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Interview: Joshua Oppenheimer on The Look of Silence

He hopes The Look of Silence can push Indonesia toward something like a Truth and Reconciliation Committee.

Interview: Joshua Oppenheimer on The Look of Silence
Photo: Daniel Bergeron

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing was a film made up of memories of mass slaughter—Oppenheimer has no problem using the word “genocide”—recalled, and eventually reenacted, by its own perpetrators in their twilight years. While the documentary profiled Indonesian death squad leader Anwar Congo, it also disentangled the relationship between his anti-communist (and U.S.-backed) mass murders in the 1960s and the ruling far-right Pancasila Youth party today, following veterans like Congo and their low-level enforcer friends as they extract protection money from village shopkeeps and mingle with neighbors’ families, as casual in their comportment as Oppenheimer’s film would have us believe they’re also feared and hated. The Act of Killing is a towering accomplishment, a documentary obsessed with questions of denial, guilt, complicity, and—in the longer run—the question of filmic reconciliation, and the remoteness of its own possibility. Following the film’s beyond-broad adulation and thorough unpacking within cinephilia, Oppenheimer’s announcement of a completed follow-up documentary about the purges could only arrive as a surprise last year.

It’s hard not to view The Look of Silence as a complicating accompanied text, doggedly foregoing its predecessor’s probe of the executioner mentality and, this time, seeking direct on-screen confirmation of culpability. Adi Rukun, an optometrist, goes door to door in the Sumatran village where he grew up, soliciting veteran killers under the guise of selling them on a pair of glasses. While Oppenheimer’s doomed-epistemology motif—wherein the perpetrators try on a pair of adjustable frames, inviting countless metaphors about blindness and oversight—is heavy-handed, the results of these face-to-face encounters are too gut-churning for it to matter. Like Kazuo Hara’s The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, Oppenheimer’s film grows more frantic the closer it gets to the truth.

His older brother murdered under suspicion of being a communist, Adi seeks a closure that feels damn near impossible. In the darkness of the movie theater, The Look of Silence’s feedback between accusation and denial becomes a painful paroxysm shuttering through the audience, begging the eternal question: Even with an on-screen confession, can cinema really change anything? Oppenheimer is surprisingly optimistic on this score, hoping the films’ public exposure within Indonesia can help push the country toward something akin to a Truth and Reconciliation Committee. Aesthetic or philosophical hang-ups be damned, we will underestimate his work at our own risk.

I’d like to begin by asking you about the disparity between these two films. You’ve used the word “diptych” in other interviews, so I suppose maybe just tell me your thoughts on pairing them, your forecasting, or not, of their pairing. The Look of Silence strikes me a more sober visual creation. In some ways, it’s even harder to watch than The Act of Killing, it doesn’t have the reenactments…

So, first of all, it’s not being pedantic, it relates to how the films relate to each other: I would say, in neither film are there any reenactments. Reenactment is something used to make visible a past, which is no longer available to the film, to excavate the past, or to illustrate it. I would say even simple demonstrations of killing that you see in The Act of Killing, when performed in that boastful register, are precisely dramatizations of the present-day lives, fantasies, stories that the perpetrators are clinging to so that they can live with what they’ve done—the persona they inhabit so they can live with what they’ve done. And then in The Look of Silence, the film goes on to explore the terrible consequences of those lies and fantasies when imposed upon the whole society, so that means the guilt, corruption, thuggery, fear.

Now, I shot The Look of Silence after I had edited The Act of Killing, before it had its first screenings, at which point I couldn’t return safely to Indonesia anymore. I had this sense with Silence, the audience should enter into any of those haunted spaces, cut through the director’s cut of Killing, and feel: What is it like to have to live there? As a survivor? What would it be like to rebuild a life surrounded by the still-powerful men who killed your loved ones, always afraid this would happen again? Too afraid to work through trauma or grief, or just to mourn. What does it do to human beings to have to live for half a century, afraid? In that sense I think the two films are very complementary. Formally speaking. And I understood that from very early on, January 2004, when I was in the middle of the two years I would spend filming all the perpetrators I could find.

I saw that they were even worse when they were together. They were reading from a shared script. It was terrifying for me because I had to let go of the hope that these men might be crazy, that their boasting was the symptom of some kind of psychosis. I had to recognize that if there’s insanity here, it’s collective and political. The boasting is a symptom of impunity. That realization came to me as if I had wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust, only to find the Nazis in power—if the rest of the world had celebrated the Holocaust while it took place.

