Draft paper to be presented at
the 7th ECPR General Conference – Section Politics and Arts / “Art as Political Witness”
Bordeaux 4th – 7th of September 2013
Simulating the Cambodian Genocide –
Rithy Panh’s film S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003)
Author:
Antti Vesikko
PhD student
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Department of Philosophy and Social Science – Political Science
[email protected]
Introduction
The Cambodian genocide (1975–1979), in which approximately 1.7 million people lost their
lives (21% of the country’s population1), is remembered as one of the worst human tragedies
of the last century. The roots of this catastrophe lay deep in international politics: in the
effects, or rather in the after-effects, of the Americans frustration in the backfiring Vietnam
War (1955–75). On March 18, 1969, United States began a four year long carpet-bombing of
Cambodia whose aim was to, according to Nixon and Kissinger, “to bomb Cambodia back to
the stone age”. The 100 000 ton of bombs – “an equivalent of 5 Hiroshima’s” as John Pilger2
proportions – dropped to Cambodia devastated the countryside and caused socio-political
upheaval that led to the installation of the Pol Pot regime of the Communist Party of
Kampuchea (CPK, also known as Khmer Communist Party Rouge and Angkar), that was
quickly renamed as Democratic Kampuchea. The new regime combined extremist ideology
(Mao Zedong’s writings of the Cultural Revolution) with ethnic animosity and a diabolical
disregard for human life to create an agrarian utopia based on slavery, repression, misery, and
murder on a massive scale. Phnom Penh was taken by the guerilla troops Khmers Rouges
(Red Khmers) on April 17, 1975. Their mission was to “erase the past memory” by
evacuation of the towns, abolition of the currency, closure of the borders, collectivization of
the land, elimination of people linked to the former regime, and also initiate a series of
internal purges of the Party. Absolutely everything belonged to Angkar: it demanded absolute
obey of its commands, it dressed people in black, changed the way they spoke, used certain
words and exclude others from their vocabulary. It was forbidden to teach, sing, dance, say
prayers and even talk to other people.3 The successive displacements of the population and
the lack of organization in the countryside result in gigantic famines. Over the four year
period that the Democratic Kampuchea regime lasted, almost two million people died. In
January 7, 1979, Phnom Penh was taken by the Vietnamese in consequence of the Khmer
Rouge incursions into Vietnamese territory in late 1978.
1
Cambodian Genocide Program of Yale University. http://www.yale.edu/cgp/index.html
John Pilger in David Munro’s television documentary Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979).
According to Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program the bombings proceed by United States were
following: 115,000 sites targeted in 231,000 U.S. bombing sorties flown over Cambodia in 1965–75, dropping
2.75 million tons of munitions.
3
Panh 1999, interview with Unesco Courier.
2
2
The Vietnamese occupation forced the Khmers Rouges to withdrawn to Thailand border. But
Pol Pot’s troops continued to strengthen their troops with a help of American and British
soldier training and the UN’s food aid. The Khmer Rouge actively practiced terror on
countryside by mines and guerilla assaults at the same time as it tried to whitewash the past
atrocities by denying the use of term Khmer Rouge and called itself as the party of
Democratic Kampuchea. They boycott the 1993 elections and in 1996 even some of the
Khmer Rouge rally to the new government. The paradoxical situation between the
perpetrators and victims is seen in positions given to former Khmer Rouge leaders. In 1979,
Khmer Rouge still occupied Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations. In 1982, Khieu Samphan
(“Brother number 4”, President of Democratic Kampuchea) was also appointed Vice
President in charge of foreign affairs of the Coalition Government of Democratic
Kampuchea, and from 1991 to 1993 he served in the Supreme National Council as Khmer
Rouge representative. During the Paris peace conference, in 1991, the absence of the word
“genocide” in the accords was considered by John Pilger and Rithy Panh as “a refusal to
allow the survivors to remember, as an insult to the victims’ dignity.” The turning point
towards the reconciliation was the death of Pol Pot on the Thai border in April 1998. This led
to surrender of the last remaining Khmer Rouge leaders in December. In 2001, Cambodia
passes the law to set up special courts to judge the Khmers Rouges. On July 18, 2007,
Cambodian and international co-prosecutors at the newly established mixed UN/Cambodian
tribunal in Phnom Penh found evidence of “crimes against humanity, genocide, grave
breaches of the Geneva Convention, homicide, torture and religious persecution.”
