At first sight, reenactment and genocide seem incompatible.
It is often assumed, at least with regards to Khmer Rouge crimes in Cambodia, that genocide is non-representable since the perpetrators left few traces of their crimes (one such trace being the photographic record at the prison S.21 in Phnom Penh) and the experience of the victims remains so overwhelming today that it exceeds ordinary frameworks of description.
Yet cultural theorist Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (2016) posits reenactment as a major feature of what she calls “Cambodian genocide film” in her study about the cinematographic representation of the Khmer Rouge terror and its legacy. The Khmer Rouge, or Communist Party of Kampuchea, came to power in April 1975 after a five-year civil war against the Khmer Republic led by Marshal Lon Nol. In the four years that followed, over 1.7 million people lost their lives in Democratic Kampuchea (as Cambodia had been renamed) to starvation, forced labor, exhaustion, sickness, and killings. The Khmer Rouge regime was overthrown in January 1979, following Vietnam’s military intervention in Cambodia. Restaging Khmer Rouge crimes, Schlund- Vials contends, helps produce the “juridical registers” through which “the prosecutorial task of identifying regime crimes, recollecting individual survivor remembrances, and delineating perpetrators from victims” can be performed (2016, pp. 172-173). Movies such as Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), about the mass massacres in Indonesia in 1965-1966, have shown that cinema may contribute to the disruption of official narratives. Critically putting the events and their long-term social and political consequences back on the map may open up, at both the national and international levels, public debates on the issues of silence and impunity. While Oppenheimer’s film relies on the stories of perpetrators, however, Cambodian movies often focus on the experience of the victims. In what other ways, then, does reenactment challenge the invisibility of genocide? Conversely, to what extent does genocide redefine the potentialities ofDOI: 10.4324/9780429445668-20 reenactment? What is actually reenacted: is it the genocidal act itself or the suffering of the people? Moreover, what does reenactment produce in terms of memory, documentation, and social effects?
To answer these questions, this chapter examines the film We Want [u] to Know (2009). This participatory movie was commissioned by the German Development Service (Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit, or GiZ) and the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization (TPO) in Cambodia. The two organizations sought to develop a pedagogical tool of communication with the population within the framework of the outreach activities developed by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). The film was made by an international team in collaboration with the people of Thnol Lok, a village in northwestern Cambodia. Four reenactment scenes were filmed for We Want [u] to Know, one of which was not integrated into the final version of the movie. The intervention of an international group of players into the social and memorial fabric of a small community in rural Cambodia shows in many ways how questions of power are deeply entangled with forms of representation. This entanglement appears nowhere more critically than in the moments when Thnol Lok villagers restage Khmer Rouge atrocities.
This chapter proposes to unpack this complex setup. The first section describes two reenactment scenes in We Want [u] to Know, the ones for which the process of staging the reenactment is shown. The second section draws on Diana Taylor’s seminal study about performances of memory to analyze how the movie articulates the categories of the “archive” and the “repertoire.” This analysis situates the film in relation to other productions about the Cambodian genocide such as Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields (1984), Rithy Panh’s S. 21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), and Angelina Jolie’s First They Killed My Father (2017). Building on film scholar Ivone Margulies’s analysis of the corrective dimension of reenactment, the third section of the chapter looks at notions of catharsis, relief, and traumatization and the cultural models associated with these notions, especially in the context of transitional justice. Taking its cue from film scholar Bill Nichols’s exploration of reenactment through loss and fantasm, the last section discusses the identity of the actual subject of reenactment in We Want [u] to Know and how this, in turn, shapes the afterlife of the movie.