The Routledge Companion To Literature And Human Rights

Alexandra Schultheis Moore

This interview with filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer provides a close look at how nonfiction film might participate in human rights work. Oppenheimer explains both the methodologies and aesthetics of his two films, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), which chronicle the aftermath of the mass murders in Indonesia in 1965–66 that brought the New Order government of President Suharto to power. The films take up the perspectives of perpetrators and victims, respectively, and break new ground in human rights filmmaking: in The Act of Killing, perpetrators enthusiastically redramatize their crimes in ways that betray the logic that initially supported them; and in The Look of Silence, a survivor confronts perpetrators of his brother’s murder while those perpetrators are still in power and in the absence of any official legal or political process of redress. As opposed to documenting atrocity or trying to raise viewers’ awareness of existing human rights campaigns, the films – in their distinct ways – attempt to formulate the possibility of human rights claims and redress where none exists.

The interview was conducted in Denmark in November 2014 the day before The Look of Silence premiered in Jakarta. We talked extensively about how the films give expression to the aftermath of atrocity in order to try to prepare the way for human rights actions in political and legal spheres.

ASM: You’ve described The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence as companion films. Can you talk a bit more about how you understand the two in relation to one another?

JO: I think the two films mutually illuminate each other. There’s a scene in The Look of Silence that is really the genesis of both films: the scene where the two men, Amir Hasan and Inong Syah, take me down to the banks of Snake River with apparent glee, demonstrating how they helped the army there kill 10,500 people in that one spot. They take turns playing victim and perpetrator. Watching that, I had this sinking feeling over what was really an awful afternoon for me that this is what it would be like if the Nazis had won. I’ve said that many times in relation to The Act of Killing. In fact, the first time that had occurred to me was shooting that scene in January 2004. What was unique about that scene was that I had brought the two men together from neighboring villages. [It’s] glossed over in the film because the story doesn’t go into the geography, but they are actually leaders of village death squads from different villages, nearby to one another but distinct. They hadn’t met each other before. What was most horrifying to me was not the atrocities that they were recounting, not even the boasting, but the fact that they were both reading from a shared script. That’s what told me that this is political; this is performative; this is historical. The boasting is functioning now, and I’m witnessing a performance that is intended to have real world effects now. That was when I had this realization that the boasting is a symptom of something wrong with the present. Hopefully I’m shorting the circuit by filming it, by exposing that performance and subjecting it to the analysis of the film.

ASM: Yet you portray the effects of that shared script through two very different stylistic approaches.

JO: I knew from that moment at the Snake River that there were two films that were both about the present, both about today, and not about 1965 per se, that needed to be made about this. One would be about what happens when perpetrators of genocide [in the political or ideological sense (Fein 1993a: 12–13; Fein 1993b: 798–99)] win and build a whole society on the basis of justifying what they’ve done. I knew that would be a film about self-deception, about rationalization, about escape fantasy storytelling. I knew it would be flamboyant because denial and escapism are always a flamboyant mental process and a collective mental process (albeit one that is imposed, and therefore intimately engaged with power because the stories when they are imposed are only imposed through dynamics of power). I knew that it would be a flamboyant film; it turned out to be a kind of fever dream: The Act of Killing. But I also knew at that same moment that there was another film to be made about what does it mean for human beings to have to continue to live, to rebuild their lives, to survive in the shadow of the men who have done this to their families; what does it do to a human being to have to live for 50 years now in fear and in silence. That is also a film about today. What does the lack of truth and reconciliation, the lack of transitional justice, the ongoing power of the perpetrators do to the survivors? That film became The Look of Silence.

If you watch The Act of Killing, particularly in its unabridged form, every long, painful sequence culminates abruptly with a hard cut to a kind of empty, haunted landscape. Usually there [are] one or two people inhabiting it, and those moments are abrupt transitions in the perspective of the film from that of the perpetrators to that of the absent dead, who I feel haunt the whole film. I knew that the second film, The Look of Silence, should be somehow equivalent to placing the viewer in those haunted spaces and making the viewer feel immersively, physically, haptically what it is like to have to live in that space: what does it do to your skin over decades and decades; what does it do to your memory, to your ability to grieve or not grieve? In that sense, The Look of Silence is a film made almost entirely in those spaces. In that sense, the two films are not just different formally, I hope they are rigorously complementary and, in that sense, mutually illuminating.

ASM: If we can begin with The Act of Killing, could you talk about the idea that there was a genre within which the perpetrators you were interviewing would recount their crimes?

JO: The idea of genre in film is sort of a myth. The origin of genre in Hollywood is that film is inherently risky. You don’t know what the film is going to be when you invest in a film, so genre was an attempt to fix that: if we add this actor and this actor and this formula, it will come out this way, and therefore we should be able to predict how much audience we’ll get. It’s an attempt to fix something which is inherently in flux, and not just in flux, but evolving historically.

I wouldn’t say that the genre of the perpetrators’ accounts is identical to each other or identical to what you see in G30S [the government propaganda film] (The Treachery of the September 30th Movement of the Indonesian Communist Party, 1984). I don’t think it’s the same, but definitely the government propaganda justifying what they’ve done and essentially stigmatizing the victims by blaming them for what happened is strongly conditioning the perpetrators’ accounts. What is really interesting about G30S is that it’s an attempt to craft the victims in the perpetrators’ own image. G30S, as I’ve written about elsewhere, depicts the Gerwani, the Communist Party Women’s Movement, as mutilating and murdering the six generals in a sado-masochistic orgy (Oppenheimer and Uwemedimo 2012: 289). The perpetrators [of the genocide] are the ones, as you see in The Look of Silence, drinking blood and mutilating people. We can recognize that this kind of cannibalistic orgy of violence, which is depicted in G30S, is to project a fantasy of the victims in the image of the perpetrators and thereby to justify retrospectively, retroactively what the perpetrators have done.

ASM: And the grotesque action by the perpetrators was known or unknown to Indonesian viewers?

