With Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing you’d be minded to think that’s it, that’s the Indonesian genocide (1965–66) done, but now he’s returned with a second film that is equally stunning, equally riveting — in its horrifying way — and equally unforgettable. To have one such film in you, but two? I think it is now safe to conclude: there are good documentary makers and there are excellent documentary makers and then there is Joshua Oppenheimer, who is amazing.
The Act of Killing showed Oppenheimer tracking down the ageing, unrepentant, positively gleeful members of the Indonesian civilian militia who, with the approval of the army and government, carried out the wholesale slaughter of a million suspected ‘communists’ after the Suharto coup. Extraordinarily, he persuaded them to memorialise their crimes in the styles of their favourite movies. I remember staying in my cinema seat and staring into space for quite a while after it had finished, trying to understand what I’d seen while asking myself: in what sort of moral universe do people take joy in re-enacting mass murders, dressed as John Wayne or otherwise? But I will leave that film here because if you have seen it you’ll know you have seen it, and will always know you’ve seen it, and if you have not seen it, I can’t hold everyone else up just because you’re a fool unto yourself.
The Look of Silence is simpler but is powerful precisely because of that simplicity. This is the story of the victims rather than the perpetrators, and it follows Adi Rukun, a mild-mannered, dignified and, somehow, rather exquisite 44-year-old optician whose older brother Ramli was killed two years before he was born. The parents are still alive.
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