Making Sense with Sam Harris - #13 — The Moral Gaze

Episode Date: July 21, 2015

Sam Harris speaks with the filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer about his remarkable documentaries, "The Act of Killing" and "The Look of Silence." If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. Today I'll be speaking with Joshua Oppenheimer, a filmmaker who has made two mesmerizing films, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. And as you'll hear from this interview, I am quite awed by his achievement. He has managed to make films about genocide that are harrowing, as you would expect, but also remarkably beautiful. And he's created a kind of moral laser with both of these projects. And it focuses the relevant emotions of outrage and compassion in a way that I haven't experienced before in film. As I say, at the outset of this interview, I consider both of these films masterpieces. I highly recommend that you see them if you haven't. I think you'll be able to enjoy our conversation whether or not

you've seen them, but this should really be a goad to go straight to a movie theater to see The Look of Silence and to go online to see the director's cut of The Act of Killing, which you can see on Netflix. But other than that, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Joshua Oppenheimer. He's a recent recipient of the MacArthur, quote, Genius Award, which if you've seen the films, you will recognize as richly deserved. So without further ado, I give you Joshua Oppenheimer. Hey, Joshua, how you doing? I'm very good. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Listen, are you sitting down? I'm going to praise you rather fulsomely to start. I'm sitting. I got to tell you, I mean, you have made two of the best documentaries I have ever seen. I mean, I consider both your films, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, just masterpieces,

and I don't use that word lightly. So it's just, it's a great pleasure to talk to you. And I'd like to, I know you have the second film, The Look of Silence, coming out today in New York. I don't know when we're going to release this podcast. I assume it'll be out in at least Los Angeles by the time we do. But I just want to tell you, I want to talk about both films, emphasizing the new one, but it's an amazing accomplishment what you've done with these films. Well, thank you so much. I'm honored and humbled by that. Thank you. Now, before we get into the films themselves, perhaps you can say a little bit about the relevant history here, because both films discuss a genocide that many people don't know anything about. And it follows a history of exploitation by Western powers that really is quite shocking. So can you tell us a little bit about what happened in Indonesia? Sure. Well, Indonesia was a Dutch colony until 1945. And

Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia, was a charismatic, left-leaning populist and the founder of the non-aligned movement. He was trying to steer Indonesia into a space, a course of development that was neither dependent on the Soviet Union, nor the West, nor the United States in the Cold War, when countries were under tremendous pressure to take sides and to align themselves with one power or the other. And this, of course, incurred the wrath of the United States. So in the years from the late 50s up until 1965, the United States began supporting very intensively the Indonesian army as a kind of opponent of the president of Sukarno and of the broader Indonesian left. And in 1965, there was a military coup in which a new military dictatorship came to power and consolidated its rule through the mass murder of anywhere between half a million and three million people in under six months. The victims were any presumed opponent of the new

regime. So union leaders, progressive politicians, critical journalists, the ethnic Chinese, anyone who was in a left-leaning organization, leaders of the Indonesian women's movement. And all of this was supported and incited and then rewarded to the tune of ultimately of billions of dollars of aid by the United States. So in Indonesia, we have essentially two generations of people who have been living surrounded by the people who murdered their loved ones. There's been no justice. The killers are still in power. That's right. Beyond there having been no justice, or the reason there's been no justice is because the perpetrators remain in power. I believe you said in another interview that it was like going to Germany 40 years after the Holocaust and finding the Nazis still in power and happy to reminisce about how they reduced

millions of people to ash. Yeah, and I think the Nazis would be more ashamed of it than the Indonesians because they knew that the rest of the world was condemning the Holocaust while it was taking place. Whereas here, the Indonesians knew, the perpetrators in Indonesia know and believe that the rest of the world was celebrating their genocide while it was taking place. In fact, while I was filming one of the perpetrators, one of them looks right at the camera because I'm right behind the camera and therefore right at me and right at the audience and says, I should be rewarded with a cruise to the United States because it was America that taught me to hate and kill the communists.

because it was America that taught me to hate and kill the communists. And there's a very inadvertently funny, but just tonally so now deranged piece of footage that you supply in the new movie, The Look of Silence, from, I think it was NBC News, or was it NBC News? It was an NBC, yeah, a special one-hour-long NBC News report produced in 1967, essentially celebrating the genocide. We hear that Indonesia is now more beautiful without the communists. And we hear that Goodyear, a major corporation, in order to harvest the latex that would end up in our tires, the soles of our shoes, and in our condoms,

was using slave labor drawn from death camps. When the workers were used up, they were sent back to the camps to be killed, starved or dispatched out to death squads to be killed. This is, of course, essentially what German corporations were doing on the periphery of Auschwitz a mere 20 years earlier. And the German radio was not actually broadcasting that to German citizens. This is actually being reported pretty openly to American citizens, but as good news, as a victory in the struggle for freedom and democracy, something that should be celebrated, something that, and it should give us pause. Anyone seeing the film ought to pause and wonder whether the struggle of the so-called free world against the communist world was the real reason for these, for American involvement in these atrocities, or whether that was actually just a pretext or an excuse for the murderous corporate plunder that we see documented in sunny terms in the NBC clip.

