The Ethics of Reenactment
Reenactment was not on Pugliese’s agenda when she conceived the project. The request of the villagers thus took her and her partners by surprise. The team was concerned about the potentially negative impact on survivors of the restaging of killings.
Therefore, they tried to rationalize the function of reenactment in the filming process as well as their own position vis-a-vis such a method. It was important for them to ascertain that reenactment was not an alien practice of memory but an integral part of post-genocide memory culture in Cambodia. Nou Va referred his international colleagues to the Day of Anger (Tivea Chang Kamheng), a state-sanctioned performanceReenacting the Cambodian Genocide 295 established in 1983 to commemorate the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime. Held nationwide in former “killing fields,” the ceremony included speeches by officials and survivors and the burning of effigies of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. After a hiatus of several years in the 1990s, the ceremony resumed in 2001 under a new name, the National Day of Remembrance. Presently, it takes place only at the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center.14 Its high point is the thirty-minute performance during which actors reenact scenes of starvation, torture, rape, beating, and killing (Khouth, 2012; Vong, 2013; Zsombor and Sek, 2015).15 There are precedents for this kind of performance. In 1980, for example, historian Ben Kiernan, one of the few scholars allowed in Cambodia at the time, describes in his report a theater play he attended in Phnom Penh, Blood and Tears. In the course of the performance, the actors reenacted a massacre. The play was popular, Kiernan writes, because of its realism and cathartic impact (1982, p. 182).Such performances in the 1980s were ideologically motivated. At a time of Cold War tensions, they helped mobilize the Cambodian population through anger and a desire for revenge (Fawthrop and Jarvis, 2004; Hinton, 2001; Hughes, 2000; Saltsman, 2007).
Nowadays, the notion of catharsis is instead seen through the lens of trauma. It is the latter’s potential for either relief or re-traumatization of survivors that comes under scrutiny. In this context, film scholar Ivone Margulies’s analysis of reenactment as “corrective mirror” (2003, p. 217) offers an interesting perspective on the subject. Reenactment, Margulies argues, engages “a moral dynamic in which the very act of repetition becomes relevant, not because it copies the original situation, providing its best and closest illustration, but because by repeating it produces an improved version of the event” (2003, p. 220). Obviously, the possibility that reenactment provides the affected individuals and communities with a “model for social action” (Margulies, 2003, p. 217) becomes complicated when power relations between international and local stakeholders are involved. The specter of exploitation looms large. Indeed, this issue is by no means new; it features centrally in The Killing Fields, for example, and Joffe himself later admitted that he behaved in a “horrible, manipulative” way. He recounted that “during shooting, I would sometimes crawl below the camera and call out to [Ngor]: ‘Remember how you felt!’” (Gilbey, 2014).16 Of course, this kind of situation did not happen during the shooting of We Want [u] to Know. On the contrary, Pugliese and her international partners were alert to the possibility of symbolic violence implied by their intrusion into Thnol Lok’s daily life. Yet, since We Want [u] to Know originated in the context of transitional justice and, as such, reflected a specific approach to post-genocide reconstruction, there was a structural imbalance in the conception of the project. Consequently, the idea of “improvement” that the team progressively came to associate with reenactment—and more broadly with the film itself—cannot be detached from the ethical question of what kind of memory practices such an experience brings to Cambodians.We Want [u] to Know was funded by the German Development Service (GiZ) and supported by several nongovernmental organizations (Kdei Karuna, Khmer Institute for Democracy, and the TPO), and the website for the movie (accessed in 2011) presents it as “a tool for NGOs and for the civil society in the framework of the outreach activities around the Khmer Rouge Trial.” In 2009, the prosecution of former S.21 commander Duch was about to start at the ECCC. Fearing a controversial impact of the trial on the population, the Tribunal launched a number of activities to explain the judicial procedure, especially in rural communities. As part of the public program of the ECCC, Pugliese’s movie cannot but convey the notion of a cathartic break from the past (“breaking the silence”) and the conflation of judicial, therapeutic, and social dimensions that form the transitional justice discourse at large (Feldman, 2004). Since the establishment of the ECCC in the early 2000s, the discussion on the transposition of Western models of therapy and justice to the Cambodian context has been ongoing (Guillou, 2012; Hinton, 2008; Ledgerwood and Un, 2003; Prenowitz and Thompson, 2010; Zucker, 2003), especially with respect to the issue of trauma recovery. In recent years, these discussions have led to a more hybrid re-conceptualization of trauma as “baksbat trauma” or “broken courage” (Agger, 2015; Chhim, 2012; Hinton and Bui, 2019; Van Schaack et al., 2011), associated with a discourse about healing, reconciliation, and transgenera- tional transmission.17Thus, the influence of the team’s “health consultants Judith Strasser and Julian Poluda” on Pugliese’s work should not be overlooked. Both actively promoted the methods of the TPO, supporting a “holistic transitional justice strategy” and the translation of “Western trauma” into local idioms and traditions via a “psychosocial approach” (Poluda et al., 2012, p. 101). This is in line with Margulies’s (2003) “corrective” dimension of reenactment. Besides references to Cambodian cultural precedents for reenactment, Pugliese also mentions Greek theater, Sigmund Freud, and literary scholar Cathy Caruth’s work on trauma. While saying that she was not convinced by “trauma theories,” Pugliese believed that “going through” things in a safe setting and doing so together could lead to a positive outcome (2015a, p. 3). This clearly appears in what she writes about the meeting at the pagoda before the villagers reenacted the killings: “We all knew that this moment of sharing was an act of exorcism and catharsis within the safe, sacred walls of the pagoda” (2015a, p.
