Daniel Nelson

 

I don’t want to put people off, but The Look of Silence is almost unwatchable. - while being unmissable.

Not because it’s visually brutal or

The Look of Silence

The Look of Silence

Image by The Look of Silence

 a bad documentary – like all filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer’s work on the Indonesian death squads who killed perhaps 1.5 million people in the “anti-communist” pogrom in the 1965-66, it’s extraordinary, searing, weird, brilliant, harrowing, unforgettable.

In the words of two other great directors it’s “profound, visionary, and stunning” (Werner Herzog) and "One of the greatest and most powerful documentaries ever made. A profound comment on the human condition” (Errol Morris).

The film came about because through the mass murders that Oppenheimer has documented, one family discovered how their son, Ramil, was killed and by whom. The youngest brother, Adi, an optician, wants to break the spell of fear and silence under which the survivors live – close to the unashamedly boastful and comfortably-off killers, many of whom are still in positions of power and influence. So he confronts them, quietly but firmly, with the camera rolling.

That’s extraordinary enough. Even more extraordinary is the filming of the killers’ reactions: moments of nervousness as they wonder whether the person to whom they have been chatting so casually might want revenge for his mutilated and murdered brother; relief when Adi maintains his stoical, painfully controlled attitude; and then a let-bygones-be-bygones appeal to Adi – what’s past is past, it’s sad but times have changed so let’s all get on with living together. But when Adi  unwaveringly sticks to his point and asks whether they don’t feel guilty or ashamed, they suddenly stiffen and toughen, dismiss such talk as “politics” and start to issue vague but alarm-ringing  threats.

What makes the film particularly hard to bear – over and above the despair you feel at the brutality, stupidity, venality, immorality and inhumanity of the killers and the burden on Adi as he tries to cope with their lack of remorse – is the desolation of his mother, exacerbated by concern for her son’s safety and by having to deal with new details of her elder son’s murder. Her aged husband is senile, with total memory loss – he thinks he is 17 – and physically disabled.  There is a long shot in which he drags himself around a room, not knowing here he is, frightened and frail. Watching it made me feel queasily voyeuristic  and I think it was a mistake to include it.

Oppenheimer’s work make you think and there’s much to say, and that will be said, about this film.  In this case, however, I prefer to let Oppenheimer speak: 

 

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

 The Act of Killing exposed the consequences for all of us when we build our everyday reality on terror and lies. The Look of Silence explores what it is like to be a survivor in such a reality. Making any film about survivors of genocide is to walk into a minefield of clichés, most of which serve to create a heroic (if not saintly) protagonist with whom we can identify, thereby offering the false reassurance that, in the moral catastrophe of atrocity, we are nothing like perpetrators.

But presenting survivors as saintly in order to reassure ourselves that we are good is to use survivors to deceive ourselves. It is an insult to survivors’ experience, and does nothing to help us understand what it means to survive atrocity, what it means to live a life shattered by mass violence, and to be silenced by terror. To navigate this minefield of clichés, we have had to explore silence itself. The result, The Look of Silence, is, I hope, a poem about a silence borne of terror – a poem about the necessity of breaking that silence, but also about the trauma that comes when silence is broken.

Maybe the film is a monument to silence – a reminder that although we want to move on, look away and think of other things, nothing will make whole what has been broken. Nothing will wake the dead. We must stop, acknowledge the lives destroyed, strain to listen to the silence that follows.

THE LOOK OF SILENCE – Story of the Production

I first went to Indonesia in 2001 to help oil palm plantation workers make a film documenting and dramatizing their struggle to organize a union, in the aftermath of the US-supported Suharto dictatorship – under which unions were illegal. In the remote plantation villages of North Sumatra, one could hardly perceive that military rule had officially ended three years earlier.