Well, it is a ghastly history, but history aside and the horrific details aside, I'd like to get at what is so unusual about your films, because there are many documentaries on horrible pieces of history. There are many Holocaust documentaries and many genocides have been reviewed in film. And this makes for difficult viewing in every case. But what's so strange about your films is that they're almost like psychological experiments for the audience and for the people on the screen. And I would imagine for you as a filmmaker, because you have created situations that no one has really seen before. I think few people would have thought possible.

And they have the effect of turning up the volume on our moral emotions and the feelings of outrage and horror at man's inhumanity to man. feelings of outrage and horror at man's inhumanity to man. But you've done this in contexts that can't contain these emotions at all. In The Act of Killing, your first film, there's a campiness and near comedy to this movie where the main killer is this amusing dandy who loves Elvis and John Wayne, and he's got this fellow goon sidekick who's a cross-dresser. And I'll get into each film separately, but I'm now talking about both generally. In the new film, you do something very different,

but it has the same effect of not being able to contain the emotions you're driving to the surface. Because in the new film, The Look of Silence, there's a formal beauty to it. And all these shots are so stunning and so tranquil. And there's a silence and an attention to aesthetic detail in your framing of everything. But it's like there are nuclear bombs going off beneath the surface. And all we're seeing is the occasional unsettling of a teacup, and the effect is just riveting. Those are beautiful descriptions of what I've tried to do in both films.

I mean, I try to paradoxically, by narrowing my focus onto one perpetrator and the men around him in the act of killing and one survivor's family and the look of silence, I try to create immersive, present tense experiences for viewers. I try not to tell a story through exposition, which of course keeps us at the distance, gives us the same remove from the events depicted that a storyteller, that a narrator would have. But instead, I try to immerse you and have you identify with the people involved. And I see my work as creating occasions, creating situations in which the inherent contradictions and horrors

come to the surface in a way that feels overwhelming. And despite it all taking place within the overall safe space of making a film, uncomfortable for everybody involved. And in The Act of Killing, you know, I'm encountering the truth of boasting, bragging perpetrators. And I felt the moral truth of this, the kind of sort of transcendent truth here would be if these perpetrators would make a musical. And so I invite them to dramatize what they've done in whatever ways they wish in order to make visible the lies, the stories, the fantasies that allow them to live with themselves, the persona, the contradictory persona they inhabit that allow them to live with themselves.

And then this is something you really see in the longer international version of the film, the version of The Act of Killing that came out outside the United States, but is now actually available in the US too as the director's cut on Netflix. It's The Act of Killing director's cut. in the US too as the director's cut on Netflix. It's the act of killing director's cut. But it's 40 minutes longer than what came out outside the United States. You see this kind of recursive process of performing, of dramatizing, and then watching and responding. And you see Anwar watching his own fantasies, his dramatizations, and then proposing the next one in response and watching and proposing the next one in response, and watching and proposing the next one in response. And what unfolds is this kind of fever dream about escapism

and guilt, and we are sucked right into it with Anwar. So I think that what's happening here is we are immersed, and each time Anwar watches the horror, watches his previous dramatization, we can see that he's terribly pained. But as you put it very nicely, there's nowhere for those emotions to go except further denial. So he launches into, he proposes what he considers to be a kind of aesthetic improvement, as though if he can fix the scene aesthetically, he can somehow dispel the pain and fix his past morally. And so one dramatization begets another, begets another, begets another, until we're tobogganing through a kind of fever dream of shifting fantasies. And we get this, and it's about, again, the lies and fantasies that make up the killers present and the terrible consequences of those when imposed on the whole

society of the corruption, the thuggery, and the fear. And in that sense, it is about impunity today, not about the events of the genocide half a century ago, which as you pointed out, there's many documentaries about terrible things in the past, and they don't have the same impact because we know that there's been many terrible episodes of history all over the world. I try to make this about the present, and I try to make it universal. Similarly, in The Look of Silence, by focusing on one survivor who sets out to do something unimaginable, something that we have never seen in the history of nonfiction film, namely survivors confronting perpetrators while they

