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The Act of Killing exposed the consequences for all of
us when we build our everyday reality on terror and lies. The
Look of Silence explores what it is like to be a survivor
in such a reality. Making any film about survivors of genocide is
to walk into a minefield of clichés, most of which serve to create
a heroic (if not saintly) protagonist with whom we can identify,
thereby offering the false reassurance that, in the moral
catastrophe of atrocity, we are nothing like perpetrators. But
presenting survivors as saintly in order to reassure ourselves
that we are good is to use survivors to deceive ourselves. It is
an insult to survivors’ experience, and does nothing to help us
understand what it means to survive atrocity, what it means to
live a life shattered by mass violence, and to be silenced by
terror. To navigate this minefield of clichés, we have had to
explore silence itself.
The result, The Look of Silence, is, I hope, a poem about a silence borne of terror – a poem about the necessity of breaking that silence, but also about the trauma that comes when silence is broken. Maybe the film is a monument to silence – a reminder that although we want to move on, look away and think of other things, nothing will make whole what has been broken. Nothing will wake the dead. We must stop, acknowledge the lives destroyed, strain to listen to the silence that follows.
— Joshua Oppenheimer, Director of The Look of SilenceSponsored by Anthropology and Critical Media Practices
Tue April 5, 2016, 7:30 only, Muenzinger Auditorium
Indonesia, 2014, Indonesian*, Color, 103 min, 1.85:1, PG-13, DP • official site