La Parole Filmée in Rithy Panh's the Missing Picture

MEDIATION AND REMEDIATION: LA PAROLE FILMÉE IN RITHY PANH’S THE MISSING PICTURE (L’IMAGE MANQUANTE) Leshu Torchin The Missing Picture, where any production of memory can both preserve and veil lives. In L’image manquante (The Missing Picture, 2013), Rithy video footage, and painted clay figurines in stunningly Panh continues his exploration of the Cambodian genocide crafted—often multimedia—dioramas, the documentary in a manner that is both harrowing and lyrical, carrying on integrates Panh’s personal story with ruminations on media- the innovations he brought to his earlier films on the subject. tion, trauma, and history. Furthermore, the film reaches Combining Khmer Rouge propaganda films, contemporary beyond individual narrative and reflection, functioning as cinematic witness as it counters silences, fills historical gaps, Film Quarterly, Vol. 68, Number 1, pp. 32–41, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. and provides a testimony that is polyphonic and collective. © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through Through his deployment of clips from his earlier films, the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www. Panh creates a sedimented text, suggestive of a past that ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2014.68.1.32. refuses to remain passed and of the magnitude of history, 32 FALL 2014 where any production of memory can both preserve and veil Rouge leaders to trial. Kaing Guek Eav, the commander of the lives of others. the S-21 prison, who was a subject of Panh’s film Duch, le Panh begins his story with the words, “In the middle of maître des forges de l’enfer (Duch, Master of the Forges of life, childhood returns,” as a camera bobs in the crashing Hell, 2011), was sentenced in 2010. And in August 2014, waves, submerging and resurfacing. This opening is a fitting Khmer Rouge leaders Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan parallel to the epigraph in Primo Levi’s crucial book on the were found guilty of being part of a “joint criminal enter- challenges and necessity of bearing witness to the Holocaust, prise” responsible for a “widespread and systematic attack The Drowned and the Saved. Taken from Samuel Taylor against the civilian population of Cambodia.” The charges of 3 Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” it reads: genocide are yet to be tried. Meanwhile, the international community was slow to rec- Since then, at an uncertain hour ognize genocide, not only then, but in the aftermath, right up That Agony returns until the 1990s. The Khmer Rouge’s social reform policies de- And till my ghastly tale is told ployed forced labor, incarceration, torture, and executions, but This heart within me burns the nature of its victim groups seemed to confuse many. The Panh’s childhood is not simply invoked as a time of innocence, murderous campaign targeted Vietnamese and Chinese mi- a time fondly recalled in middle age, for it is also a ghastly tale norities as well as religious minorities: Muslims, Christians, and that must be shared, a traumatic memory that comes unbid- Buddhists. However, their ideology also dictated a purge along den. The Missing Picture becomes a testimony of suffering, social and class axes, meaning teachers, students, artists, intel- his own, his family’s, and Cambodia’s, which he imparts to the lectuals, and the professional classes of doctors and lawyers. Its viewer. This urgency for telling also finds a resonance in basis in political ideology as much as (if not more than) ethnic Levi’s book, wherein he cites Simon Wiesenthal’s recollection differencehasledsometotermthisan“autogenocide,” as if of the concentration camp guards and their taunts to the not all genocides were, in essence, just that, and as if such dis- 4 prisoners: tinctions don’t risk reifying ethnic differences. Although measures of transitional justice and international However this war may end, we have won the war criminal tribunals can be constrained, they nonetheless func- against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but tion as means for redressing histories and giving voices to vic- even if someone were to survive, the world will not be- lieve him . we will destroy the evidence together with tims. Arthur and Joan Kleinman have observed that official you. We will be the ones to dictate the history of the silences around suffering contribute to a culture of terror, and Lagers [concentration camps].1 that in such contexts, “public witnessing . forges . an act of political resistance through keeping alive the memory of 5 This threat was practically realized in the case of the Cam- things denied.” bodian genocide, where indifference and silence have domi- On an official level, public