still hold a monopoly on power. We see another kind of confrontation when Adi goes and shows that he's willing to forgive the men if they can only accept what they've done is wrong. They're forced to see him and by extension, his brother whom they murdered, and then all of their victims as humans. And their lies, their delusions start to crumble. And you see them frantically scrambling for new lies because those emotions are impossible, as you put it, Sam. And they start to deny responsibility, they get angry, they get defensive. And all of this takes place within a space that I've tried to depict with as much grace and humanity and even love as possible so that we can feel the haunted silence in which the family has been,

the survivors families are forced to live and in which this is taking place. And I hope it makes the violence and the anger and the sort of tinderbox, it's the kind of silence of nitroglycerin. I hope it makes, that the beauty and the intimacy makes all of that more shocking. It certainly does. And also the level of compassion

evinced in especially the second film, The Look of Silence, is really breathtaking. Adi's compassion and his apparent willingness to forgive if he can only find someone with a conscience worth forgiving. Seeing his interaction with the killers of his brother is just mesmerizing. And I want to step back for a second, though, because we just kind of breezed through the act of killing. And for those who haven't seen the film, it would be very difficult to understand what's going on here. In fact, I think even if you've seen it on a first viewing, it's very hard to appreciate how strange a document this is. You inevitably miss some of the amazing detail in the beginning

as you're trying to figure out, get your bearings in this world and with this project that you've created of the musical in which these killers reenact their crimes. So I want to just talk just broadly about the devices you use in both films. In the act of killing, as you say, you have the killers create a musical, kind of a weird hybrid Western film noir soap opera in which they depict their torture and murder of their neighbors. And crucially also their feelings about it. Right, right. You know, these sort of musical numbers often reflect on their feelings about it. Right, right. These sort of musical numbers often reflect on their emotions about what they've done, their desperate attempt to glorify it, for example. And they play both parts.

So you have killers playing victims, too. And so they're experiencing both sides of it. They don't even change costume. Incongruously, they play victims in what they were wearing as killers. But it becomes this very strange ritual of almost just an expiation of their sins. And then you have them watching this footage. And this is a device you use in both movies where you have both perpetrators and victims watching the confessions of perpetrators on television, and then you film them while they're watching themselves or others confess to these crimes.

And so this film within a film device in the act of killing is what, in my view, makes it really one of the strangest documents our species has ever produced. Half of my amazement at the film was not so much that the events themselves that you depict are amazing and horrible, but the sheer fact that your film exists was as amazing as anything within it. I mean, how you got these people to collaborate in this way and what they thought they were doing. And just, it produces this uncanny feeling of strangeness. Now in the look of Silence, your new film, it's a very different film. You're treating the same material, you're

talking about the same events, but you have a different device here where Adi, who's an optician, is fitting, he doesn't do this in every interview, but in many interviews with the killers, the interview is conducted over the course of him fitting them for eyeglasses. So he's testing their vision and then he's using that as a context in which to have this conversation. Was that, did you just stumble into that device or was this, did the filmmaker in you realize that this was going to produce wonderful footage and a great way in so that you crafted this as a device?

Well, no, of course the filmmaker and I recognize that this would be, the filmmaker and me recognize that this would be this powerful metaphor for blindness because I knew Adi would be testing the eyes of men who would be resistant to seeing. So I knew that, and I knew that specifically the eye tests would be this, they wouldn't give us access. I mean, the film, the perpetrators Adi's confronting knew me from years earlier. So the access would come from me. I would bring Adi and I would say, I'm back after all these years. have done in whatever way you wish, which is what I would have maybe asked them to do years earlier. I would remind them that I'd gone on to make a film with some of the most powerful men in the country in which they do just that. And that would, of course, serve to keep us safe. The act of killing had been shot, but had not yet come out, had not yet been seen by anybody. It had been edited, but had not been seen by anybody when we shot The Look of Silence. I knew once it was seen, I wouldn't be able to return safely to Indonesia. So this was

a space where it was a narrow window where we could make this film. And I realized that I was well known for being close, for having made this film with the highest ranking perpetrators in the country and people believed, therefore, that we were close because no one had seen the act of killing yet. Now, I'm still close with Anwar Kongo, the main character in the film, but of course, the powerful politicians in the act of killing hate me. So I would tell the men Adi was visiting, I'm back with this. After all these years, I've gone on to make a film with some of the most powerful men in the country. I would name some names. I wouldn't refer to them as the most powerful men in the country. I would name some names. I wouldn't refer to them as