In 2003, when a Cambodian-French filmmaker Rithy Pan (born in 1964 at Phnom Penh)
completed his documentary film S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003, la machine
de mort Khmère rouge), the attempt of U.N. and Cambodian officials to create a tribunal and
court to condemn the crimes of the Khmer Rouge was delayed by a lack of funds and by
political instability. Like all his compatriots Panh was forced to work in the Khmer Rouge
labor camps until 1979 when he managed to escape and reach the Mairut refugee camp in
Thailand and within the same year to France. In 1985, he was admitted to IDHEC (Institut
des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques). Panh returned to Cambodia for the first time in
1990. Due to the absence of Cambodian film culture, he had to first train the film crew for
five years to help him shoot his films. Panh is to be considered an intercultural director that
3
lives between two countries, using France as his home base, and Cambodia as the subject of
his movies. The advantage of being an expatriate for artist is that he has distance to the events
and culture of Cambodia.4 Before the groundbreaking documentary S21: The Khmer Rouge
Killing Machine, Panh had already directed 10 documentary films (between 1989–2000) and
one fiction film (1993–94, ”NEAK SRE” Les Gens de la Rizière / “NEAK SRE” The people
of the rice field). In these films he represents different personal and family memories and
points out the impossibility, or rather difficulty, to represent genocide. The after-effects of
Khmer Rouge regime – trauma, amnesia, shattered identity, the ruins of social cohesion –
were obstinate and reinforced by the international politics. For Panh, it was necessary “to
understand the banalization of evil and the dehumanizing machinery of the Khmer Rouge.”5
The unreliability and ambivalence of the eyewitness testimony of the spectacles of horror and
violence has often been problematized for its limitations as only a part of individual memory.
Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985) made a pivotal turn in the representation of genocide:
he chose to represent the machine rather than its victims, limited his attention to insignificant
details or procedure, and made the film in the present. According to Lanzmann, the purpose
of his film was “to communicate, to transmit” the Jewish testimonies that were still marked,
stamped by the terror. The representing of the testimonies through audiovisual media like
cinema led him to regulate the degree of horror6 so that it would not rise too high to destroy
the conditions of transmitting: “I wanted really to address the intelligence of the viewer more
than emotions.” According to Lanzmann, the film is “not a documentary”, “not at all
representational”.7 He first claims that in his film “nobody meets anyone”, but he continues
by stating that on some occasions he makes them meet up, thus the film is “a place of
meeting”. The main problem of Shoah is Lanzmann’s constant presence and interfering
attitude in testimonies that are almost without exception separated.8 Lanzmann tries to keep
his film under control: he does not bring victims and perpetrators into same space, so that
power relations could actualize or something unexpected unwind. Anyhow, in couple of
4
Panh 2006, interview with Lekha Shankar.
Panh 1999, interview with Unesco Courier.
6
That is the reason why Lanzmann left Simon Srebnik’s horrible tales of Nazi sadism in Chelmno outside of the
film (Lanzmann 1991, 93). More of this representational limit and intolerable images will follow.
7
Lanzmann 1991, 96–97.
8
The alternation between irony and outspokenness that Lanzmann uses against the “all too well memorizing”
Poles and “all too little memorizing” Nazi’s can be seen in Arendtian sense as the guarantee of ability to judge
(Parvikko 2008, see Chapter 5. Arendt’s Ironies and Political Judgment, pp. 183–228).
5
4
scenes this happens as Lanzmann puts prisoners (barber Abraham Bomba) or civilian
testifiers (the Polish locomotive driver at Treblinka) to re-enact their past vocation in front of
the camera. What Lanzmann gets is the “the pillars of [his] film”: Bomba’s trembling body
and silences on cutting the hair and locomotive driver’s gesture of cutting the throat.
In a film S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), Panh followed Lanzmann’s insights
but deviated in his insistence not to oppose witnesses to archives for that would have been to
miss the functioning of the killing machine inlaid in the discursive apparatus and the filing
system.9 Thus, Panh makes the perpetrators and victims to meet, puts discourse and the
bodies of the survivors and former Khmer Rouges guards in action via reconstruction of the
intolerable spectacle of Tuol Sleng prison (“21”) making them both react to various sorts of
archives and perform the past events in the present, and in the presence of their victim Vann
Nath. Contrary to Lanzmann, Panh reverses the gaze of the camera to perpetrators: guards
repeat and undergo the past events in simulation. This liberates the affects of guards and
records the dehumanization transition through words, gestures, and reactions.
The aim of the paper is to discuss the aspects of the individual and the collective memory –
trauma, forgetfulness and amnesia – related to eyewitness experience and representations of
the genocide. The focus will be on Rithy Panh’s documentary film S21: The Khmer Rouge
Killing Machine, but I also draw some examples from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and from
the friction between intercultural cinema and Hollywood culture industry. Firstly, I will deal
with the problems inherent in eyewitness testimonies in films, which leads to pondering of
the ethical situation of documentary or filmmaker. Secondly, I will examine what kind of
communal bonds in Panh’s film establishes and dismantles. What can we accomplish by
bringing the perpetrators and victims together to commemorate the past atrocities and, what
insights could this encounter give us for thinking of collective memory? Thirdly, I will
interpret Panh’s film in a light of intercultural cinema and compare its representation of
embodied memories and circulation of intolerable images. In Conclusion, I will draw these
different threads together to contemplate on the possibility of film as mourning work and as
an alternative truth commission. Can the truthfulness of the film act as a ceremony that
purifies the bad karma from the divided nation by creating a new social link between the
9
Rancière 2008/2011, 110–111.
