Joshua Oppenheimer

THE LOOK OF SILENCE: chilling and powerful

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THE LOOK OF SILENCE
THE LOOK OF SILENCE

In the powerful and chilling The Look of Silence, documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer explores the aftermath of genocide in a society that has never experienced a truth and reconciliation process. This is Oppenheimer’s second masterpiece on the Indonesian genocide of 1965-66 in which regime-sponsored death squads executed over one million suspected political opponents. Today, the victims’ families live among the murderers.

The Look of Silence centers on 44-year-old optometrist Adi, as he investigates the murder of Ramli, the older brother he never knew. Earlier, Oppenheimer had filmed Ramli’s killers as they describe and act out Ramli’s savage torture, mutilation and murder. They are unrepentant and even nostalgic about their crimes. Their matter-of-fact recollections are sickening. We see Adi watching this video, trying to contain his rage and disgust. Later, Adi – in the guise of fitting them for new glasses – is able to confront those responsible. He faces the actual machete-wielding killers, the leader of the village death squad, the higher-up who ordered the killings and even one of his own relatives.

What makes this bearable to watch (and even more affecting) is meeting Adi’s family: his earthy 80-something mother, his frail and batty 103-year-old father, his giggly 7-year old daughter and his 10-year-old son. There’s plenty of humor in this warm family. But in one scene, the son receives a ridiculously twisted propaganda version of the genocide in public school.

The “Silence” in The Look of Silence is reinforced by the spare soundtrack. We often hear only “crickets” (frogs, actually).

The Look of Silence is the companion to Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, which made my list of Best Movies of 2013. In The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer got the unapologetic killers to re-enact their atrocities for the camera – even relishing their deeds. The Act of Killing contains some of the most bizarre moments in any documentary EVER, including a cross-dressing mass murderer and a staged Bollywood-like musical number of Born Free, complete with dancing-girls in front of a waterfall, in which the garotted dead reappear to thank the killers for sending them on to the afterlife. The Act of Killing is more of a jaw-dropper. The Look of Silence – because it is more personal, is more powerful.

The Look of Silence stands alone – you can fully appreciate it without having seen The Act of Killing. But what I wrote about The Act of Killing is true for both films: “hypnotically compelling – you can’t believe what’s on the screen, can’t believe that you’re still watching it and can’t stop watching”.

I saw The Look of Silence at the San Francisco International Film Festival before its limited theatrical release slated for July 17. It’s one of the best films of 2015.

THE LOOK OF SILENCE: chilling and powerful

by
THE LOOK OF SILENCE
THE LOOK OF SILENCE

In the powerful and chilling The Look of Silence, documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer explores the aftermath of genocide in a society that has never experienced a truth and reconciliation process. This is Oppenheimer’s second masterpiece on the Indonesian genocide of 1965-66 in which regime-sponsored death squads executed over one million suspected political opponents.  Today, the victims’ families live among the murderers.

The Look of Silence centers on 44-year-old optometrist Adi as he investigates the murder of Ramli, the older brother he never knew.  Earlier, Oppenheimer had filmed Ramli’s killers as they describe and act out Ramli’s savage torture, mutilation and murder.   They are unrepentant and even nostalgic about their crimes.  Their matter-of-fact recollections are sickening.  We see Adi watching this video, trying to contain his rage and disgust.  Later, Adi – in the guise of fitting them for new glasses – is able to confront those responsible.   He faces the actual machete-wielding killers, the leader of the village death squad, the higher-up who ordered the killings and even one of his own relatives.

What makes this bearable to watch (and even more affecting) is meeting Adi’s family: his earthy 80-something mother, his frail and batty 103-year-old father, his giggly 7-year old daughter and his 10-year-old son.   There’s plenty of humor in this warm family.  But in one scene, the son receives a ridiculously twisted propaganda version of the genocide in public school.

The “Silence” in The Look of Silence is reinforced by the spare soundtrack.  We often hear only “crickets” (frogs, actually).

The Look of Silence is the companion to Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, which made my list of Best Movies of 2013.  In The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer got the unapologetic killers to re-enact their atrocities for the camera – even relishing their deeds.  The Act of Killing contains some of the most bizarre moments in any documentary EVER, including a cross-dressing mass murderer and a staged Bollywood-like musical number of Born Free, complete with dancing-girls in front of a waterfall, in which the garotted dead reappear to thank the killers for sending them on to the afterlife. The Act of Killing is more of a jaw-dropper.  The Look of Silence – because it is more personal – is more powerful.

The Look of Silence stands alone – you can fully appreciate it without having seen The Act of Killing.  But what I wrote about The Act of Killing is true for both films:  “hypnotically compelling – you can’t believe what’s on the screen, can’t believe that you’re still watching it and can’t stop watching”.

I saw The Look of Silence at the San Francisco International Film Festival before its limited theatrical release slated for July 17.  It’s one of the best films of 2015.

The Act of Killing: the banality of evil like you’ve never seen it

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Okay, here’s a jaw dropper.  In the chilling documentary The Act of Killing, perpetrators of genocide in Indonesia are asked to re-enact their murders – and they are pleased as punch to do so.  We meet unapologetic mass murderers face-to-face.  Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer has created the year’s most startling documentary.

After the 1965 military coup, death squads sympathetic to the military labeling opponents of the regime, landless farmers and ethnic Chinese as “communists” – and killed 2-3 million fellow Indonesians.  The killers were mostly Indonesian paramilitary groups and gangsters.  The Act of Killing introduces us to several of these murderers,  who don’t try to evade or spin their deeds, but instead look proudly and nostalgically at their murders as the highlight of their lives.

The film primarily focuses on two self-described gangsters, Anwars and Herman.  The two enthusiastically embrace the film project so they can document their murders for history.  Anwars is said to have killed a thousand by himself.  Because beating them to death produced too much messy blood, he devised a method of strangling them with wire. The corpulent Herman chooses spends about a third of movie dressed in flamboyant drag, which is ridiculous, but the film is so disturbing that the audience just can’t laugh. Besides acting out interrogation torture murders and a village massacre, the two come up with a Bollywood-like musical number of Born Free, complete with dancing-girls in front of a waterfall, in which the garotted dead reappear to thank Anwars for sending them on to the afterlife.  It is beyond bizarre.

In the film’s most riveting scene, a guy who has been recruited to play a torture victim in the film-within-a-film, recounts the death squad murder of his step-father to Anwars and Herman.  To keep his composure, he awkwardly laughs as he describes the abduction – but his eyes are clearly blaming the old gangsters.  Then he acts out his torture for the camera.

The Act of Killing is hypnotically compelling – you can’t believe what’s on the screen, can’t believe that you’re still watching it and can’t stop watching.

The Act of Killing is directed by Oppenheimer and co-directed by someone credited as “Anonymous” and Christine Cynn.  Oddly, there is no writing credit.  The great documentarians Errol Morris and Werner Herzog are among the executive producers.

[We don’t often explore genocide from the perpetrator’s point of view, although two excellent documentaries come to mind:  Shoah and Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, both on my 5 Essential Holocaust Films.  The current film Hannah Arendt is about the academic theorist who coined the term “banality of evil”, but that story’s duel of letters between hand-wringing intellectuals makes for a stale discussion.]

The Act of Killing is a very uncomfortable movie, and I suspect that it wouldn’t be not a great choice for most of my readers.  But it pushes the envelope of cinema and is the most uniquely original film of the year (or millennium so far?).  I’m really glad that I watched it.