The look of Silence (15) Directed by: Joshua Oppenheimer HHHHH

Joshua Oppenheimer’s debut The Act of Killing was a radical reinvention of the documentary form; a film that used cinematic artifice not only to expose the banality of evil in the grinning, ageing guise of Indonesia’s communist-slaughtering civilian militia, but to subtly force these perpetrators of crimes against humanity to unravel their tightly knotted denials of wrongdoing through repeated re-enactments of their murderous acts for Oppenheimer’s camera. It was a jaw-dropping reminder of the power of cinema to elicit truth, and a testament to the way art – even in the crude form of a murderer mugging for a camera – can unlock the emotional reality of a moment already rendered abstract by history.

Functioning as a sequel of sorts, The Look of Silence revisits that world. Oppenheimer’s subject once again is Indonesia’s collective refusal to acknowledge the barbarity of the communist purges that resulted in a million deaths following the 1965 coup. This time, he zeroes in on one man’s determination to confront this shameful past – or, more accurately, one man’s determination to force the maniacs who murdered his brother to confront it. This is Adi, a 44-year-old ophthalmologist. His brother, Ramli, was killed before Adi was born, but the traumatic manner of his death has cast a pall over Adi’s life, and the lives of his parents (both centenarians). The film begins with Adi watching a video of a former member of the militia gleefully recounting the details of Ramli’s death. The footage was shot by Oppenheimer years earlier during his research for The Act of Killing and in presenting it to Adi in this manner he’s again showing how film, far from being a distancing device, can provide a direct connection between past and present.

After watching this footage Adi decides to track down these men with Oppenheimer’s help, a course of action that at first suggests the film isn’t going to be as formalistically daring as its predecessor. And yet contrivances such as the symbolically rich sight of Adi interviewing some of the men under the auspices of an eye examination pack an emotional wallop. What follows involves much talk of “following orders”, as well as denials and protestations that the wounds of the past should not be re-opened. Yet the shame etched on the faces of Adi’s interlocutors is impossible to hide and macabre revelations by some that they drank the blood of the dead to stave off madness function as unwitting admissions of the kind of collective insanity for which there are no words to adequately explain. The titular look of silence ultimately belongs to Adi as he comes to this realisation.