Archive and Repertoire in Cambodian Genocide Film
Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields, shot in Thailand in 1984, is possibly the first movie to use reenactment as a means of articulating the archive and the repertoire. Based on the article “The Death and Life of Dith Pran” by journalist Sydney Schanberg, published in The New York Times Sunday Review on 20 January 1980, the film recounts the ordeal of Schanberg’s Cambodian assistant Dith Pran in Democratic Kampuchea.4 As the first director to make a commercial movie about the Cambodian genocide, Joffe understood the importance of giving an accurate account of the events.5 Therefore, he carefully researched the material available at the time, including press coverage, refugee testimonies, reports by U.S.
State Department experts, and photographic records by foreign journalists of the arrival of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975.6 Thanks to this archive, Joffe’s rendering of the fall of the city is particularly effective. The movie does not only reproduce the photos; but it also shows this journalistic archive in the making, as some sequences focus on foreign photographers such as Al Rockoff (played by John Malkovich) documenting the marching of Khmer Rouge guerrillas into Phnom Penh. However, Joffe was soon confronted with a “black hole.” After the Khmer Rouge regime sealed off Cambodia, very few outsiders could access the country, and those who did were mostly Maoist supporters from the West. As a result, there is no documentation of daily life in Democratic Kampuchea apart from the propaganda material produced by the Khmer Rouge regime itself and its friends.Thirty years later, Angelina Jolie encountered the same problem in her adaptation of child survivor Loung Ung’s memoirs, First They Killed My FatherJ In this case, too, the fall of Phnom Penh (although less of a “grand spectacle” than Joffe’s) is rendered accurately.
The first vehicle shown roaming the streets of Phnom Penh, for example, is driven by people from MONATIO (National Movement), a political faction that was willing to negotiate with the Khmer Rouge.8 The images of the men sitting on the top of the armored vehicle, cheering the crowd, and waving their red and blue flags replicate the pictures taken by journalist Sven-Erik Sjoberg in Phnom Penh in 1975. Obviously, both The Killing Fields and First They Killed My Father had to use Khmer Rouge propaganda material to create a depiction of living conditions in Cambodia, whether for the building of dams, the work in rice fields, or the political “education” sessions in labor camps and villages. This raises the question of how to represent everyday life in Democratic Kampuchea without reproducing the aesthetics and viewpoint of the perpetrator. For both directors, it is through the repertoire—that is, the stories and bodily memory—of survivors that this problematic archive can be countered and subverted.Bodily memory plays a central role in the cinema of Cambodian director Rithy Panh. Indeed, his movie S.21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) contributed to making reenactment part of the discussion on (the Cambodian) genocide and cinema, although Panh himself expressed doubts vis-a-vis the term “reenactment.” The movie, which brings together former inmates and guards of the prison S.21 in Phnom Penh (today the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum), includes a number of scenes in which the ex-wardens perform anew some of their prison routine of inspection and interrogation. Bodily memory supplements the existing archive (S.21 execution lists,Reenacting the Cambodian Genocide 293 photos of prisoners, and paintings by survivor Vann Nath). Panh’s idea is to produce a documentation of the disciplinary gestures performed in Democratic Kampuchea and thus visualize the mechanism of extermination (Mangeot et al., 2004). These gestures were only partly recorded, for example, via the notebooks of Khmer Rouge interrogators at S.21.
Reenactment makes it possible for them to “return as physical sensations” (Boyle, 2009, p. 100), thereby expressing things beyond the mere description of what happened. By turning the repertoire of the S.21 guards into an additional (filmic) archive, Panh makes accessible “translations of living memory” (Lim, 2012, p. 122) that help capture things that are not always perceptible in other arenas, such as justice and history (Bradshaw, 2019). Rather than being a “strategy,” then reenactment manifests itself through the process of assembling different testimonies and thus achieving a more complete form of witnessing.When The Killing Fields was released in 1984, the term “reenactment” was not so much in use, yet reenactment is a major component of Joffe’s movie and complicates the relation between the archive and the repertoire. The repertoire in The Killing Fields merges the recollection of Dith Pran with that of the man who played his role, Dr. Haing S. Ngor, a gynecologist who had survived the Khmer Rouge regime and resettled in the United States in the 1980s.9 Ngor’s experience obviously informed his interpretation of Dith’s story, and some scenes were “reenactments” of his own suffering at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.10 Dith himself saw it as the very quality of Ngor’s performance because “only someone who got trapped like me could do this part” (Freedman, 1984). As embodied memory, Ngor’s performance interacts with the archive at a double level. It revisits the written text of Dith Pran and gives it some new physicality, as Ngor’s body lends its power to Dith’s words. Once recorded, this mixed repertoire becomes a new archival document about life in Democratic Kampuchea, believable and “remarkably true to life” (Chandler, 1986, p. 96).
Jolie’s movie presents a different situation. Obviously, the main actors— the children playing Loung Ung and her siblings—did not experience the Khmer Rouge regime. In this sense, one cannot speak of reenactment as it appears in The Killing Fields.
Still, there is something that goes beyond mere “acting.” For the movie, the children had to learn the daily gestures of Democratic Kampuchea from the repertoire of survivors. In this respect, there is a quasi-documentary dimension in First They Killed My Father, as the film replicates the situation at the time when children came under the control of Angkar (the Organization) and were “remodeled” into new beings. The strength of Jolie’s film lies in documenting this process of apprenticeship and indoctrination. In this regard, the sequence that shows young Loung planting a landmine under the approbative gaze of a Khmer Rouge soldier is exemplary. The banality of the gesture, as if Ung were just planting some vegetable, associated with the brutality of the context points to a form of “traumatic realism,” the intricate relation of everyday life andcatastrophe (Rothberg, 2000, p. 106) that formed the daily social fabric of Democratic Kampuchea.We Want [u] to Know follows a different path. On the one hand, the younger generations in Thnol Lok had no idea about what had happened in the village during the Democratic Kampuchea period. For them, reenacting episodes of the past was possibly a form of entertainment, as the whole process of filming the movie and the presence of foreigners in Thnol Lok probably were too.11 On the other hand, older villagers such as Grandma Nhey relived, through reenactment, the most painful events of their lives. Indeed, they chose this violent form of transmission because they felt the youngsters did not believe their accounts of the Khmer Rouge years, and they thus wanted to “shake” them. In this sense, the reenacted scenes in Pugliese’s movie can be interpreted as the attempt, undoubtedly an extreme one, to initiate intergenerational encounters around the past. This attempt departs from both The Killing Fields and First They Killed My Father. Unlike Joffe, Pugliese does not seek to achieve any verisimilitude in the reenacted scenes—the verisimilitude Ngor himself increasingly criticized in later years, expressing his concern about it on several occasions.12 Unlike Jolie’s movie, We Want [u] to Know does not merge different levels of interpretation around the reenacted daily gestures.
The dyeing of the family clothing in black after Ung arrives in the labor camp, for example, is typical of the combination of documentary, symbolic, and metaphorical elements proposed by Jolie in First They Killed My Father)3 The scene illustrates the conditions in which the gesture was performed. At the same time, it signals the progressive disappearance of Ung’s family and the dissolution of Cambodian individuals into the Democratic Kampuchea collective body. There is no such thing in We Want [u] to Know. Pugliese’s movie documents a process of transmission, the effort to foster a communal conversation about the past and its long-term effects. That reenactment functions as a radical way of initiating a dialogue between older villagers and younger generations in Thnol Lok is certainly a major issue. It brings to the fore ethical questions as to the filming process itself and as to the cross-cultural environment in which it took place, as we shall see in the next section.