MEDIATION AND REMEDIATION: LA PAROLE FILMÉE IN ’S (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 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 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 and 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 .” 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 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 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. Dubious reports and film to hold, and now he gives it to us, the audience. forced false confessions constitute the documentation of the In these ways, The Missing Picture bears witness to and period, and even today, the portraits of prisoners from S-21, combats the multiple erasures of the Khmer Rouge—its kill- the notorious detention center, taken by the guards them- ing of people and their voice. The film functions as testimony, selves, are shown and circulated, a reminder of whose lan- particularly as Panh’s personal experience is positioned within guage reigned, and whose language continues to threaten 12 a collective process. At the same time, through its form, con- to dictate this history. tent, and reflections, it foregrounds the challenges of bearing Given the silence, denial, and surfeit of pernicious docu- witness and more broadly calls attention to the processes of mentation, it is hardly surprising that Panh has described the 13 memory and the construction of history. state of memory in Cambodia as profoundly damaged. The role of voice is crucial. “The Khmer Rouge began,” Nor is it surprising that he has dedicated much of his docu- Panh has explained, “by killing words.” (This is a direct transla- mentary work to the recovery of Cambodian histories and tion from the French, which reads, “Les Khmers Rouges ont com- conditions, often with a focus on that which falls outside the 9 mencé par assassiner les mots”). Religion, foreign languages, domain of official documentation. Panh deploys what he has music, and radio were among the first to be banned under the called la parole filmée, the everyday speech of ordinary peo- 10 regime of Angkar. Fantasy, individualism, and modes of ple, a characteristic observed by both Annette Hamilton and 14 expression beyond those issued by the state were all rendered Deirdre Boyle. At its most basic, this term refers to the tes- illegal. Slogans and propaganda commandeered the descriptive timonies onscreen as well as to Panh’s privileging of subject terrain, veiling the violence that was covertly being encouraged voice and observation over an expository approach.

FILM QUARTERLY 35 Panh’s la parole filmée is a form of speech that privileges the the Ramayana, specifically, Rama’s wife Sita. Captured by a vernacular and the incomplete in order to counter the violent, demon who wants to marry her, Sita refuses, staying true to artificial, and totalizing language (and language systems) of the her husband and thinking only of him. Signing each one 15 Khmer Rouge. This speech is collective and polyphonic in of these letters “as Ly’s Sita,” Bophana adopts fantasy as an opposition to the purity that characterized the cultural dictates expression of devotion. For Panh, it is more: this language of of Angkar. The linguistic underpinnings of the term reverber- romantic (and even religious) devotion becomes a language of ate here, as this parole negotiates the language system, function- resistance. Her speech gives expression to the will, beauty, and ing as a speech act or “performative utterance” that aims to spirit destroyed and silenced by the Khmer Rouge. transform the conditions it describes. These strategies confer This attention to popular speech emerges elsewhere in a testimonial function on Panh’s films, enabling them to con- the film, when painter and former inmate , one front the authorial voices that marginalized and rendered ab- of the handful of survivors of S-21, encounters Him Houy, sent both the people and their experience. At the same time, the former deputy head of security and one of the prison’s cinema’s cultural expression offers a secondary form of resis- executioners. They walk together through the detention tance against a regime that claimed the lives of artists and out- center, now a museum. On the walls hang Nath’s paintings 16 lawed forms of traditional and creative culture. of torture, beatings, children torn from mothers’ arms, and Panh’s earlier Site 2 (1989) offers the most straightforward shackled prisoners. Nath guides Houy to various canvases, interpretation of his parole filmée. In that documentary, Panh and asks for corroboration. At times, Nath points out that returns to the Mairut refugee camp in , where he the scenario depicted is not one that he witnessed, but one to had lived ten years earlier in the aftermath of the war. which someone else bore witness, and which he, Nath, has Through the use of extensive observation and testimony, painted. Not only do these paintings provide Nath’s own ac- focusing particularly on resident Yim Om, Panh shows the counts, but they also offer up the stories of fellow prisoners life of those living in precarity, fearful of being forgotten and recounted during their internment, as well as the stories of never returning to Cambodia. Panivong Norindr argues that friends and strangers recounted after the war, testimonies Panh’s strategy of eschewing voiceover in favor of the voices given, received, and