The Missing Picture13

While Waltz with Bashir and The Act of Killing largely address the traumatic experiences of perpetrators and bystanders, Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture focuses on the victims of historical mass violence.

The Missing Picture engages with Panh’s personal experiences before, dur­ing, and after the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia (1975-1979), including his time spent in a forced labor camp where most of his family members perished. As is well known, the Khmer Rouge’s agricultural reforms, their summary executions, and the incarceration and torture of supposed polit­ical opponents in labor camps resulted in the deaths of approximately 1.7 million Cambodians.¹⁴ While Panh’s filmography contains many films dealing with this historical episode, most notably Rice People (1993) and S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), The Missing Picture was, until recently, the only film to draw from his personal biography.

Panh uses mixed media—including dioramas, tableaus, photographs, and fragments from his earlier films—to tell the heartrending story of his family’s demise. Meanwhile, the film’s poetically intoned first-person nar­ration provides a self-conscious reflection on the images being shown and the story being told, raising epistemological and ethical doubts about this project. We learn that Panh initially set out to find photographic evidencePerforming Violence 323 of executions carried out (for instance, at the Choeung Ek killing fields) by the Khmer Rouge.

In his search for images of the atrocities, Panh does unearth canisters of pre-communist footage as well as Khmer Rouge propaganda. The regime in Cambodia did not produce as much propagandistic material as its coun­terparts in Vietnam or China, yet the entourage of Pol Pot was well aware of the power of the image, and the Khmer Rouge employed a marked visual strategy from the early stages of their rule onward.¹⁵ Taking great pains to destroy the memory of pre-communist cultural life and eliminate its carri­ers (Schlund-Vials, 2016), the regime imposed its own grand narratives of hard-won social equality, agricultural modernization, and historical pro­gression upon Cambodia’s inhabitants (Torchin, 2014).

Consequently, the missing picture (l^, image manquante) of the title possesses a plethora of varied yet resonant associations. Besides the missing photo­graphs of executions, the phrase refers to the cultural images of Cambodian life before 1975 (including its thriving musical and cinematic scenes) that the regime hoped to efface from collective memory. Yet the term also points to the injustices not documented by the regime. For instance, the tragedy of the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh’s residents to the countryside is, in the period’s official discourse and imagery, also a “missing picture.”

Most importantly, what is missing in the carefully orchestrated propa­ganda are the personal experiences and stories of those individuals who fell victim to the regime.

It is in this context that Panh’s mixed-media approach acquires its full force. The director commissioned elaborate dioramas from the Cambodian sculptor Sarith Mang. These detailed miniature worlds depict myriad set­tings, including Panh’s childhood home, the camps where he worked, the hospital where his mother and sister died, and the film studios where he spent much of his childhood before the Khmer Rouge takeover. These sets are populated with figurines that have been made with clay from Cambodia’s rice fields and killing fields. The resulting scenes are often gruesome, depict­ing executions and starvation, and are sometimes imaginative—picturing, for instance, the funeral rite that his father never received. The dioramasand figurines are regularly interspersed with and superimposed over archi­val footage and propaganda material. Panh thus restores a human per­spective, “peopling” the Khmer Rouge’s empty utopias with the disfigured bodies and heart-wrenching stories of its victims. In The Missing Picture, it is reenactment that allows the director to imaginatively make up for the unrecorded experiences of those whom the regime made suffer.

Besides the figurines and dioramas, Panh uses montage and patchwork frames to juxtapose historically disparate archival images, comparing, for instance, the streets of Phnom Penh before and after the advent of the com­munists. In all these cases, he does not supplant one image for another but rather develops a mode of editing that preserves historical and ideological multi-layeredness. Through such a rearrangement of existing material, the film explores what seems to be the director’s haunting self-reflection: how can documentary film bear witness to historical atrocities if the same medium was used to efface past crimes or to airbrush them with propagandistic lies?

Panh’s reflection on his chosen medium, and the reality it can create, is exemplified well in a scene toward the close of the film.

Figure 16.7 The inmates of a forced labor camp watch a propaganda film, as shown in The Missing Picture.Performing Violence 325 vision of his own. Rather than taking recourse to the uncomplicated refer- entiality associated with the indexical image, he reframes existing material (the propaganda film on screen), embedding it within the imaginative reen­actment (the diorama of camp life) to convey personal and emotional truths about historical trauma.