8). Pugliese emphasized the necessity of creating a “new space of action [where the villagers could] talk about these very painful things in a different way and make them public” (Poree, 2009, translation mine). This even helped some villagers find closure, a team member told a journalist (Gee, 2009). The movie gives a positive view of the impact of reenactment on survivors. Back in the village after shooting the reenactment of Grandma Nhey’s arrest, the team interviews the old woman (Figure 15.3). She tells them, “I felt very happy leading the actors. By doing it, memories became alive again. Now I’m old and recalling the past makes
Figure 15.3 Ella Pugliese and Nou Va with Grandma Nhey.
Source: Photo by the follow-up crew, 2012, courtesy Ella Pugliese.
me happy. I’m glad that someone acknowledges my story. The past is gone. Now it’s time for us to be happy again. We should be happy again. Now we can let it go. That is all.”
In the Q&A that followed the screening of We Want [u] to Know at Bophana Center for Audiovisual Resources in Phnom Penh in May 2009, Pugliese declared: “I do not think [reenactment] is bad. The woman who lost her father, when she tries to imagine where and how he died, this becomes for her a means of making this death more concrete, as she never found the body of her father. It is a form of reconstruction” (Poree, 2009, translation mine). Pugliese admitted that some villagers went through emotional distress, but she thought they felt better after talking with the mental health consultants. In general, the team had the impression that “people had progressed well in this direct confrontation with the past” (Poree, 2009, translation mine). It is, of course, very difficult to assess the actual effect of reenactment in this context, and the notion of a “corrective mirror” for individuals experiencing a post-genocide environment remains highly debatable.
Still, one may consider the potential impact of the movie at the communal level. According to Nou Va, the movie opened up people who had been closed off for a long time and encouraged them to tell stories they had never theretofore told (Wilkins, 2009), thereby creating an additional layer of social interactions among the villagers.Yet anthropologist Anne-Laure Poree (2009) suggests that Pugliese and her partners failed to take responsibility when they let the villagers go ahead with the reenacted scenes without suggesting any alternatives, and she wonders about the team’s “passivity” vis-a-vis people in Thnol Lok. Seen as such, reenactment illustrates the general dynamic between the two groups. What film scholar Bill Nichols writes about the “immersive” dimension of reenactment, turning the film director into a viewer of his own film (2008, p. 77), might apply more broadly to Pugliese and her team’s experience in Thnol Lok. Possibly insufficiently prepared for the task, immersed in the village life for several weeks, they were overwhelmed by request to reenact the killings and by their encounter with the villagers more generally.18 From the outset, they hardly questioned the things they were told or the social relations in Thnol Lok. The young urban Cambodian members of the team, brought up to respect elders, did not dare to interrupt the villagers when they spoke. As the international members did not speak Khmer, they had to rely on their Cambodian colleagues for communication, which always came delayed and fragmented, thereby preventing them from being reactive and keeping them in their outsider position. This might explain why, after discussing it with civil society representatives and film directors (including Rithy Panh), Pugliese decided not to include the execution scene in the movie and replaced it with a view of the landscape. As a “black hole” never to be seen by spectators, what the reenactment of Khmer Rouge killings makes visible is less the painful memories of Thnol Lok villagers than the cultural tensions that developed over appropriate forms of memorialization and the intervention of outsiders (that is, Westerners) in the process. Far from being the outcome of a collaborative process, reenactment instead reveals the gap between the international team and the people of Thnol Lok. As such, it marks the limits of participatory filmmaking, at least in this context, and further prompts the question of who is the actual subject of reenactment, as will be seen in the next section.