5
victims and perpetrators, and once again enable the conditions of the collective memory and
identity to emerge?
The eyewitness testimony and ethical situation in films
In the beginning of the film S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) we are faced
with simultaneous sound of city and intro insert text: “Before the war, Cambodia was an
independent, neutral country with a population of 7.7 million.” The following shot reveals a
high panoramic shot panning right and capturing the ordinary life and street noise of the
capital Phnom Penh. During the panning Panh inserts two extra sound tracks of artillery fire
and threatening ambient music to clash the present image and sound with the past sound of
war, as to transform our perception of the visual image. Before the panning stop we are given
a brief historical chronology in the form of insert text: “1970: Coup d’Etat against Prince
Sihanouk.” The cut takes us to black and white archival film depicting Khmer Rouge
guerillas carrying their guns in the jungle, Pol Pot and other comrades arriving to Phnom
Penh and walking on the city roof top of buildings, a pan of destroyed and deserted city. All
of this accompanied with the propaganda song that is not subtitled. The next montage
sequence reveals us Cambodians working as slaves in thigh organized queues, carrying the
soil. To this montage Panh has inserted a Democratic Kampuchea’s propaganda song10, now
adding also an insert text to translate these lyrics that reminds us of “Blut und Boden”
ideology:
“Bright red blood / that covers cities and plains of Kampuchea, out motherland, / Sublime blood of workers
and peasants, Sublime blood of revolutionary fighting men and women.”
While the propaganda song continues and the insert texts are translating the audible11, Panh
faces us with a color image of contemporary Cambodia. In it are three farmers collecting the
rice from the fields. The director adds yet another short-term sound track, that of bird song
while the camera gives us close ups of the farmer faces and hands picking up the rice,
accompanied by intensified sound of water splashes. The sudden cut gives us a close-up of a
10
This insert of the propaganda song relates the reality of the working camps because the workers while they
were working were oppressed by these songs flowing from the field speakers.
11
The song continues the following way: “The blood, changing into unrelenting hatred, / And resolute struggle /
On 17 April, under the flag of revolution, / Frees us from slavery…”.
6
young baby crying and being washed by his/her mother. Behind them we see a little child
playing with toy revolver that drops suddenly next to baby. The propaganda song stops at the
same time as the cut but with a slight echo as if the violent and haunting past reaching over
the cut to the next image. Little by little we become conscious of being in a country house of
the former Khmer Rouge deputy head of Santébal, Him Houy, haunted by the irrevocable
past that causes him sleeplessness and headache.
Why is Panh starting his film with a high panorama shot of the city? And, why is he
establishing continuity between the opening shot, Khmer Rouge black and white archivalpropaganda film and Him Houy’s family working in rice fields, and discussion the
catastrophe with his parents? (Ta Him & Yeay Cheu) Perhaps the high panoramic opening
shot links with the Khmer Rouge black and white archival-propaganda film? And states the
point of view of official narrative and Western media focus on the Cambodian genocide?
This is exactly the detached and vertical “Archimedean Point” of perceiving things that
Hannah Arendt spoke on his lecture at the University of Michigan College of Engineers in
1968. Dealing with the question of storytelling and eyewitness Arendt sets the disinterested,
impartial and apolitical Archimedean perspective (historiography) against the down the earth
narrative knowledge provided by the limited and participatory eyewitness stance based on
historical accounts of Thucydides that is inherently political insofar as it is able to engage the
audience in critical thinking.12 Applied to film, the Archimedean perspective is a stand point
of Francis Ford Coppola making the film Apocalypse Now (1979). As Claude Lanzmann
reminds us, Coppola is “God with thirty-six cameras and a helicopter ballet”.13 He has a point
of view of God, similar to author François Mauriac, whom Sartre criticized of having no
point of view (situation) in his novels which leads to conclusion that Mauriac had the point of
view of God, because it is nowhere.14 This is why the camera in the Panh’s film does not rise
up from the ground level – apart from the opening shot – to observe human tragedies as
entomologist. This is to be considered as an ethical position of the intercultural documentary
12
Guaraldo 2001, 48; following the insights of Lisa Disch (1994, 128) in article Hannah Arendt and the Limits
of Philosophy, Ithaca and London, Cornell U.P.