JO: I think that people in Indonesia know that. There’s a really telling line in The Act of Killing – when they’re improvising a reenactment of how they killed but on the set where they’re reenacting scenes from G30S and remaking rigorously or precisely the stupid, iconic images from G30S. In that moment Adi Zulkadry says about the reenactments of violence against “Communists,” if we succeed in making this film it will show Indonesians what they’ve always already suspected, namely that what we did was wrong, and that the propaganda film was a lie: that we were the bad ones. Which is to say that Indonesians must have suspected that these grotesque things that the Communists are accused of doing in G30S don’t come out of nowhere. They don’t come out of a vacuum. They are, in fact, sort of through a dark mirror, the image of what the perpetrators actually did. In fact, it’s not even through a dark mirror. It’s not even any worse than what the perpetrators did. It is simply what the perpetrators did, slanderously applied to the victims, who were, almost entirely, civilians who were unarmed and not resisting and who were taken out to be killed. Insofar as ordinary Indonesians already know this, G30S functions as a threat to the society. It functions on two levels: we would have you believe, the government is saying, that this is what the victims would have done; but also, don’t question us because this is what we will do.

The boasting of Inong Syah and Amir Hasan, the fact that they know how to speak that way together, and also in the tone of voice in The Look of Silence in which some of the perpetrators tell those same stories in front of Adi Rukun (whom they know to be from the region, but they don’t really know who he is until he reveals himself), there we see that that boasting – which kind of flowers unfettered before my camera – normally functions as a kind of threat to their neighbors. It functions as a kind of code with each other (we’re a part of this), and even a kind of threat to each other: stay on this page, stay on message, this is how we talk about this. And I think it also functions, like Anwar’s fiction scenes in The Act of Killing, as an attempt to replace the awful memories that keep one awake at night with relatively contained fiction accounts, which appear to be adequate to the traumatic, unspeakable things that the perpetrators have done and experienced and can’t help but remember, but aren’t really adequate to them. I’ve talked about Anwar’s film and his effort to make these fictional scenes as an attempt to build up a kind of cinematic psychic scar tissue. I think that the perpetrators’ boasting is, too.

ASM: In The Look of Silence, we see that at least one perpetrator made his own representation of the killings. How does that compare to the boasting?

JO: This is Amir Hasan’s self-illustrated memoir of the killings, Embun Berdarah (1997) (which, by the way, he wanted to make into a musical). In this story, the key chapter is “Blood Paid with Blood.” It opens with a quote from Napoleon Bonaparte: “If the sky should fall on our heads, we would hold it up with the tips of our swords.” Then it comes to its core, which is “Story from the Old Well,” where five ghosts of the first five people that Hasan killed come out from the well and recount in the first person the murders of the remaining twenty-seven people that he killed. And we get images … this is one of where Ramli [Adi Rukun’s murdered brother] rebelled supposedly; this is Ramli and his mother and his wife and two kids and younger brother; this is Hasan peeking outside the house, waiting to take him away … And it ends with a list of names of whom they killed, what night they killed them, what prison they were picked up from, where they were killed, and how they died. You see Ramli here [points] [translating]: “picked up on Saturday night,” “taken from the cinema at Sialang Buah,” which is where the political prison was, and there’s a little footnote that he was killed at the Sungai Pekong (or Chinese Temple Creek), which is a different river than the Snake River. You can see Kemat, who is in the film, and [it says] “ran away.” It’s signed on May 1966.

This chapter that begins with a Napoleon quote ends with another Napoleon quote: “I think of my life as a chest of drawers, and the most important thing is to keep the contents of all of the drawers rigorously separated. When it’s time to go to bed at night, I lock all of the drawers, make sure I know where the key is, and then I go to sleep.” I think this book is like Hasan’s chest of drawers. Of course, images, memories, feelings, trauma that defy representation also defy the neat categorization into separate drawers. This book is both an attempt to build a chest of drawers and a manifestation of all of the contents mixing and overflowing to create this kind of toxic mess. I think the same is true of Anwar’s fiction scenes, and he’s propelled from one scene to the next to the next to the next because he’s constantly trying to close the drawer on something. But like those ghosts coming out of the well, oozing out, he has to try to contain it again and again and again. There is always an excess that haunts every attempt to pin down his trauma in a kind of stable representation.

The perpetrators’ performance, boasting, is not a simple performance. It is at least, as Ben Anderson said, a performative demonstration of impunity, a performative insistence: We have impunity; we can say this. It’s a claiming of political space (Anderson 2012: 281–83). It’s a threat to the rest of the society, as is G30S. It has borrowed some of its iconography from G30S. G30S has become nationally a kind of metonym for the genocide, just as Ramli has become a synecdoche for the genocide. They both become synonymous with the genocide, one nationally and one locally. It’s also functioning as a kind of code among each other and threat to each other and finally a kind of desperate attempt to tame the demon of memory.

ASM: Given that the killings were orchestrated at the national level, if carried out locally, why interview the lower-level perpetrators, those who carried out the killings, as opposed to those who ordered them?

JO: The performative boasting speaks to why it was really important to work with actual executioners and not just their highest-ranking commanders. I found over the course of interviewing the first 40 perpetrators that I met before Anwar, and then the people I met above Anwar, that anyone who had even the slightest distance, who was even slightly removed from the killing – including the newspaper publisher Ibrahim Sinik, who is able to say, “One wink from me and they were killed” – is somehow able to sleep easily at night. That’s enough. That thinnest distance between them and the murders seems to be enough for most people to live with themselves. They’ll cling to that, they’ll magnify this little gap between them and the actual slaughter into something enormous. It’s a firewall between them and what they’ve commanded.

It is the actual executioners who are haunted by these indelible images of cutting throats or drinking blood or strangling who need to somehow tame those images. They borrow from the national rhetoric, written by the highest commanders justifying what they’ve done, to try to sugarcoat this horror, this awful rot, with the patriotic rhetoric of heroic victory over Communists.

I had a sense, because I was entrusted from 2003 and 2004 by Adi [Rukun] and other survivors, to somehow expose this national lie, that when we see those two things juxtaposed, that when viewers see those lurid details of killing juxtaposed with this kind of flowery, patriotic rhetoric that the national lie would come crumbling down. Because the perpetrators’ individual accounts, with details of the killing, are undeniable (because they’re coming from perpetrators themselves), we would see in the attempt to sugarcoat the unspeakable what the heroic rhetoric is always already doing: it is always already justifying violence.