most powerful men in the country, I would just name their names. And then I would say, I this time want to film you and Adi discussing these events. You both have personal relationships to it. You may disagree with each other, try to listen to one another. Because of course, Adi was hoping to find reconciliation with his neighbors. And I told him from the beginning, I don't think you'll find anybody who's able to admit their guilt because it would be too traumatic for them to do so. But if I can show their pained responses, if I can show how impossible it is, that is to say, if I can document why we fail to get the reconciliation you're hoping for, I will be

making visible how torn the social fabric of Indonesia is, and how urgently truth, reconciliation, and some form of justice are needed. And in that sense, for anyone watching the film anywhere in the world, people will be forced to acknowledge the prison of fear in which every Indonesian is living today, and therefore forced to support and somehow to support truth and reconciliation. And I said to Adi, I think that, so I think you will fail, but I think that we might succeed in a bigger way through the film as a whole. And so like the dramatizations in The Act of Killing, I felt that the confrontations in the look of silence would make visible something that had, impossible to ignore, something that had previously been invisible

or deliberately ignored by everybody in Indonesia. And so then I would say, I'm here, so I want to document this, I would tell the perpetrators, I want to document your conversation with Adi, try to listen to one another. And if you can, and as a thank you for your time, Adi is an optometrist. He will test your eyes. And if you need glasses and want glasses, we'll give you as many pairs of glasses as you like. And you see, I realized that the eye tests, in addition to likely producing this kind of powerful metaphor for blindness, would also help keep the confrontation safe. You referred to them as

interviews, Sam, but you're, well, we're having a conversation more, but such a conversation could be called an interview. You're sort of interviewing me. An interview is when you're looking for information and feelings. Adi's trying to do something. He's trying to reconcile his family with his neighbor's family, with his brother's killers. And that's not an interview. That's a confrontation. That's a dramatic scene. And I realized that if we could make, wherever possible, if the first part of this drama,

this confrontation, were eye tests, it would help keep us safe. Because when you're having your eyes tested, you're, of course, disarmed. Your guard is down. You're not likely to physically attack somebody. And also, of course, it was a context that Adi could prolong for as long as necessary, where he could elicit the stories, the most important details of what the perpetrators had done, all things that they had told me years earlier. But of course, if Adi were to go to them and say, I understand you did this and this and this from Joshua's footage, they would feel trapped. And there would be no chance of dialogue. It would be dangerous

and confrontational from the outset. So this was a chance for the perpetrators in a comfortable setting to volunteer what they had done. And in a context that a setting or timeframe that Adi could control, he could keep it going for as long as necessary. So that was the original impetus for the eye test. But of course I understood this would likely be this very powerful metaphor because I knew the kind of stories they would tell. I knew they would tell these unspeakable details, things like right out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting,

while their eyes are being framed by these ridiculous, surreal, scarlet test lenses. Yeah, yeah. And visually, it has an aesthetic beauty, too. You open the film, if I'm not mistaken, with a shot of one of the people getting his eyes tested. So much of this hinges on Adi as a person and just how he shows up for these confrontations. And he is truly remarkable. I mean, there's a level of moral seriousness and gradations of anguish and compassion that you get off of him. I mean, he's like a one-man truth and reconciliation commission. There's a moral force

to his very subtle conversations with these people. Once you're witnessing it, you realize you haven't seen these kinds of encounters between people really ever. Ever. Yeah. And it's quite amazing. Watching the film, though, I began to worry for his safety. And it seems like he was running a considerable risk collaborating with you. And this comes out, you know, his concern about this comes out at various points in the film. And I believe in your press materials, you talk about this being, you mentioned it here, it's the first time that this has ever happened where you have someone confronting perpetrators of a genocide when the perpetrators are still in power. And so I'm just wondering,

what kind of safety precautions did you take? And what is his security situation now? Well, we knew that we might have to stop the filming and perhaps not even release the film throughout the production. For each of the confrontations, Adi would go with no ID so that if we were detained, it would be hard for Adi to be, for Adi, for them to identify who he was before we could get help, hopefully, from one of our embassies. Adi would bring, we would have come with two cars so that we would be able to, if we had to run away or escape, it would be harder for them to follow us. So we had a kind of getaway vehicle. And we, Adi would have his family waiting at the airport ready to evacuate if anything went wrong for all of the confrontations with the more powerful perpetrators.

These were safety precautions that we took. But then when the film was, I think what kept us safe above all was, as I said earlier, first of all, the cover that we had from the fact that I was believed to be close to the highest ranking perpetrators. Of course, word could have spread to them. Somebody could have asked, do you realize what Joshua's doing? And that could have fallen apart. So every night between the confrontations, I would spend with Anwar Kongo, which was sort of strange to be shifting between Adi by day and Anwar by night. But we knew that if word had spread, Anwar would be the first to find out.