13
Lanzmann 1991, 95.
14
Ibid. 94. Lanzmann’s criticism of Coppola is a sharp one but he forgets the one important aspect of the
Apocalypse Now, that is, the gradual limitations of storytelling (in technical devices) relating strongly to Joseph
Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness (1899) and its main character’s, Charles Marlow, role as an eyewitness.
7
director to situation himself/herself in the strain of unwinding events and winding the
memory.
Unwinding the Khmer Rouge – bringing the perpetrators and victims
together
Yeay Cheu (mother): Hold a ceremony so we never see that again.
Him Houy (son):
Who wants to see that again? Why do you say that, ma?
Yeay Cheu (mother): With a few cents, hold a ceremony so we never see those men again. Become a
new man as of today. All those people were corrupt. […]15
Ta Him (father):
You killed people. Tell the truth, then have a ceremony. Make an offering to the
dead so they find peace, so there is no more bad karma in the future. What can we
do? The country took that turn. “I did not want to do that!” Ask the dead to
remove the bad karma.
Yeay Cheu (mother): Who killed whom, I did not know!
Him Houy (son):
Stop it! I have a headache. [long break] I am sick all day long. I can’t eat a
thing.
Similarly to the montage of Khmer Rouge black and white archival-propaganda film, the Him
Houy’s family discussion about the haunting past and its ghosts is shot16 as shot-reverse-shot
that opposes the people in the image and emphasizes the disunity of space and sense of
opposition. The camera is first situated low like in Ozu’s “tatami shot”, but it will soon rise a
little above family members heads. The sounds of the scene include the natural sounds of
environment: goat bleat, grasshopper chirp, rooster crow, the Buddhist prayer singing mantra,
jingle of chimes. The family discussion often top one on the other. This scene begins with
medium image of the son in the foreground and the mother in the background. Then the
conversation is shot with changing close-ups of the family members. Close to the end of
scene Panh lets his camera to pan within a single shot movement from the father to the son,
where the camera holds for a minute.
This family conversation reveals the Buddhist aspects of Cambodian society and its
convention to make peace with the past. After the Khmer Rouge annihilation the countryside
15
The conversation is edited and some parts from the middle are missing. See Appendix I. for the transcription
of the whole conversation.
16
There are two cameramen in the film: Prum Mésar & Rithy Panh.
8
of Cambodia was full of corpses and skeletons. According to Cambodian saying and belief
“people who have died a violent death cannot be reincarnated”. The souls of dead people who
have not had a religious funeral and burial wander the earth forever, haunting the living.17
The advices that tormented Him Houy receives from his parents are following: tell the truth
and hold a ceremony. According to Panh, this is one side of the Cambodian memory that
reflects the fear of dealing with the past. These Cambodians sees the past as burden (“old
wounds”) that should be forgotten for the sake of the future (the irreversible). The tormenting
trials could revive serious political quarrels and set off another civil war. Another section of
these people generalize Cambodians as “fatalistic” and accept the history of war and
genocide as their “karma”. Opposing approach sees the trial of the Khmer Rouge as
indispensable because the victims could be tempted to take revenge. The mourning work does
not stop when the trial is over and judgments declared but its aim is to restore the fragmented
indentities of the victims.18
Following the scene of Him Houy’s family discussion, Panh first introduces the survivor of
S21, the painter and author, Vann Nath who is recalling his entry into prison while finishing
his painting representing the prisoner chain of S21. The next scene stages the meeting of Nath
and, public works department mechanic Chum Mey (2nd survivor). They recall the events in
S21 by going through archive material of S21 prison that is now working as a museum. Vann
Nath position in film is to work as an alter ego of the director, or rather a Deleuzian “invented
character”, enabling Panh to express himself.19 The next step for Panh is to bring five former
Khmer Rouge soldiers or officials to the museum to meet Vann Nath, who questions them of
their past deeds (“Do you see yourselves as victims?), and shows them his paintings asking
the perpetrators to correct his verbal description of the painting if he is wrong. As Sylvie
Rollet20 has demonstrated a chance meeting of Pahn and Nath on the set of Bophana, a
Cambodian Tragedy (1996, Panh) inspired the filmic device used in S21-film. Panh followed
Nath as he suddenly found himself in the presence of one of his torturers, Him Houy. Panh
17
Panh 1999, interview with Unesco Courier. When Panh returned to Cambodia in 1990, after 11 years of exile,
the first duty for him was to find the survivors of his family and recover the remains of the dead and give them a
proper burial, so their souls would stop wandering the earth and could be reincarnated in the cycle of life and
death: “I wanted at least to confirm they had died, so I could start to mourn properly”.
18
Ibid.
