Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
It may come as a surprise to many who watch Joshua Oppenheimer’s latest documentary about the systematic murder of a million Indonesians in the 1960s that it is a genocide in history to which the vast majority of people may have no idea happened. Unlike the actions that led to the Khmer Rouge, the barbarity of events that saw six million people exterminated in the death camps of Europe or the slow destruction of the ethnic American people by the United States Government, the act of murder of a people based on ideology has never really entered the minds of those encumbered and immersed into a world with no Cold War to focus their minds.
Not only is The Look of Silence a piece of historic film-making but it is harrowing and even without the images of the conflict in Indonesia to guide the viewer along, what transpires as 44 year old Ari confronts the men who acted as judge, jury and executioner is enough to feel the rising swell of anger jump and spin in the veins.
Documentaries by their very nature can be hit or miss, mostly through their target demographic perhaps being of a small audience, the truly interested will always make time, the history buffs chomping at the bit for new information, but the ordinary person on the street might let it go, representing as it does, not escapism but the full frontal assault on the senses that some may find too upsetting to deal with.
Deaths in any campaign between ideologies are regretfully and damningly expected, but murder, planned and executed is another thing entirely and the film captures this to the point of sorrow and not being able to fully comprehend the enormity and scale of what goes on in the minds of those who perpetuate such crimes against Humanity.
Perhaps the most telling part of Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary is not in the presentation or in the story itself but in the credits, arguably the most missed part of any film. There is a chill that comes over you when you realise what you are seeing scrolling over the screen is the word anonymous over and over again. It is that point in which all that has transpired suddenly becomes real, that there are still many out there who would gladly harbour grudges and those who feel that the initial act was not severe enough, it is a statement of the human condition in which to remind behind the lens is the only way to stay safe.
The Look of Silence should be hailed as a stirring reminder that the world is still fighting a war of ideology and that many casualties have been accounted for but just how many are still fighting that battle? Clinical, harrowing and a fine piece of cinematic art, The Look of Silence is film which reveals many layers of truth.
Ian D. Hall