Venezia 71 review - THE LOOK OF SILENCE by Joshua Oppenheimer

Some things are simply not better left unsaid. Some aspects of a story are not meant to remain unexplored. Joshua Oppenheimer proves that in his powerful follow up to the celebrated The Act of Killing. The Look of Silence was presented in the main competition of the 71st Venice Film Festival.

With The Act of Killing, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer left an instant and indelible mark in the history of documentary. In The Look of Silence, the subject remains the same. The Indonesian Communist Purges was an unspeakable act of genocide that was up until then widely unexplored in the westernised world. With his previous work, he followed a group of the men who committed the terrible murders and played with the concept of lack of camera nutrality by having them re-create them in front of it. This time, he focuses more blatantly on the victims and in particular through a series of meetings between the same men he followed for seven years for his previous documentary and the brother of one of the victims - a victim whose mutilation was particularly brutal.

As the title implies, the pace of the documentary is much slower and meditative and silence itself is a key element. It is the silence of the victims that still dare not talk too loudly and condemn the atrocities that took place in the sixties due to perpetual intimidation and fear of repercussions. But it is also the silences of the close ups that Oppenheimer allows his film, whether it is of the family of the victim or the criminals - some of whom still enjoy a considerable amount of wealth and power. These close ups add incredible intensity and trigger and seem to speak more then words. As we, the viewers, see them we cannot help but imagine internal Shakespearean monologues and even cannot help but dare to imagine the true words of forgiveness that will probably never be heard out loud.

A note must also be spared for the very impactful meetings with the sons and daughters of the perpetrators of these atrocities, who were kids when the genocide took place. This is cause for great natural intensity and tension and is a result of Oppenheimer's basic belief, or lack of belief in the nutrality of the camera. The rejection of the concept of fly on the wall documentary filmmaking is something that he played with a lot in The Act of Killing, a movie about the making of a movie - in that case a propagandist biopic. In The Look of Silence he forces the establishment of the characters these people have developed through their life experiences and social tenures. So, while the camera keeps shooting, the silence becomes a protective shell that prevents the men from revealing something other than what they believe to be or what they would like others to think they are.

This is a concept and theory satirised and strengthened by another ingenious element. Countering the camera lens, or acting as an alter ego, is sight. The central figure, the brother of the victim, is an oculist who tests lenses on the old men who were responsible for the murder of his flesh and blood. The same man's father has lost his sight and can't remember his dead son at all. This is an important element, considering the blind eye the rest of the world turned until Oppenheimer decided to reveal it to the world (the film also includes a shocking propaganda video from the US in which the purges are praised). The haunting fact is that it is impossible to tell how many of these tragedies we are not aware of.