19
Panh (2003) reminds us that he started filming with Nath already in 1991, and he has never stopped calling for
a trial for the Khmers Rouges, even at the time when some were talking about drawing a veil over the past in the
interest of reconciliation.
20
Rollet 2012, 2.
9
tells about this encounter: “[Nath] took him by the shoulders and brought him to look at his
paintings. He took him from one canvas to another asking if the atrocities depicted in the
paintings honestly reflected what prisoners had endured”. The willingness and courage of the
victim (Nath) to question his perpetrators openly works strive for establishing the social link
between the fractioned sides to understand the process of dehumanization. For Rithy Panh,
this creation of social link is necessary, although “the torturers’ and victims’ process of
memory cannot be situated at the same level”, but there “comes a moment when victim and
executioner need each other in order to continue and complete the process of memory”.21
These staged scenes of encounters, where the perpetrators and victims meet, are often shot
with a single camera movement (long take) to emphasize the unity of space and sense of
togetherness. The power relations of the guards and prisoner have turned: senior Nath stares
at the young guards and question them what made them stop thinking. The guards cannot face
the eye contact of Nath, but lower their gazes to the ground. This visual power of gaze22 is
equivalent to Pol Pot’s and his officers domineering gaze that repress their subordinates.
The following scenes are crucial for Panh’s film: he exposes the ex-guards to various sort of
documented materials of the killings (photographs of victims, the reports and instructions of
their superiors etc.) and ask them to read aloud and perform the daily procedures of the
prison. They react and recall the tortured and killed prisoners of the archive photographs and
testify the horrors they committed under surveillance.23 He puts two guards to perform their
daily prison routine check. The guards walk on the corridors and check the conditions of their
imaginary prisoners. At the same time as they are walking through corridors making their
daily check the voice-over of guard [this is revealed in delay] consist of reading of the daily
report in which he describes with the technical terms of the prisoners physical and emotional
conditions. These scenes are also shot with a single camera movement or tracking shot to
emphasize the unity of space and sense of togetherness.
21
Rollet 2012, 3.
Found also from the colonizer and colonized power-relationship.
23
During filming Shoah Lanzmann was obsessed with the question of the ethical limits of representation. His
insistent of not using female actors in barber scene (Abraham Bomba) that would have been unbearable.
Similarly the testimonies that dealt with female suffering (as Filip Müller’s) always stopped to crying and
silence, for the sake of transmitting. In Panh’s film there is no such a gendered limit: one guard tells how he
arrested, beat and killed young female “doctor”, Nay Nân, that worked at the hospital 98. Actually, Panh’s film
consists of several readings of reports that deal with the beating and killing women and child prisoners.
22
10
The circulation of intolerable images and embodied memory
”Je suis un arpenteur de mémoires.”
Rithy Panh
The active producing of dis-information, propaganda and Hollywood entertainment by
United States during and after the Vietnam War and Cambodian genocide was often based on
the circulation of intolerable images within the discourse legitimating the American invasion
or suggesting the amnesty for the crimes committed they committed.24 Discussing the
American culture products, like the film Delta Force (1986), Edward W. Said25 marks that
the idea of killing Arabs and Muslims as terrorists is legitimized by the popular culture. This
legitimation of the grotesque visual representations of the “Other” and its suffering or
exploded body can be seen in especially in media circulation of intolerable images. Jacques
Rancière deals the qualities of these images in his article The Intolerable Image.26 According
to him, the dominant media actually reduce the exceeding limit of torrent of images of
genocide. What we are faced is too many nameless bodies, too many bodies incapable
returning the gaze that we direct at them.27 The question of qualities of intolerable image is
three-fold: it is an image when seen causes pain or indignation, (Kristeva’s abject); it raises a
moral question of exhibiting those images; 28 and finally, raises a doubt of the image of
reality.29 This shift from the intolerable in the image to the intolerable of the image has found
itself at the heart of the tensions affecting political art as a clash between reality and
appearances.30 Intolerable images make the spectator feel guilty, about being there and doing
nothing. Thus, the images of action seem to confirm us not being only spectators.31 The
24
As is the case in Roland Joffé’s extremily popular film The Killing Fields (1984).
Said 1994, 87.
26
Rancière 2008/2011.
27
Ibid. 96.
28
Intolerable image comes close to Lanzmann’s or Adorno’s thinking of the ethical limits of representation and
the possibility of transmission. In article Are Some Things Unpresentable? Rancière (2003/2009, 124) declares a
difference to above-mentioned in his insistence that there is no form of writing to represent Holocaust or
genocide experience. Rancière argues that Robert Altelme’s (or Primo Lévi’s) writing style in its paratactic
linking of simple perceptions is already found in Flaubert and from other 19 th century “realist novels” (“the new
novel”) or in Camus’ style that Barthes called “l'écriture blanche”.
