Few filmmakers would have dared even attempting to craft a worthy successor to the extraordinary documentary The Act Of Killing – but Joshua Oppenheimer is no ordinary director. His shatteringly important film The Look Of Silence provides a chilling and complex portrait of complicity, cultural memory and self-delusion. While The Act of Killing put the perpetrators of the 1960s Indonesian genocide in the limelight, allowing them to recreate their murders in ghoulishly grandiose ways, here the camera acts as the bulb in an interrogation, under which the same protagonists deflect, defend and deny.
Optometrist Adi’s brother Ramli was killed in the unimaginable purge of over a million “Communist” objectors to Indonesia’s military dictatorship - and Adi now interviews the guards and leaders involved in the murder of his brother. Meeting them in person, Adi’s unwavering gaze and grace is evident, as he fits these mass murderers for new eye prescriptions and gives them an opportunity to look clearly at their selves and actions. Without exception, they’re only interested in the former.
Cultural memory also becomes a powerful theme of the film, a motif symbolised by Adi’s 100-year- old mother remembering the tragedy perfectly. His senile father, meanwhile, lives in a mental landscape free from this trauma.
The title refers to Adi’s astonishing ability to quietly observe while men recount literally drinking the blood of their victims, allowing them to indict themselves in their own words. But it’s also about the silence of complicity, which extends to the murderers’ families, and perhaps even Adi’s family too.
The fear and danger that reverberate through the film are breathtaking – emphasised by the credits, which, by necessity, list most of the crew as “anonymous.” An astonishing work.