These reframing strategies are not merely visual. The director also embeds his own mnemonic project within an intertextual network of what Michael Rothberg (2009) has called “multidirectional memory.” Through his implicit reference to the notorious Lanzmann-Godard disagreement, for instance, the director places his film in dialogue with the memory of the Holocaust. It is hard to miss, moreover, how the intonation of Panh’s sol­emn and poetic French voice-over alludes to the narrator in Alain Resnais’s seminal Nuit et Brouillard (1955), arguably the first documentary about the Holocaust. The film thus aligns itself both aesthetically and intellectually with Holocaust memory in order to create a context for its discussion of the lesser-known Cambodian genocide.¹⁶

In his work on “multidirectional memory,” Rothberg resists the wide­spread notion that the cultural memories of diverse groups will inevitably compete for public and political recognition.

Panh’s film not only refracts Cambodia’s recent traumatic history through an ethical and epistemological debate about Holocaust representation but also leans heavily on European psychoanalytic models of traumatic mem­ory. Explaining the motivation for his cinematic quest, the narrator notes: “In the middle of life childhood returns. Like water, bitter and sweet. I seek my childhood like a lost picture [une image perdue}. Or rather it seeks me.... The memory is there now.” This passage returns throughout the film, each time using slightly different wording: “In the middle of life child­hood returns, bitter and sweet, with its images.” These remarks invoke yet another connotation for the “picture” (Timage) of the title, associating it with the long-repressed but emergent (visual) memory of childhood experi­ences, a complex of recollections tainted simultaneously by trauma and nos­talgia (being bitter and sweet). The traumatic undertones receive the most attention; childhood’s horrors and losses, it is suggested, are subject to a post-traumatic repetition compulsion. They return, “seeking” Panh as if by their own volition.This interpretation is confirmed in the film’s finale. A diorama shows a cliched psychoanalytic setting: an analyst sits in a chair beside a patient (presumably Panh himself) lying on a couch, his gaze fixed on the ceil­ing.

Panh thus references Western paradigms of personal and historical trauma, yet not to subscribe to them wholeheartedly but to place them (crit­ically) in a constellation that includes other, culturally embedded mourn­ing traditions. As Jennifer Cazenave remarks, Southeast Asian mourning practices differ significantly from those in the West, as the dead are typi­cally “considered social actors who demand in the present moment mate­rial care from mourners rather than memorialization” (2018, p. 58). The specific meanings and rituals of mourning in The Missing Picture under­line the importance of a historically and culturally sensitive approach to trauma. In his study Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds, Stef Craps scrutinizes a Western-centric understanding that sees trauma as the result of one discrete and shocking event, the “railway accident” or wartime “shellshock” being paradigmatic cases in this tradition. Such a conceptu­alization of trauma has long blinded researchers to more incremental and accumulative instances of traumatization, for instance, in (post)colonial contexts. Criticizing the persistence of Eurocentric and universalizing ten­dencies in trauma theory, Craps advocates a scholarly attitude that “take[s] account of the specific social and historical contexts in which trauma nar­ratives are produced and received, and [that is] open and attentive to the diverse strategies of representation and resistance that these contexts invite or necessitate” (2013, p. 5). While referencing a western psychoanalytic tra­dition of trauma theory, Panh foregrounds its limitations and puts forward an alternative approach.

The figurines are essential in this respect, and their creation is part of the film’s story. When Panh shows the sculptor’s hands carving out figures representing the bodies of his family members, the narrator’s solemn voice, as if to highlight the activity’s ritualistic significance, remarks: “With clay and water, with the dead, with rice fields, with living hands, a man is made.” Only when given new symbolic bodies—materially connected to life and death, to the rice fields and the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields—can Panh’s family members become recipients of material care. Such posthumous carePerforming Violence 321 is perhaps enacted most powerfully when Panh gives his father the burial he never received. In reality, the camp guards had taken away his father’s corpse, and Panh’s mother had told her children that he really “should have been buried by his own.” Panh stages the ceremony. Several figurines dressed in white, the color traditionally associated with mourning, stand in line to pay their last respects.

Even as he borrows from European discourses about psychic and cultural trauma, Panh shows himself keenly aware of their limitations. Set against a habitual focus on words (e.g., Freud’s “talking cure”) and images (the men­tally engraved image of psychic trauma, but also the hypothetical, gruesome historical picture) is the performative mode. Giving “flesh” to his deceased family members and reenacting their stories, he relates to their loss not only through word and image but also, primarily, through the tactility of touch. Reenactment allows, moreover, not merely for victims’ lives and deaths to be reconstructed but also for imagined and symbolic forms of redress to be performed. If the paradoxes of verbal and visual representation are associ­ated with trauma, the performative logic of reenactment—with its material, embodied, and interactive qualities—clears a path toward mourning.¹⁷