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The Missing Picture – review The Missing Picture – review
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Rithy Panh's documentary The Missing Picture – Cambodia's entry for best foreign film Oscar – is a sombre, stylised memoir of the director's childhood when his country had been taken over by the Khmer Rouge. Many of his family died in the labour camps that were intended to "re-educate" the people and purify them in the flame of revolutionary socialism. In fact, of course, they were the instruments of mass torture, mass murder, mass psychosis, a vast theatre of cruelty and fear directed by an oligarchy of fanatics whose homicidal activities were in no way impeded by America's "sideshow" bombing raids.Rithy Panh's documentary The Missing Picture – Cambodia's entry for best foreign film Oscar – is a sombre, stylised memoir of the director's childhood when his country had been taken over by the Khmer Rouge. Many of his family died in the labour camps that were intended to "re-educate" the people and purify them in the flame of revolutionary socialism. In fact, of course, they were the instruments of mass torture, mass murder, mass psychosis, a vast theatre of cruelty and fear directed by an oligarchy of fanatics whose homicidal activities were in no way impeded by America's "sideshow" bombing raids.
Startlingly, Panh tells his story through a mixture of Khmer Rouge propaganda newsreels and little clay figurines. It was perhaps the only way of managing the devastating memories. Rather as infant victims of abuse will sometimes be asked by social workers to tell their story through soft toys, Panh tells part of his own history through these figurines. As well as this stratum of tragedy and pain, The Missing Picture has an element of Godardian reflection: the "missing picture" is the definitive image of truth for which he is searching.Startlingly, Panh tells his story through a mixture of Khmer Rouge propaganda newsreels and little clay figurines. It was perhaps the only way of managing the devastating memories. Rather as infant victims of abuse will sometimes be asked by social workers to tell their story through soft toys, Panh tells part of his own history through these figurines. As well as this stratum of tragedy and pain, The Missing Picture has an element of Godardian reflection: the "missing picture" is the definitive image of truth for which he is searching.
Cinema is ubiquitous, and yet it may not be able to show the fact of loss. I was weirdly reminded of Georges Perec's literary experiment La Disparition, a text in which the letter "e" is missing; the conceit was inspired by his mother perishing in the Holocaust after the Nazi invasion of France, which was marked not by a death certificate, but a heartwrenching document, called an Acte de disparition which simply recorded her "disappearance". The same unresolved pain is present in this dark journey into the past.Cinema is ubiquitous, and yet it may not be able to show the fact of loss. I was weirdly reminded of Georges Perec's literary experiment La Disparition, a text in which the letter "e" is missing; the conceit was inspired by his mother perishing in the Holocaust after the Nazi invasion of France, which was marked not by a death certificate, but a heartwrenching document, called an Acte de disparition which simply recorded her "disappearance". The same unresolved pain is present in this dark journey into the past.
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