THE LOOK OF SILENCE by Joshua Oppenheimer

Joshua Oppenheimer returns to Indonesia to explore its Communist Purges after his groudbreaking The Act of Killing in a follow up feature called The Look of Silence.

 

The Look of Silence kicks off with a despicable piece of archive footage where a US reporter praises the prepetrators of the Indonesian Communist Purges for fighting Communism. This introduces the ambition of the filmmaker for righting a wrong that was never given much of a thought before his previous feature shook the world of documentary filmmaking.

 

In The Act of Killing, the tone was provocative and sometimes even satirical. In it, he followed a group of such perpetrators as they re-enacted the brutal acts of those days. In his follow up, the tone is a little more meditative and serious, and focuses more on the perspective of the families of the victims. The Look of Silence is structured around a series of meetings between the wrong doers and the family of the victims, the latter party represented by a man whose brother's mutilation was particularly brutal.

 

As the title implies, silence plays a big role in the film and heightens the interactions of each of the sequences. It's clear that the interactions themselves are disappointingly bland and mostly inconclusive. But Oppenheimer, as he had proved with the previous film, has a certain determined finesse about his approach, which is influenced by his distancing himself from a fly on the wall approach and his lack of belief in the neutrality of the camera. 

 

Thus, the camera lingers on the subject, often in close up shots, long after they have finished having anything to say to each other. This can highlight a quiet and yet imposing sense of frustration, the usual result of re-examination of history and a stubbornness that prevents any form of important redemption. It also conceals a strong backbone of restrained and unspoken anger and outrage, incited by the succession of sequences and the stories told by the subjects that highlight the long lasting impact the Communist Purges had on the country's identity, and how they so heavily marked its society and social status.

 

The approach of The Look of Silence, which once again makes use of the beautiful natural landscape of its Indonesian setting, is also unsettling. The close ups not only underline the titular silence, but also treasure its relentless air of discomfort and awkwardness. On top of this, there are some naturally repulsive shots of the father of the victim whose story is the narrative point of focus. A man who, with his physical decay, visible vulnerabilities and crippling blindness becomes, becomes a most excellent and real metaphorical representation of this black page in the history of mankind.

 

The Look of Silence by Joshua Oppenheimer is out in UK cinemas from the 12th of June 2015