With The Act of Killing, director Joshua Oppenheimer instantly became one of the most important names in documentary cinema, his film proving one of the most acclaimed, discussed, and, sometimes, sharply criticized releases of 2013. Oppenheimer recorded the perpetrators responsible for the deaths of over half a million Indonesians in 1965-1966, a genocide veiled as an anti-communist purge that, because of its roots in politics endorsed by the West, is still relatively little-known. It was both a light into our world’s underwritten history and a bold new step for the form, but his follow-up, The Look of Silence, is even better. This time around, Oppenheimer documents the confrontation that Adi, the brother of a victim of the genocide, has with the various perpetrators. Resolving his first film’s formal uncertainties and provoking even more disgust amidst quiet strains of optimism, The Look of Silence is hands-down one of the year’s highlights.
After a screening at last year’s New York Film Festival, we were lucky enough to sit down with the director. Oppenheimer talked in eloquent monologues about everything from performativity in documentaries, the essence of nonfiction filmmaking, the origin of his latest feature, and, of course, the film itself. Looking back on it, I only wish I had requested more time, as the interview ended when there was clearly much more to say. Luckily, Oppenheimer will likely be a name that lasts, and we can only hope that more opportunities arise as he continues to shine a light on one of the 20th century’s darkest chapters, the repercussions of which are still felt in modern-day Indonesia.
To start, congratulations: you’re officially a genius, as per MacArthur. Did they just call you one morning and say, “You win”?
Yes, they do, they do, and, in fact, at first I thought it was like a journalist or someone I was supposed to meet and I failed to make an appointment, and I just jumped out of bed. It was a total surprise.
The Act of Killing was tied at #19 on the Sight & Sound list of greatest documentaries. There were a lot of newer films on that, e.g. Leviathan, Man on Wire, Los Angeles Plays Itself, and The Gleaners and I. Does that indicate anything about the state of documentary?
No. [Laughs] It doesn’t. It doesn’t indicate anything about it to me.
It’s a lot of different kinds of films. All of those films, and Act of Killing, are doing different things, but there is a lot of talk right now about “hybrids,” which has been done for a while, and obviously the availability of digital equipment has a big effect. Was any of that on your mind during either The Act of Killing or The Look of Silence?
So certainly — and there I have something to say — what I did in Act of Killing wouldn’t have been possible in the days of celluloid. To go through a filmmaking process where you get sort of sucked into catalyzing and allowing to flourish a project that takes on an absolute life of its own, namely these former death squad leaders, dramatizing the fantasies by which they live with themselves and justify their actions, and creating elaborate, increasingly elaborate, ever more elaborate fiction scenes… staging those fantasies generated 1,200 hours of footage. That would be an airplane hangar filled with celluloid. And that would be impossible for any filmmaker to edit, to review, to cut, to work with the multiple cameras, to sync them up. There was no way in the days of celluloid to sync up cameras on the same event…and then layers of reflection as the characters would watch the footage and comment on it. It just wasn’t possible. So that’s certainly something I’ve thought about.
And, more to the point, I’m not sure I really see a trend toward embracing what I feel is the state of nature in documentary cinema, which is that whenever you point a camera at anybody, they start acting, they start performing, and they start acting out the scripts by which they imagine would be coming to them. They start acting in the way they want to be seen. And from there you can infer how they really see themselves. And you can ask questions then for what are they compensating. Why do they want to be seen a certain way? But when you acknowledge that, that whenever you point a camera at somebody they start acting, they start staging themselves, then you’re in this space of performance. And you’re saying whatever you get in a non-fiction film is a form of performance. That’s a kind of axiom of mine that you see in the work of Ulrich Seidl, Michael Glawogger — you see it more in Europe; you see it, in some small extent, in other people’s work — but I don’t know if that’s enough to call it a trend, given that I think it is in fact the state of nature of the whole medium.
And it’s still the case that the vast majority of people calling themselves documentarians are trying to get past that state of self-consciousness as quickly as possible. And most of the time they don’t, but they try to hide it. That is to say, they simulate a reality with the people they film in which they pretend they’re not affecting it. Whereas, in fact, any time you film anybody, you’re creating a reality with the people you film, whether it’s a fiction film or a nonfiction film. But I don’t see a trend, but I think the attempt to hide that that’s what’s going on, and the way we try to talk about doc as a transparent window on reality obscures what really happens when you point a camera at someone and therefore leads filmmakers to miss the opportunity that the awareness of that self-staging invariably presents. And I think that’s an enormous shame.
Albert Maysles acknowledged that when you point a camera, people start acting, so you need to point the camera at them long enough until they can’t keep up the façade.
