The Look of Silence (2014)

In the last couple of years I have been hearing much about Oppenheimer's visually stunning homage to humanity filmed in Indonesia but hesitated to see this film along with its diptych counterpart "The act of killing" for some time, for unknown reasons. My hesitancy, though, didn't prove to be so wrong when, today, coming from a premiere screening of The Look of silence (I had several chances to see it at a few festivals in November, but didn't) I realized that I timed my back-to-back viewing of both these films perfectly. Writing this, I am still delightfully shocked by the eloquence of Oppenheimer's diptych, by the transformative power that it can contribute to not only Indonesian society but also society in a broader sense of the word, by the simplicity with which the diptych establishes itself as an audacious but also highly objective whole, whose role is not to judge but rather to show.

Because, are we really ready to judge before we know, before we are shown? So many things have happened in the twentieth century, so many ideologies mixing and intertwining, so much greed, hate and ugliness has swum up from the depths of the human being which itself was caught in a web of rationally unexplainable phenomena, in one that was woven so quickly that people in their everyday struggles weren't even ready to understand it. The world we live in has far surpassed our comprehension capabilities. We, the westerners, are swimming in a vast sea of information which we believe has no bottom; but in reality, it does have one. When we are ready to strip ourselves of everything that is phantasmatic, everything that, when seeing clearly, we spot as false and pretentious even from a distance, we find ourselves swimming in a small pond that has a clearly defined bottom (offering us orientation), and that bottom is comprised of bits of compassion and understanding.

Understanding as in understanding the events that have left a crucial mark on us, the 21st century human beings. The vestiges of the 20th century can be seen everywhere and in that way we are still not done with that turbulent era; we have to acquire a collective conscience of what shaped our world into what it is today. The collective acts of realization will bring us closer to our very core, they will uncover our innermost traumas and even widespread deceptions. Because once we are introduced to the power of deception, The Act of killing shows us, we learn to seek safety in it; we, as thinking individuals, naturally learn to tailor the reality in order to make us survive after having realized the most nightmarish of notions about our own nature, after seeing the unrecognizable darkness that lingers in us and floats to the surface when it is summoned by the environment of which logic feeds the subconscious, the animalistic in us.

As much as the first part of the diptych, The act of killing, explores these dark territories of humanity, the second one, The look of silence searches for ways of reconciliation; of returning onto the path of humanity of which basis is in compassion and onto which we return only by realizing how intricately interwoven we all are. In Indonesia, the two films are called only "Killing" and "Silence", which obviously stands for the silence that arrives after the unexplainable storm of cruelty; the silence that has the capability to tell far more than words can, if it is only rendered correctly. Silence, in other words, is the sound of reconciliation; the sound of letting go of emotional baggage making us stale and tying us to empty systems and ideologies that only emphasize the abyss between individuals instead of acting as an integrative entity.

Sooner or later we will have to face everything that happened in the 20th century. We will have to acquire a certain subconscious understanding of it so we will be able to again feel connected to our environment instead of feeling disillusioned and estranged from each other. We will have to acknowledge our power of self-deception, that was so genuinely presented throughout Oppenheimer's diptych and learn to use it in a positive, productive way. And then, we will have to summon our sense of compassion in order to cooperate in this tough assignment. It really isn't an easy one; however, it is a highly important one - at once, our facades of untouched, gloomy individuals will go down, like the facades of the perpetrators in "Killing" and "Silence"; for a moment, our uncomprehending self will be seen as being utterly lost in what history has brought upon him, like a child being lost in a big crowd, not knowing where to turn; but when we will collectively realize that we are lost, we will be able, in that lost space, to build anew.

More at: http://filmmind.tumblr.com/post/118960051043/in-the-last- couple-of-years-i-have-been-hearing