For that reason it was really important to go to the lower-ranking perpetrators. It was a crack. I saw that the boasting, which was evidently borrowed from a national rhetoric and a national official history, as used by these low-ranking perpetrators, was an attempt to gloss over something so obviously awful as something heroic. It was creating a kind of visible, undeniable symptom showing that the whole story is a lie. What is interesting is that they become aware of this dynamic while they’re making the film. Adi [Zulkadry] says, “If we succeed in showing what we did here properly, in this frame, it will show that all of the things that we’ve always said about this are lies. And everyone already knew it.” That is really important because it speaks to a kind of cognitive dissonance in a whole society that’s been terrorized: everyone already knew we were lying to them.

ASM: Although he’s giving history lessons to everyone at that moment, too, when he reminds them that the Communist Party wasn’t illegal then. You can see what they had known that they have forgotten or had to forget.

JO: I think that’s interesting because if you just look at that one moment in the film, first of all, everyone just nods, oh, yes, of course that’s right, so they did know it; but they didn’t want to know it. That was one of the things that I found most fundamental to all of the perpetrators, that in order to live with these things, the perpetrators would have to develop a kind of cognitive dissonance between what they know and what they believe. They would know one set of facts, such as that the first person that they killed was the man who does the call to prayer at the mosque, and they would cling to beliefs that are absolutely contradictory to those facts: for example, that all the Communists were atheists and were planning to kill everybody religious. They wouldn’t just know that the person was doing the call to prayer at the mosque at the time of the killings, they would know that the person was active in the mosque since he was a little boy. When Anwar, for example, was running in the streets and being a young thug, this guy was at the mosque teaching the Qur’an and then doing the call to prayer. And then they would say he is the enemy of religion and kill him. Anwar and the perpetrators would know one thing and believe something totally opposed to it, and cling to that belief. That would allow them to live with what they’ve done, and presumably, it allowed them to do what they were doing while they were killing.

Somehow there is this ability for perpetrators – and for all of us – to act on beliefs that we empirically know are false. For example, every perpetrator I have filmed knows the propaganda and narratives they have drawn upon to justify their actions, both at the time of the killings and afterwards, to be factually false. Yet that does not undermine the efficacy of these narratives in motivating the perpetrators to kill with a self-gratifying sense of righteous indignation, even rage. Nor does the fact that the perpetrators know they are lying to themselves undermine the efficacy of those lies as salve for a guilty conscience. I believe, in fact, that this sort of cognitive dissonance – the gap between what we know and what we emotionally believe – is an essential mechanism of many areas of human action, and certainly political action. This is something we tend to overlook, perhaps because the gap between empirical knowledge and belief, or the role of fantasy, storytelling, narrative, and language in obscuring reality from ourselves, is something of an anathema to our Enlightenment tradition. It is very hard for us to acknowledge, in short, that the better part of reason is, in fact, rationalization. Yet I think this is at the core of how politics works.

ASM: Much of the work of The Act of Killing takes place through shifts in perspective. Could you talk about the effects on the characters of their reenactments, or what you’ve called their “counter-performances” (Oppenheimer and Uwemedimo 2012: 291), as well as the moments when Anwar rescreens them, and we see Anwar watching himself?

JO: They are two parts of a process that are inevitably in tension with each other because there was always a risk with rescreening that there would be a moment of recognition that would lead for us all to get kicked out and me and my crew to get arrested. There was always a sense of danger when we would actually show Anwar what we were shooting. There certainly was at the beginning. The first time we did it we had my crew at the airport ready to evacuate if they didn’t receive a text message saying that everything is fine. When we first showed him that scene on the roof when he’s demonstrating how he killed with wire and he dances.

I think the rescreening would always generate two things: doubt and enthusiasm. What I mostly saw when I was doing it was enthusiasm and a sense of, okay, we can make this better. But when I was editing the film and trying to understand what is really happening here, I was looking at his face. The editing is not just about how I’m going to put together a great story out of what I’ve shot or show what happened: it’s an excavation, it’s an analysis of all this data. When you’re showing someone footage you’ve shot, you’re of course trying to watch what his reaction is but you’re also trying to control the situation in case danger emerges. You’re trying to stage a scene that you’re shooting because actually when he’s watching it wasn’t staged in the sense of scripted but staged in the sense that it was a mise en scène that we were shooting, so you’re conscious of technical things like light and sound. But when you’re in the editing room, you have the time to really look at subtext and facial expression. I would see a lot of doubt creep into Anwar every time that he was watching the footage. And of course, that doubt is: maybe all of the things that I’ve said about what I’ve done are lies. Maybe this isn’t heroic. Maybe this doesn’t make me look good.

There’s a very telling scene in the film where Anwar is watching the cowboy scene and Herman is crying over what is supposed to be “her” father’s corpse, and Anwar looks very alarmed. I say, “Anwar, could the Communists’ children enjoy this scene, enjoy this film?” He says, “Yes, sure, but only if they don’t know what it’s about.” We can see that he’s struggling with doubt there. That doubt is everything. That little crack is everything, because [at that] moment it is not just an entertaining or a beautiful family movie about genocide, as he says in the film; the moment it fails to be that, the moment the genocide, the mass killing, is impossible to represent as something positive, then it wasn’t positive. Then the whole story comes crashing down; the whole lie that it was okay comes crashing down. The screenings were very, very important moments of recognition, and they were intentioned with the kind of raw enthusiasm that would usually propel forward the reenactments.

ASM: Did the succession of reenactments suture or generate those doubts that emerged in the rescreening process?

JO: I think the reenactments also led to doubt, every single one. If you start at the beginning of the film and you look at the scene where they’re in the street casting people for the attack on the village, and you see Anwar looking a little aloof from the back. And certainly when you see him just after, when he’s out on the rooftop where he’s killed and he’s dancing. He’s showing how he killed and he seems very eager to show how he’s killed; but when he steps out on the roof just before that, he lets out this sharp sigh, and then we cut to him with the wire around his own neck. That’s because (although it’s not in the film) after he shows us how he killed he said, “Now I have to show you how the victims died.” Then he says to me, “If I think about this I could go crazy, so to run away from all this I would be taking drugs, dancing.” So even there the reenactment leads to doubt. And certainly it does later when he watches the reenactment of the Kampung Kolam village massacre and stands back and says, “The children will curse us.” And of course it does in the three movements descent in the film noir section. I think every fiction scene that he makes always has a confrontation with something abject and something terrible. How can it not be?

