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New York Film Festival: A ‘Genius’ Grant Winner and His Unblinking Camera

By LARRY ROHTER /  The New York Times

Joshua Oppenheimer, director of “The Look of Silence,” playing at the New York Film Festival. Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

No documentary in recent years has had a greater impact on both the public and filmmakers than Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Act of Killing,” an examination of government-directed mass killing that took place in Indonesia in 1965. At the Toronto International Film Festival this month, no less than Martin Scorsese said he found the movie, which was nominated for an Oscar earlier this year, haunting and inspiring.

Now, Mr. Oppenheimer, a 40-year-old Texas native based in Denmark, is back with another look at the same killings, albeit from a very different point of view. “The Look of Silence” focuses on a family in north Sumatra that lost a son in the slaughter and follows Adi, the victim’s younger brother, as he confronts those responsible. By contrast “The Act of Killing” zooms in on Anwar Congo, a leader of the death squads responsible for the killings.

Appropriately enough, Adi is an itinerant optometrist, going door to door to administer eye exams, often, to the discomfort of his subjects, making small talk about the 1965 events. “That, of course, created this amazing image of people who are willfully trying not to see, confronted by a man who is trying to make them see, both literally and metaphorically,” Mr. Oppenheimer said.

“The Look of Silence,” which won five prizes at the Venice Film Festival this month, will be shown Tuesday and Wednesday nights at the New York Film Festival. Mr. Oppenheimer, who last week was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, flew in from Europe for the screenings, and immediately sat down for an interview on Monday. Here are edited excerpts:

Q. How would you describe the relationship between these two films? Did one grow out of the other? Is the new film a sequel?

A. I see the two films as companion pieces to each other. I don’t see “The Act of Killing” as taking precedence simply because it came first. In fact this film is closer in theme and in focus to the film I initially set out to make when I went to Indonesia a decade ago.

Q. Is it your intention that the new film should in some way elaborate on the previous film?

A. The two films illuminate each other, like two paintings in a diptych stand in relation to each other. The new film certainly confirms how the climate of fear, the boasting of the perpetrators that we see in the old film, is imposed on the whole society. People are feeling fear because of the injustice of perpetrators remaining in power and keeping everyone afraid.

Q. Though companion pieces, stylistically these films are very different. Was that an aesthetic choice, or was it made necessary by the kind of footage you had?

A. It was an aesthetic choice because the first film is about fantasy, about our exuberant indulgence in stories that do harm. It’s about escapism, it’s about Hollywood. This film is about silence. I was trying to find poetic allegories for silence and that, of course, leads to a formal restraint.

Almost every painful sequence in “The Act of Killing” culminates with an abrupt cut to a silent tableau, a kind of haunted landscape, with one or two sole figures in it. These are abrupt switches in the point of view of the film, where we leave the perpetrator’s perspective, and shift to the perspective of the absent dead. In “The Look of Silence,” I wanted to feel like we had entered those haunted spaces, and the whole movie should take place within them. These two languages are different, but they are rigorously and entirely complementary. When you ask how they illuminate each other, it’s the restraint and formal simplicity of “The Look of Silence” that illuminates the kind of baroque, Hieronymus Bosch-like quality of “The Act of Killing,” and vice versa.

Q. In contrast to “The Act of Killing” I had the feeling in the new film that the camera refuses to cut away or blink. The conversations go on way past the boundary of discomfort and embarrassment.

A. There’s a sense that the most loving thing you can do sometimes is just bear witness. Werner Herzog [one of the executive producers] and I recently had, I don’t think it was a disagreement, it was just approaching the same thing from two different directions. He was saying something that I’ve heard him say before, which is that cinema knows no mercy. I said that not flinching is cinema’s greatest gesture of love when you are witnessing something important. Maybe it’s that I don’t like to think of myself as someone merciless.

But there are many moments in the film that raise this conundrum. People ask me in Q&As, “How could you not stop when this old man says ‘turn off the camera’?” But my loyalties in that moment were not to him. They were to Adi, and not just to Adi as an individual, but to Adi’s family, and not just to Adi’s family, but to a whole class of survivors and to the human rights community, which had entrusted me with this work for a decade. So you don’t blink. Because you know you are seeing something important, and you are the only eyes on it.

Q. You talked about these films as a diptych. But triptychs may be more common in art, which leads me to ask, are you done with this subject?

A. This is the end. This is the biggest audiovisual archive of material pertaining to this genocide, and we are now in dialogue with a variety of genocide-related archives about making sure the body of footage is available to scholarship and human rights advocacy. But apart from all the advocacy I’ll do around the release of the film, I feel my work as a filmmaker is done.

That’s partly because I have so many other things that I am eager to explore. I think the methods I developed during “The Act of Killing” are a kind of state of nature for nonfiction films. Whenever you film anybody, if I say I am going to film you all day tomorrow, the big event in your day will be me filming you. The first impulse you will have will be to stage yourself for me, and that offers all this insight into how you want to be seen, how you really see yourself, what scripts you are acting out for me. So I think this method of self-presentation, of giving people a platform, a stage to present themselves in whatever ways they wish, is this unexplored area — partly because it has been technically difficult to do in the days of celluloid, partly because it is expensive and time-consuming to do, partly because journalism and documentary filmmaking have had a symbiotic relationship over the decades.

But what the nonfiction camera creates whenever it films anybody, that’s something I really want to explore, and I want to explore it in other places and areas. I want to explore it here in the United States, I want to explore it around other themes.

Q. I presume that winning the MacArthur “genius” grant will make it easier for you to do that.

A. It’s like five years of a more generous salary than I have ever had. It allows me to start developing and shooting, in whatever direction. I have different ideas and I’m doing the research, exploring and looking for the seeds to plant the new tree. And whatever film or films this leads to, I have that freedom now to explore with the same kind of rigor and dedication and also wildness that I brought to this project.

Q. So what’s the tree you want to plant first? Or is it too early for you to answer that?

A. It’s too early to be specific. I have so many thoughts. But I’m interested in the United States, I’m interested in the American dream, and positive thinking and fear of death. I’m not hiding my obsessions from you just to be enigmatic; it really is early.

Also, I don’t make films about topics. I have themes and questions. And then I look for people who are somehow, in their lives, embodying some paradoxes, some contradictions and metaphors, with whom I can take a transformative journey. Adi was one of those people, Anwar was one of those people, and the way I came to make both of these films, I realize now, was by filming with and meeting many people and then homing in on two. I didn’t see the filming of countless perpetrators as casting, but I think I was looking for people with whom I could take a journey that would transform us both.

Reference: The New York Times