From the openDemocracy archive. 'The Look of Silence' will be screened at London's Somerset House on 22nd February.
Joshua Oppenheimer. Flickr/Heinrich-Boll-Stiftung. Some rights reserved.In his masterpiece Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2011), as well as in numerous public lectures, the distinguished historian Timothy Snyder has emphasised that in order to comprehend the scope of atrocities such as the Holocaust, we are obligated to tell individual life stories of victims, survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators. The histories of the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Srebrenica massacre, the Rwandan and Indonesian genocides are too enormous and complicated to grasp by simply analysing graphs and figures. One needs to feel that the victims, their lives, hopes and deaths were real, otherwise history will remain at a cold distance from us. The Look of Silence , the 2014 film by the acclaimed documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer, masterfully fulfils Snyder’s injunction.
The film is a follow-up to the hugely successful The Act of Killing (2012), a film that examines the mindset of the perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide (1965-1966). The latest documentary takes a closer look at the victims of this horror, while also recording the encounters between two groups of people who have been neighbours for nearly 50 years. The Look of Silence confirms Oppenheimer’s status as one of the most ambitious and humanistic filmmakers of his generation; his cinematic approach aims at nothing less than a reconciliation between the Indonesian people.
