Reenacting Killings
The film crew that arrived in Thnol Lok in October 2008 included film director Ella Pugliese, visual artist Jens Joester, co-ideator and consultant from the International Centre for Conciliation Shanti Sattler, human rights activist Nou Va, TPO mental health consultants Judith Strasser and Julian Poluda, and education consultant Leah Roth-Howe.
Pugliese intended to make a participatory movie involving Thnol Lok villagers in every phase of the project, from the conception of the film to its editing.1 The teamReenacting the Cambodian Genocide 289 members acted as “facilitators”; they taught the villagers how to handle video cameras and microphones, and they organized artistic workshops such as drawing and puppet theater. Every evening, they sat together with the people of Thnol Lok for a screening of the material produced during the day and discussed it with them. It was during the first week of the project that older villagers told the team that they wanted to reenact killings by the Khmer Rouge. Pugliese’s first reaction was to deflect the request.2 Some people kept referring to The Killing Fields, but Pugliese explained them that she had no money for such a “Hollywood-like” production.3 The villagers were so insistent, however, that eventually, she and her partners gave in. It was a participatory movie, they reasoned, and if Thnol Lok inhabitants wanted to do something, then they had to go with it.Once the decision was made, the team proposed to meet the villagers at the local pagoda and help them prepare a storyboard for the scene (Figure 15.1). The meeting at the pagoda was an intimate moment, full of sacrality, silence, and reflection, and for some villagers, it was an emotionally challenging moment. One woman, who felt the pain arising within herself, went to talk with the psychologists of the TPO.
In contrast, the preparation for the shoot itself “was a loud, enthusiastic, funny event” (Pugliese 2015a, p. 7), which, in hindsight, Pugliese explains through the positive power of laughter as a means of taking distance and repositioning tensions. The corresponding sequence in the movie shows some villagers drawing on sheets of paper and blackening sandals to make them look like Khmer Rouge rubber shoes, one of the major symbols of the Democratic Kampuchea regime as cadres and the military wore sandals made from used car tires. A man takes off his black trousers and hands them to an “actor” impersonating a Khmer Rouge
Figure 15.1 In the pagoda.
Source: Photo Leah Roth-Howe, 2009, courtesy Ella Pugliese.
Figure 15.2 Reconstruction.
Source: Photo Leah Roth-Howe, 2009, courtesy Ella Pugliese.
guard. Another man teaches a youngster how to tie the krama (traditional scarf) in the Khmer Rouge way. The next scene shows a group of villagers taken away by two Khmer Rouge guards to the execution site. They walk in line and follow the path that originally led to the actual execution site, which is now a rice field (Figure 15.2). The sequence ends here. Following conversations with different interlocutors, Pugliese decided not to include the reenacted killings in the final version of We Want [u] to Know. The second reenactment concerns Grandma Nhey, a villager who lost her husband and children during the Democratic Kampuchea period. The team films her as she returns for the first time to the Cheu Theal pagoda near Kampot, where her husband was arrested by the Khmer Rouge. Grandma Nhey declares, “I want to film pulling my husband with one hand while carrying my child with the other hand and how my husband was tied.” Two youngsters dressed as Khmer Rouge take the husband away while a woman, impersonating a younger Nhey, grabs the man’s arm. Grandma Nhey repeats what she had screamed at the time: “Don’t take my husband away.
I can’t feed my children alone. Please don’t take him.” The last image shows the pagoda, completely empty.In rural Cambodia, Khmer Rouge crimes have hardly been documented. In this respect, Rithy Panh’s recent movie Graves Without a Name (2018) and artist Vandy Rattana’s video work Monologue (2015) are powerful reminders that, in the countryside, many Cambodians died or were murdered anonymously and in unmarked places. Today, the death sites are covered with vegetation, and only the people who were around at the time are still able to indicate where the killings took place and where the bodies were disposed of. In recent years, Case 002 (the 2011-2018 trial of Khmer Rouge leaders Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, and Ieng Sary and his wife Ieng Thirith at the ECCC) has contributed to shifting attention to killing sites outside Phnom Penh. In 2009, however, the focus was on S.21 and the prosecution of Duch (Kaing Guek Eav), the prison’s former commander. Moreover, unlike S.21, detention centers in the provinces (or zones) did not record their activities of interrogation and extermination—as far as the current state of research on the subject shows. The team behind We Want [u] to Know thus operated in a void since there was no evidence (neither photos nor documents) of what had happened in Thnol Lok in the Democratic Kampuchea period, only recollections by older villagers. Indeed, it was this absence that motivated the villagers to reenact the killings. When the team asked them why they were so keen to restage such a horrific event, they said that they wanted to “create their own evidence” because there was no record or trace of the massacre. Obviously, the idea was not to produce any “evidence” with legal or juridical value for the ECCC but rather “affective evidence” (Pickering, 2020, p. 59), that is, something communicable to those who had not experienced the Khmer Rouge regime.
In this context, Diana Taylor’s analysis of performances of memory in the Americas may shed some light on the reenactments in We Want [u] to Know.
Taylor discusses the transmission of knowledge, memory, and identity in the aftermath of violence and the forms of postcolonial recognition that emerge in the process of performing. The “archive” and the “repertoire” are major components of this process; Taylor defines them respectively as “documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all those items supposedly resistant to change” and “embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing— in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge” (2003, pp. 19-20). Taylor does not see the archive and the repertoire as opposites but as elements in a “constant state of interaction” and having a relation that is neither sequential nor binary (2003, pp. 21-22). This interaction of the archive and the repertoire features centrally in We Want [u] to Know. What the Thnol Lok villagers ask Pugliese and her team to do is to turn their repertoire (that is, their stories and bodily recollections) into an archive that becomes accessible to others. One of the main functions of the reenacted scenes is to be an “act of transfer” (Taylor, 2003, p. 1). As we shall see, this specific role of reenactment is not new in Cambodian genocide film; indeed, it has materialized in a variety of ways over the past decades.