Ugly history aside, doc sees both sides

Director Joshua Oppenheimer says audiences used to seeing cinematic justice exacted as revenge might be confused by the approach a mild-mannered optometrist takes in his documentary The Look of Silence.
Director Joshua Oppenheimer says audiences used to seeing cinematic justice exacted as revenge might be confused by the approach a mild-mannered optometrist takes in his documentary The Look of Silence.

Austin, Texas-born filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer has earned two Oscar nominations and started an international discussion about the genocide that occurred in Indonesia from 1965 to 1966. He makes documentaries that don't resemble anything that has come before.

In his 2012 film, The Act of Killing, paramilitary gangsters who killed hundreds of thousands a half century ago re-enact their crimes in gangster-movie and even musical form. Watching the victims thanking the mass murderers for sending them to heaven is a moment that will make viewers adjust their sets.

Oppenheimer's 2014 film The Look of Silence, which is on Netflix and airs on PBS' POV next week (it is scheduled to run on AETN on Wednesday and July 3), is not as surreal but is equally jaw dropping and unconventional. The film follows Indonesian optometrist Adi Rukun, whose brother Ramli was one of those killed in the genocide. Oppenheimer sets up meetings between Rukun and the men involved with his brother's death. While creating new glasses for the now aging perpetrators, Rukun reveals who he is and talks openly with the men about their roles in Ramli's death and in the deaths of others.

In an ordinary movie, it's easy to imagine the opthamologist saying something like Mandy Patinkin does in The Princess Bride: "Hello, my name is Adi Rukun. You killed my brother. Prepare to die." But Oppenheimer says Rukun has become a national hero in his home country for doing something far different.

"That's what we expect to see in movies, right? We expect the vengeful hero to take justice in the form of revenge," says Oppenheimer from Denmark. "Justice should never be revenge. It's a pity because justice should always be -- this might not be the most exciting definition of justice -- justice should just be a ritual that societies go through that allow us to say that this may never happen again. This is forbidden now, in the future and always."

If Rukun does have Inigo Montoya's courage, he walks away from his encounters with the still-powerful men because he has what Winston Churchill defined as tact: the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.

"When Adi confronts them with it, he reframes it, and they're forced to see that Adi's a human being and that Adi's brother Ramli was a human being too. At some level, the perpetrators are forced to realize that they've been lying to themselves when Adi reveals that his brother was killed.

"They realize that if Adi is this gentle human being, perhaps Adi's brother was a human being too," Oppenheimer says. "Adi would certainly not wish that anyone he's confronting would be punished by eternal damnation in hell. He doesn't see his mission is searching for justice, but there is some truth in that he's able to say these incredibly provocative things -- indeed, unspeakable things in that context -- things that have never been heard or said by any survivor to any perpetrator since the genocide because the perpetrators are still in power. And he's able to say them in this gentle, almost understanding tone so the perpetrator is caught off guard for just long enough that a dialogue begins."

Humblebragging

The Look of Silence alternates between Rukun's encounters with the perpetrators and previously unseen interviews that Oppenheimer conducted with the perpetrators where they boast of their atrocities.

There's also a vintage NBC news clip where one perpetrator claims his captives asked him to kill them. The American reporter starts the clip by calling Indonesia's civil war -- in which President Sukarno was eventually overthrown by General Suharto -- a triumph over communism. Many of the victims were targeted simply because they were ethnic Chinese.

Oppenheimer recalls that Rukun watched much of the footage he eventually included in The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence and wanted to meet with the participants over the filmmaker's own objections for the optometrist's safety.

"Throughout those seven years, [Rukun] was always empathic with the people he was viewing, no matter how terrible their testimony," Oppenheimer says. "The idea that the boasting is a kind of defensive mask covering guilt was something I got from Adi. We hear that early in The Look of Silence where a man is showing how he killed women to his own wife, and his wife is laughing nervously. I remember when I was editing the film, anticipating what he would say. I thought 'This man is really a monster.' Adi said, 'This man must feel so guilty. Otherwise, he would never be numb this way.' I thought, 'My God. There is no limit to Adi's capacity for empathy.' I've learned a great deal from that."

A Numbers Game

Oppenheimer chose to immerse viewers in Rukun's world instead of covering the bloodshed as a whole. As a result, the film becomes more universal despite the subtitles.

"One could easily make the film about five, six different survivors' families and their experiences and then from that we would infer a kind of pattern of survivors in Indonesia. Any kind of inference of a pattern is an abstraction and would be distancing. I wanted you to feel as if Adi was you and his children were your children and as if his parents were your parents and thereby make this film about you," Oppenheimer says.

"This is not just Indonesian history. This is American history. If it had been a historical documentary, it would have, at best, been a kind of indictment of American foreign policy as a whole and at worst just a kind of description of what happened in Indonesia. I wanted to make a film about what fear and silence as a consequence of impunity do to human beings everywhere, including in America right now. I wanted this to be about the toll of the fear and the impunity on all of us."

From watching the film, it's hard not to wonder if Rukun has given his life for his activism. The optometrist has a passport and is ready to flee to Copenhagen if threats get serious. Rukun, who received support from foundations and the Columbia, Mo.-based True Life Fund, has also set up an optometry practice in a different part of the country to stay away from the men he has confronted, and has a small security team but still speaks around the nation.

"There's a team of five people working full time to monitor Adi's safety. Adi's seen as a kind of national hero in Indonesia. He's spent the last two years traveling with the film internationally and in Indonesia and working as an optometrist," Oppenheimer says. "I still receive death threats warning me not to return to Indonesia, Adi has not been threatened since the film has come out. The threats I receive are from people I've embarrassed in The Act of Killing. And Adi's dignity and his gentleness have meant that people see him as a hero."

The Ultimate Reward

Because of the risks involved, some of Oppenheimer's collaborators are credited simply as "anonymous." Nonetheless, the filmmaker doesn't seem sore about losing out on Academy Awards to Amy and Twenty Feet From Stardom. Oppenheimer says Indonesians have become more open about a subject that was previously taboo to even discuss.

"Teachers are now using the two films in high school so they can teach about what really happened alongside the official curriculum, which they can present as 'this is what we're supposed to teach you,'" he says. "There's both a public discussion, a media discussion and indeed now because of that, a government reaction."

MovieStyle on 06/24/2016

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