retransmitted. of the refugees is part of a larger project of restitution “of the As they stand before each painting, Nath asks Houy to people rarely heard before and the memory of the dead confirm its veracity. “Did this happen?” he asks, later prod- 17 Cambodians who haunt the nation.” ding, “Then this picture is not a lie?” As Annette Hamilton This project of restitution is made explicit in Bophana: A has observed, “Vann Nath’s palpable desire for confirmation Cambodian Tragedy (1996), in which Panh reconstructs the from Him Houy of the paintings’ fidelity implicitly draws 18 story of Hout Bophana, imprisoned and executed in the no- attention to the lack of photographic or filmic images.” torious Khmer Rouge detention center, S-21. The film begins Nath seeks verification for these paintings, which serve as with the driest of facts: name, age, nationality, and position, a visible record to combat the documentation produced by spoken over the image of a box of documents. Before long, the Khmer Rouge, such as the photographic portraits of the family recollections and Bophana’s own letters take over, prisoners, which also hang on the walls of the same museum. joining and overwhelming the official records as a new por- Through Panh’s film and these dialogues, Nath’s paintings trait is drawn of a woman, her tragic fate, and the painful bear witness to the challenges of accessing a past that has un- losses experienced by all those left behind to testify. dergone a process of erasure whereby restoration comes to Despite the need to turn to Khmer Rouge records for spe- rely in part on perpetrator documentation, a charged neces- cific details, Panh always privileges the vernacular over the of- sity in many historiographical processes. ficial. A photograph of Bophana hangs on the wall of the Tuol Such confrontations with history and mediation continue Sleng Genocide Museum, which stands on the former site of in S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), perhaps S-21. She is one of the many whose photographs were taken Panh’s best known film to date, in which former prisoners by their captors as a part of their record-keeping. Ultimately, and their guards engage with one another and the past however, it is her letters and her fantasies that can grant access through reenactments staged at the site for the camera. to the woman. These letters, read aloud on the soundtrack, As a body of work, these films function as testimony to the chronicle not only Bophana’s suffering, but also her fantasies, truth of the and to the conditions pre- which became mechanisms of self-preservation as well as cipitated and yet veiled by the Khmer Rouge. In their process, articulations of her profound love for her husband, Ly Sitha. they favor the vernacular and the dialogic, the performative Writing to him, Bophana imagined herself a character from and the multiply mediated. As such, the films call attention to

36 FALL 2014 and reflect on the social interactions and negotiations de- the traumatic, since, as she writes, “empirically based realist manded in the rebuilding of a nation and in the recovery of historiography may not . . . take into sufficient account the 24 a past. vicissitudes of historical representation and memory.” The Panh’s films develop their own distinctive testimonial voice. clay figures embody two challenges of representation: the one This parole negotiates Bill Nichols’s “discourses of sobriety,” that occurs when the magnitude of history (and its horrors) those official languages that “regard their relationship to the defies contained expression and the one that addresses a real as direct, immediate, and transparent” and through which still-current experience of trauma that requires integration “power exerts itself . . . [for in the] ‘traditional essay or docu- into a personal narrative. Panh rejects documentary natural- mentary . . . the authorial ‘i’ speaks to and on behalf of a ism as a style that requires the posture of complete revelation 19 universalized collectivity.” However, Panh’s idiom incorpo- and the production of a spectacle that risks producing a more rates and counters the totalizing systems of the Khmer Rouge, complacent viewer. Such a viewer would enjoy the certitude and as such engages the shared “I” of testimonials that Nichols of knowledge and emotional satisfaction, rather than experi- describes elsewhere as embodying “social affinities and collec- ence the distance and difficulties embedded in a project of 25 tives . . . acutely aware of hegemonic discourse and social reclamation that is more process than statement. difference, historical conjecture, material practice, and mar- Figurines are not The Missing Picture’s only method for 20 ginality.” Moreover, as his practice locates the vernacular voi- conveying this expression of history and trauma’s magnitude. ces of Cambodia, it actively remaps the landscape and its The less than linear narrative structure of the film enacts the people through the production of discursive space that is dia- ways in which trauma itself is not readily managed or con- logic and polyphonic, engaging interaction much like the tained. Sometimes the recollection is orderly, while at other ground wars described in Patricia R. Zimmermann’s States of times memory upon memory rush in, overwhelming the 21 Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies. story of loss. Meanwhile, the