The conditions I encountered were deplorable. Women working on the plantation were forced to spray herbicide without protective clothing. The mist would enter their lungs and then their bloodstreams, destroying their liver tissue. The women would fall ill, and many would die in their forties … Fear was their biggest obstacle they faced in organizing a union … I quickly learned the source of this fear: the plantation workers had a large and active union until 1965, when their parents and grandparents were accused of being “communist sympathizers” (simply for being in the 3union), and put into concentration camps, exploited as slave labour, and ultimately murdered by the army and civilian death squads.

In 2001, the killers not only enjoyed complete impunity; they and their protégés still dominated all levels of government, from the plantation village to the parliament. Survivors lived in fear that the massacres could happen again at any time.

After we completed the film (The Globalisation Tapes, 2002), the survivors asked us to return as quickly as possible to make another film about the source of their fear – that is, a film about what it's like for survivors to live surrounded by the men who murdered their loved ones, men still in positions of power.

We returned almost immediately, in early 2003, and began investigating one 1965 murder that the plantation workers spoke of frequently. The victim’s name was Ramli, and his name was used almost as a synonym for the killings in general.

I came to understand the reason this particular murder was so often discussed: there were witnesses. It was undeniable. Unlike the hundreds of thousands of victims who disappeared at night from concentration camps, Ramli’s death was public. There were witnesses to his final moments, and the killers left his body in the oil palm plantation, less than two miles from his parents’ home. Years later, the family was able to surreptitiously erect a gravestone, though they could only visit the grave in secret.

Survivors and ordinary Indonesians alike would talk about “Ramli,” I think, because his fate was grim evidence of what had happened to all the others, and to the nation as a whole. Ramli was proof that the killings, no matter how taboo, had, in fact, occurred. His death verified for the villagers the horrors that the military regime threatened them into pretending had never occurred, yet threatened to unleash again. To speak of “Ramli” and his murder was to pinch oneself to make sure one is awake, a reminder of the truth, a commemoration of the past, a warning for the future. For survivors and the public on the plantation, remembering “Ramli” was to acknowledge the source of their fear – and thus a necessary first step to overcoming it.

And so, when I returned in early 2003, it was inevitable that Ramli’s case would come up often. The plantation workers quickly sought out his family, introducing me to Ramli’s dignified mother, Rohani, his ancient but playful father, Rukun, and his siblings – including the youngest, Adi, an optician, born after the killings.

Rohani thought of Adi as a replacement for Ramli. She had Adi so she could continue to live, and Adi has lived with that burden his whole life. Like children of survivors all across Indonesia, Adi grew up in a family officially designated “politically unclean,” impoverished by decades of extortion by local military officials, and traumatized by the genocide.

Because Adi was born after the killings, he was not afraid to speak out, to demand answers. I believe he gravitated to my filmmaking as a way of understanding what his family had been through, a way of expressing and overcoming a terror everybody around him had been too afraid to acknowledge.

I befriended Adi at once and together we began gathering other survivors’ families in the region. They would come together and tell stories, and we would film. For many, it was the first time they had publicly spoken about what happened. On one occasion, a survivor arrived at Ramli’s parents’ home, trembling with fear, terrified that if the police discovered what we were doing, she would be arrested and forced into slave labour, as she had throughout the years of dictatorship. Yet she came because she was determined to testify. Each time a motorcycle or car would pass, we would stop filming, hiding what equipment we could. Subject to decades of economic apartheid, survivors rarely could afford more than a bicycle so the sound of a motor meant an outsider was passing.

The Army, which is stationed in every village in Indonesia, quickly found out what we were doing and threatened the survivors, including Adi’s siblings, not to participate in the film. The survivors urged me, “Before you give up and go home, try to film the perpetrators. They may tell you how they killed our relatives.”

I did not know if it was safe to approach the killers, but when I did I found all of them to be boastful, immediately recounting the grisly details of the killings, often with smiles on their faces, in front of their families, even their small grandchildren. In this contrast between survivors forced into silence, and perpetrators boastfully recounting stories far more incriminating than anything the survivors could have told, I felt I'd wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust, only to find the Nazis still in power.

