In 2001, when filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer first went to Indonesia, he knew nothing of the country and its political history. He arrived by invitation of the International Union of Food
and Agricultural Workers to document
the struggle to unionize a Belgian-owned oil-palm plantation in North Sumatra. Upon discovering the terrible conditions faced by the workers, who were forced to spray pesticides and herbicides without any kind of protective clothing and were developing life-threatening illnesses as a result, Oppenheimer found something even worse: Any attempt toward organized protest was met with intimidation by Pancasila Youth, the largest paramilitary organization in the country. This was
the same civilian group, the workers told Oppenheimer, who had been involved
in the mass purging of communists in 1965, a genocide fanned by the incoming military of the Suharto regime. Pancasila Youth had broken up the previous union 50 years ago, sending many of their family members to concentration camps, where they were exploited as slave labor or sent to their untimely death. And they still wield a significant amount of political power.“That’s when I understood that what was killing these people and making them sick was not just the poison, but fear,” Oppenheimer says. “Nobody was reporting this, nobody was talking about this. So I started to think, what could I do as a filmmaker to expose the mechanism of fear that is underpinning this exploitation, which is essential to the functioning of the global economy? And in exposing the mechanism of fear, could I intervene in it?”“The Look of Silence,” which opens in limited release in July, is a continuation
of the intervention Oppenheimer began in “The Act of Killing” (2012). In that film, at the urging of the survivors’ families, he began to track down the perpetrators, many of whom lived as neighbors of the families of people they’d killed. What Oppenheimer found was that the perpetrators were not only open to talking
about their crimes but often bragged about them. “I realized that boasting is of
course not a sign of pride,” Oppenheimer says. “People brag when they’re insecure and they’re compensating for something. That’s true of all of us.” For the murderers, boasting was a form of impunity, “a desperate attempt to cling to a narrative in which these men can still live with themselves,” as Oppenheimer puts it.The process he devised for “The Act of Killing” was to give the perpetrators free rein over their false narrative, helping them produce a film within the film about their heroic version of the mass killings that, according to Oppenheimer, if seen by anybody—not least in Indonesia — would force them to confront the lasting legacy of the genocide. What the killers produced was a combination of Hollywood noir dressed in the garish colors of a Bollywood musical, a vision so over-the-top that it’s easy to see the lie underneath.While making “The Act of Killing,” Oppenheimer would show his footage to the survivors’ family members, who provided feedback and urged him to continue. One of his main supporters and collaborators in this process was Adi Rukun, an optician born after the killings of 1965, whose brother Ramli’s murder had plagued his family. When Oppenheimer returned to Indonesia in 2012 to make “The Look of Silence,” after editing “The Act of Killing,” he had no idea Adi Rukun would become the main character of his new film. And when Rukun suggested confronting the people who’d killed his brother, Oppenheimer was hesitant. “At first I said, absolutely not, because such confrontation is unprecedented in Indonesia,” he recalls. “There’s never been a nonfiction film where you see survivors confronting perpetrators who are still in power, because it’s too dangerous.”But Oppenheimer quickly realized there was a possibility they might be able to make the film relatively safely. When they began shooting with Rukun, “The Act of Killing” had not yet been released and the only thing the perpetrators knew about Oppenheimer was that he had interviewed many of their highest-ranking superiors. The unusual situation opened up a space where most of the killers would indeed speak to Rukun on camera.The result is a film more confrontational than “The Act of Killing.” The “silence”
of the title is the fear that permeates what Oppenheimer, more than once, calls the haunted spaces in which the survivors
are forced to live. Over and over, we watch Rukun attempting, and often failing, to puncture the bubble of impunity the perpetrators have formed around themselves. “The perpetrators, Adi felt, would see that he was not coming for revenge but as a neighbor, and would take responsibility for what they had done,” Oppenheimer says. “I felt Adi wouldn’t get the apology he was seeking, but if we could film this, if we could document why he doesn’t get the apology, then through the film we could show how torn the social fabric in Indonesia is, and consequently somehow succeed on a much bigger scale where Adi fails in these individual scenes.”Oppenheimer says he conceived the two films as a single work, exploring the same themes from different perspectives. While “The Act of Killing” never officially received a theatrical release in Indonesia, it is available to download, and there have been underground screenings. It caused enough of a stir, with the government officially denouncing it in the press, that Oppenheimer doesn’t
feel safe returning to the country. Before making “The Look of Silence,” which, unlike the former film, received an official screening in Indonesia late in 2014 and was, according to Oppenheimer, met with a rapturous response from thousands of people, he and his collaborators made sure there was a plan in place for Rukun and his family to escape retaliation.While nothing has officially been done to confront the prevailing indemnity of those behind the mass killings of 1965, Oppenheimer says his films have opened a dialogue between the Indonesian people and their complicated and violent history: “Both films show that we have no choice but to deal with the past. As William Faulkner once said, ‘The past is not dead, the past isn’t even past.’”A version of this story originally appeared in the July issue of Modern Painters.
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