use of actor Randal Douc to de- This testimonial function is intensified and amplified in liver the voiceover as first-person testimony forces a gap at his new, highly personal film, The Missing Picture, in which the aural register: this is Panh’s story, and his voice, but not Panh bears witness to his own experience of the genocide his voiceover. Such strategies intervene to refute common and the labor camps. Once again, he advances an alternative claims of complete and unfettered access to a traumatic expe- idiom to represent both the past and the challenges of its re- rience, and more generally, the past. presentation. His testimonial parole interrogates the claims of Such deployment of fantasy and experimentation resists those who have dictated the past and presents individual ex- the representational regime of the Khmer Rouge, whose real- perience that resonates with collective concerns and histories. ist representations and discourses of sobriety abetted the wide- It is impossible to talk about The Missing Picture without spread destruction of a people and their culture. As these two discussing its clay figurines. Crafted from the sediment of are placed in relation to one another, they emphasize the Cambodia, they are multiply evocative. They come from the chasm between the personal recollections and experiences of earth of a place that holds the bones of the lost and from a people, reclaimed in the wake of the systems of representa- which many of the survivors were exiled, living in Thai ref- tion that sought to eliminate them. ugee camps such as those chronicled in Site 2. Their connec- At times, film, as a medium of record, becomes suspect. tions with childhood are almost self-evident, for that is the Both in the aforementioned opening shots and in interstitial time when dolls are used to tell a story. Their material com- video, stacks of film cans in varying states of decay and de- position furthers this link. “When we were young,” Panh composition are visible, encrusted with detritus. These literal- told The Voice of America, “we went to the river and we got ize the status of the missing pictures, pictures that may have some clay and we produced animal figurines and tried to tell once existed, but now persist only in fragments, faded links to 22 a story with that.” For Panh, the medium is significant: his the world they once represented. It is not always made clear choice of clay is not random. what footage lies in these canisters. In some cases, it might These figures also embody the trauma that resounds for suggest those fragments of a Cambodia before the war, clips Panh individually and for the community he has represented of 1960s pop jouissance or traditional Apsara dance. Embed- in so many of his films. Their use evokes Janet Walker’s the- ded in colorful dioramas, recalling a musical older brother or ory of the traumatic paradox, which suggests that the truth of a filmmaker whose studio the young Panh graced, these re- the psychic trauma is manifested through an antirealist mode covered strips of film express profound loss. They cannot be 23 that is “striated with fantasy constructions.” The potential as colorful or as “complete” as the figurines Panh arranges for a departure from the realist and the sober extends beyond around them.

FILM QUARTERLY 37 The clay figures searching through strips of film embody two challenges of representation in The Missing Picture.

Such juxtapositions as well as the physical deterioration of purpose behind the film comes to the fore. At another point, this the photographic image begin to level a presumed hierarchy footage is shown in its full materiality, as filmstrips examined by of a representational regime. Whether as point of resistance or the narrator. The voiceover notes, “Pol Pot forges a reality con- lament, these sequences reveal the limited authority and formant with his desire.” The voice takes over the position of power of the photograph. Although Panh cannot find the authority, reminding the viewer that the photographic image is photo he seeks—the evidence produced by the Khmer not neutral: it can be an instrument of destruction and perni- Rouge—this is not because there is no Khmer Rouge foot- cious fantasy. The manifest contamination of these “sober” age available. The propaganda exists still, and is incorporated forms ensures that the alternative testimonial idioms, Panh’s pa- in the film, although Panh troubles any claims of truthful role, will not be dismissed as insufficient. representation affixed to the medium’s indexicality with a Innovative and profoundly moving, these aesthetic strate- voiceover that interrogates the evidentiary status of the propa- gies for bearing witness to a horrifying history both hew to ganda footage, noting in one sequence that the cameras fail to and exceed the conventional wisdom of Holocaust and capture the hunger and pain of the workers. Also hidden are trauma scholarship. The best of those works frequently up- the staging of events and the tragic histories of cinematogra- hold an aesthetic of the fragmented, discontinuous, oblique, phers who failed to produce the perfect picture. or fantastical—tactics that embody the effects of the trauma “A Khmer Rouge film is always a slogan,” the voiceover as well as the historical shock of the horrific event, both of 26 states as a clay cameraman crouches with his camera as footage which precipitate a crisis in witnessing. The informal pro- of the camps plays behind him. The effect is one of simultaneous hibition of images arises not only from the demand to recog- concealment and revelation. The clay figure blocks out part of nize the magnitude of the horror—one that defies ready this documentary record, but is equally restored as the human containment—but from a belief that a coherent representation