processes forge official memory nated. Despite the existence of the Genocide Convention, through the use of testimony, that first-person narration of ’ there was no intervention into the Khmer Rouge s brutal re- suffering which harbors transformative potential. Often asso- ’ gime. Vietnam s invasion (which put an end to the camps) ciated with the courtroom, where one bears witness to the had more to do with tactical maneuvers than commitment to truth of an event in order to bring about justice, the term has human rights; the Khmer Rouge were allied with the Viet- been extended to additional venues and possibilities. Shoshana nam People’s Army of North Vietnam. Delay in due process Felman and Dori Laub have advanced testimony as a speech resulted in impunity for the perpetrators, many of whom act that both facilitates the recovery of an experience and a lived side by side with victims in the years to come. In the af- personal narrative and fosters an ethical community of re- 6 termath the Vietnamese occupiers held some trials, but these sponsibility between speaker and listener. Its political impli- were designed more to impugn the United States and China cations have been elaborated in the Latin American genre than to achieve justice or restore the historical record to the of testimonio where injustice is recorded and expressed in or- Cambodian survivors. Indeed, Cambodia’s UN seat remained der to restore a history that has been denied or buried, as well the purview of the Khmer Rouge for years afterward. as in numerous human rights films which rely on practices 7 It was only in 1997 that Pol Pot received a trial in absentia and tropes of witnessing and bearing witness. In such con- 2 (and not even for genocide) after twenty years of inaction. texts, testimony offers a means of uniting and rebuilding com- Since then, a joint process of the Cambodian government munities, reinforcing their relationship to the past and to their and the UN has brought a handful of the remaining Khmer lands, while trials that include testimony can provide public FILM QUARTERLY 33 Silences and suffering are remediated in The Missing Picture. performances that wrest control over history from the perpe- seemingly forgotten. Fingers manipulate one of the strips, trators and restore it to the victims. as if to try to animate the dancers on the celluloid. A cut to In the absence of such processes, or in conjunction with footage of a dancer—albeit not the one on the strip—points to them, film assumes that testimonial function. The Missing Pic- Panh’s cinematic efforts at recuperation and reconstruction, as ture is based in great part on Rithy Panh’s own experiences as a he acknowledges and integrates the multiple losses of culture, teenager during the genocide, during which he lost his family human life, and all their material traces. and was put to work in a labor camp. This is not a story re- Other strategies bolster the film’s function as storyteller of lated through an easy flashback of voiceover and archival foot- compounded absences and persistent damage. Panh deploys age. It is told more as recollection and struggle—as pursuit of Khmer Rouge propaganda footage in the exposition of a past, a missing image. The voiceover (and the promotional materi- but does not give it authority as the voiceover scans for evi- als) describe this image as a photograph taken by the Khmer dence of the harm not seen, and tells stories of what took place Rouge sometime between 1975 and 1979 that could act as offscreen and behind the camera. For his personal story, there 8 proof of this heinous crime. However, the broader aims seem are few, if any, photographic images. Clay figurines are ar- to be the recollection of all missing images: the Cambodia that ranged in elaborate dioramas that remind the viewer of what once was, the stories of the victim, and the childhood of Panh can no longer be accessed but which must be recreated if its himself. The opening images of the film suggest this to be a story is to be told. These scenes move back and forth between daunting if not insurmountable task as stacks of film canisters, life before the camps and life in the camps, both medium and rusted and piled haphazardly, appear on screen. Film spills out shifting temporalities gesturing to the elusiveness of memory of these and also lies in curled heaps on the floor, dusty and and the necessity of its preservation and transmission. The 34 FALL 2014 Clay figurines recreate events from Panh’s past in The Missing Picture. close of the film returns to the surf, where the voiceover ex- by the same words. “Tospare you is no profit; to destroy you 11 plains that with nothing left of the events, Panh has made this is no loss” reads one popular refrain.

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