The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

157 Rithy Panh Gestures of protest Rithy Panh’s compelling documentary and feature films explore Cambodia’s recent traumatic past and its uncertain present. His body of work eloquently contributes to the reconstruction of Cambodian identity, which was largely stripped away during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–79). His early feature film Neak Sre (Rice People) 1994 focuses on a family’s struggle to eke out a living from the rice paddies, while One Evening After the War 1998 looks at the love between a returned soldier and an indentured prostitute. Exploring deceptively simple situations, Panh’s cinematic works present quiet understandings of the complexities surrounding love, loss, hope and frustration in contemporary Cambodia. Panh uses film as a way for survivors to record their memories, both personal and cultural, and to restore a semblance of identity and social cohesion in a country disconnected from its rich past. As a young child growing up in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, Panh dreamt of becoming an astronaut like his hero Neil Armstrong, or an educator like his father. The ascension of the Khmer Rouge to power and the subsequent decimation of both population and culture — including the death of Panh’s parents, sister and nephew — would forever change his aspirations. After fleeing to France as a refugee, he took up painting, and then writing, in an attempt to piece his life together. However, it was not until he was handed a camera that he faced the memories of his past: 1 Without genocide, without wars, I would probably not have become a filmmaker. But life after genocide is a terrifying void. It is impossible to live in forgetfulness. You risk losing your soul. Day after day, I felt myself sucked into the void. As if keeping silent was capitulation, death. Contrary to what I at first thought, to relive is also to take back your memory and your ability to speak. 2 Empowered by his experience, Panh enrolled in the influential L’Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies) in Paris, and directed his first documentary film Site ll in 1989, which examined the story of a displaced Cambodian woman living in a refugee camp on the Cambodia–Thai border. It was through these early works that Panh began to understand the need to reclaim identity through memory. This philosophy was further inspired by the work of French New Wave director Alain Resnais, once a student of the same film school. Having just emerged myself from genocide, Alain Resnais’ work on Night and Fog [1955] and Hiroshima Mon Amour [1959] really moved me. Resnais was the filmmaker who made me realize that filmmaking is a tool of expression I could use to express my own story. 3 Unlike Resnais’s Night and Fog , which was one of the first films to take a confronting look at the Nazi concentration camps in Poland, Panh’s films about the Cambodian genocide do not focus on the broader political and historical context of the regime. Instead, he articulates the psychological trauma associated with genocide through the recollections of those who survived. Even Panh’s S-21: la machine de mort Khmère rouge (S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine) 2003, in which a survivor of the regime’s most feared extermination facilities confronts his former guards and torturers, is carefully focused on the personal memories and experiences of individuals within the collective history of genocide. Uninterested in the usual conventions of documentary — archival image montages and accompanying voice-over — Panh relies on the camera to record, to interrogate and, above all, to listen. Through each intimate remembrance and historically inspired story, Panh interweaves evidence of human dignity and memory, utilising the camera to both record and actively listen to the unfolding narrative. Each film is a gesture of protest to awaken a nation still traumatised. 4 With his sparse observational style and uncompromising lens, Panh’s filmmaking resolutely challenges the status quo, prompting Cambodians to give voice to the lost — both dead and living— and to embrace the importance of culture, identity, memory and dignity. 5 Amanda Slack-Smith Endnotes 1 Sophie Boukhari, ‘Directors in exile’, The UNESCO Courier , October 2000, p.37. 2 Rithy Panh, ‘Je suis un arpenteur de mémoires’, Cahiers du Cinéma , February 2004, pp.14–17, trans. and quoted in William Guynn, Writing History in Film , Routledge, New York, 2006, p.187. 3 Michael Guillen, ‘TIFF08: Un barrage contre le Pacifique (The Sea Wall) —The Evening Class interview with Rithy Panh’, The Evening Class , 21 September 2008, <http://theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2008/09/tiff08-un-barrage-contre-le- pacifique.html>, viewed 1 September 2009. 4 The trial of Kaing Guek Eav, the first of five former Khmer Rouge leaders, began in August 2009. He was the head of the notorious Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison camp in Phnom Penh, presiding over the death of approximately 17 000 people. Young Cambodians are often unaware of the genocide due to a selective educational curriculum, while ageing generations are still fearful of former leaders yet to be tried. 5 With the assistance of Leu Pannakar (cinematographer for former leader King Norodom Sihanouk) and selected international supporters, Panh has created the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center in Phnom Penh, named after a woman whose torture and death was the focus of his early documentary Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy 1996. Ten years in the making, the centre is dedicated to the preservation of Cambodian filmic, photographic and audio histories.