It allows for a narrative destressing on the role of the individual. It’s not highlighting…

Well, when I realized that these men aren’t insane, that they’re not monsters, I also was arriving at the premise for both films: that every perpetrator in the film is a human being, and there’s no notion of being divided into good guys and bad guys. That these men might be monsters, or psychotic, is a lie. That mainly serves to reassure us, that we have nothing to do with these men.

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When you say “us,” though, do you mean as Western moviegoers? As Americans? Another difference between the two films is the given context of United States foreign policy.

You’re asking two separate questions. First, I want to say, I mean for “us” as human beings. That we are all closer to perpetrators than we’d like to think, and this is a frightening thought. But the fact is, if you or I grew up in Anwar Congo’s family, or the families of any of the perpetrators in The Look of Silence, we went to their schools in 1950s Indonesia we would hope that, in 1965, we would make different decisions. But we know we’re very lucky never to have to find out. When you overcome that frightening thought, you recognize that every act of evil in our history has been committed by human beings, by a human being like us. That’s the only hopeful perspective on human evil because it’s the only one that implies that we ought, therefore, to find ways of organizing ourselves, ways of living together, we teach one another, we encourage our children to do two things: one, to practice the widest possible empathy. With people we’d be otherwise tempted to dismiss as an other. Because we depend upon their suffering to feed ourselves and clothe ourselves, or all the people who make our electronics who we know are forced to survive in conditions of misery. From which we profit, at least, materially. I don’t think we profit in human terms. So we might be tempted to think of them as distant, remote from us. Or people we would otherwise likely demonize or see as different. If we encourage each other to practice the widest possible human empathy, and if we can encourage everybody in our society to doubt, to not accept the messages… To understand that the most important message in school should be, you shouldn’t really trust everything your teachers say. You shouldn’t trust authority – the exact opposite of what most schools teach children. We may be able to find a way of living together where these kind of unthinkable violence is no longer inevitable, but actually no longer even imaginable.

Earlier in the film we see an NBC documentary from the time, which is celebrating the genocide, reporting the genocide quite honestly, talking about hundreds of thousands of people being killed, but celebrating it on television as good news, as a victory over communism. They say such things as, “Bali is now more beautiful without the communists.” They would have us believe that in the exotic cultural difference of the Indonesians, the Balinese victims might have asked to be killed, which makes them so different from us we can’t even imagine their thoughts and feelings might have been.

There’s an important moment, also, in the director’s cut of Killing where Anwar and Adi watch this government propaganda film justifying the killings, and that was forced upon generation upon generation of younger Indonesians, essentially blaming the victims for what happened to them, saying they deserved it, the perpetrators were heroes. And I asked, “How do you feel about this film?” Adi says, “Oh, we know it’s a lie, it’s obvious, it’s ridiculous.” And Anwar, panicking, interrupts him and says, “It might be a lie, but it’s still the one thing that makes me feel better. Please don’t say that”—suggesting the cognitive dissonance that lies at the heart of all the perpetrators’ boasting. We know what they did was wrong, but because they’ve never been removed from power, they still have available to them a victor’s history justifying everything that they’ve done, so they do what every human being feeling guilt would do: They try to take these bitter, rotten memories and sugarcoat them in the sweet language of a victor’s history. Which would celebrate their atrocities.

That accounts for the persistence of their boasting, and why they always have to talk about the worst details. Because those are the bitter memories they need to swallow.

Along those lines, can we talk about the movie Anwar thought you were making? I hate to use this word, but as “characters” in the documentary, did they realize…

How about “participants”?

Well, exactly. Did Anwar know he was participating in a big social-justice-issue documentary release? Your intention was, I’m assuming, to do an international release.

But the most important release for both these films is in Indonesia. They’ve been seen there more widely and talked about more widely than anywhere else. And making this film, my fundamental position was: I never felt like the American filmmaker, or having spent nearly all of my life in Europe, also sort of a Danish filmmaker who comes in and makes a film to expose this for the world. First of all, because I thought the world won’t care. I’m surprised and honored by how much care there has been for these films abroad. But I felt I had been tasked by the survivors and the human rights community to make a film that would expose, especially for Indonesians, the nature of the regime in which they’re living, in the case of the first film, and the prison of fear that Indonesians are forced to raise their children in today—an abyss of fear and guilt and fear of their own guilt, for the perpetrators, that divides every Indonesian from each other. That Look of Silence makes it impossible to ignore. And forces people to address, and to start talking about how it might be overcome. That was the most important thing. I felt less like the American filmmaker who comes in from outside than the agent—the secret agent of the survivors and the human rights community. [laughs]

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Be that as it may: Anwar did not understand. Was that your question?

