Joshua Oppenheimer has followed up (on “The Act of Killing”)
with a very personal “The Look of Silence”, where he films Adi, a
youthful-looking (but 44-year-old) optician interviewing elderly family members
and their cohorts about their roles in the horrific “anti-Communist” purges in
Indonesia back in 1965 as a military government took over.
Most shocking is the appearance of Adi’s father, heaving
scarred, gaunt, demented, even without underarm or private hair. Adi is attentive to his parents, while he
grills them about the death of his brother, and interviews other patients about
their personal moral culpability in what had gone on a half century before. These
activities had included cutting off sexual parts of both men and women before
they died.
The film could be seen as a study or perspective in personal
moral accountability, when belonging to a group that one knows is doing bad
things. Yet, one must be loyal to the
group.
There was the idea that the “communists” didn’t believe in
God or Allah, but that wasn’t really true.
The history is ironic, as at the time the United States,
under LBJ, was just getting involved in Vietnam and would learn how brutal communist
guerrilla war in SE Asia would be, and that would lead to my own conscription
in Feb. 1968, although I did not go to Vietnam.
Oppenheimer’s camera captures both the squalor of western
Indonesia (near the damage area from the tsunami) and the lush natural beauty
of the land. He often dawdles on images
of jumping beans.
Most of the credits in the film are anonymous, showing that
even today people fear reprisals from Indonesia’s government. The title of the film reflects the half-century silence of the family members throughout adulthood about their complicity decades before. They seem to be very little bothered by conscience, until Adi brings up the their pasts to them.
The official site is here (Drafhouse
films, and Participant Media, along with Final Cut for Real, digital
video). Producers included Werner
Herzog, Erol Morris and Andre Singer.
I saw the film late Sunday afternoon before a fair audience
at Landmark E Street in downtown Washington DC.
Picture: Lakeland FL, 2015, personal visit.
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