The Look of Silence

"The Act of Killing" is one of the best, weirdest, and most disturbing movies I've ever seen. Joshua Oppenheimer's follow up documentary, "The Look of Silence," is more conventional in its approach, but it's also deeply affecting.

Oppenheimer returns to the same material he mined in "The Act of Killing," the slaughter of communists in Indonesia in the 1960s. The men who actually supervised the killings are alive and well for the most part, and still exercise a gangsterish kind of control over the country. Communists aren't still being murdered overtly and en masse, but one senses that it would be easy for someone to "disappear" if he/she pushed too hard against authority. "The Act of Killing" stuck close to the murderers, and we watched in stunned disbelief as they gleefully reenacted their killings, the heroes of their own demented movies. "The Look of Silence" follows a man whose brother was murdered as part of the Communist purges before he was even born, and now wants to confront the men who carried out the murder. It's unclear, probably even to himself, what he wants from these confrontations. Possibly just an apology, possibly simple recognition of what they did. The conversations run the gamut from cathartic to downright frightening (one man obliquely hints that he could make very bad things happen to the film's protagonist if he wanted to). But the reaction from all of the killers is essentially the same: the past is the past (even though in Indonesia it isn't), why are you bringing all of this up again, can't we just agree to forget?

Of course agreeing to forget is what makes horrific events like these possible to repeat. The most fascinating interviews are those not with the killers themselves but with the children of the killers, the people who have inherited their parents' legacies (on both sides of the conflict) and now must make something of the world they share. In some cases, the children learn details they never before knew and we watch them process them on screen in real time. It's difficult as a viewer to know how to feel about these inheritors of their parents' actions. On the one hand, they really can't and shouldn't be held accountable for things their parents did when they were children or possibly not yet even born. On the other hand, like it or not, we all inherit our own histories and have to at least acknowledge them, both the good and the bad, if we are to learn from them.

Both "The Look of Silence" and "The Act of Killing" are infuriating to Western viewers who have been raised to believe that freedom and justice eventually triumph and that evil, either individual or systemic, gets punished. These are brilliant films, and while they certainly sow doubts in my head about the state of mankind, I feel like a better person for having seen them.

Grade: A+

With just two films to his name, both about the Indonesian mass-murders of the mid-1960's Oppenheimer has become the most important documentarian of his generation.

His second film, "The Look of Silence", coupled with his "The Act of Killing" has created a sea- change in the Indonesian truth, justice and reconciliation movement. Forcing new laws to be written and putting the government in a defensive position against the nation's media.

But Oppenheimer is more than an activist. He's an artist. His films are contemplative, playful and quietly confrontational. His visual attack is succinct, his marriage of form and theme is flawless and his moral intent is thunderous.

Where "Act of Killing" was concerned with a larger study of post-massacre Indonesia, "Look of Silence" chooses a more intimate landscape. Geographically, emotionally and cinematically it is regional. Concerned with a single killing, the men who did it – directly and indirectly - the family it affected and the small village that has lived with questions about other killings like it for fifty years. Where "Act of Killing" lived in absurdist grand cinema, "Look of Silence" exists in tight close-ups of the perpetrators, survivors and truth-seekers. More than anything, more than words, their faces tell the story. So much happens behind the eyes, around the corners of the mouth, in unspoken glances. The horror, doubt, guilt and seemingly impossible reconciliation stirs below the surface. For all the cinematic flex of "Act of Killing", this contained take on the same material, seems more haunted and human.

The star of the film, Adi the eyewear peddler, pursues this mission with intelligence and courage. We meet his family. His happy playful daughter, his thoughtful son, his cautious loving wife, his ageless mother (probably the most engaging character captured on film this year), his wisp of an ancient father, and his memory of a murdered brother, looming over everything. From them he finds the courage to question murderer after murderer face-to-face. The combination of his profession as an optometrist with his quest to seek truth would seem heavy-handed if it were fiction, but nothing here is inauthentic. In showing all of Adi's family, from the fresh and young, to the spent and dying, we see the full arc of life.

Lastly, the film makes a glancing but firm indictment against the American anti-Communist fervor that fed into - and the American corporations that profited from - these killings. It gives strong evidence that the Cold War, the war of ideology and the murder of millions, allowed for, and was even fought for, Western corporate dominance in places like this. And here the grinding up of human beings for profit in this situation is undeniable. Oppenheimer wants to make sure no one involved gets off without having to face, if not their own role in the massacre of millions, then at the very least, their culture's.

And so it goes, the people (wives, mothers, daughters, sons, fathers, husbands), the silence, the haunted jungle hum that fills most of the auditory space in the film, the great and overwhelming significance of it all… everything pools together to show us something words alone can't manage. Something about how a horror can be so great that its impact can loom over generations. About living with debilitating fear of those who have claimed power over you through violence. About the most nightmarish tendencies in humanity, and our courageous capacity to overcome the worst of ourselves. About just how difficult it is to look into the eyes of a killer and say, "I know what you did."

And more profoundly, more frighteningly… "I know you."

A fantastic companion piece to The Act of Killing, one of the most deeply disturbing films I've ever seen. But it's not fair to call it a continuation of that film, and what this is revolved around is inherently interesting and riveting in itself. "I knew nothing about it"... the whole film can be summarized in those few words. the film is infuriating in some of the same ways The Act of Killing was, but less so by the mere fact that it's less concentrated on the individuals who committed those acts. And because it concentrates on the family of a victim, it's heartfelt in a way it's sibling film wasn't. Fantastic, thought-provoking, discomforting in the ideas and questions that it touches upon.

It's hard to "review" a movie like "The Look of Silence". You don't really watch it and evaluate it like you do anything else. You bear witness.

I have never been able to write anything about its prequel, "The Act of Killing". I broke my rule of reviewing every movie I watch on here because I just wasn't up to the task. Watching that movie, and "The Look of Silence" to a slightly lesser extent, was like being dosed with heroin and hit with a sledgehammer. The usual "disturbing" movie, documentary or otherwise, has an impact that can be shaken off eventually. With "The Act of Killing", I never really felt it, but I knew it was there. It took something from me. The impact bled through into my day to day life. It wasn't just like a bad dream. It was real.

Here is "The Look of Silence". It gives a different side of the story that "Act of Killing" presented, through the son of survivors of the Indonesian genocide. He learns about the fate of his older brother, killed two years before his birth. Then he confronts some of the killers and their families, though these meetings don't go as you might expect, especially for the son, Adi.

This movie really should be watched alongside "The Act of Killing". Whereas "The Look of Silence" is no less horrible in its descriptions of actual murder, I have a feeling that it is the goodness of Adi and his family you will remember.

I didn't really know much about the mass killings in Indonesia in the 1960's before watching this documentary, but something about it was so compelling and unbelievable that it practically was a mini-ww2. The Indonesian government at the time were very much like Nazi's, which is sickening, and this documentary brings light about the disgraceful ways religious propaganda can persuade people to kill.

What I got out of this documentary was that many of the killers didn't know what a communist was, let alone think they were people. They were spun lies about the communists and many took joy in killing them. One of the most eye opening documentaries I've seen, amongst one of the most sadistic and terrible mass killings in history.