ASM: In the massacre scene, the burning of the village, it seems as though they are unaware of what counterperformance might produce within their own communities. The perpetrators are casting their own wives and children as victims and, thus, asking their family members to inhabit, however briefly, the other side of the national, patriotic history.

JO: There’s been so much misunderstanding about that scene. Normally we see historical recreations of violence like that and the sound is loud and realistic, and there the noise is getting quieter and quieter and quieter and is being replaced by an insect and then Anwar’s breathing. That breathing incidentally can’t be from that scene because there is a lot of noise in that scene. It’s taken from the aftermath of a later scene, where Anwar is under the table, pulling the wire. Afterward he is out of breath, and it is that breathing that is playing there in the soundtrack to the massacre. I think that people are not accustomed to there being any real element in a scene like that.

Here the real element is that it’s the real perpetrators. Then people think that the whole thing is real: it’s a real village we’re attacking; those are real survivors. We worked hard to isolate the children from what the scene was about, that it had a historical referent. We had a wonderful member of the crew who runs a school, and she was over on the side playing with the kids and explaining what was going to happen and how it doesn’t mean anything, and the kids were joking about it. Then they were figuring out who could cry for real on command, and we put them in the front. But the wives we didn’t isolate. There is this woman who looks as though she’s fainted. She hasn’t fainted, she’s possessed is what she said later, and that is how the other people in the scene understood it. She could be going through something there that is akin to what the daughter in The Look of Silence goes through when she hears for the first time what her father did. That of course could be really traumatic.

There’s a beautiful line in a Colombian novel called The Sound of Things Falling where a character says: “The saddest thing that can happen to a person is to find out their memories are lies” (Vásquez 2013: 273). The moment when you come to terms with what your husband or father, as in the case in that scene in The Look of Silence, actually did has to be devastating. If there’s an ethical dilemma there, in the context of making this film, it is that we couldn’t control that experience for everybody. We couldn’t attend to it with the intimacy that we attended to it in that scene with the daughter. She’s married to that perpetrator – he’s the man [Ali Usman] on television who says in The Act of Killing, “God hates the Communists, and that’s why the film is turning out so beautiful.” Who knows what she knew over all those years being married to him?

ASM: I want to ask you about Herman. Although you’ve noted that Anwar made Herman perform the transgender roles, Herman seems to love the freedom of his performances and he often steals the scene. And although he’s modeled after the propagandized image of the monstrous members of the Communist Women’s Movement, some may think that he extends the myth while others read him as subversive.

JO: Herman and Anwar’s relationship is doing very important emotional work. They are a kind of folie à deux. Herman falls in love with acting (in fact I found out later he had always been an actor), and actors have a loyalty to the truth, at least the emotional truth of a situation. You can’t be a good actor if you don’t have that. Herman becomes, therefore, a moral force in the film because he’s loyal to the emotional and moral truth of these scenarios, which is precisely what Anwar is trying to lie about. So there’s this inherent tension, because we see in him the glimpses of a moral compass. And for that reason, he does steal those scenes, and not because he’s in those fabulous dresses.

Especially in America people ask if he is gay, and he’s not; and it wouldn’t be funny if he were gay. I feel that in one of those scenes with the fish where he’s in his bright pink dress, there’s this wonderful moment when he’s itching his ear, and the sun comes out on him and his pink goes from shocking to incandescent, and he blooms into a glowing, beautiful mistake. That’s kind of what the national lie is. He becomes the fly in the ointment that shows something is wrong with this picture, but in a very seductive way. I think that is implicating and provoking to viewers because it is also fascinating. It makes us think about what is pleasure in cinema, what is it when we watch cinema.

ASM: How does Anwar and Herman’s relationship impact the narrative development of the film?

JO: Speaking only of the long version, if you look at how their relationship is constructed through the film, every narrative turn grows out of that relationship. For example, when we go into Anwar’s nightmare, Anwar’s in the bed, trying to say this stupid line with the ghost, “I thought I killed you,” and Herman says, “Can’t you just get this right? What’s so hard about this? All you have to say is, ‘I thought I killed you.’” Then Anwar is frustrated with himself. And from that sense of self-doubt and ordinary, quotidian insecurity about his ability to act, he goes into the beginning of this downward spiral into his nightmare where the fiction and reality start to blur.

The same is true when we go the other way, from the fiction making of the nightmare in the studio to the little section with the Pancasila Youth, and then where Herman has cut off Anwar’s head. It looks utterly ridiculous, but there is a raw force in Herman’s stupid acting. He’s crying over the head, and then we hear the director say, “now laugh,” and it doesn’t make any sense. It’s a crazy direction – how can you cry to laugh? It’s an effort to push him into being this demon where, in fact, he’s the sympathetic one there because he’s mourning. He starts laughing. Out of that raw drama and the way he’s being yanked about through the direction of his performance, we cut abruptly to that Pancasila Youth lunch. And then something interesting and precisely dreamlike in terms of displacement and translation happens. We see Yapto Soerjosoemarno (the leader of the Pancasila Youth) be nasty to the woman. After posing with her and flirting with her, he says she looks like a whore. The waitress goes off proudly and shows the picture she’s just taken to the maître d’ or whomever that is, and then Yapto tells the joke about the sex worker who has given six men blow jobs, and they laugh over that story. Somehow, in the flow of the film, the waitress has become the sex worker. Then we go into a little loop with Haji Anif, his “very very limited” crystal, and using Pancasila Youth to clear people off their land, culminating in the song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Then we return to Herman and Anwar dramatizing the same nightmare, but now in a real jungle, not just the TV studio, with Anwar as a talking severed head, while Herman is eating Anwar’s entrails. The scene culminates with Herman shoving Anwar’s penis in his face. Somehow, Herman has become, not consciously, the figure of that woman – the prostitute, the waitress – taking revenge. And Anwar now is no longer just Anwar, but Yapto and all of those men. Anwar is being constructed through that relationship as a vessel, for something bigger than Anwar, bigger than the individual.

