indonesian public from the mass killing, as it did at the time. They look at Adi Rukun asking them questions, demanding the curtain be torn down, as a threat to national security. They begin asking questions of him—“where do you live?”—to insinuate threats to his security.
The film begins with shots of jumping beans—moth larvae that move about inside hard casings. They are plentiful amid the foliage of tropical Sumatra. They form a metaphor, one can assume, for the political situation in Indonesia, where people of a younger generation like Adi, refusing to rest content with the silence and the lies, push against the iron cages of the military and its assorted para-militaries. What seems as static as a stone may suddenly jump.
This film has certainly helped jumpstart discussions in Indonesia about the political genocide, despite it being banned and many of its showings raided. Given the current attempts to enforce silence, one can hardly imagine anything more subversive than the image of Adi, staring intently, refusing to be deferential, eschewing phatic communication—the smiling, the joking, the small talk—and demanding honest answers. Like its predecessor, this film is profound and profoundly moving.
John Roosa
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 220-222