Returning, in His Own Way, to the Killing Fields

‘The Missing Picture,’ Rithy Panh’s Look at 1970s Cambodia

NYT Critics' Pick

International New York Times | 18 March 2014

A scene from “The Missing Picture,” in which clay figures are used to help tell Rithy Panh’s story about Cambodia’s mass killings. Credit /Bophana Center, via Associated Press

The audacity of “The Missing Picture” — a brilliant documentary about a child who held on to life in Cambodia’s killing fields — is equaled only by its soulfulness. On April 17, 1975, the day the Khmer Rouge seized the capital, Phnom Penh, the 13-year-old Rithy Panh, his family and millions more were driven from that city and other towns and villages and straight into hell. Four years later, many of his relatives, including his father, mother, sisters and a niece and nephew were dead; decades later, Mr. Panh, now a filmmaker, has told his story in a movie in which the act of remembrance serves as a form of resistance.

“Memory must remain a reference point,” Mr. Panh asserts in his 2012 memoir, written with Christophe Bataille, “The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts His Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields.” “What I’m looking for is comprehension,” Mr. Panh continues, “I want to understand the nature of the crime, not to establish a cult of memory.” It’s an edict that feels like a moral imperative in “The Missing Picture.” The movie, which turns historical reclamation into something of an exorcism, traces Mr. Panh and his family’s ordeal both through familiar documentary devices — including archival news footage, old photographs and haunting snippets of song — and, more radically, through carved and painted clay figurines that serve as human stand-ins. 

Along the way, Mr. Panh takes stock of the Khmer Rouge; its leader, Pol Pot (1925-1998); and the geopolitical events preceding their years of terror, but his approach is at once more expansive and specific. Culturally authorized history invariably belongs to vanquished leaders as well as to their victorious counterparts, which itself becomes a triumph, as endless books and movies about Hitler suggest. In “The Missing Picture,” Mr. Panh rights that imbalance by focusing on the ordinary people, like his relatives, who lived and died under the Khmer Rouge (Khmer is the name of a Cambodian aboriginal people and the country’s largest ethnic group), rather than on the perpetrators who tortured, starved and slaughtered so many. Mr. Panh shows Pol Pot, who eerily smiles in propaganda clips, but there’s no doubt to whom this movie belongs. 

Written by Mr. Panh and Mr. Bataille, it opens with a striking series of images of badly discolored and misshapen strips of celluloid and corroded, dusty film cans. These, too, were victims of Pol Pot’s ideologically grim reign, which sought to “purify” Cambodia by stripping it of any perceived Western influence and bourgeois taint and by turning the population into revolutionary peasants. Cambodians were divided into “old people” (or “base people”), who were from rural areas and often illiterate, and “new people,” who included intellectuals, Buddhist monks, city dwellers and even those who spoke French, the language of the country’s past colonial master. Wearing eyeglasses could be a death sentence; in his memoir, Mr. Panh recalls how his mother asked his father to throw away his neckties.

“The Missing Picture” is narrated with restrained musicality in French (by Randal Douc), a language that Mr. Panh learned after he emigrated to France. (An equally affecting English-language version was shown at the New York Film Festival last year.) The French narration, Mr. Panh has said, is in tribute to his father, a former Cambodian government worker who loved French poetry. The first clay figurine you see emerges in the rough hands of a man who turns this little lump into a totem, a memory, a father. (The figurines were created by Sarith Mang.) It’s an indescribably touching transformation, as is the narration that echoes another, more familiar story of creation: “With clay and water, with the dead, with rice fields, with living hands, a man is made.” 

Despite the peasant roots of his father, the family wasn’t spared the Khmer Rouge’s violence, and soon after leaving Phnom Penh, it was swept up and away in the terror, subjected to ideological “re-education” and renunciation, as well as to crushingly brutal forced labor, disease and starvation. The figurines in the movie’s diorama-like sets — including the one in the colorful shirt representing the young Mr. Panh — initially help keep what happens on screen at somewhat of an intellectual remove. There’s a distinctly Brechtian quality to how the figurines are deployed that initially recalls Todd Haynes’s “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” a 1980s film in which Barbie dolls are used to narrate the singer’s death, The figurines in “The Missing Picture” are more sober and nakedly sincere, more touching and horrifying. 

In time, the clay figurines begin to change — their rib cages jut out, their faces sink in — as does your relationship to them. First, they become characters, and then, with alchemical mystery and deep feeling, they turn into people. The transformation of clay figurines into rounded characters you come to care about greatly may not be especially surprising, given that such transporting transmutations are as old as cinema. Yet what is startling is the depth of emotion that Mr. Panh solicits from you as he fills in the missing picture of this lost world and — with the little clay boy in the colorful shirt, the little clay woman dying in her bed and the little clay father that he yearns to hold close — reclaims the very human individuality that the Khmer Rouge sought to obliterate.

The Missing Picture

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan. 

Written and directed by Rithy Panh; text written by Christophe Bataille, narrated by Randal Douc; director of photography, Prum Mésa; edited by Mr. Panh and Marie-Christine Rougerie; music by Marc Marder; produced by Catherine Dussart; released by Strand Releasing. At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. This film is not rated.