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Escape from the Killing Machine
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Four decades after the Khmer Rouge took and terrorised Cambodia, Rithy Panh has told the story, his own story, of the boy who survived it all. In doing so, he has made perhaps his most powerful and idiosyncratic film yet.
by lary wallace / photo by Šcorbis / profile
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ust minutes from here is where the bodies were buried. It’s where they were buried until the Khmer Rouge ran out of room in the ground for burying them, and then they were taken to a place just south of here, and buried there. The burying stopped but the torture continued. And the bodies remain. Rithy Panh was among those tortured, but he was not among those buried. Much of the rest of his family was. Today, from the offices of Bophana, Panh’s filmheritage-preservation center, you can get in a taxi and within minutes be at the site of S-21, which for the larger part of four years — 1975-1979 — was perhaps the most feared destination for any Cambodian (and even some non-Cambodians) not favored by Pol Pot’s regime. Now they call it the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, and you can witness there the instruments of torture that were used on all the families like Panh’s. You can witness the filthy, claustrophobic cells, and the grim blackand-white portraits of prisoners — many of them, like Panh himself at the time, just children — that were taken upon detainment. Most hauntingly of all, you can witness the skulls stacked behind glass in a huge cabinet, several rows high, row upon lengthy row of nothing but skulls, an astonishing testament to the grim possibilities of human hideousness. They say 17,000 prisoners passed through here before the horrors finally ceased; the skulls in this cabinet represent only a sliver of those, even as they manage to represent all of them.
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It’s a crime you can’t put into numbers, but you can put it into words. Panh has put it into words, in his memoir The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts His Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields (2012). When he confronts the commandant, a high-ranking jailer named Duch, he asks if he experiences nightmares “from having authorised electrocutions, beatings with cords, the thrusting of needles under fingernails; from having made people eat excrement; from having recorded confessions that were lies; from having given orders to slit the throats of men and women lined up blindfolded at the edge of a ditch and deafened by a roaring generator.” (Duchy, for his part, answers flatly and in the negative.) So it can be put it into words, this crime, but it can no longer be put into pictures. The time for that has passed. Many pictures were taken, by an official cinematographer who was later inexplicably tortured and killed. Other pictures were lost, or destroyed, or, more often, never taken at all. That’s where Panh got the title for his most recent movie, a documentary called The Missing Picture, nominated this year for the Best Foreign Film Oscar and honoured at Cannes with the top prize among the Un Certain Regard selections. In the film, Panh actively engages and challenges what must be the single most vexing conundrum for the filmmaker in his particular position: how do you make a documentary about events for which so little documentary evidence is available? And he’s answered the riddle by
Rithy Panh was among those tortured, but he was not among those buried. Much of the rest of his family was.
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To properly chronicle the horrors inflicted by the Khmer Rouge requires an iron constitution. transcending the very limits of photography itself, with the kind of profound ingenuity that emerges from only the most desperate circumstances. here is a gravity to him. Of course there is. But there is also a levity, a big-bellied buoyancy of spirit touched with enthusiasm and humor. Meeting him, it’s easy to forget this is a person who was 11 when his family was rounded up and imprisoned — who watched his father take his literal last breath after vowing, “I’m not eating anything that doesn’t resemble food fit for human beings,” and who watched his older sister die, too, and then his mother, and then his nephews. It’s easy to forget this is someone who wrote, in The Elimination, of this trauma “manifest[ing] itself as unending desolation; as ineradicable images, gestures no longer possible, silences that pursue me.” To properly chronicle the horrors inflicted by the Khmer Rouge requires an iron constitution and an encyclopedic understanding of what was endured there. Rithy Panh has both, and so he’s been able to chronicle it, not just in The Missing Picture but in a handful of other films. Until The Missing Picture, the most notable of these were Bophana (1996) and S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), the latter a documentary in which he confronts the former torturers of Tuol Sleng (and which serves as a kind of companion piece to The Elimination). “In film, I don’t usually tell my own story,” he says. “It’s