38 FALL 2014 would confer legibility, transmissibility, and logic on the event with meaning and gestures toward compounding mediations. (and the fantasies of the perpetrator). Such reasoning lay As such, it suggests the magnitude of a history that leaves its behind Claude Lanzmann’s refusal of archival images in Shoah traces on the image, as well as to the overdetermined nature (1985), which addresses the resonance of the past on the present of the image itself. 27 while keeping the past obscene. At another point in the film, the voiceover recalls the rice Panh, however, explicitly embraces the value of images farming within the labor camps as a clip from LesGensdela and the demand for their creation. This is hardly surprising rizière (The , 1994) graces the screen. One of Panh’s given the dearth of representation and recognition the case of forays into fiction, this is a neorealist drama of a family, whose the Cambodian genocide faces. One might find a parallel in matriarch takes her name from Yim Om, the star subject of Atom Egoyan and his relationship to the Armenian genocide, Site 2. The family attempts to cultivate rice, but meets with which, although widely reported at the time, suffers today challenge upon challenge, all leading to tragedy. Although from political and social amnesia. According to Marie-Aude not explicitly about the genocide, the preoccupation with rice Baronian, this absence has inspired him to recreate as many speaks both to the Khmer Rouge’s agricultural devastation 28 images as possible. Such is certainly the case with Panh, who (the famine they brought about when they minimized the has dedicated his filmmaking to the topic of the Cambodian varieties of rice grown) and to the Cambodians’ own discon- genocide, and who has established the Bophana audiovisual nection from their land. They were exiled in the immediate center that collects archival materials and trains young cine- aftermath and the period of Angkar forced a loss of traditional astes, all in the service of reconstituting national memory and practices. As the film (and its attending promotion recalled), 29 culture. when asked where rice comes from, the Cambodian children This commitment to the visual and the role of mediation in refugee camps answered, “from UN lorries.” manifests in The Missing Picture in the form of a robust and Where no image of an experience exists, Panh uses some- yet ironically invisible (or unremarked upon) intertextuality thing available (or imagined) and thus gestures to the gaps as Panh incorporates references to or audiovisual elements of produced through traumatic experience and a compromised his other films. This tactic deepens his autobiographical ele- historiography. And in this case, by using images from a con- ments even as it enhances the work of testimony that aims to temporary fiction set after the genocide to tell the story of the use personal narration to address the wider historical injustice genocide, the sequence fuses past, present, and future, gestur- and experience of the collective. At all times, his cinematic ing to the resonance of trauma across time and to the dynamic quotations enhance the reflections on what it means to medi- processes of rebuilding and remediating history. ate a history that has been missing for so long. The persistence of this history and its effect on the present At one point, Bophana appears as an oblique reference is invoked in another cinematic quotation. Onscreen, a row of when the camera lingers on an S-21 portrait as a voiceover men dig at the side of the road as the voiceover remarks on the declares that we can know little of the woman. In some continued injustice and poverty in Cambodia. Although it fits ways, this is true: this photographic portrait is one of many the narration well, this clip actually is taken from La terre des taken in S-21; it is the document of a perpetrator, which, âmes errantes (The Land of Wandering Souls, 2000). Set in when combined with their others, tells us little about this present-day Cambodia, the film explores the hardships faced woman save for what serves the Khmer Rouge narrative. by those who dig trenches to lay fiber optic cable—a commu- However, the choice of this particular woman gestures to nications technology that will link Cambodia to the rest of the Panh’s earlier film, and even to other works. Elizabeth world. Although part of a media technology, these are the peo- Becker initially published Bophana’s story after recovering ple rendered invisible, marginalized completely. However, her files from the interrogation center—files that included in Panh’s film, their resourcefulness and their strength are Bophana’s own letters and stories. It was this book that in- brought to the fore. But soon it becomes clear that the lives of spired Panh to make his film, which now plays daily in the workers are not the only things that are hidden. As they dig 30 museum that stands on the notorious torture site. And it is the trench, the workers excavate a killing field, unleashing dis- this woman who gives the Cambodian film archive and cussions of the past, and for some, the actual souls of the dead. training center its name. That Bophana has been referred to The haunting of the present takes on both material and super- as the “Anne Frank of Cambodia” heightens this radical natural dimensions. Much as in Panh’s earlier The Rice People, mediation, as she is now herself constructed by another me- the past returns to both disrupt and cast into relief the troubled diation (a diary), which has itself been multiply mediated. As relationship of Cambodians to their land, undergirding this deployed in The Missing Picture, Bophana’s image resonates rupture from the past that reverberates in the present. The