Another place this happens is when Herman goes into politics. Anwar is bullying him. Herman is under the umbrella; he has his hair up in curlers. Out of a fight and this sequence of bullying that starts on the train, Anwar says, “You smell bad” and, “You’re not an artist.” Herman, in reaction to that, goes into politics. He loses, and he has nowhere else to go but back to Anwar. The film continues as a result of that political failure. Somehow the politics has grown out of their relationship and resolves back into their relationship.

Finally, at the end of the film, Herman is brutally tortured by Anwar when Herman plays the mother of this teddy bear; and then Herman tortures and kills Anwar tenderly (he’s been fanning him and looking after him tenderly). And out of that, we reprise to that scene in the jungle, when the monkeys come down and eat Anwar, and from that nightmare, again, we go back to the Pancasila Youth and we see the last glimpse of Yapto and those guys walking through the museum of dead animals – the gallery of death. Then we go from that to “Born Free.” Whatever is happening inside of Anwar leads to these wild swings between abjection and celebration, which become more and more wild. They start with just a little slip in the mask on his face in the scene on the roof at the beginning, and then they become these wild swings between playing the victim and celebrating at the waterfall. They are not just the wild swings of an individual lying to himself, they are also always, and through this relationship with Herman, constructed to encompass a whole political system, a whole moral vacuum, a rotten system.

ASM: How do you understand Herman and Anwar’s development as characters, particularly in terms of the sense of closure we get with Anwar?

JO: Over the course of this journey, Herman becomes more and more angry, not just because he’s being bullied, but because he’s glimpsing again and again the origin, the foundation of their power, which is ugly – it’s mass murder – and he didn’t participate in it. As a street kid with few other options, he has been complicit with its legacy of terror by being a thug and borrowing from it. It makes him disenchanted with Anwar, his idol, his hero, and that anger comes out more and more in his performance.

At the end of the film, when Anwar is retching, we leave Anwar on the stairs, and he’s just standing there. That shot for me, and then the cut to the fish in the long version, feels like it’s not just a psychological ending on Anwar’s conscience, because over this 2 hour and 40 minute experience, Anwar is the vessel for the whole society. When we took out 40 minutes of the film for the theatrical release, it took out all so much about Anwar and Herman’s relationship. In the shorter version, that same image of Anwar on the stairs felt psychological in a way that felt opposed to political, which is why I cut to him leaving the shop. In the longer version, Anwar’s character itself is constructed as an epic vessel that transcends the very distinction between the psychological and the political. He and his emotional journey become a vessel for the rottenness of an entire regime – and this is achieved in part through the evolution of his relationship with Herman (and the emotional work that relationship does in the film), which has been largely removed from the shorter versions. Thus, in the shorter version, Anwar remains a character going through an emotional journey, set amidst a society riddled with corruption, thuggery, and fear. This binary opposition between the psychological and the political is never quite overcome by the time we reach the final scene of retching; that is, the construction of Anwar Congo’s character in the shorter version never fully synthesizes the psychological and the political. I hope the short version’s message is consistent for most viewers with that of the uncut film, but it’s a lesser film that does a lesser work – Anwar as a vessel for a whole society is never quite achieved, because that psychological, cinematic vehicle of his relationship with Herman, and the quiet pauses and moments of intimate reflection between the dramatizations, are missing.

ASM: The National Human Rights Commission’s Ad Hoc Team conducted its legally mandated investigation from 2008 to 2012, which overlaps the filmmaking period, and the film was released just before Komnas HAM delivered its report. To what extent were the release and distribution of The Act of Killing, particularly within Indonesia, part of a coordinated effort with the National Human Rights Commission as well as other human rights groups?

JO: I was in constant dialogue and collaboration with certain human rights organizations, KontraS, the Commission for the Disappeared, and Victims of Violence, in particular. At the same time, I wasn’t in touch institutionally with the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) at all, except that I had heard through the human rights and survivor network, such as it was in North Sumatra, that Joseph “Stanley” Adi Prasetyo, one of the very forward-thinking and progressive commissioners and who was also from a Chinese Indonesian family, was going to commission a report, an investigation into 1965, at which point I contacted him. I made available all of the footage I had, including my sources. The commissioners interviewed some of the perpetrators and many of the survivors whom I’d filmed (the people who appear in The Look of Silence, by and large). I don’t think they interviewed Anwar, but they knew about the film I was making. They endorsed the film. They wrote the report. They submitted the report to the attorney general’s office. The attorney general’s office rejected the report, and before they could marshal much of an appeal, the term of that commission expired, and the Parliament was electing a new commission. The new commission was significantly less progressive. “Stanley” was voted out of the commission, even though he was a kind of polestar – its moral compass or one of the best people on it. The new commission said some not positive things about The Act of Killing right when we needed people to say positive things about it, after the earlier commission had said: “If we are to transform Indonesia into the democracy it claims to be, citizens must recognize the terror and repression on which our contemporary history has been built. No film, or any other work of art for that matter, has done this more effectively than The Act of Killing. [It] is essential viewing for us all” (Prasetyo 2011).

My team in Indonesia went to the new commission and showed them The Look of Silence. With the new presidential election, hopefully a better president [Joko Widodo], the sense that it’s not as politically costly for them to look into these issues because the new president has said that he wants to, and with a film that is perhaps less threatening to nationally powerful politicians, the commission has asked to host (and is doing a beautiful job hosting) the first screening of The Look of Silence, which is tomorrow, along with the Jakarta Arts Council (both government organizations). It’s sold out for two screenings in a large venue that holds approximately one thousand people. That makes it a landmark event. I feel as if our love letter to Indonesia, or at least the second half of it, is being read aloud by the government to the people.

ASM: One of the most affective dimensions of The Look of Silence is its intimacy, particularly its representation of Adi Rukun’s family, but then extended to the intimacy of murder and of survivors and perpetrators living together. Could you talk about the relationship between the intimate scenes with Adi’s family and the embodied effects of decades of that fearful silence?