29
Ibid. 83.
30
Ibid. 84.
31
Ibid. 87.
25
11
circulation of intolerable images that is typical for some of the commercial film genres32 ),
but the redistribution of intolerable images and play with its different representations can also
be used as a strategy of the film, as Rancière notes referring to Panh’s insight to expose
guards to various sort of documented materials of the killings, to enable the representation of
the Khmer Rouge killing machine, how it could operate and how it is possible for the guards
and prisoners to see it, think about it and feel about it today. The redistribution of the
intolerable image is “demoting those who have just expressed their power as torturers once
again to the position of school pupils educated by their former victims.” The treatment of the
intolerable is thus a matter of dispositif of visibility (lat. dispositio33), which creates new ways
to perceive and confer meaning on these visible objects, and shifting the audience’s gaze and
consideration. 34
The representation of the machine and its functions is activated in a scene where a guard
Khieu Ches (“Poeuv”) is asked to re-enact his daily duty in a scene that lasts two minutes. He
first, explains the procedures at the same time as he is performing them. Suddenly, the
propaganda song of the Khmer Rouge starts playing outside of the room and the guard’s
affective level rises. His body35 takes over and he starts shouting to imaginary prisoners and
taking invisible objects away of them. In this scene Panh has placed the camera in the back of
the room as not to disturb Ches with the camera presence. The director makes the guards to
repeat these daily procedures and continues to raise the level of archival material. A little
later on, the camera follows from the close range as the same guard (Khieu Ches) repeats the
daily procedure in another cell complex. This scene is conducted at the night and lasts already
four and half minutes. The propaganda song playing outside and the camera following at the
close range (“camera as weapon”36) reaffirms Ches’s body as he performs his duty like a
32 War films, splatters, giallo. Susan Sontag (2003, 100–101, Regarding the Pain of Others) has noted about
this “mounting level of acceptance violence and sadism in mass culture: films, television, comics, computer
games.” This observation is based on Benjamin’s idea that cinema was a logical response to modern capitalism
way of life where the experience of shock had become ordinary.
33
In English translation “apparatus” or “device” describe merely the technical dimension, as the Latin
disposition (“organization” or “arrangement”) refers to the system used for the organization of arguments in
Western classical rhetoric.
34
Ibid. 100–102.
35 As Alvin Cheng-Hin Limt (2012, 5, 18) has pointed out this sonorous backdrop is an added anachronism.
According to him, David Chandler has emphasized that the night-time soundscape generated by S-21 was
constituted by the screams of the tortured prisoners. But in this scene Panh is thinking of the affects of the
audience, which adding music significantly stimulates.
36
This relates to Khieus Ches’s consciousness of the power being observed by Angkar, the invisible
organization that repress the subject with the visual power of gaze.
12
somnambulist or a body-archive overwhelmed by obedience.37 Panh’s mission to actualize
the past experience reconstructs a counter-memory of the genocidal event in the present. This
actualizing process is based upon circulating usage of intolerable images.
In interview Panh explains the idea of making these guards to repeat their past actions that
were still concealed in their bodies, in their somatic memory:
“At the start of the shoot, one day when we were at Poeuv’s home, in the village, he showed me how he
closed the door of the room at S21 that he guarded. Looking at the rushes, I saw that his gesture was
prolonging his words, and I discovered that another memory existed: the memory of the body, sharper,
more precise, unable to lie.”38
Poeuv was perfect example for Panh because he was 12 or 13 years when he was
indoctrinated to hit the prisoners. During the shootings this early indoctrination, some kind of
automatic mechanism, was suddenly switched on again as he started to repeat past gestures
and body moments. Panh describes him as “a child who has been beaten, and when he reenacts these gestures, all the pain that has been contained inside him for years submerges
him.”39 But could Poeuv’s body expression work as collective utterances?
Cinema can be seen as a perfect tool to exam the embodied memory concealed within the
body. It can’t give us the presence of the body, but it produces a genesis of the body. “We do
not even know what a body can do”: in its sleep, in its drunkenness, in its efforts and
resistances”, says Deleuze40 relating to Spinoza’s Ethics. Dealing with the time-image cinema
Deleuze devotes one chapter to the body. He sees to kind of cinematic bodies: everyday
bodies and ceremonial bodies, that belong to the domain of affective-image. As the former
relates the Antonio’s exhausted characters with their strolls on spaces called any-spaceswhat-ever, the latter relates to moment when all other action has become impossible, like in
ritual, or in mourning-process. As Poeuv’s is repeating his past routines in the present, the
past-as-present activates in him as he is taken over by the automatic mechanism. In her book
37
Similar reading with slightly different stress is found from Rollet 2012, 4.