the first time I’ve made a film like this. There are two missing pictures. One picture is the missing photography of this time. The other is of my own family. I would like to see my grandfather, for example. It’s important to talk about what people knew at the time, because the young people want to know what happened. You can see the young people come and say thank you.” He doesn’t want to be known as “the genocide director.” He’s made plenty of films, fiction and nonfiction alike, about plenty of other subjects, and he will make more. He knows he can’t let the Khmer Rouge consume his life. To do so would be to concede defeat, to wear his history like a suit of clothes, becoming the person many expect him to be, the person many still living would like to see him become. “You can live, you can smile, you can love,” he says. “That is surviving. That is how you fight back. Not to be depressed and make everything about the Khmer Rouge. I make pictures on many things, but when it’s necessary….” he Missing Picture may just change the way documentaries are made. That sounds like a foolish forecast, and maybe it is, but when you watch the movie and admire the elegance of its central technical solution, you can’t help but hope — and believe — that documentarians everywhere will employ a similar strategy: letting clay figurines (or something similar) stand in for the places in the story where footage is unavailable. Panh says the idea to do his movie
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this way came to him more or less by happenstance, when he asked a member of his staff to show him how certain scenes from the period would look constructed of clay. Then the idea occurred to him, and that’s how it began. There is very little precedent for this kind of thing. The most literal precedent would be a movie of entirely different tone and subject (a movie that is, in fact, for copyright reasons, no longer even in circulation): Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), in which Todd Haynes had Barbie dolls act out scenes in place of human beings. A much less literal and less obvious comparison can be made to Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, about the Jewish Holocaust (1991). Although not even a film at all, it too is a personal retelling of genocide that replaces humans with a toy-like conceit. Where Panh uses clay figurines, Spiegelman uses cartoon mice, but the effect is very much the same. It’s a counterintuitive move, risky in the extreme. The danger is that such a conceit will only neutralise the material — or, even worse, actually ridicule and trivialise it. But in The Missing Picture, as in Maus, what happens is the opposite. What happens is, the cartoonish quality somehow enhances the reality, and hence the tragedy. For one thing, the clay figurines don’t stand alone. They share the movie with actual documentary footage; sometimes, they even share a frame with such footage, one superimposed on the other. This can have a haunting effect, that of innocence trampled by reality. Sometimes the effect is more subtle
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but just as haunting, deriving from the mood the toy-like constructions summon from the photography, making it ominously present and actual in a way it never could be standing alone. Panh, for his own part, fancies the symbolic significance of clay coming from the earth and, just like humans, returning to the earth, each of them returning to the same place. It’s a dynamic he understands intimately, having personally buried his share of the 2 million bodies wasted by Pol Pot’s regime. It’s no accident, then — and a matter of no little poignancy — that one of the concluding sequences of The Missing Picture is a montage of these clay prisoners, one after another, being laid to rest beneath shoveled clumps of dirt. n the bookshelf behind Panh’s desk are two figurines made for the movie but whose sequence, finally, was never filmed. It was to feature a young man bringing a bucket of bran to a pig who eats almost as well as himself, his meager proportions of rice not even enough to properly sustain him. The young man would like to eat the pig, and the pig, we can be sure, would like to eat the young man. But neither can eat the other, and they are both being eaten alive by the Khmer Rouge killing machine. Rithy Panh escaped from the killing machine, essentially by outlasting it. Once the Khmer Rouge fell, he fled to Thailand, but that came with some troubles. The Thai military kept rounding up him and others like him and
The cartoonish quality somehow enhances the reality, and hence the tragedy.
