Doc Watch: Political Theater

You think our political process has gotten nasty? Here are two reminders of the butchering by tyrants in the 1960s and '70s. They are both companion-piece follow-ups from celebrated documentarians:

THE PEARL BUTTON (A-minus) - Patricio Guzman has documented Chile's horrid '70s for decades now. His last two films are gorgeous ruminations on General Pinochet's purges of his political opponents after the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende's democratically elected government.

"Nostalgia for the Light" looked to the skies, grounding its theme in the powerful telescopes perched in the Atacama desert and tasked with scanning the cosmos for the secrets of life and the universe. Here, Guzman trains his gaze on Earth's vast seas, similarly inquisitive about the Meaning of It All.

Like in "Nostalgia," Guzman lulls the viewer into a contemplative state, pondering the unknown. Around the halfway mark (in each film) he imperceptibly flips the narrative and focuses on the Disappeared. In "Nostalgia" the hook was the women who wandered the desert sifting for bones and other remains. Here, Guzman is immersed (at times, literally) in the waters off the coast of Chile. It was reported that one method of murdering political opponents of the dictatorship was to inject them with cyanide, use wire to tie the bodies to railroad ties, load them onto helicopters and then drop them into the ocean.

Guzman's anthropology stretches back to the middle of the 19th century, when a British delegation took some indigenous people hostage, dragging them back to Europe and parading them around London. One of those captives provides the connection to the title of the film. Guzman's interactions with those indigenous people is fascinating. A scene in which he tossed ordinary words out at an elderly woman and she responds with the native version of the word or phrase seems both so utterly random and essential to the story.

I didn't know going in (or halfway through the film) what the title of the movie meant, and I won't explain it here, because the lovely story is best experienced fresh.

The images wash over you elegantly across 82 minutes. The camera is endlessly curious. We watch bubbles float to the surface. We hear ice crackling in a glacier. We gaze at the moon, the province of the white man. It's all profoundly moving. 

THE LOOK OF SILENCE (B-minus) - I'm not sure what Josh Oppenheimer's end game is, but I'm hoping that his offbeat examination of the Indonesian massacres of the 1960s doesn't extend into a trilogy.

We were a bit perplexed by "The Act of Killing" two years ago, appreciative of its audacity -- Oppenheimer staged re-enactments with the killers in a bizarre burlesque -- but left cold by the experiment. In the latest, the Santa Fe filmmaker pits an optometrist, Adi Rukun, whose brother was a victim of the purge that killed hundreds of thousands known or suspected communists, against several offenders. He brings his crude mobile optometry kit to the home of one of them, promising a new set of frames to the grizzled, toothless old man. During the visit, he gently grills the man about his past sins until the conversation boils over into a defensive rant.

Much of Oppenheimer's own optics here are frustratingly static. For some reason, he plunks Rukun in front of a television set so we can watch him watch two of the former henchman talk casually about and play-act their 50-year-old crimes against humanity. The camera stares at Rukun's stony, stolid, vaguely Christopher Walken-like facial features. What are we looking for in his eyes?

Another thread follow's Rukun's ancient parents (his father is purported to be 103). The old man is deaf and blind and must be bathed and fed by the mother. We watch this infantile old man get powdered like a newborn, swaddled modestly for the camera, and we wonder, again, what the point is in gawking at his humiliating end of life. Was he torn apart for decades over the death of his son? Who knows? He's demented; it was all probably lost to him years ago.

We also visit with a victim who survived the attacks. He tells Oppenheimer, in dialogue later echoed by one of the assailants, that what's past is past and it's time to forget and move on. The consensus is that the ancient history can only be reconciled with an uneasy, unpleasant detente. It's a powerful message to the viewer. You wonder why Oppenheimer doesn't take heed and just move on.