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Joshua Oppenheimer The Director Joshua Oppenheimer 56 57 JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER In 2012, a film was released called The Act of Killing in which death-squad leaders of the 1965 Indonesian genocide personally reconstructed their killings through surreal sequences and operatic set pieces. It was nominated for an Oscar, won a BAFTA and both Errol Morris and Werner Herzog fêted it as the most important documentary of the past decade. This year, its director Joshua Oppenheimer released The Look of Silence, which told the victims’ story in no less transcendental and upsetting terms. Both films have provoked a national debate in Indonesia, made heroes or pariahs of the participants and stamped a new form of documentary on the world. One which searches out poetic truth with the participation of its subjects: monsters made men, the voiceless given voice. You will never have seen anything like Oppenheimer’s films. Interview Joshua Bullock 58 59 Photographer © Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Joshua Bullock: So how does a Texas-born documentary filmmaker end up and surrealness of it. We talked about how metaphor and surrealism work making films about historical genocide in Indonesia? in these films, with people who really had never seen a film before, apart from action movies on TV. It was an amazing three months, and it was how Joshua Oppenheimer: In the early 2000s I was asked to train a group of I learned Indonesian as well. The other thing the project did was introduce plantation workers who were trying to organise a union in the aftermath me to the first perpetrator I ever filmed, Sharman Sinaga, before The Act of of the Suharto military dictatorship to make their own film about their Killing project had even begun. struggle. It was called The Globalisation Tapes. And while it must carry, to some extent, my fingerprints and the fingerprints of Christine Cynn who JB: The idea of filming the perpetrators of the 1965 massacre really came was with me on that film, it can’t be called a film by me. I knew nothing initially from being unable to speak to the survivors, didn’t it? about Indonesia before. I was asked to do it by the International Union of Food and Agricultural Workers and really we could’ve been sent anywhere JO: The survivors said, “Film the perpetrators if the army’s threatening us in the world to film with agricultural workers who were just emerging and not allowing us to be filmed.” Because I’d already filmed an executioner from a period of military dictatorship or totalitarian government under called Sharman Sinaga confessing openly to killings in The Globalisation Tapes which unions were illegal. Colombia was an option, Moldova was an and my short ‘Muzak: A Tool of Management’, I thought it might work. I option. Parts of India that had been under martial law were possibilities. think you see a development from my early shorts and documentaries into But they chose Indonesia, and we found ourselves on this Belgian-owned what is really my filmmaking as I understand it now. I’ve moved from these oil palm plantation in an area of Sumatra where tourists and foreigners never kind of ironies being established or asserted through montage relationships visit. We found that the Belgian company made the women workers do or sound–image relationships to then working with the participants to create the supposedly lighter work of spraying the pesticides and the herbicides, a reality in which those contradictions themselves become visible. In The Act but they didn’t provide the workers with any protective clothing. Then of Killing for example, I meet these boastful perpetrators and they are eager the women would inhale one particular herbicide; it would get into their to show me what they’ve done, to demonstrate and dramatise their acts. I bloodstream, reach their liver, dissolve the fabric of their liver tissue, and they had a feeling – I guess pretty quickly – that they liked being filmed. They’d would die of liver failure in their forties. One of the first things they tried to talk about their past with a strange, surreal glorification. I had a feeling that do as a union was ask for protective clothing. They approached the company, the poetic truth of this would be for these men to make a musical. So, in The the company responded by hiring Pancasila Youth, the paramilitary group Act of Killing I helped them make a musical. Ultimately one that does not at the centre of The Act of Killing, to threaten and attack the workers. The glorify them at all but reveals the moral vacuum that they’ve created. And it’s workers dropped their demands immediately. a kind of flamboyant fever-dream about escapism and guilt, not a celebration. I asked, “How can you let this go so quickly?” They said, “Well, you see, But I’ve come to create a reality with the people I film that embodies our parents and our grandparents died in the mass killings in Indonesia in the poetic truth I’m trying to explore. In The Look of Silence similarly, 1965. They were members of a National Plantation Workers’ Union, which these confrontations and these eye tests during the confrontations do that. was strong until the genocide. Just for that they were seen as likely opponents It’s a creation of the reality that makes visible these contradictions in an to the new military regime, and were killed. We’re afraid this could happen organic way – a reality that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Adi wasn’t to us again.” Not least because Pancasila Youth was the main organisation confronting perpetrators – could never confront perpetrators – without the to do the killings in this region with the army, and they’re still powerful. film. It’s a reality, it wasn’t staged, it isn’t fake, but it was created because of At that point, I realised what was killing these women I was living with the film. and befriending was not just poison, but fear. They said after they finished making The Globalisation Tapes, “Why don’t you come back and make a film, JB: I found it very interesting that you brought Adi into the fold by showing this time about why after forty years we’re still afraid.” That’s what led to him footage of the killers’ testimony while you were filming The Act of both The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. Killing. How did you decide that he was your way into the victims’ story for The Look of Silence? JB: Having seen those two films first, T h e G l o b a l i s a t i o n Ta p e s makes for fascinating watching, because stylistically it has elements that pervade your JO: In 2003, after I came back to the plantation workers to make a film work: reconstructions, participation of non-actors and the surrealism of about why they were still afraid, they introduced me to Adi’s family right scenes like the elephant football which bring to mind the giant, operatic away: to Rohani and Rukun, his parents. Adi’s brother’s name Ramli had fish sequence in The Act of Killing. Were those things an early instinct in become synonymous with the genocide as a whole throughout that region. your filmmaking? Tens of thousands of people had been killed there, 10,500 at that one spot on Snake River alone where Ramli had died. There were many other JO: I guess so. If you’re seeing these resonances, it must’ve been. I feel like rivers with similar clearings that probably had similar numbers; at one place one should look for symptoms, one should look for manifestations of a I know more people had been killed. And yet these tens of thousands of problem, cracks in a façade, and the elephant football was a perfect example other people had been taken to rivers, then killed, and their families never of it. Here they were clearing jungle to make virgin rainforests to make way told what happened. Which meant that the relatives and survivors couldn’t for oil palm, and elephants were becoming homeless or being killed, and to mourn. They couldn’t work through their grief, because they couldn’t even prevent that they would train them to play football. I certainly remember the admit to themselves that their loved ones had died. They would say belum discussions about why this might be meaningful for a viewer, why this might pulang, ‘they haven’t come home yet’. They clung on out of respect for the help them understand the perversity of the whole system that the film’s ever-fading hope that they might, one day, come back. And yet they could addressing. I remember we brought a DVD player, and a whole collection talk about Ramli, because Ramli’s grave is in that plantation where I made of films that we thought explored these things. Then, with live translation, The Globalisation Tapes. His murder had witnesses and consequently was we showed them every night in film screenings. We were screening films irrefutable. So to speak about Ramli was a way to give a voice to some of which would inspire the project’s methods; from [French anthropological the grief that they couldn’t articulate with regards their own loss. Over the From top: A waterfall scene from killer Anwar Congo’s family film interpretation of the genocide. Photo by Carlos Arango de Montis (framegrab); a surreal set-piece of what filmmaker] Jean Rouch to The Hour of the Furnaces, which also has a very decades, Ramli became synonymous with the genocide as a whole.
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