Panh, Rithy 2004.
39
Ibid.
40
Gilles Deleuze 1985/2005, 182.
38
13
The Skin of the Film. Intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the Senses (2000) Laura U.
Marks has extended and brought together aspects of Deleuze’s cinema books in his analysis
of perception, memory, the social and body. She criticizes Bergsonian orientated perception
that suggests the individual perception being possible without recourse to collective memory.
Marks, on the contrary, sees the element of communal experience to be implicit in Bergson’s
theory of perception, and thus, informing the process of cinematic spectatorship as well:
“Perception is never a purely individual act but also an engagement with the social and with
cultural memory.”41 Even if the perception is highly personal it embodies a collective
expression that uses experimental means to arouse collective memories.42 As Teshome
Gabriel describes, viewing film is sharing responsibility of constructing the film where both
the filmmaker and the spectators play a double role as performers and creators. Thus, viewing
film is a collective process, especially in the intercultural cinema, in which, the individual
stories are used to represent collective histories.43 The utterances (speech-acts) or the gesture
of bodies, delivered in this kind of minority cinema, are not individual, but collective.44
Memory for Marks, is more like a minefield (Proust’s involuntary memory) than the limpid
reflecting pool that Bergson describes. In addition, Bergson does not deal with the traumatic
effect of memory, he has endless trust on individuals’ capacity and freedom move back the
circuits of perception and recollection (voluntary memory). It is this involuntary memory that
is switched on in Poeuv’s body.
Conclusion
Understanding everything is almost the same as forgiving.
Primo Lévi
Although a documentary like S21: the Khmer Rouge killing machine remains “something
subjective” it can offer insight and details to come to terms with the collective history of
Cambodia. The acceptance of the fact that no one is unable to understand everything, because
then the comprehensive understanding would become almost the same as forgive, enabled
41
Marks 2000, 62.
Ibid.
43
Ibid.
44
Marks 2000, 62.
42
14
Rithy Panh to start the process of mourning. By listening, searching and gathering details he
started to fulfill his way of carrying out his share of the work of remembrance. The important
part of Panh’s mourning process is obviously filmmaking that establishes encounters for
perpetrators and victims, the situations where commemoration and conflicting memories
clashes against each other. Cambodia, according to Panh, will never recover its lost identity
unless it puts the past on trial within the whole community.45 In 2003, Panh presented the
former Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan his new documentary about the notorious S-21
prison. Samphan said he realized for the first time the extent of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities:
“When I saw the film, it was hard for me to deny (the killings). There’s no more doubt left. I
was surprised because I never thought it (the regime) went to that extent in its policies. S-21
was in the middle of Phnom Penh. It was clearly a state institution. It was part of the
regime.”46 Similarly the reception of Panh’s film in Cambodia has led to many arguments and
discussion. According to Panh, the shadow of the Khmer Rouge regime that represses the
public life of Cambodia has to be opened up with art works that activates the talking: I want
to jog their memories and give back my people energy lost during the genocide”.47
For Panh, the making of a documentary is collective being: “[…] being with other people,
body and soul.” His insistence of bringing the both sides of the catastrophe, both victims and
torturers, to remembrance past events can be seen as a way out of documentaries that keeps
the sides apart and trust the active interrogation of characters to provide dead ends to testify
the limits of representation. Panh’s work of remembrance is based upon “talking and
providing a platform for the witnesses of the genocide. […] each testimony is one small stone
that helps to build up a rampart against a threat that is always possible, both here and
elsewhere: the return of barbarism.” The haunting past and the burden of history with its
atrocities must be dealt extensively within the whole community. Thus, documentary
filmmaking as a work of remembrance has to be also affecting and effective. When modern
nation building is based on the temporal project of simultaneity that emerges ‘cross-time
simultaneity’ (clock and calendar) and ‘simultaneity-along-time’ (past and future fused into
45
Panh 1999, interview with Unesco Courier.
As many as 16,000 people are believed to have passed through the gates of the infamous prison but only 14
are thought to have survived. In 1980, the former prison S21 was transformed into the Tuol Sleng Genocide
Museum.
47
Panh 2006, Panh 2006, interview with Lekha Shankar.
46
15
instantaneous present) into solid community of homogeneous, empty time48, abundant
memories of atrocious pasts that stresses the irrevocable past are often seen threatening and
breaking the progress of the nation. It is hard to draw a line between the irrevocable past
seeking for justice and forgetting in order to serve life and future. Should we try to “learn”
endlessly the Holocaust and other genocides, as Lanzmann proposes, not to forget?49 Or, can
the prolonged process of mourning and remembering suppress the present possibilities of
thinking future? How long this process of mourning as commemoration should go on?
