The Fantasmatic Object of Reenactment
In 2012, Pugliese and her team received a grant from the Movies That Matter Foundation (Amnesty International) to organize mobile screenings of We Want [u] to Know across Cambodia (Roth, 2012).
It was on this occasion, in April 2012, that the movie was shown in Thnol Lok for the first time. The local associations that had been involved in the project had visited the village since the making of the film, but they had never brought the movie with them. Additionally, when We Want [u] to Know was screened at Chenla Theater in Phnom Penh in 2009, only twelve of the villager-protagonists attended it. But there had never been a public screening of the film at the village itself, and this was an important event, especially as it was also the first time the team (including Pugliese and her young daughter Anouk) had returned to Thnol Lok since the filming.The reunion, however, proved disappointing.19 It became clear that some villagers had been ambivalent about the usefulness of the project (Bennett, 2012, p. 2). For Pugliese, the biggest surprise came when she was told, on the day she arrived in Thnol Lok, about Grandma Nhey’s feelings about her participation in We Want [u] to Know and her concerns over the impact of the screening in Thnol Lok. Grandma Nhey was worried. She was doing better, was not alone anymore, and did not want to be exposed in her suffering to her fellow villagers. The conversation with the old lady was filmed. “The old woman whose story had often been taken as an example of how deep such a process can go, was telling the camera that she felt uneasy that her miserable fate [had] been shown all over the place” (Pugliese, 2015b, p. 13). Nevertheless, the screening in the village had a positive effect for Grandma Nhey; she felt the recognition and compassion of the people around her. Still, for Pugliese, this once again brought to the fore the issue of participation.
Her experience in Thnol Lok made her more cautious about “participatory” filmmaking and her own role in the process. She came to question many aspects of it, including the transparency of the working process and the space left for those who do not want to participate. Over time, she even adopted a more basic definition of her work as “sharing and going together through a process” (Pugliese, 2015a, p. 5). She also turned to auto-ethnography, a contentious genre that connects autobiography with wider cultural, social, and political issues. This allowed her to reevaluate her own practice “as a traumatized person” and express “the most personal and emotional parts” of the story (Pugliese 2015a, p. 16). This shift suggests, then, another perspective on reenactment in We Want [u] to Know.Pugliese stresses the link between her working on the trauma of others and experiencing her own trauma, as well as the importance of achieving “the intersection between other people’s stories of loss and my personal loss” (Pugliese, 2015a, p. 17). Indeed, We Want [u] to Know can hardly be understood without referring to the accidental death of Jens Joester, Pugliese’s partner and her daughter’s father, in Kampot in 2009, after the shooting of the movie. When Pugliese returned to Cambodia in 2012, it was with the idea of “trying to untie the knots on multiple levels—the private and the public, the personal and the collective, work and life, the western and Cambodian perspectives” (Pugliese 2015a, p. 2). The experience was obviously very difficult, as the reality of Thnol Lok in 2012 superimposed on her memory of the village in 2009. The village chief had died, some movie participants no longer lived in Thnol Lok, and others had grown up and did not have the same relation with the team anymore. Pugliese slept in the same wooden hut where she had stayed with Joester at the time. She also had a “flashback” during the screening of We Want [u] to Know for the villagers and she remembered the evening sessions in 2009.
Interestingly, it is at this stage in her account that she mentions the scene of the reenacted killings: “people reacted by laughing out loud to the re-enactments although, and maybe also because, they were watching some villagers dressed as the terrible Khmer Rouges [sic]” (2015b, p. 4, her emphasis). This points, again, to the complexity of reenactment in this context. The two scenes (the killings and the arrest of Grandma Nhey’s husband), seen again as being imbued with cathartic power, are put at a distance and come to form the background for Pugliese’s own reenactment. A week after the screening in Thnol Lok, Pugliese and her daughter traveled to Kampot. There, they looked for the bridge where Joester had lost his life. At a symbolic level, Pugliese felt that she was doing exactly the same thing as the Thnol Lok women when they had the most painful moments of their life reenacted. By returning to Cambodia in 2012, she “repeated” the itinerary of some survivors (especially the scene where Thnol Lok villagers take the same path as the victims). Pugliese describes the process of identifying and filming the place where she had lost her beloved one as a kind of “ghost of a film” (2015b, p. 24), an attempt to fill a “missing chapter” in her and her daughter’s life (2015b, pp. 19-20). This echoes what film scholar Bill Nichols writes about the fantasmatic dimension of reenactment, which always seeks to reconstitute “the ghost of the absent subject” from absent sources. “The attempt to conjure that specter, to make good that loss, signals the mark of desire,” he argues (2008, p. 74).Pugliese’s desire adds a new layer to We Want [u] to Know, or more precisely to the afterlife of the movie. By “vivify[ing] the sense of the lived experience, the vecu, of others” (Nichols, 2008, p. 88), reenactment offers the possibility of owning the past in a corporeal but fantasmatic form. Retrospectively, it transforms Pugliese’s earlier experience in Thnol Lok. The director thinks that the words she now uses to talk about her situation are very much like the words Grandma Nhey used then when she decided to go back to the pagoda where her husband had been taken away in order to film there.
In both cases, Pugliese argues, the camera was a “defence” between her or Nhey and the world (2015a, p. 4). Upon her return to Thnol Lok in 2012, she felt a different connection with some people in the village, especially Grandma Nhey. The latter actually acknowledged this as she told Pugliese that “we are same [sic] now, you suffer, I suffer, we share the same fate” (Pugliese, 2015b, p. 3). This new solidarity with Cambodian survivors through the common experience of loss and grief made Pugliese feel like an outsider and at the same like someone included in the community, a situation that she found “surreal and painfully real” (Pugliese, 2015b, p. 6).This liminal state came to its full expression during the ceremony held at the Phnom Plet pagoda two days after the screening as the conclusion of the team’s journey back to Thnol Lok (Figure 15.4). The decision to hold this ceremony was made after Nou Va explained to Pugliese that the villagers had been upset with him and the other Cambodian staff for not having organized a ceremony for the spirits before shooting the movie in 2009. Although not a believer, he was affected by the critique. Pugliese herself
Figure 15.4 Ceremony at the Phnom Plet pagoda.
Source: Photo by the follow-up crew, 2012, courtesy Ella Pugliese.
was torn between two reactions. Why had they not respected the local customs? Why had they not been told about it, since they obviously would have complied?
One thing I know: if anybody, the villagers, the Cambodian staff, had told us of this practice, if Va had thought of it at the time—it was simply another senseless casualty that he forgot—I would, Jens would have definitely said yes, let’s do it, of course, out of respect for the country which hosted us. And because we felt it was a dangerous world, a dangerous mine field that we were walking through.
(Pugliese, 2015a, p. 15)
Troubled, Pugliese could not but make the connection between this inauspicious start and Joester’s death (Pugliese, 2015a, p. 15). The ceremony thus became a form of repair at many levels, the fantasmatic merging with the corrective. The ceremony for the dead at the pagoda was followed by the planting of sacred trees: something was being put to rest while something else would grow. It was the form of closure that Pugliese had sought to bring to the Thnol Lok villagers in 2009 and the one the villagers themselves tried to give back to her when she finally returned to them.