A scene from Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary “The Look of Silence.” (Courtesy Drafthouse Films and Participant Media)
“The Look of Silence,” the new movie from filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, delves into the same period of bloody unrest that marred Indonesia in the mid-1960s that his highly lauded 2012 documentary, “The Act of Killing” plumbed, but from an entirely different angle.
“Killing,” which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, allowed the sadistic perpetrators behind the mass executions to put their own spin on their unconscionable deeds, but not without Oppenheimer’s subtle, yet biting illumination of the heinous nature of their transgressions and the unrighteous impunity they received from a capitulating government looking to bury the past and move on. “Silence,” by stark contrast, is the salving counter flow to “Killing,” a cathartic podium for the survivors and family of the victims who live with daily reminders of the ghastly past and the constant duress of a reoccurrence.
How Oppenheimer arrived at such a place of riveting paradox, ghostly horrors and egregious complacency is almost as compelling a story as the ones told in his films and the tumultuous history of the Islamic archipelago. As a college graduate in his 20s, Oppenheimer signed on with the International Union of Food and Agricultural Workers to make a documentary somewhere in a developing nation to highlight workers’ rights violations on plantations and mass producing farms.
“It could have been anywhere,” the filmmaker recalls, “you’d think South America or Africa, but I went to Indonesia.” While working on the documentary Oppenheimer found it difficult to get the workers, who were working under what the director calls “slave-like conditions,” to open up. “There were these thugs there that kept silencing them. The workers were really fearful and when someone finally said something they told me about 1965.”
Oppenheimer who studied filmmaking at Harvard and resides in Copenhagen, admittedly (at the time) didn’t know the full extent of the atrocities that lay in Indonesia’s bloody past. Back in the mid-1940s, the Dutch colony won its independence from the Netherlands after the island was released by the Japanese at the end of the Second World War. Its first president, Sukarno, a galvanizing hand in the quest for independence, would lead the country for nearly 20 years until the September 30th Movement, an attempted coup allegedly initiated by the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) — there has been speculation of a plot from within the military — that would send the island nation into turmoil — something that the gripping historical drama, “The Year of Living Dangerously” (1982), starring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver, captured quite well. Continue reading
Thorpe’s impetus (and the film) comes after a traumatic breakup and subsequent train ride to Fire Island where, taking in all the high, nasally sounds around him, he comes to the realization that he and all of his fellow gay passengers “sound like a bunch of braying ninnies.” The inherent fear: Who will want to be with me if I sound so ridiculous? It’s affirmed by a bunch of buff young lads lazing on a beach who tell Thorpe if they wanted something high-pitched and effeminate, they’d be straight. The point is further hammered home by clips of locker room porn in which gridiron beefcakes pound away at each other issuing directives with the deep-throated machismo of a hetero hump. 
Heineman gained a perilous unlimited access to his subjects; it might be more accurate to say he’s embedded. The film begins with the steamy nighttime capture of an outdoor meth lab where the brewers wear bandannas to conceal their faces from the camera – and the noxious vapors. They do what they do out of opportunity. “As long as god allows it, we make drugs,” one offers meekly. They learned how to make their cocktail from an American chemist and his son. (Maybe Walter White is still kicking around?)
The roots for the documentary go back to when Moselle ran into the boys, a.k.a. the Wolfpack, on the street, caught by their eye-catching long hair (down to their waists) and demeanor. What unfolds is talking heads and recreations looking back to their early childhood, when the boys were kept under lock and key. Their father, Oscar, a Hare Krishna who met their mother, Susan, in his native Peru, blessed all his offspring with uber-long Sanskrit names. As a patriarch and a man, Oscar’s more hippie than overbearing despot, but his logic – to lock the boys within the plastered walls of a tenement apartment in the projects to keep them safe from outside harm and violence lurking in the streets – seems odd given the blood-soaked nature of their cinematic diet.
Workman, an Academy Award-winning filmmaker in his own right, breaks down the genius of Welles with great care. In one example he neatly dissects the opening of “Touch of Evil” into its innovative use of variable music, lack of credits and the inlaid suspense created by a car with a bomb ticking in its trunk as it rolls though a busy pedestrian way. Fellow directing greats Martin Scorsese, Costa-Gavras and Sydney Pollack pop up as talking heads to espouse respect and admiration for the man who, like Marlon Brando, embraced his later-stage corpulence and need for a buck, shilling Paul Masson wine. Despite many feathers in his cap, Welles still had to struggle to get his visions made, and indie stalwart Richard Linklater (who made the homage “Me and Orson Welles” in 2008) underscores the point by tagging him as “the patron saint of independent filmmakers.”
Randi’s most notable targets were Stanford-backed telekinetic Uri Geller and dramatic “omniscient” evangelist Peter Popoff, whose scam of his wife feeding him information through an earpiece inspired the 1993 Steve Martin movie “Leap of Faith.” Randi’s exploits before and after the injury landed him on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson several times, and he assisted Alice Cooper with some onstage chicanery (the rock star’s staged beheading). Hoodwinking all-stars Penn and Teller and Jamy Ian Swiss chime in to attest Randi’s “amazingness.”
The film centers on two former assault victims, Andrea Pino and Annie Clark, young women who through diligence and genuine concern for others become de facto activists and leverage Title IX to hold schools accountable. Their quest, while earnest and just, meanders at times. It’s here that Dick seems to have lost his way as well, but as the girls’ state-hopping odyssey continues onward he uses their quest to float the notion that nothing is being done at these universities because the presidents don’t want a scandal – any type of stain or negative publicity could mean the loss of funding and well-heeled applicants. “We don’t condone rape, but it never happens” seems to be the mantra from coast to coast, and god forbid if it’s a prized student athlete caught in the crosshairs.
For What it's Worth 