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The Look of Silence, review: 'astonishing'
The Telegraph (UK) - August 28, 2014
Joshua Oppenheimer has made a follow-up film to his acclaimed documentary The Act of Killing that's as different from that film as a microscope is from a proscenium arch: while his Oscar-nominated 2013 picture showed the death squads' leaders gleefully re-enacting the butchery in a series of surreal, ghoulish theatrical tableaux, this second film zooms in close, finding unfolding fractal patterns of horror-within-horror in the story of a single victim's plight.
Ramli, a supposed enemy of the new state, was cornered by a squad of soldiers and stabbed until his intestines started spilling out of his side. He fled to his parents' home in the sleepy countryside close to the city of Medan in North Sumatra where a death squad led by two men, Amir Hasan and Inong, picked him up.
They promised his mother they would take him to a hospital: instead, they threw him in a van with other captives, drove him to a nearby river, stripped him naked, carved his flesh with a machete, listened to him plead for mercy, then chopped off his genitals and watched him bleed out, before rolling his body into the water.
We know this because Oppenheimer filmed the two men describing the murder, while laughing, in 2004, standing on the spot where they carried it out. And Ramli's younger brother Adi also knows this, because when we first see him, he's watching Oppenheimer's tape.
The Look of Silence's title really describes Adi's face in that early shot when he watches the tape: his eyes shine and his lips are slightly parted, but he doesn't say a word. Instead, we hear the sound of crickets chirping in the bushes outside: a cartoon sound-effect for silence, which Oppenheimer turns up loud, drawing attention to the cacophony of things that are being unsaid.
Throughout the film, Adi goes to confront various men, now frail and mostly toothless, who were involved in his brother's killing: he's an optometrist, and often interviews them during eye-tests while they wear a trial frame and lenses. The symbolism here is obvious and ingenious: by confronting these decrepit thugs with his brother's story, Adi is trying to correct their self-perception; make them look clearly at their deeds for perhaps the first time.
Some men respond to Adi's calm questioning with mild irritation, others with thinly veiled death threats. At one point, Inong starts talking about drinking human blood during the purge as a means to stay sane, and you assume he's talking figuratively until he describes the process by which the blood was collected: a glass tumbler held under the jugular, which filled up in a second or two when the throat was slit. "Human blood tastes both salty and sweet, did you know that?" Inong asks, one eye twitching strangely, with gentleness in his voice. Again, you realise a look of silence is the only sane response.
The Act of Killing was about the mechanisms of moral delusion – mass-murderers escaping the implications of their pasts by turning them into performance – but The Look of Silence connects the dots back up, and turns the focus back on culpability and complicity. The extent to which Adi's community conspired in the murder of his brother is shattering, and when the end credits roll, and you notice most of the crew's names are listed as "anonymous", the threat seems fresh and immediate. (One of Adi's interviewees, a man directly involved in the 1965 purge, is the current head of his local government.) This is an essential companion piece to Oppenheimer's earlier film; another astonishing heart-of-darkness voyage into the jungle of human nature.
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