Well, I would argue that this is a very good example — and I love their work — but I would argue this is a good example of not speaking in a productive way or an insightful way about documentary. If you look at their masterpiece, Grey Gardens, the longer they point their camera, the more the women start to cleverly and manipulatively use the camera, perform for it, compete with each other for its attention. So the film becomes more and more performative, not less and less. And I think that if we recognize that as a basic thing that’s not just happening, not just generating fabulous performances that make that film, but actually the key to its emotional development as the women become more and more shrill in their competition for the attention of the filmmakers, then we start to have the opportunity to understand what that film is really doing and why it’s a great film and how its drama works. But if we simply say, “Oh, the filmmakers hang around long enough until they forget the camera,” then we’re lying to ourselves and we’re lying to any young filmmaker who is trying to think, “how does documentary work and what are we doing when we make it?”
The Look of Silence features many scenes where there’s a confrontation between Adi and somebody else and they get very angry, telling him “the past is the past” and telling you to turn off the camera. Is this sort of the opposite, where you film a short conversation and they’re closer to being themselves because they haven’t learned how to manipulate the camera yet?
[Oppenheimer pauses]
Was there a lot of footage filmed and edited in each of those individual conversations, or are we seeing most of what was recorded?
I’m trying to think… it’s an interesting question and I don’t think I’ve thought about it that way. It’s interesting because not only could those conversations not exist without a camera — Adi couldn’t know who those men were without my old footage, without watching that old footage.
Which old footage do you mean?
I met Adi in 2003 when I was just starting this work on the 1965 genocide and was working with survivors, and Adi came in a plantation village where I had helped the plantation workers make a film called The Globalization Tapes, which is not really my film but a film they made with me and my colleague Christine Cynn’s facilitating. Then we started in 2003. It turned out the plantation workers were all survivors of this genocide and the film was made to document their struggle organizing a union. And it turned out their biggest obstacle was fear, because their parents and grandparents had been killed for being in a union in 1965. They said, after we made that film, “Come back and let’s make another film about what it’s like for us to live with perpetrators all around us and still in power.”
And I came back in early 2003 to start that work, and we started, of course, working with the survivors with whom we worked to make The Globalization Tapes. But they said there was one victim in particular whose name was synonymous with the genocide across that region, and his name was Romley. Because Romley’s murder had witnesses. People saw Romley die, unlike the tens of thousands of people who had been brought to river banks, decapitated and thrown into the river. People saw Romley die, so to speak about Romley for the survivors was to insist that these events, which the government had threatened them into pretending never had occurred, it was to insist even to themselves and to each other really had occurred. It was like pinching yourself to remind yourself and to retain a link, a connection, to the source of their fear and trauma, which, once severed, deprives you of any opportunity to ever heal from that trauma because you can’t recall what the original trauma is.
I mention that because I think it’s the condition that Adi’s father is in at the end of the film. He’s forgotten the event that’s ruined his life, but he’s trapped with the fear, and he’ll never escape that prison.
So, going back, I was quickly introduced… because Romley was so well-known, I was quickly introduced to Romley’s family, and then instantly attached to Romley’s mom, Rohani. Then she introduced me to her son, Adi, who was living outside the village in the city of Medan. Adi was different from the others because he was born after the killings, and was different from everyone in his family being born after the killings and consequently wasn’t as traumatized as everyone else, and was trying to understand what had happened in his family that had led everyone to be so afraid. He was also being stigmatized at school as a communist because he was related to a victim. He was trying to understand what happened but no one would talk about it, including his family, lest he go to school and talk about it and get himself and his family in trouble. So he wanted answers. Why is his family like this? Why is the whole country as it is? And he saw the means to answer those questions in my early filmmaking with the survivors back in 2003. Then the army threatened Adi not to participate in the film, and threatened everybody, all the survivors, not to participate in the film. Then they suggested I film the perpetrators — before I quit, try to film the perpetrators. That was a novel and sort of preposterous idea to me at first, but when I did I found their openness and their boastfulness.
When Adi saw that material, also in 2003 — some of the early material, in fact, that you see in The Look of Silence, that he’s watching — he said “continue to film the perpetrators, because anybody who sees this anywhere in the world will be forced to acknowledge, just from the way they’re speaking, that something is terribly wrong here today.” Not that something terrible happened here 40 years ago, but that there’s something still terribly wrong. And then I felt entrusted by Adi, and by the entire Indonesian human rights community and all the survivors with whom I started working, to continue filming any perpetrators I could find. And I spent two years doing that, working my way from perpetrator to perpetrator up the chain of command, from this plantation village to the city and then beyond, to Jakarta. Every perpetrator that I filmed was boastful. Anwar Congo I met in 2005, two years later; he was the 41st perpetrator I filmed. Then I spent five years filming The Act of Killing with Anwar and his friends. Adi, the whole time, was watching whatever we had time to show him with this same mixture — changing mixtures — of anger and fascination and devastation. So that’s how I met Adi, and he was transformed, I think — at least in his understanding of what was happening in Indonesia — by his witnessing the process of my making The Act of Killing.