It doesn’t have to be about Anwar, specifically. Just in the process of making these movies across so many years, so many conversations and negotiations with people: the notion of what the finished product will be.

I think in both films you see the realization of that in different ways. In The Act of Killing, you hear the perpetrators and the politicians around Anwar, telling him to stop. “Stop, we must stop doing this, because if we succeed it will show all of Indonesia, it will show people what they’ve always suspected is true. Namely that all of the propaganda justifying what we’ve done is a lie. And that, what we did was wrong. And we could lose power from that.” And Anwar always decides to continue. I think the actual reason he’s participating is that somebody’s finally listening to his pain.

I think in The Look of Silence, all of the confrontations, you see these men who knew me, as one thing, who would come and film with them in a couple days. With the exception of the family at the end. I was filming perpetrators in the time that I was working my way, quickly, across the chain of command and filming everybody I could find. They knew me as one thing, taking me to the places where they killed and showing how they did it, and suddenly I come back with Adi, after all these years, and in the course of Adi’s confrontation with them, and it’s not an interview, it’s a confrontation, they realize this is something very different from what they thought. And that’s when, of course, those scenes become…very, very tense. And dramatic. Sometimes even frightening.

So much of this film is about processing, or denying, memory. A few years back, writing about Otto Preminger’s Exodus, David Bordwell invoked a concept originally belonging to Henry James, of “weak specificity.” It’s the idea that someone talking about something can be as dynamic in its own showing/telling, as flashbacks, re-stagings, abstract vignettes, music montages, etc. While your style appears more spartan to begin with, can we talk a little bit about how you shoot and edit these kinds of conversations?

How do you make dynamic cinema out of people listening or processing? It’s a usefully phrased question, because in fact cinema is a terrible medium for words. And it’s an indictment of most of our cinema, how dominated it is by dialogue. And action. Cinema’s a wonderful moment for doubt, for silence, for moments where people don’t believe the things they’re saying. Which is another thing that, uh, is important about the so-called director’s cut of The Act of Killing, as we have much more time to feel Anwar’s doubt. Everything has more space where we feel the doubt of everybody in the film, and the growing nightmare that they’re a part of. In The Look of Silence I felt that I was building on those insights, to try and figure out ways of capturing, especially, reactions. Focusing not on the dialogue, the speaker, in those confrontations, one can create a very tense and dynamic scene where you’re sort of cutting back and forth—panning back and forth—between these men, between Adi and the perpetrator and tense confrontation.

A film professor might tell his students to cut it like that.

Well, it would create an illusion of drama. But the real drama is in the face of the people as they’re realizing what happened, the face of the daughter of the perpetrator who’s realizing her father isn’t the man she at least tried to convince herself that he was. It’s in the realization that these men are now having their boastful accounts of what they’ve done challenged, indicted. And we see in their faces a kind of network of fissures and fractures, in this facade of heroism, as they’re forming. The shame, the panic, the guilt, the fear of their own guilt, issue through those cracks. Flow through those cracks. And that involved figuring out a way of filming those confrontations while focusing as much as possible as reactions, which I did as much as I could with two cameras, to favor the listener rather than the speaker. With the confrontations with the two most powerful perpetrators, with the uncle, we didn’t know he was a perpetrator so we didn’t come prepared for that. The two most powerful, we didn’t dare have two camera setups because it would be harder to get out of there, quickly, to run away. We even had a getaway car so we could escape without being followed if necessary. There, we had to establish the beginning of a sentence of dialogue and then quickly pan, as quickly as possible, to the listener, so we could cut the pans out and have the same language we had developed for the other scenes.

I studied the work of Ozu, who I think is really the master of dialogue where everything important is being said in the silences. The scene with the uncle, actually, this loving relationship has transformed into an unsafe relationship for both of them, where the uncle is saying to Adi, “Your brother deserved to be killed. My nephew deserved to be killed.” And therefore, by extension, you might deserve to be killed if you continue to do this. That scene ends with brokenness and shame, and it was one of the most awful things I’ve ever seen. It’s something Werner Herzog pointed out at the German premiere of the film in Berlin when he and I had a dialogue on stage. The camera pans back and forth between the uncle and Adi; it’s the grammar of filming dialogue, but all we’re filming is shame and silence.

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Steve Macfarlane

Steve Macfarlane is a film curator and writer from Seattle, Washington. His writing has appeared in BOMB, Cinema Scope, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and other publications.

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