JO: I think the intimacy of the film makes it a film about memory. Memory, as distinct from memorialization and commemoration, is something very intimate. If the film were not also about the father’s deterioration, the mother’s resistance to him forgetting their son, the prison of fear in which that leaves him because it’s as though he’s lost the door – not remembering the events that have caused his trauma, there is no chance that he will be able to work through what happened; it’s too late. He’s trapped in this prison of fear, which is how we see him at the end of the film. Adi shot that scene. It’s the only scene in the film that Adi did shoot. I had given him a camera to find images that he felt embodied the experiences of his family, and this was actually a couple of years earlier (in 2009, I think) than shooting the rest of the film, and he came to me with that image. He was so upset, and he said, “I spent all day trying to comfort my father, and I couldn’t. Then I felt the most loving thing I could do was to witness it.” I asked him, “What does the scene mean to you? Why is it important to you?” And he said, “He’s forgotten everything, but he hasn’t forgotten the fear. He’s trapped in this fear. And because he’s forgotten everything he’ll never get out of that prison.”

A couple of years later, when he said he wanted to meet the perpetrators, Adi referred to that scene. He said, “I want to meet the perpetrators because if they can acknowledge what they’ve done when they meet me, and I can therefore separate the crime from the person and forgive the person, and then we can live together as human beings, instead of as perpetrator and victim, divided by fear, I can maybe find a way out of this trap of fear (that my father is stuck in) for my family, going forward.” And of course, the irony then is that the whole family has had to move as a result.

Going back to the intimacy issue, the film couldn’t be a film about memory if it weren’t for that intimacy. I think that’s the key to it. It’s also about texture: not just the texture of skin, but the texture of experience and the texture of voice. First we hear from Adi’s mother: her voice over the shot of the truck coming with no headlights, and it’s a very gravelly, old woman’s voice – it could almost be a man’s voice. It’s her voice talking to Ramli, who is absent. It’s something about the texture of her thoughts and her voice that makes this intimacy about the present-day legacy of this past.

ASM: Does that sense of intimacy, captured so carefully and lovingly in the scenes with Adi’s parents and with his children, extend (negatively) to the perpetrators’ descriptions of the murders they committed? Do you see those murders and mutilations as intimate acts in any way?

JO: Regarding the intimacy of the killings, in the old footage of the perpetrators boasting, very often we’re hearing about these intimate events but in a very generic way, particularly when the two men go down to the river. There are exceptions, as when Sharman Sinaga shows [demonstrates] how he killed on his wife: there’s something shockingly intimate there. And when Inong is telling some of the worst details, such as cutting the woman’s breast in front of Adi, and the brother who gave his sister – there we feel this awful intimacy.

The tenderness of the family, and the loving relationship between the members of the family and between the camera and the members of the family, the gentleness of those scenes is in contrast to the violence of the killings. But also, it has a relationship to the intimacy of the killings. It’s often the intimacy that the perpetrators, through the boasting, are denying. We remind the viewer of the stakes of physical contact through those very intimate scenes with the family: how bodies should treat each other.

There’s one place in the film where that strategy is really deliberate: that scene where I linger on the two men going down by the river. They’re first smelling flowers, and then they’re holding hands and helping each other down the slope, and then saying, “Now we’re safe” at the bottom. The next scene begins with Adi helping Kemat down that same slope.

ASM: How do you try to capture the physical, material, psychological effects of living in the aftermath of atrocity?

JO: The embodied effects of fear are also probably there in the confrontations with the perpetrators. One thing that’s very important to me is that I don’t want it to seem like Adi is going to interview the perpetrators. Those are not interviews. An interview is a scene where you’re trying to elicit information or the feelings of a subject for some kind of transparent purpose. Adi is a character and he has a project in going to meet those perpetrators. He’s trying to do something for his family, for the way his family lives alongside the perpetrators. Those are scenes and they’re confrontations; they’re not interviews. In those confrontations, wherever we could, which was with the less powerful perpetrators where we weren’t afraid that we would have to run away, we would have two cameras (and when we didn’t have two cameras, we would shoot in such a way as it would look as though we had two cameras). We’re able to capture less the words, and more the reactions. I think I was trying to see the mutual fear. We see fear in all sorts of forms on the people’s faces in the confrontations: Inong becomes afraid of Adi; maybe the daughter becomes afraid of her father when she hears the awful things that he did; certainly before Amir Siahaan, the Pancasila Youth leader, threatens Adi, we see him become afraid. The sense is that there’s a social fabric that’s torn by fear.

The Look of Silence is looking at what fear does to a family and the silence that comes from fear. It’s also looking at a community where just below the surface people are living in fear of each other. You see that most strongly in the final confrontation with the mother and her two sons. It opens with the close up of the mother, whom we’ve just seen with her husband looking at this book [his memoir, Embun Berdarah], and she’s trembling as she’s realizing that Ramli’s brother is there to tell her what her husband did.

ASM: What role does the aesthetic have in the stories you want to tell?

JO: In The Act of Killing, it was really important that all of Anwar’s scenes be as powerful and as transporting for the viewer as they are for Anwar. Which means making the waterfall scene, for example, not just kitsch and stupid, in which case we’d be sneering at him, but also majestic.

I think somehow cinematic beauty is seductive, and the mechanism of cinematic identification is greatly aided by images that are beautiful but in a precise way. In the scenes where they’re bathing Adi’s father in The Look of Silence, we’re looking at something very precise: we’re looking at the fall of water down the wrinkles in his skin. When you don’t have a score, and neither of these films really has a score (they both have something dreamlike that happens with insects and sound spaces and diegetic sounds in the scenes with the family in The Look of Silence as we go into the nightmare sections and the descent into hell in The Act of Killing), and you don’t have music, if you don’t have beautiful images, it’s really hard to create an experience that transports.

This goes to something that I really feel is important with film. For me, I want film to be something like one of those dreams that, although it’s a dream, you recognize a truth about your life in the dream that is so piercing that it jolts you awake. And when you wake up, the dream is more true. It’s not one of those dreams that when you wake up your life is completely different. Your life is illuminated by the dream’s incandescence. It’s there – you wake up and you understand something you’ve been struggling with. The dream becomes a kind of transporting experience of recognition, not strangeness. To transport viewers, you have to dignify the images that we are entering.