When I showed these testimonials to those survivors who wanted to see it, including to Adi and Ramli’s other siblings, everybody said, more or less: “You are on to something terribly important. Keep filming the perpetrators, because anybody who sees this will be forced to acknowledge the rotten heart of the regime the killers have built.”

From that point on, I felt entrusted by the survivors and human rights community to do a work that they could not safely do themselves: filming the perpetrators. All of them would enthusiastically invite me to the places they killed, and launch into spontaneous demonstrations of how they killed. They would complain afterwards that they had not thought to bring along a machete to use as a prop, or a friend to play a victim.

One day, early in this process, I met the leader of the death squad on the plantation where we had made The Globalisation Tapes. He and a fellow executioner invited me to a clearing on the banks of Snake River, a spot where he had helped murder 10,500 people. Suddenly, I realized he was telling me how he had killed Ramli. I had stumbled across one of Ramli’s killers.

I told Adi about this encounter, and he and other family members asked to see the footage. That was how they learned the details of Ramli’s death.

For the next two years, from 2003-2005, I filmed every perpetrator I could find across North Sumatra, working from death squad to death squad up the chain of command, from the countryside to the city. Anwar Congo, the man who would become the main character in The Act of Killing, was the 41st perpetrator I filmed.

I spent the next five years shooting The Act of Killing, and throughout the process Adi would ask to see material we were filming. He would watch as much as I could find time to show him. He was transfixed.

Perpetrators on film normally deny their atrocities (or apologise for them), because by the time filmmakers reach them they have been removed from power, and their actions condemned and expiated. Here I was filming perpetrators of genocide who won, who built a regime of terror founded on the celebration of genocide, and who remain in power. They have not been forced to admit what they did was wrong.

It is in this sense that The Act of Killing is not a documentary about a genocide 50 years ago. It is an exposé of a present-day regime of fear. The film is not a historical narrative. It is a film about history itself, about the lies victors tell to justify their actions, and the effects of those lies; about an unresolved traumatic past that continues to haunt the present.

I knew from the start of my journey that there was another, equally urgent film to make, also about the present. The Act of Killing is haunted by the absent victims – the dead. Almost every painful passage culminates abruptly in a haunted and silent tableau, an empty, often ruined landscape, inhabited by a single lost, lonely figure. Time stops. There is a rupture in the film’s point of view, an abrupt shift to silence, a commemoration of the dead, and the lives pointlessly destroyed. I knew that I would make another film, one where we step into those haunted spaces and feel viscerally what it is like for the survivors forced to live there, forced to build lives under the watchful eyes of the men who murdered their loved ones, and remain powerful. That film is The Look of Silence.

Apart from the older footage from 2003-2005 that Adi watches, we shot The Look of Silence in 2012, after editing The Act of Killing but before releasing it – after which I knew I could no longer safely return to Indonesia. We worked closely with Adi and his parents, who had become, along with my anonymous Indonesian crew, like an extended family to me.

Adi spent years studying footage of perpetrators. He would react with shock, sadness and outrage. He wanted to make sense of that experience. Meanwhile, his children were in school, being taught that what had happened to them – enslavement, torture, murder, decades of political apartheid – all of this was their fault, instilling them and other survivors’ children with shame.

Adi was deeply affected – and angered – by the boasting of the perpetrators, his parents’ trauma and fear and the brainwashing of his children. Rather than pick up where we left off in 2003, gathering survivors together to recount their experiences, Adi wanted to meet the men involved with his brother’s murder. By introducing himself to them as the brother of their victim, he hoped they would be forced to acknowledge that they killed human beings.

