NON-FICTION CINEMA AS A SITE OF INTERVENTION

SYNOPSIS

What happens when social structures make speech impossible — and can moving images break that silence open? The talk pursues this question through the non-fiction film The Look of Silence (2014).

The film follows Adi, whose brother was murdered during the Indonesian genocide of 1965–66, as he confronts the killers — men who hold positions of power to this day. In staged confrontations, Adi breaks a collective silence whose very persistence is a form of ongoing discrimination. That the survivors of a genocide should question the perpetrators while those perpetrators are still in power, and that such an intervention should be filmed at all, moves beyond what non-fiction cinema had until then been able to do.

The film's power lies in its form. It stages the two perspectives as a structure of looking — who looks at whom, and with what authority — and in doing so it breaks apart the familiar pairing of active perpetrator and passive victim. At moments, the editing turns this around entirely — an active victim comes to face a passive perpetrator. What becomes legible here is a medio-performative perspective. Non-fiction films can bring forth levels of reality in which active and passive no longer divide cleanly. Perpetrator and victim no longer swing between mastery and subjection; instead the film comes into resonance with the past by opening a visual discourse between the two poles.

This discourse, the talk argues, strengthens a sense of self-efficacy and raises the question of how objects might become people again. In closing, the talk opens the argument towards social media, where structures of the gaze, objectification and asymmetries of power are negotiated in similarly visual terms.