The Look of Silence
Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Talent: n/a
Release Date: 11th June 2015
In 1965, the CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a communist conspiracy to kidnap and murder leaders of the Indonesian army. The US embassy in Jakarta, along with the British Foreign Office, provided the military, led by General Suharto, with transportation and communications equipment, weapons and a kill list of members of the Indonesian Communist Party — then the world’s largest communist party outside of China — as part of mass-killings that saw the loss of up to 2.5 million lives in the space of two years.
This is the background, never mentioned, to the story told in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and, now, The Look of Silence, documentaries — the latter framed by unassuming optometrist Adi, whose brother Ramli was killed in 1965, confronting paramilitary members and their families in a series of poignant interviews — about Indonesia’s shameful recent past, in which the mass-killings seem to have erupted from the wild oriental psyche as a result of political ignorance (e.g. ‘communists worship the devil’) or mystical belief (e.g. that drinking the blood of one’s victims protects one from insanity) rather than from the material conditions of class struggle and imperialism of which history has made record. For all that it vilifies the foot-soldiers of the slaughter, it remains cosy with its generals. Suharto, who ran the country from 1967 to 1998, is never mentioned, and America’s involvement in events is framed as merely cultural or, barely, ideological.
Oppenheimer says that he receives death threats from Indonesian paramilitary members. In the West, he is nominated for Oscars and honoured at the BAFTAs. His films claim to expose the lies told by mass-murderers in order to absolve themselves of guilt for the crimes they committed. However, in selectively depicting historical events as an irrational, hermetic and national conflict, he produces in turn a narrative of absolution for Western imperialism, whose bloodied hands are rendered entirely absent from proceedings. This is State Department *mauvaise foi* at its most polished. Murderers need to tell themselves something to sleep at night.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
