Artforum reviews The Look of Silence, the new documentary by Joshua Oppenheimer, who directed the acclaimed 2012 documentary The Act of Killing, which exposed the mass killings of communists by authorities in Indonesia in the 1960s. The Look of Silence is a companion piece to The Act of Killing, and focuses on the survivors of the mass killings. Here’s an excerpt from the review by Tony Pipolo:
The concentrated, unflinching aim of Adi’s gaze, intensified by that of Oppenheimer’s camera, makes The Look of Silence a movie about other kinds of looks and silences, and the actual experience of watching it aesthetically and psychologically complex. His achievement is not limited to having pulled off an act of confrontational journalism in the face of retaliatory dangers—amazing as this was. More than its predecessor, this work is also a testament to the cinema as a unique instrument of investigation. Every frame of the movie is imbued with its director’s ethical sensibility borne through a formally restrained aesthetic. Indeed, the gaze of the camera, held with steadfast equanimity and unwavering trust in its revelatory potential, seems touched by the spirits of Rossellini and Tarkovsky, for whom the camera’s protracted look on the world could ultimately disclose nothing less than existential truths. As in their work, Oppenheimer’s interest in big questions is inseparable from the intrinsic properties of the art form enlisted to address them.
Whereas most documentary filmmakers are driven primarily by their material, and only secondarily, if at all, by the spatiotemporal parameters of the medium, the framing and duration of shots in Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence trouble the line between what we see and what lies hidden, between what is said and what is thought—often seizing simultaneously the contradictory phenomena of both. What is at stake is not merely this or that fact, this or that speaker, or this or that investigative method, but that ultimate, inaccessible realm, inadequately labeled truth itself. The long takes and silences of this approach constitute a style that literally reflects reflection, soliciting the viewer to weigh patiently rather than respond superficially to everything seen and heard. One recalls Claude Lanzmann’s approach in Shoah (1985), which eschewed archival footage of concentration camp horrors, allowing long shots of the grounds bearing little trace of their existence to resonate within both participants and viewers. Just as Lanzmann used that erasure to imply the unrepresentability of the crimes of the Holocaust, the silent looks and absences of Oppenheimer’s movie conjure disturbing images of what we don’t see and invite anxious meditations on the ugliest aspects of human nature.
Image: Still from The Look of Silence, via Artforum