If there is beauty in the films, part of what I look for or strive to do is to create images with as much doubleness as possible, as many layers of meaning as possible. It’s obvious when Herman plays the mother of a teddy bear in The Act of Killing that there’s all this doubleness: did Anwar kill a child in reality? Is he simply taking out his anger on the victims? It’s a mother, but it’s not a mother: it’s Herman, who is a gangster. And the child is only a teddy bear, which makes it safe, but also, because it’s a teddy bear, that’s why he’s able to go all the way and to kill it, which he can’t do when it’s humans playing the victims. Or when Anwar plays the victim, there are all of these layers: it’s a man being tortured. No, it’s a man going through a real emotional ordeal. No, it’s actually the killer going through an ordeal. No, but it’s a film noir gangster scene. All these layers of meaning make the material much smarter than I am. I want the viewer to have the space to shift her attention to different layers over the course of watching a scene.

Part of what makes the images arresting is not just that they’re beautiful but the way those layers call out to you as a viewer. An example is what became a key image in The Look of Silence: the shot of Inong with the glasses – this twitching face while he’s in between telling awful things or sometimes his twitching face while he’s telling terrible, terrible things about drinking blood and so on. I was very aware when I was shooting that scene that the obvious thing to do would be to have the two people talking and the camera following back and forth, and I said, no, no, I definitely want a second camera. It was one of the first scenes I shot with him, so the cinematographer was still getting to know me. He said, OK, let’s put it on Adi, and I said, no, no, no, Inong’s going to have red glasses on. Let’s put it on him. Because the tableau with multiple layers of meaning there actually isn’t Adi, it’s this twitching, strange face with these plastic, red glasses, talking about images that could come from Dante’s hell. I think it’s the lingering on those images for their sake that is the core of both films’ visual power. It’s not that the compositions are so spectacular or the color is so wonderful. It’s that, it’s that. That’s also about giving viewers the space to make their own film by moving through these layers.

ASM: To what extent are the arresting images, the layering, leading viewers to particular conclusions or reactions?

JO: I was talking with Niels [Niels Pagh Andersen, editor of both films] about the third tear. I think it was Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being who said you cry the first tear because something is sad. You cry when you watch a film or read a book. You cry the second tear, which is the start of kitsch and sentimentality because the whole world is crying the first tear with you, and you know that. We escape from the pain of the first tear into the second tear. We escape from the pain of the singular moment of trauma or grief or sadness into sentimentality. I think what I try to do is to bring the audience to a third tear, where we cry a third tear because we become aware of the tragedy of our escape, the tragic consequences of escaping the moral meaning of the first tear by indulging in the escapism of the second tear.

The iconic cut for me in The Act of Killing for this is the cut from the dead animals wrapped in plastic which are impregnating Anwar’s downward spiral with the deathism – this sense that we destroy everything we touch that haunts the whole political, moral, apocalyptic landscape of the killers’ Indonesia. We inject his downward spiral with that, and then we cut from this very vulnerable looking antelope covered in plastic to this beautiful shot of the waterfall.

(By the way, there’s one sound playing throughout the whole scene when Anwar plays the victim. It sounds like there’s dripping water when he plays the victim because there’s an echo on it. And it’s raining; there’s rain in the soundtrack. And then when we get to those plastic wrapped animals it loses its reverb and it starts to be the voice of the animals. It’s a little persistence of something. I’m sure, poetically for me, it’s like the little butterfly in The Look of Silence, of something that has to come out, that’s almost smothered but not quite.)

In that waterfall scene, it’s beautiful and it’s tragic that Anwar could still be so naïve; but I think that’s where we cry a third tear, if viewers cry (and some do) there. Because we realize, oh, what a tragedy this lie is. We see the glowing incandescent lie that we should celebrate genocide, and we cry for that.

Going all the way back to the question of beauty and building these arresting images by constructing them in the mise en scène and then how they’re edited, those fiction scenes of Anwar are leading to a kind of melodrama for him, a melodrama of self-pity, culminating when he’s with the little chicken, and he’s singing to the wind-up chicken, “the pain just gets worse and worse.” Constructing a melodrama but leaving enough space in these arresting images and in the layers of meaning in those images that the viewers’ journey through those images is not melodrama but tragedy. There are two parallel layers.

The same is probably true in some of the confrontations in The Look of Silence, like when Inong has the red glasses, and we get to this impasse, which is the impasse of all of Indonesian society: when Adi and Inong have nothing more to say to each other, and Inong is shouting at me to turn off the camera, and I don’t turn off the camera. I refuse to stop filming, Adi refuses to stop challenging, and Inong refuses to say more. He’s twitching. We get to this tragic endpoint, which speaks to the need for truth and reconciliation through this succession of gross stories that Inong is telling and an argument between the two characters and this evolving layer of tragedy. Which is there in that aesthetic doubleness, in the way the scene is shot with the twitching face framed by these red glasses, and also in the rhythm of those images: the interruption of the recounting of atrocity by Inong (which he does with this terrible whisper as though he’s almost trying to seduce Adi into enjoying this genre of sadism which characterizes so much Indonesian anti-Communist propaganda) that is punctuated by Adi asking very calming, “So, do you see more clearly or less clearly,” as he’s swapping in and out the lenses. That’s just one example of how I’m drawing our attention to one of the other layers in those images.

ASM: I had the feeling throughout both films, in very distinctive ways, that the camera was making possible the evidentiary work of the film, not in terms of collecting what was there but in creating it, providing access, making it possible, and maybe providing a degree of protection. Do you understand your project and Adi’s project as the same, especially given that he could not have had these confrontations on his own and he had to relocate with his family after the film was made?

JO: They are very much the same project. When Adi said to me in 2012, “Josh, I want to meet the perpetrators,” I said, “Absolutely not.” He had spent eight years looking at all of the footage of perpetrators I had had time to show him. Then he explained why: that he wanted to be able to forgive. I thought, I don’t think that he’ll succeed. I don’t think that, just because they meet the brother of one of their victims, the perpetrators will so quickly or easily apologize. Or, if they do, it may just be to get rid of him. But I thought that his goal was so noble that following him and helping him attempt to realize that goal would make visible these very important issues about truth and reconciliation and the stakes involved: the necessity to break silence, but also the trauma that comes with breaking silence, and the impossibility of having a one-person truth and reconciliation process.