FILM QUARTERLY 39 stories of these individuals are never far from the stories of future, this embedding suggests the complicated processes of their nation, its people, and its past. reconstituting and rebuilding the narrative. Each fragment This shot of laborers holds an overabundance of significa- gestures to multiple possible stories and trajectories, of indi- tions in The Missing Picture. It refers explicitly to the injustice viduals and collectives; each fragment gestures to the magni- of poverty and the struggles of present-day Cambodians. It is tude of history that exceeds ready containment in any form. suggestive of the clay earth, excavated for the figurines that And each, in its remediation, performs the work of reaching animate Panh’s past, the lost and hidden history. As a quota- back, in which one both struggles to retrieve the lost and to tion, it references a literal excavation of the dead—a project reinvest both the past and the present with new meaning. enmeshed with media technologies. And it reminds the au- dience how the larger past returns unbidden, much like Panh’s childhood, which, as the voiceover explained at the Notes beginning of the film, returns. (“In the middle of life, child- 1. Cited in Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: hood returns.”) Vintage Reprint 1989), 10–11. The credit sequence of The Missing Picture includes foot- 2. Sydney Schanberg, “Cambodia,” in Crimes of War: What the age of the crew (and Panh) preparing the dioramas, but this Public Should Know, ed. Roy Gutman and David Rieff (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1999), 58–65. is not the only backstage moment. At another point, there is 3. Thomas Fuller and Julia Wallace, “Decades after Khmer a shot of Panh holding a camera, filming Vann Nath and an- Rouge’s Rule, 2 Senior Leaders Are Convicted in Cambodia,” other man as they pore over documents of the past. This New York Times, August 6, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/08/ scene is not new to this documentary, however: it originates 08/world/asia/decades-after-khmer-rouges-rule-2-senior- in another, most likely S-21, and its appearance here explic- leaders-are-convicted-in-cambodia.html?_r=0. 4 “ ” itly embodies the parole filmée, the exchanges and encounters . Schanberg, Cambodia. 5. Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman, “The Appeal of Ex- filmed to produce histories that can contest those of the re- perience; The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of cord. Here, the testimonial exchanges come together, turn- Suffering in Our Times,” in Social Suffering, ed. Arthur ing in on and reflecting one another. The film has offered Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret M. Lock (Berkeley: up Panh’s testimony delivered by proxy: Randal Douc’s University of California Press, 1997), 17. voiceover, clay figurines, and clips from Panh’s other films 6. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witness- (which incorporate their own testimonial encounters). The ing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (London: Routledge, 1992), 204. credit sequence provides glimpses backstage into the pro- 7. Leshu Torchin, Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide duction of this film, and notably, the production of another on Film, Video, and the Internet (Minneapolis and London: film—albeit one not necessarily excerpted for The Missing University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 5–6. Picture. It gestures to the production of all the testimonial en- 8. For instance, see “The Missing Picture,” Films Distribution, counters that have been part of Panh’s oeuvre. This choice www.filmsdistribution.com/Film.aspx?ID=2058. 9 “ ” does not appear to be reflexive, nor engaging a postmodern . Rithy Panh, La Parole Filmée: Pour vaincre la terreur, Communications 17 (2001): 385. relativism. Rather it positions all these projects as deeply en- 10. Angkar was the Communist Party of Kampuchea that led meshed. The individual testimony is part of a collective testi- the Khmer Rouge. mony: Panh’s personal history imbued these projects, just as 11. Schanberg, “Cambodia.” these projects now form a part of Panh’s autobiographical 12. The Photo Archive Group printed twenty portraits from account. The parole filmée is more than the filmed speech of the negatives found in S-21 and these were exhibited in everyday people: it is Panh’s own speech as rendered through a range of venues, including the New York Museum of Modern Art. With little information provided alongside film, this one and all his others. the