So, going all the way back to your original question, those confrontations with the perpetrators could never have happened, in so many ways, without the camera. It couldn’t have happened if he hadn’t seen that material. It couldn’t have happened if he hadn’t therefore known what these men had done. It couldn’t have happened, therefore, if he couldn’t select who he wanted to meet. When we met them, the camera was the precondition for our access because they knew me because I had filmed them before. They knew that I made, but hadn’t yet seen, The Act of Killing, so they thought I was then close to the VP of Indonesia, the governor of the province, the chief of the Indonesian police, the head of the paramilitary movement in Indonesia. So they would think two or three times before they sent their thugs out to attack us physically. That was the only way we were able to shoot such dangerous scenes. And then, the camera was surely a way… the camera, and Adi as the newcomer, were absolutely what were focusing the conversation.
During that scene Adi says to one of the perpetrators, “What would you do if I came here during the New Order dictatorship?” And Amir-Sal says, “You can’t imagine what I would have done.” Well, equally, if Adi had come without me and without my camera one can’t imagine what they would have done. So those conversations are entirely dependent on the filmmaking process — they are a result of it. Both The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence are films whose central dramatic spine is generated by the filmmaking process itself, and, in that sense, they are inevitably movies about cinema and movies about movie-making. So it’s really hard to say that what was… I think you never, to go all the way back, I think you never, in any documentary, unless you’re filming a sporting match or a trial — both of which are usually staged for cameras to start with — or you’re filming wildlife with such a telephoto lens that the animals are unaware of your presence, I think you’re never filming pre-existing reality. And any filmmaker who says you are is feeding you a fiction so that you can suspend your disbelief and appreciate the movie as it’s intended, just as you have to suspend your disbelief to appreciate a fiction film.
There’s a lot to work with there. So, seeing as it’s a film about movie-making, people keep telling Adi that “the past is the past” and “forget it.” And what this film is insisting is that it’s not even the past. Not only should we not forget it, but it’s still here.
Mmmhmm, yes.
To me, the most striking juxtaposition of that truth and what they’re insisting is when the children are confronted and none of them knew the full extent. They’re shocked. They knew their parents were involved, but that’s it.
Well, there is the daughter… two of them, the two boys, are absolutely lying, and that’s why I confronted them with that footage, because I’d spent two months with that whole family, including those two sons, in 2004, working with their father when he was still alive to reenact what he had done. So they’re lying. They knew the details of what he did. They’d read the book. They were involved with making the old footage I’m trying to confront them with. The daughter didn’t know the details.
So what’s interesting to me about that is this sense of the next generation beginning to realize the importance and the guilt that runs through their family — and, on the other hand, there are people that don’t at all. So is their progress in the next generation, for the children of the grandchildren realizing that the genocide was wrong? Which is more common, the sons or that daughter?
I think the sons are more common in the sense that people will, by necessity — so they can live with their families, so they can live how they grew up, so they can make sense of who they are and who they’ve become — it must be more common to remain loyal, initially, to your parents. But I think the daughter provides a very, very important example for Indonesians in terms of how this film can make an impact in Indonesia, because she’s someone who has the dignity and grace to apologize on her father’s behalf to Adi…
And welcome Adi to the family.
…And sort of welcome him to the family, and in that strange, mysterious, painful, delicate moment, to show that truth, reconciliation, and possibly some form of healing is not only profoundly needed — I think the whole film shows that — but to show that it’s possible. And it spans the gap between the people who have been longing for that on the survivor’s side and the relatives of people coming from perpetrators’ families. I think children of perpetrators in Indonesia who see the film — and they will — will see in her a model, or will see in her the proof that this can happen, and they’ll see in the whole film how urgently it’s needed. So I think it is the inertia of those sons that this film must overcome in Indonesia, and the trend must bend toward those daughters if there is to be progress.
I think you’re absolutely right: the film is about how the past is still present. And if you say “the past is past,” which you hear so many people say, unless there’s a collective and moral understanding of what the past is, the past can never be past. It’s actually, “the past can only be past once people have recognized collectively what the past is.” And so long as people are lying about it and not talking about it, the statement is merely a threat, or surrender.
The Look of Silence enters a limited release on Friday, July 17th and will expand in the coming weeks.