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returning them to the Khmer Rouge. Today, Panh has a fondness for Thailand and visits often, but back then his experience, as he remembers it, was quite different: “I did not understand why the Thai government would take us back to the Khmer Rouge, but when they arrested us they would steal everything they could find. They took gold. They looked everywhere, for money, for gold. It’s terrible, terrible.” This happened three times. The final time, Panh said to his captors, “If you want to send us back to the Khmer Rouge, kill us.” They put them in a pagoda in the middle of the jungle, and it was there that they were discovered by a journalist and reported to the Red Cross. At a refugee camp in Mai Rut, they were fed and given medical care. Because of familyreunification laws, Panh and his one living sister were allowed to move to France, where two of their brothers had gone to study just before the Khmer Rouge came through Cambodia. Panh studied there too. He was at last safe from the Khmer Rouge, but he would never be safe from his own memories. “The world was wobbling,” he writes in his memoir of this time. “I nearly suffocated in the plane. I fell several times while walking in the street. In Paris, I avoided the subways and buses. I’d stare at the crowds of people and tremble. Where were they all going? And where had they come from? The slightest noise would make me jump. I held on to metal, to tiling, to wood, to my relatives, to my books, to paper; I held on to the night.” At first he took up drawing and woodworking, but those “were pushing me into silence.” Film is different — film “shows
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the world, presents beauty, and also deals in words.” Painting was an art that kept costing him money, but once he had that first Super 8 camera, he could just let it run and run and be no poorer than when he started running it. All he needed to feed it was film, and the film always lasted. s he sits in his office telling you about all this, relaxed and sweet-tempered, you’d never guess this is a place where the killing machine visits him still — a place where, as he’s written, “Images come,” and where “I chase after them. During the day, under the fan in my office, I unfold a cot and fall onto it. That way I don’t have to fear vertigo. I’m not tempted to put an end to it.” Those four years “are neither dream nor nightmare, even though I still have plenty of nightmares. Let’s call it a complicated chapter in my life. And one which I’ll never forgive. For me, forgiveness is something very private.” “We are not talking about a little crime,” he says. “We are talking about genocide. It’s like you’ve died already and [been] born again, but you’re born with this death inside of you. You cannot really forget it. So we try to deal with that. We try to live with that. I don’t want young people to [have to] ask me what happened to their grandparents.” That’s why Panh has made the films about the Khmer Rouge he’s made, and why he maintains the film-preservation centre here at Bophana. Not because he’s intent on casting himself as victim, but because he knows that witness has to
Panh fancies the symbolic significance of clay coming from the earth and, just like humans, returning to the earth.
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By purposely going after the brightest among its citizens, the Khmer Rouge wiped out so much of Cambodia's culture.
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be paid, and an understanding of what went on has to be reached. “What I’m looking for is comprehension,” he wrote in a note to himself while filming S-21; “I want to understand the nature of the crime, not to establish a cult of memory. I want to avert repetition.” By purposely going after the brightest among its citizens, the Khmer Rouge wiped out so much of Cambodia’s culture, in both its actual and potential forms. No one knows the exact cost, and no one ever will. When Panh takes me around the centre, which occupies both stories of a large open-air building on a side street in Phnom Penh, he shows me a theatre on the first floor full of young children. They watch cartoons here, and educational films, and any other kind of film that’s deemed appropriate. This is where they come to learn about themselves, because, as Panh likes to say, you don’t know who you are if you don’t know where you came from. “A lot of them,” he tells me, smiling with pride, “this is the first time they’ve ever seen a movie on a big screen.” He wants them to know what movies look like writ large, and he wants them to know, too, what it is to make them with painstaking care. On display throughout the first and second floors of Bophana — in addition to model sets from TheMissingPicture — are vintage cameras and editing tools, clunky relics from an age before filmmaking became automated in so many of its facets. “We have a new generation of filmmakers that are very dynamic,” he says. “They use good film and go around the world.” That said, “The young generation does not know how we made films before.”
Of course the knowledge he imparts extends well beyond calls to caution and gratitude, into technique and how to coax the most from your art. “When I teach, I tell students, ‘You don’t make films with people; you make films aboutpeople.’ When you make films about people, it takes time. It takes time to be with them and understand, to share ideas. It takes time. And you’ll get out of the experience much richer, with a stronger sense of humanity. That’s why I like documentary films.” Panh wants to make, next, a filmabouttheeraofcolonialism — about how it hasn’t really ended in Cambodia, that old divide between rich and poor not just remaining but actually increasing. “I’d much rather be making musical comedies,” he says. “They’re more fun. But this is a part of my life, and I have to deal with it.” I ask him about the response he’s received from The Missing Picture — specifically, from those who also survived the events depicted. “They are very touched,” he says, “very sincerely touched…. They are very proud of the film. Obviously it’s a sad story, a very tragic subject, but when you are able to face such a story, you become stronger in the end. And that’s what they felt.” It was a big gamble, telling this story in clay, because it was not just an artistic gamble; it was a moral gamble too. But it was a gamble that paid out and whose validity has been acknowledged and appreciated by the only constituency whose opinion on this matter really counts. After time and destruction have rendered these atrocities almost literally surreal, Rithy Panh has dug into the earth and managed to make them real all over again.