The Look of Silence

“I think you are avoid­ing moral respon­si­bil­i­ty,” says Adi to the man in charge of the death squad that tor­tured and mur­dered his broth­er, Ram­li, dur­ing the 1965 Indone­sian geno­cide. ​“You’re so sexy, I can’t stand it,” sings Adi’s father, a man so tiny and tooth­less he’s like a child, right down to the nap­py he wears and the care he receives from his family.

Adi’s moth­er, Rohani, is a charm­ing­ly creased old woman. She pass­es the days chop­ping papayas or look­ing after her hus­band or sit­ting under a tree in the trop­i­cal heat. These tran­quil scenes are at odds with the ragged state of her insides. She will nev­er, not ever, move on from the mem­o­ry of her old­est son, Ram­li, appear­ing at the house, hold­ing in his pro­trud­ing guts, hav­ing briefly escaped from a death squad. They had tea before the gang­sters came back to fin­ish the job.

Rohani’s tes­ti­monies return like an automa­ton to this day, fill­ing in details of an event that is vivid­ly pre­served and incom­pa­ra­bly grotesque. She is a woman of few words and it takes the length of the film for the extent of her suf­fer­ing to come out. When it does, the most stag­ger­ing thing is how raw it all still is, 50 years on. At least, it is stag­ger­ing to per­ceive on an emo­tion­al lev­el. Intel­lec­tu­al­ly it makes sense that, to quote anoth­er geno­cide sur­vivor, ​“the wound is open” when those respon­si­ble still rule the coun­try and flaunt their pow­er every day.

The Look of Silence works as a stand­alone sto­ry of life in the heart­land of grief, but is enhanced by hav­ing seen direc­tor Joshua Oppenheimer’s aston­ish­ing 2012 doc­u­men­tary, The Act of Killing. This film showed the psy­cho­log­i­cal som­m­er­saults that enable a human to kill anoth­er human. This time Oppen­heimer – with Adi as his part­ner – has cre­at­ed a doc­u­men­tary that shows what it means to be a vic­tim of a mur­der­ous and still dom­i­nant régime. He metic­u­lous­ly lays out the fur­ni­ture of Indone­sian past and present before zero­ing in on inti­mate truths about the peo­ple who live there today.

While respect­ing the com­plex­i­ty of both stand­points, The Look of Silence is not an emo­tion­al democ­ra­cy between killers and vic­tims. It is an anguished trib­ute to those that suf­fer bru­tal injus­tice abstract­ly and in the par­tic­u­lar dev­as­tat­ing scheme of this film. The char­ac­ters are a moth­er, a father, a dead son and a live son. Adi was born after his broth­er died and does not know how his fam­i­ly lived before a shroud of sor­row engulfed them. Hav­ing grown up among trau­ma­tised loved ones, his desire for jus­tice is stronger than his fear of vio­lence. The mood is hushed. The lux­u­ri­ant land is cap­tured in awe-inspir­ing fram­ing as Adi, a door-to-door optometrist, goes about talk­ing to mem­bers of the death squad or army. Some have boast­ed on film about the par­tic­u­lars of his brother’s tor­ture. They are old but not decrepit and full of self-jus­ti­fy­ing logic.

Oppen­heimer moves through the details of a sophis­ti­cat­ed sto­ry with ambling poise, find­ing humour in the aching and grace­ful cen­tral fam­i­ly and their idio­syn­crasies. Dad­dy is oper­at­ing under the belief that he is a teenag­er. Mum­my thinks he is ​“at least 140.” It’s like Oppen­heimer is in love with his sub­jects and show­ing through cin­e­mat­ic sto­ry­telling how wor­thy of love they are. Adi’s desire for truth in the form of an admit­tance of guilt from per­pe­tra­tors hangs in the air as a poten­tial source of relief. So too does the idea of his­to­ry repeat­ing itself in the form of the vio­lent silenc­ing of his ques­tion­ing voice. The spec­tre of fur­ther dam­age being vis­it­ed upon this fam­i­ly that we have come to know is unbear­able and pal­pa­bly real. In the sup­posed ​‘safe space’ of a filmed inter­view, eva­sion turns to men­ace. The footage sud­den­ly attains the use of evi­dence in the case of a disappearance.

The next scene is of Rohani hold­ing a tiny fluffy chick, clean­ing out its cage. Her com­pas­sion seems like a brave lit­tle amulet against the machin­ery of state bru­tal­i­ty. Oppen­heimer locates tragedy as per­son­al help­less­ness in the face of the unima­gain­able. This is the emo­tion­al core of a film whose lay­ers go on and on, pro­vid­ing a chal­leng­ing alter­na­tive to the Indone­sian his­to­ry we see being taught to chil­dren in a pro­pa­gan­da-dri­ven class­room. Not only are the vic­tims that Oppen­heimer embeds with liv­ing with per­son­al demons, they are also strug­gling to save their expe­ri­ences from Big Broth­er-style vaporisation.

The Look of Silence is a hybrid of intel­lec­tu­al and emo­tion­al fear­less­ness that dev­as­tates as it edu­cates and could only have been made by one man. Where jour­nal­is­tic immer­sion and philo­soph­i­cal bril­liance meets human­ism, there stands Joshua Oppen­heimer with his camera.