Joshua Oppenheimer 2014 Indonesia/Denmark
Documentary
In 2012 Joshua Oppenheimer did what very few have done before him, namely become an important, truly great director in the space of one big film. His hallucinatory, nightmarish documentary The Act Of Killing took a genuinely fresh approach to its subject and chronicled the mind-boggling time that he convinced the still-in-power perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide of 1965-66 to re-enact their crimes in whatever cinematic genre they favoured. They promoted the film on their country's television network apparently unaware that they'd ever done anything wrong. When I saw the film I ran into a friend who was working in the box office as I was leaving and couldn't even verbalise a response. It was sincerely petrifying, ferocious, groundbreaking. The director Werner Herzog, whose own work has been described with such words, later called it "unlike anything I've ever seen", which considering he's seen active volcanoes, death row inmates, Nicaraguan child soldiers, cave paintings dating back some 30 millennia, the ghost-ridden castle of a 16th-century composer who killed his wife and her lover, a steamship hauled over a Peruvian mountain by thousands of Amazonian Indians and once cooked and ate his own shoe is quite a statement. Unfortunately amid the acclaim was a storm of controversy, many claiming that, while the film showed a side of crooked humanity no other ever had, Oppenheimer's methods not only exploited the tragedy and glorified the criminals' horrific acts but may have even helped them come to terms with all that they'd done. In response Oppenheimer made The Look Of Silence (with Herzog and fellow fearless portrayers of cruelty Errol Morris and André Singer on production), in which door-to-door ophthalmologist Adi meets a variety of those responsible for the anti-communist purge under the guise of giving them an eye test with the vivid Bruegelian carnival of squalor of the former exchanged for forensic detail and the quietness of the title. What the interviewees don't know is that Adi's elder brother Ramli was one of their victims, a killing that has haunted his parents and by extension him. Adi was actually born after his brother's death as a replacement of sorts for the son whose loss his parents never recovered from, as his mother puts it "you're the answer to my prayers". She seems unaware though that while he may have saved her life she has effectively destroyed his, raising him not only to be a substitute but also equipping him with the obsessive bitterness his brother would have had had he survived. Soon she's shown caring for her legally blind, near deaf, deep within the throes of dementia husband with a combination of subjugation and tenderness. She claims he's 140 while his estimate is 17, his ID card meanwhile reads 106. Which is the true number is never revealed. Likewise she has forgotten her own age, it long having been drained of any importance. Late on Adi finally tells her what he has been doing and asks her about forgiveness, her response is to insist he takes a club wrapped in newspaper or a boning knife to any future interview before showing him exactly where on the back of the head to attack. Her existence has been clouded in a different way to both his and the murderers, although no less traumatically. Adi's own children are also shown and they're happy, silly and generally prove that he has reacted differently to the past he shares although a school scene reveals his young son being taught anti-communist propaganda as if it were fact, his lecturer talking of gouged eyeballs and rebels crushed under foot, their army style uniforms reinforcing that, as much as Adi and his concerned wife may attempt to try and shield the kids the current society will always overpower them. The conversations are similarly powerful, at one point an old man is shown and with his Compo Simmonite hat, wobbling jaw and warped frame he could be the twin of Adi's father. He's actually Inong Sungai Ular, the first man to be examined and one of those who personally slaughtered Ramli as well as hundreds of others. He complains that his neighbours are all scared of him and can't understand why even as he discusses unprompted the drinking of his victims' blood to ward off madness (a true irony) and describes what a woman's breast looks like when severed from her body ("Like a coconut milk filter"). Another man graphically depicts his crimes, belly laughing as a young child sits in the next chair. At intervals Adi watches video footage of Inong and his accomplice Amir Hasan taking a tour of Snake River, revisiting the exact location where they attempted to murder Ramli for the first time, detailing the horrors they forced upon him like aged heroes revisiting the battlefields of their youth. His reaction brings the title to a literal form, words alone are not enough and he can only stare. During the interviews Adi shows an astonishing lack of fear, Inong even mentions that his questions are far deeper than those Joshua (Oppenheimer) asked. His resolve only slips when one man, reaping the wealth of his position into his old age, asks where he and his family live and you realise that he truly does understand what his answer could mean. Another visit takes on a new aura when the man's daughter apologises for her father's past actions, claiming that he's now too senile to remember what he did even as he sits beside her, only a minute removed from reminiscing about his glory days. In a troubling moment Adi offers forgiveness but the camera then cuts to footage of Adi's father, genuinely mentally infirm and curled up like an emaciated fetus. He is asked about his dead son but can't even grasp the question. A stopover with his uncle provides perhaps the most unsettling scenes of all. Only once do the pair overstep the mark when, in lieu of being able to confront a long-dead subject, they visit his family and show them the book he published about his past complete with his own horrendously violent illustrations. The man's sons are barely as old as Adi and so their denials are probably truthful but when their mother makes the same claims she is presented with TV footage of her alongside her husband as he provides a reading of the book. As valid as this may be the scene still feels like exploitation and it's really quite hard to see who it benefits. As with his previous film Oppenheimer also doesn't skimp on accusing the USA of collaboration in the genocide and as Inong and Hasan pose for a photo at the end of the recording one flips the peace sign synonymous with Churchill and numerous US presidents. To compare the two films is difficult; neither is better than the other, they're just different. What's certain is that both are exceptional pieces of filmmaking, unique in their terror and their portrait of human evil but with a power that makes them indisputably hard to recommend.
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