By, Stephen Applebaum
3 min read
ByStephen Applebaum, Stephen Applebaum
I first met Jewish-American film-maker Joshua Oppenheimer at the Berlin Film Festival following a screening of his documentary about the 1965-1966 anti-communist purge in Indonesia, The Act of Killing . The setting was apt because whereas Germany has confronted its descent into barbarism, in Indonesia it had become almost taboo to talk about the genocide that claimed a million lives.
The people who ordered the killing were never toppled. Consequently, the survivors and families of victims were forced to live in silence, while the killers lived as free men, hailed as heroes by political leaders and in propaganda taught to schoolchildren.
When Oppenheimer tried to talk to survivors on a plantation in North Sumatra in 2003, the army threatened them but eventually, the survivors told him to film the perpetrators. What Oppenheimer discovered shocked him. Far from living in fear, the men who'd bathed Indonesia in blood openly boasted about their "achievements".
The killers became the focus of The Act of Killing. Oppenheimer still wanted to get the other side, though. And in between finishing editing the film and its release, he returned in 2012 to work with Adi Rukun, a 44-year-old optometrist whose brother, Ramli, had been butchered in the genocide, two years before he was born.
The result is The Look of Silence, in which Adi confronts men involved in the purge about their beliefs and actions. These include Inong, one of Ramli's killers. Now an old man, Inong regrets nothing; he even admits to drinking victims' blood, to stave off madness.
Like Adi, Oppenheimer grew up in the shadow of genocide. "I come from a family which lost many people in the Holocaust," he says, "and grew up with the sense that the aim of all politics, if not of all art, is to somehow prevent these things from ever happening again. And they keep happening again."
Oppenheimer never got to confront his relatives' killers. In this sense, Adi may perhaps be seen as a proxy, going on a mission that the film-maker couldn't pursue directly on behalf of his own murdered family members, but which he can facilitate for the Indonesian.
Adi was raised in a family that was deeply traumatised but too scared to talk about what had happened, explains Oppenheimer: "So you feel that something is terribly wrong but you're not scared in the same way because you didn't witness those things - that's Adi."
In addition, his mother told him repeatedly that the only reason she could continue living was because she'd had him as a replacement for Ramli. "So here's this man who has an almost questing curiosity to understand what his family went through," says the director.
The eye specialist chose who to talk to from interviews Oppenheimer had compiled making The Act of Killing. They knew that the confrontational nature of the project would make it dangerous, and possibly violent. However, Oppenheimer believed that because he'd met the perpetrators before, and because they knew he'd worked with influential political and military figures, "if they were ever on the verge of sending their thugs (who were always around) to attack us, they would have second thoughts, because they knew I was close with the governor."
All Adi wants from the encounters is a sign of remorse that will enable him to forgive. But there is no resolution, just a sense of the "mess lurking under the surface" of Indonesian society.
"It was very important that this is a film made in honour of the dead," says Oppenheimer. This meant not offering easy solutions or sending the message that justice will be achieved. This also honoured the pain of Adi's parents, burdened by an unspoken grief.
"I could see in them that nothing will put right these lives," Oppenheimer says. "Nothing will bring back the dead. So I thought it was so important to pause and listen to that silence that they lived under. . . It is not a peaceful silence, but a tense and terrible one."
His hope is that The Look of Silence will broaden the debate about 1965 that The Act of Killing helped to open up in Indonesia, and whose Oscar nomination forced the government to admit for the first time that crimes against humanity had been committed. The documentaries are not just about Indonesia, however. They are about humanity and human behaviour. The killers of '65-'66, like the killers of the Holocaust, were just ordinary people.
"This is terrifying, because it suggests we all might be closer to perpetrators than we like to believe," says Oppenheimer. "Yet this is also hopeful, because if all perpetrators are human, then we ought to be able to create societies in which we care for each other more."
The Look of Silence is on release.
