The Look of Silence (UK Rating: 15)
When The Act of Killing was released in 2012, it put the spotlight on the Indonesian genocide of the mid 1960s, a long-forgotten corner of modern history. Joshua Oppenheimer’s stirring documentary challenged leaders of the death squads to re-enact their killings in a cinematic style of their choice. It wasn’t an easy watch and neither is its sequel, The Look of Silence, which is released this Friday, 12 June, and, while it’s a more personal story, it’s no less powerful or shocking.
Adi is an optician, visiting clients at home and fitting them for new glasses. Many of his clients are elderly and remember the horrors of the coup and subsequent mass killings in 1965. A number were actively involved in them and it’s the starting point for Adi’s search to find the people behind the killing of his brother, Ramli. As well as talking to his customers, his research includes watching extensive TV interviews with some of the killers, and it eventually leads to him meeting the man who gave the orders and the man who wielded the knife.
The genocide may have happened in the mid-60s, but its effects haven’t gone away, and the biggest one is a universal sense of fear. Many of the death squads, and their leaders especially, now occupy positions of political power in Indonesia. Therefore, people are initially reluctant to talk to Adi and resist his questions; the first person he talks to denies that any killings took place and says she didn’t know any communists (the generic term for anybody who opposed the new regime behind the carnage). There’s been no reconciliation process for the victims or their families and this film is quite possibly the closest they will get. That fear is at its most visible right at the end of the movie, when the credits roll, with many of those involved listed simply as Anonymous. It speaks for itself.
However, despite the fear and apprehension that goes with living in the same village as members of the death squads, Adi pursues the truth with a quiet dignity. He’s not just looking for his own peace of mind. There’s his parents, as well, who’ve never recovered from the death of their eldest son. His father is in his 80s, deaf, frail, nearly blind and suffering from dementia. Adi helps his down to earth mother to care for him, but her pain never goes away. If anything, it intensifies when her son’s search uncovers a family secret about her own brother.
It’s a film punctuated with long moments of silence and they’re essential for the audience to take in the full reality of what they’re seeing and hearing. Oppenheimer blends impressive simplicity with a moving intimacy in his camerawork; there are frequent close ups of faces and hands, together with some powerful images laden with significance or comment on the narrative. It’s a film that needs to be slowly digested afterwards, in some of that silence.