Then I realized that because I’d shot The Act of Killing and the production of The Act of Killing was famous throughout North Sumatra, but because The Act of Killing hadn’t come out yet, all of these perpetrators would be unlikely to attack us. They would think twice. They would think, oh wait a moment, Joshua is close to the governor, Joshua is close to the head of police, Joshua is close to Yapto, he’s close to Anwar who is also famous and powerful locally, and Ibrahim Sinik, the newspaper publisher who is very famous and powerful locally. I recognized that the production of The Act of Killing gave us a unique cover that a filmmaker would normally never have. It allowed us to do something utterly unique in the history of cinema, which was for survivors to confront perpetrators while the perpetrators are still in power. Which I don’t think we’ve seen anywhere before in a nonfiction film.

We’re seeing something unprecedented that happened because of this very unique situation that I’d shot The Act of Killing but hadn’t yet released it. We went ahead and we shot those scenes between Adi and the perpetrators of Ramli’s murder. I think we have a shared project in those scenes. It’s interesting, though, and it leaves the film in a kind of instability, at the end where we diverge. Maybe the filmmaker’s project and the protagonist’s project diverge at the end like that also in The Act of Killing, where I confront Anwar and say, look, you’re not feeling what your victims felt. Maybe that has a similar formal effect, as the moment in The Look of Silence when Adi is willing to leave it with the mother and her two sons [of Amir Hasan, the village death squad leader], and I’m not. I then continue to confront them with this old footage we had shot together.

That happened because earlier I had spent months working with this family, trying to dramatize Hasan’s memoir, and I knew they were lying. It never occurred to me that they would lie this way; in fact, the whole purpose of that scene … the reason we went to shoot that scene with the widow and her two sons was because Adi was going to go and say, “Look, you know who I am. I know who you are. We live side by side. How shall we live together in the aftermath of this? My daughter may one day marry your grandson. How shall we live together?”

Because they lie, that conversation can’t take place. In fact, I think they know exactly who he is, despite the fact that Erwin, the son, says they don’t know the survivors. I think they know exactly who he is. Adi went to school in Matapao, the mother’s school. She was a teacher in his elementary school. They of course know who Ramli’s family is. Ramli was the most famous victim from the region. They react with fear, they lie, and I felt angry, both because it was such an absurd lie because we had spent months working on this, and also angry on behalf of Adi because it meant he couldn’t have the conversation that he had come to have. So I confront them with this old footage. That’s a moment when our projects somehow split.

ASM: To what extent do you see Adi in The Look of Silence as a human rights campaigner, or the film as a human rights documentary?

JO: The film is, hopefully, a backward-looking poem to what’s been destroyed; one thing that makes the film so unlike a “campaigning” human rights documentary is its depiction of Adi’s (and my own) imperfections (for example, our confronting perpetrators without first telling Adi’s family), the depiction of Adi’s mother as a woman who wants revenge; and the fraught and terrible impasse to which each confrontation leads. These are not things you would see in a campaign film. Although Adi is the film’s protagonist, he differs markedly from “heroes” in campaigning human rights documentaries. I think what’s most unusual about Adi is that what he is trying to do has no chance of succeeding unless accompanied by a major political transformation (the sort of transformation that would normally be the precondition for this kind of confrontation of perpetrators by survivors). In that sense, the film shows how urgently truth, reconciliation, and justice are needed, but by way [of] inference – that is, if this very reasonable, necessary dialogue that Adi is trying to initiate has any chance of success, then there must be a process of truth, reconciliation, and justice.

If I’m not mistaken, usually the “heroes” of human rights documentaries embark on campaigns – however beset and unlikely to succeed – that, if they were to succeed, would go far toward addressing the injustices documented, and such films often fail to acknowledge that justice in the future would not undo the catastrophe of the past. In such films, when we support the hero and the movement from which she or he comes, then we are supporting the cause of justice. Adi is not campaigning, and his project of eliciting apologies has no chance of succeeding.

Instead, Adi and my interventions do two things, I hope. First, they provide an example of what an honest dialogue might look like. That viewers can sense how unprecedented such dialogue is allows them also to feel how much change needs to take place, and allows them perhaps to participate in the process of breaking silence; that is, by witnessing these unprecedented confrontations, viewers help Adi succeed where he failed in the scenes themselves. Second, the tensions raised by these scenes make visible the enormous stakes involved with truth and reconciliation, the fear that divides people, and this again, therefore, makes palpable how urgently change is needed.

And yet – and this is also distinct from most human rights documentaries of the “campaigning” sort – the film doesn’t pretend that justice in the future would make whole again what has been destroyed for the survivors’ families, for Adi’s mother and father, for instance.

ASM: Is there a moral responsibility you feel in making these films, and if so, to whom or to what principles?

JO: I think that there’s a moral responsibility to intervention, but it’s not simply to the people into whose lives you’re intervening. It also can be to other, bigger things. Here I knew that these confrontations would make visible the fear that divides people in Indonesia in a very particular way – namely, to show Indonesians how urgently truth and reconciliation is needed. I have a sense now that The Act of Killing opened this space for a different kind of national conversation about what happened in 1965, and into that space comes this second film which says: look at how urgently we need truth and reconciliation. In that film, Adi provides a model – a gentle, dignified, humane model – for how that can work. We see in the daughter of the perpetrator a model even for children of perpetrators’ families for how truth and reconciliation can work and be safe. It’s precisely for that reason that, yes, we created these disruptions, these very unpleasant situations for Inong, for Amir Siahaan, for the family of Amir Hasan.

The daughter of Samsir manages to make that unpleasant situation something redemptive by actually finding the courage to apologize on her father’s behalf. But by intervening we made visible something undeniable that people need to address. Our commitment was not to the people in the scenes, not simply to the survivors, but also to the younger generation of Indonesians who deserve a country with real accountability, rule of law, and an end to this terrible impunity.