For a victim to confront a perpetrator in Indonesia is all but unimaginable – as one can see from The Act of Killing. I set out to do something unprecedented: make a film where victims confront perpetrators while the perpetrators still hold power. The confrontations were dangerous. When we’d meet more powerful perpetrators, we would bring only Adi and my Danish crew, cinematographer Lars Skree and producer Signe Byrge Sørensen. Adi would come with no ID card. We would empty all numbers from our telephones and bring a second car we could switch to minutes after leaving, making it harder for the perpetrators to send police or thugs to follow us. But none of the confrontations ended violently, largely due to Adi’s patience and empathy, and the fact that the perpetrators were not quite sure how to react to us because they’d known me from years before.

Still, the confrontations were tense. Again and again, Adi says the unsayable, leaving the audience to feel what it is like to live as a survivor, and to perceive the contours of an oppressive silence borne of fear.

IMPACT OF THE ACT OF KILLING

The Act of Killing had the impact the survivors hoped for when they first encouraged me to film the perpetrators. It has been screened thousands of times in Indonesia, and is available for free online to anyone in the country. This has helped catalyse a transformation in how Indonesia understands its past. The media and public alike are now able, for the first time without fear, to investigate the genocide as a genocide – and to debate the links between the moral catastrophe of the killings and the moral catastrophe of the present- day regime built, and still presided over, by the killers.

In October 2012, Indonesia's most important news publication, Tempo magazine, published a special double edition dedicated to The Act of Killing, including 75 pages of boastful perpetrators' testimony from across Indonesia. The magazine's editors gathered this testimony to show that the film could have been made anywhere in Indonesia, that there are thousands of feared perpetrators enjoying impunity around the country, and that the problems of corruption and gangsterism are systemic. This special edition broke a 47-year silence about the genocide in the mainstream media.

Indonesia's National Commission on Human Rights issued its statement about the film: “If we are to transform Indonesia into the democracy it claims to be, citizens must recognize the terror and repression on which our contemporary history has been built. No film, or any other work of art for that matter, has done this more effectively than The Act of Killing. [It] is essential viewing for us all.”

For a long time, the Indonesian government ignored The Act of Killing, hoping it would go away. When the film was nominated for an Academy award, the Indonesian president's spokesman acknowledged that the 1965 genocide was a crime against humanity, and that Indonesia needs reconciliation – but in its own time. While this was not an embrace of the film, it was incredible, because it represents an about-face for the government: until then, it had maintained that the killings were heroic and glorious.

There is a scene in The Act of Killing in which I accuse one of the perpetrators of committing war crimes, and he responds by accusing the West of hypocrisy, noting that the US slaughtered the native Americans. More to the point, the US and the UK helped engineer the Indonesian genocide and for decades enthusiastically supported the military dictatorship that came to power through the slaughter.

When The Act of Killing was awarded a BAFTA, I used my acceptance speech to note that neither the UK nor the US can have an ethical relationship with Indonesia (or so many other countries across the global south) until we acknowledge the crimes of the past, and our collective role in supporting, participating in, and – ultimately – ignoring those crimes.

A film cannot change a country’s political landscape. Like the child in the Emperor’s New Clothes, it can only create a space for the people who see it to discuss the nation’s most painful and important problems without fear, and for the first time.

Into this space comes The Look of Silence.

POLITICAL SITUATION IN INDONESIA TODAY

In July 2014, Indonesia elected its first president who doesn’t come from an elite background, is not an oligarch who enriched himself through corruption or the plunder of the nation’s resources, and isn’t a military general who rose to power through the military dictatorship.

President-elect Joko Widodo, commonly referred to as “Jokowi,” has shown a real concern for the plight of ordinary Indonesians and has been outspoken on the need to acknowledge the human rights violations committed by the military. Nevertheless, his supporters include army generals surrounded by killers and their cronies … Moreover, Jokowi selected for his running mate Jusuf Kalla, the vice president who, in The Act of Killing, gives a speech at a paramilitary rally in which he says, essentially, we need our gangsters to beat people up and get things done.

Joko Widodo’s strong track record as Governor of Jakarta, as well as the electorate’s rejection of the old regime, is, finally, cause for hope.          

 

 

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