Ferryman of Memories

The Films of Rithy Panh

DEIRDRE BOYLE

“I do not know another film director today with a more complete understanding of human experience—of its precariousness and pain as well as its deepest joys. Rithy Panh presents the harshest of realities in a way that dwells on beauty, sensuality, and light. He paints with the lightest of touches, using music, pacing, and timing with the precision, emotion, and unity of an orchestra. Ferryman of Memories is a welcome introduction to his unique work.”

—Angelina Jolie, actress, filmmaker, and humanitarian

“Through her deep engagement with Rithy Panh and his films, Boyle offers us a timely reminder of Cambodia’s difficult history, of superpower complicity, and how the impact of the Khmer Rouge’s short brutal reign continues to mark Cambodian people today.”

—Annie Goldson, professor and officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit at the University of Auckland

“Like Claude Lanzmann regarding the Shoah, no other film director than Rithy Panh has managed to make visible, audible, and imaginable the uncanny world of the Khmer Rouge that brought Cambodia into hell. Seeing in Panh a modern Charon who transports human souls to the other side, Deirdre Boyle guides us through a disturbing journey where suffering and trauma, but also grieving and redemption, are pervasive.”

—Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, professor of visual culture and author of The Death in Their Eyes

Ferryman of Memories: The Films of Rithy Panh is an unconventional book about an unconventional filmmaker. Rithy Panh survived the Cambodian genocide and found refuge in France where he discovered in film a language that allowed him to tell what happened to the two million souls who suffered hunger, overwork, disease, and death at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. His innovative cinema is made with people, not about them—even those guilty of crimes against humanity. Whether he is directing Isabelle Huppert in The Sea Wall, following laborers digging trenches, or interrogating the infamous director of S-21 prison, aesthetics and ethics inform all he does. With remarkable access to the director and his work, Deirdre Boyle introduces readers to Panh’s groundbreaking approach to perpetrator cinema and dazzling critique of colonialism, globalization, and the refugee crisis. Ferryman of Memories reveals the art of one of the masters of world cinema today, focusing on nineteen of his awardwinning films, including Rice People, The Land of Wandering Souls, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, and The Missing Picture

DEIRDRE BOYLE is professor emerita of media studies at The New School in New York where she directed the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies. She is a writer, media historian, and psychotherapist. Her books include Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited, among others. She has received Guggenheim and Asian Cultural Council fellowships.

228 pp 39 color and 3 b/w images

6.125 x 9.25

978-1-9788-1464-6 cloth $34.95T

March 2023

Film • Human Rights

“Deirdre Boyle’s training as both media historian and psychotherapist provides a major resonance in this outstanding book on one of current cinema’s best directors, Rithy Panh. Moving between personal memoir and film analysis, Boyle sweeps the reader into the Cambodian genocide as an extraordinary chapter in twentieth-century history.”

—Raya Morag, author of Perpetrator

Cinema: Confronting Genocide in Cambodian Documentary

Table of Contents

Preface

Prologue

1 Uncle Rithy and the Cambodian Tragedy

2 The Return: Discovering the Gaze

3 The Khmer Rouge: Three Years, Eight Months, Twenty-One Days

4 Perpetrators and Survivors: The S-21 Trilogy

Interlude: Dark Tourism

5 After the Wars: Fiction and Nonfiction

6 Colonialism: France and Cambodia

7 Remembering the Past, Mourning the Dead Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Appendix 1. “Confronting Images of Ideology: An Interview with Rithy Panh by Deirdre Boyle”

Appendix 2. “On a Morality of Filming: A Conversation between Rithy Panh and Deirdre Boyle”

Notes

Films and Books by Rithy Panh

Index

GENDER,

CREATIVE LABOR & 1970S AMERICAN CINEMA