Just for our listeners, Anwar is the perpetrator protagonist from your first film, The Act of Killing. And of course, that's right. And so we knew that he would tell me or I would feel that something was amiss if word had spread. That was what would allow us to make the decision with some comfort to shoot the next day. We shot the scenes as quickly as possible. Over the course of their six confrontations, we shot them over six days, and we worked our way up the chain of command. We shot one test confrontation. In fact, it's the one with Inong, the man with the red glasses that we talked about earlier, because we knew he had a terrible relationship with his commanders, had no one therefore to complain to really. And Adi does not tell him, you may

remember this from the film, Sam, Adi does not tell him who he is. And we use that so that Adi could then go to his wife and to his mother and his family and say what he's doing. We could film their reactions, which you see in the film as well, and you see their apprehension. And then we showed them that scene so they could see what it looks like. The family then said, this is very important. If there's some way of continuing this, even if it means we have to move, you should try to continue because you're breaking half a century of silence here. I think the other thing that kept us safe was the fact that these men simply could not believe these conversations were happening at all. There's this sense of total disbelief.

They just can't believe the questions that are coming out of Adi's mouth, and they don't know how to respond. In a way, being able to intimidate or bully or terrorize someone depends on them being afraid. There was this kind of amazing study of a woman somewhere in the Midwest whose fear center in her brain wasn't working and people would come up to her to mug her and she would react with no fear. And they would run away because they were frightened

by her lack of fear. And I think there's some of that going on. In any case, when we had a rough cut of the film, about six months before the world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, we met, all of us, the film crew, the team that had already released The Act of Killing in Indonesia, Adi's family, and me, and my producer in Thailand, because we knew I couldn't safely return to Indonesia anymore, ever since The Act of killing was released. And we asked, what should we do? Should we hold this film back until these men are so old, they pose us no threat, or until there's been real political change in Indonesia,

or should we release the film and the family moved to Europe? Well, when the family and the Indonesian team saw the film, they said, this has to come out right away. There's so much momentum for change from the first film, the act of killing, that we need to build on that. And the family said, this has to come out right away. There's so much momentum for change from the first film, The Act of Killing, that we need to build on that. And the family said, well, we're willing to move to Europe if that's what it takes. Crew in Indonesia said, let us see if there's a way we can keep you in Indonesia, if you would prefer that, if you feel comfortable with that, because we think that Adi will be seen as a national hero when this film comes out.

We'll have a central role to play in the movement for truth and reconciliation. In fact, we were able to do that. The family did have to move several thousand kilometers from where we shot the film, from where the family comes from. They're now out from under the shadow of perpetrators, but still in Indonesia. There's, of course, nationally powerful perpetrators who we also worry about. They have not threatened Adi. There's the family still in Indonesia. The children are in better schools. We see the terrible brainwashing that happens in Indonesian schools in the film. The children are in better schools. We've raised money for Adi with the True False Film Festival for Adi to open an optometry store, a brick and mortar eyeglasses shop, and for the kids to be able to go to university should they wish to. So there's a better future

that we're trying to build for the family. But the fact that the family should have to flee like fugitives when they're simply trying to create, trying in fact to forgive their neighbors, is a sign of how far Indonesia still has to go before it becomes truly a democracy with the rule of law, where the law applies equally to the most powerful as it does to the weakest. And that said, Adi is now seen by many in Indonesia as a national hero and is playing a very central role in the movement for truth and reconciliation there. And yet we do have a plan B for the family to leave the country should it at any point become necessary. Oh, good. Well, I'm happy to hear both of those facts. But I guess I'm a little surprised or confused about the basis for surprise among the Indonesian higher-ups. All the perpetrators knew

what they were divulging in their encounters with you and in both films. And there's evidence, certainly in the act of killing, that this history of genocide is openly celebrated. There's one scene where you have them on what looks like a local talk show, maybe it's a national talk show, and there's a young woman interviewing Anwar Congo and the others about their murder of communists, and they even claim that they killed 2.5 million communists, kind of the high end of the spectrum. I think it's more often said that a million people died. So they're celebrating this on television, and there's lots of laughter, and there's absolutely no moral qualm about what happened. So then what is if that is in fact what the national dialogue is around the disappearance

of over a million people and all these people knew what they were telling you and they were bragging about having participated in this, what is then the basis for outrage once your films come out? I think there's an official history which doesn't refer to the genocide but talks about the heroic extermination. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes

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