images, the perpetrator gaze was both privileged and The performance of mediation and remediation points to veiled, leaving the photos and faces as screens on which the magnitude of history, where there are so many stories that visitors and reviewers projected their interpretations, little need to be told. Through the quotations, the film presents the of which incorporated Cambodian testimony. Reviewer sedimented layers of Cambodian history that have been able Michael Kimmelman chose a distinctly Christian frame- “ to retain their polyphony and polysemy in the face of the to- work for reading: The wrenching detail is the number safety-pinned straight into his bare chest: he is like St. talizing narratives of the Khmer Rouge and the forced era- Sebastian” (“Poignant Faces of the Soon-to-be Dead,” sures brought on by the genocide and its aftermath. Rather New York Times, June 20, 1997,C1). Lindsay French has than impose a narrative of history that organizes experiences written about this exhibition in “Exhibiting Terror” in and events in a meaningful trajectory of past, present, and Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights, ed. Mark

40 FALL 2014 Bradley and Patrice Petro (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Uni- 24. Ibid., 806. versity Press, 2002), 131–55. 25. Panh, “La Parole Filmée,” 377. 13. Panh, “La Parole Filmée,” 373. 26. For instance, see Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Schindler’s List Is 14. Ibid., 374; see also Deirdre Boyle, “Trauma, Memory, Documen- Not Shoah: Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, tary: Re-enactment in Two Films by Rithy Panh (Cambodia) and Public Memory,” in Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspec- and Garin Nugroho (Indonesia),” in Documentary Testimo- tives on Schindler’s List, ed. Yosefa Loshitzky (Bloomington nies: Archives of Suffering, ed. Janet Walker and Bhaskar and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 77–103; Sarkar (New York: Routledge, 2010), 155–72; Annette Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimony: The Ruins of Mem- Hamilton, “Cambodian Genocide: Ethics and Aesthetics in ory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Michael the Cinema of Rithy Panh,” in Holocaust Intersections: Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium, ed. Representation (London and Minneapolis: University of Axel Bangert, Robert S.C. Gordon, and Libby Saxton Minnesota Press, 2000). (Leeds, UK and Philadelphia, PA: Maney 2013), 175. 27. Claude Lanzmann, “The Obscenity of Understanding: An 15. See also Hamilton, “Cambodian Genocide,” 175. Evening with Claude Lanzmann,” in Trauma: Explorations in 16. SamSam-Ang, “Preserving a Cultural Tradition: Ten Years Memory, ed. and intro. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore and London: after the Khmer Rouge,” Cultural Survival Quarterly 14, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 200–20. Similar rea- no. 3 (Fall 1990), www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/ soning informs projects not as austere as Lanzmann’s. Such is cultural-survival-quarterly/143-fall-1990-cambodia. the case with Silence (Sylvie Bringas and Orly Yadin, 2000), the 17. Panivong Norindr, “The Sounds of Everyday Life in Rithy testimony of a young girl’s experience in the Theresienstadt Panh’s Documentaries,” French Forum 35, nos. 2–3 (Spring/ concentration camp and her subsequent upbringing where she Fall 2010): 184. was told to forget her past. Here animation not only aims to 18. Hamilton, “Cambodian Genocide,” 183. forge identification with a child’s experience of the Holocaust, 19. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Indianapolis and but also its shifting and unstable imagery provides a subjective Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 3. dimension, communicating a trauma not yet shared. These 20. Bill Nichols, “The Ethnographer’s Tale,” in Visualizing The- creative imaginings provide means for expressing the psychic ory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994, ed. Lucien Taylor and material inaccessibility of the event, and for the silences (New York: Routledge, 1994), 76. that followed. Panh’s experimentation furthers these tradi- 21. Patricia R. Zimmermann, States of Emergency: Documentaries, tions. See Orly Yadin, “But Is It Documentary?” in Holocaust Wars, Democracies (London and Minneapolis: University of and the Moving Image, ed. Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman Minnesota Press, 2000). (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2005), 168–72. 22. Sarah Williams, “Cambodian Oscar Contender Aims to 28. Marie-Aude Baronian, Cinéma et mémoire. Sur Atom Egoyan Convey History Lesson,” Voice of America, January 31, 2014, (Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique and Liège: L’aurore, www.voanews.com/content/cambodian-oscar-contender- 2012), e-book. aims-to-convey-history-lesson/1842089.html. 29. , , Cambodia, http://bophana.org/. 23. Janet Walker, “The Traumatic Paradox: Documentary Films, 30. Elizabeth Becker, “Minor Characters,” New York Times, Historical Fictions, and Cataclysmic Past Events,” Signs 22, August 28, 2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/books/review/ no. 4 (Summer 1997): 803–25. 28BECKERL.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

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