According to Rithy Panh, the haunting past must be confronted in the acts of commemoration
in order to avoid the transmission of traumas to next generations. He sees his own generation
as a “sacrificial generation” whose sacrifices will benefit the following two or three
generation. Close to end of the film the Khmer Rouge guards are performing their usual walk
to the execution place near the S21-prison. In the darkness of the night the camera tilts down,
and stares at the puddle. This connects to Vann Nath’s previous talk to the camera:
I don’t want to revenge against these people. But to tell us to forget, because it belongs to the past… it’s not
like you step over a puddle and get your pants wet. They dry and you forget. This is something painful,
really painful, and even if it’s been 20 years it’s not so far back. It hasn’t “dried”.
The work of remembrance in cinema is to revive memories, to rewind memory, to assure that
memories survive and build safeguard against the radical contingency of the world. It consists
of reestablishing a collective memory that works as a pedagogue for the present and future
generations offering them back the possibility to construct identity and rehabilitate the lost
dignity.50 After 10 years of Rithy Panh’s struggle the Audiovisual Center Bophana was
opened in Phnom Penh in December 4, 2006. Worldwide funded Center collects images and
sounds of the Cambodian memory and makes them available to a wide public, but it also
trains Cambodians in the audiovisual professions by welcoming foreign film productions and
its own artistic projects.51 Inauguration this Memory Center is pivotal to Pahn because the
eradication of memory seems to have led to a near-eradication of the arts in Cambodia, which
was symbolized in the burning down of the well-known Suramet Theatre in 1994: “No one
48
Anderson 2006, 26.
Lanzmann 1991, 85.
50
Panh 2006, interview with Lekha Shankar.
51
Panh 2006a, interview with Scott Rosenberg.
49
16
seems bothered to erect it again – it’s like a blot in our memory.”52 The second aspect of the
importance of the Memory Center is the fact that Cambodia consist of young generation. In
2006, 70 percent of Cambodia’s population were under 25 years and have no reference about
their past.53 Audiovisual media, like cinema, with its archeological practice strives, not only
help the people think about the past and the future, but it also liberates gradually the present
and futures generations from the haunting past:
But we must come to terms with our collective history. I do not want to leave this burden to our children. A
time will come when they will be able to turn the page and be confident about the world around them. The
ghosts will then stop haunting the living. 54
Appendix
I. Appendix – the scene of Houy remembering the Khmer Rouge with his mother and
father (4.20–8.03)
Yeay Cheu (mother): Hold a ceremony so we never see that again.
Him Houy (son):
Who wants to see that again? Why do you say that, ma?
Yeay Cheu (mother): With a few cents, hold a ceremony so we never see those men again. Become a
new man as of today. All those people were corrupt!
Him Houy (son):
I wanted to return to the army. I would rather have died.
Yeay Cheu (mother): You would rather died! Then tell the truth!
Him Houy (son):
Death was certain there. Better to die at the front. But they would not let me go. I
did not force you to do that.
Yeay Cheu (mother): And you did not go of your own free will. But people do not see that. [break] You
have to tell the truth. Whether it is 100 or 200… it does not matter who killed
whom. You killed people.
Ta Him (father):
You killed people. Tell the truth, then have a ceremony. Make an offering to the
dead so they find peace, so there is no more bad karma in the future. What can we
do? The country took that turn. “I did not want to do that!” Ask the dead to
remove the bad karma.
Yeay Cheu (mother): Who killed whom, I did not know!
Him Houy (son):
Stop it! I have a headache. [break] I am sick all day long. I can’t eat a thing.
52
Ibid. Rithy Panh’s documentary The Burnt Theatre (2005) focuses on interviews of a theater troupe that
inhabits the burned-out remains of Suramet Theatre.
53
Ibid.
54
Panh 2004, “Interview with Rithy Panh.”
17
Yeay Cheu (mother): When I think of it, whether it is me or another, another son or my own… Why
did he do it? I pity the dead and I pity my son. My son stayed home. He never
behaved badly, never insulted the elders. But they indoctrinated him, turned him
into a thug who killed people. I brought my son up properly. When I think of the
Khmer Rouge, who killed without flinching… What cruelty!
Ta Him (father):
The Khmer used to say: “The bones cry out, the flesh calls for blood.” There will
be bad karma. What do you think?
Him Houy (son):
If we killed people… and personally killed people… and of our own free will,
then that is evil. But I was given orders. They terrorized me with their guns
[break] and their power. That is not evil. The evil is the leaders who gave the
orders. [break] Deep down, I was afraid of evil. I was afraid to die then. Even
today, I am scared. So I only do good things. Ever since I was a child, I had
always been good. I still am today. I do not steal or do holdups, I do not hurt
anyone.
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20