Almost three years ago, Joshua Oppenheimer unveiled The Act of Killing, a startling documentary about the 1965-66 mass killings in Indonesia. Its audacious ploy was to encourage unrepentant murderers to re-enact their deeds in the form of scenes from action flicks, a tactic that was extremely well-received by Western critics.
The gimmick yielded some sequences that were cathartic, but others that were at best distracting. At times, the film trivialized a subject that Oppenheimer clearly took very seriously. Widespread acclaim for the documentary seemed to reflect its emphasis on something movie reviewers know well — movies — over the considerably more obscure subject of Indonesian history.
Of course, both Westerners and Indonesians have good reason to know little about the horrific episode broached by Oppenheimer’s films: It’s a taboo subject, one the Denmark-based American filmmaker is nearly alone in addressing. He does so much more effectively in The Look of Silence, which uses members of a single family to represent the millions of victims and survivors.
Obeying the strictures of cinema verite, the director generally avoids historical context. But he couldn’t resist the clip that opens The Look of Silence: a 1967 TV news report in which an NBC correspondent exults in the “purge” of communists from Indonesia. He interviews a local man who says, with earnest absurdity, that some of the alleged communists actually asked to be killed.