Two documentaries that are playing at the New York Film Festival deal with systemic violence through the documentary form, displaying the myriad ways film can address tragedy through the lens of memory. Death is haunting and never leaves us, but in reexamining the past we might be able to better understand the present and navigate the future.
“The Look of Silence,” Joshua Oppenheimer’s companion piece to last year’s astonishing “The Act of Killing,” takes a different approach to the same material as his previous film, which focused on the government-backed purge of communists in Indonesia in 1965. “Silence” is a more somber view of the same events that unfolds from the perspective of the victims. Oppenheimer follows Adi, whose brother was murdered by the subjects of “Killing,” while he travels around and confronts those responsible. The camera lingers on these conversations between perpetrator and victim, over and over again past the point of comfortableness, acting less a witness to what is being discussed than a tool to prod the truth out of those who are most likely to obscure it.
South Korean filmmaker Jung Yoon-suk takes a different approach with “Non-Fiction Diary.” The film centers on the crimes committed by a group called the Jijon Clan, who murdered five people and were arrested in September 1994. Their case became a media bonanza, sparking public dialogue about the corrupted moral core of Korean society. The film then expands to include two more no less horrific tragedies: the collapse of both the Seongsu Bridge in Seoul one month after the arrest, which killed 32 people, and the towering Sampoong department store, which killed 502 people and injured nearly 1,000. Using media footage from the time period along with accounts from police officers who were on the scene, the film draws links between the three events and what they reveal about the connection between wealth inequality, class resentment, and violence.
Both films speak from the present tense and in their own ways hope to affect change. “Silence” is the less subtle of the two, but no less powerful because of it. Oppenheimer seeks truth less in connections than in confessions, especially those that shock the audience, such as when one of the perpetrators confesses to drinking the blood of those they killed. But the most shocking thing in the film is a simple phrase of denial, repeated again and again: “The past is the past.” With his camera, Oppenheimer intends to rebuke that claim, no mater how painful the process seems for subject and viewer alike.
“Diary” is more restrained, not engaged in an act of simply remembering the past but in re-contextualizing it. It’s the more sober of the two works and more resonant for the questions that are asked about violence. Why are people killed? Is it because killers are “born with the seed of evil,” as one political commentator remarks in the film? Can we remove violence from its context, and what role does capitalism play in the tragedies at hand? Should the wealthy owners of the Sampoong department store, which collapsed due to negligence, be punished any differently than the members of the Jijon Clan, who emerged from the other end of the social and economic spectrum? Is one guiltier than the other?
The questions in “Diary” and “Silence” are at once obvious and complex — which is part of what makes them work so well — while the answers are so easy to comprehend and so difficult to put in words. The simple act of asking, of remembering, of taking another look, is the first step toward understanding.
