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The Missing Picture – review The Missing Picture – review
(4 months later)
Rithy Panh is a film-maker, historian and survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide who has fashioned a vibrant career out of excavating the past. The Missing Picture follows on from his earlier films, Rice People and S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, in tackling the horrors of the Pol Pot era, although on this occasion the approach is so nakedly personal and so honeycombed with open-ended questions that it amounts to a bewitching form of self-therapy.Rithy Panh is a film-maker, historian and survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide who has fashioned a vibrant career out of excavating the past. The Missing Picture follows on from his earlier films, Rice People and S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, in tackling the horrors of the Pol Pot era, although on this occasion the approach is so nakedly personal and so honeycombed with open-ended questions that it amounts to a bewitching form of self-therapy.
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On the cusp of middle age, Panh has decided to re-enact his 1970s childhood with the aid of painted clay figurines. The effect is haunting; at once intimate and oddly distancing, a means of framing old traumas and thereby controlling the story. Panh shows us how the revolution falls like a black curtain on the land, how Cambodia's reviled middle classes are "re-educated" as proletarians and how the population survives by eating insects and rats.On the cusp of middle age, Panh has decided to re-enact his 1970s childhood with the aid of painted clay figurines. The effect is haunting; at once intimate and oddly distancing, a means of framing old traumas and thereby controlling the story. Panh shows us how the revolution falls like a black curtain on the land, how Cambodia's reviled middle classes are "re-educated" as proletarians and how the population survives by eating insects and rats.
Midway through, as starvation takes hold, he starts chiselling ribs into the torsos of his figures and intercuts his factual reconstruction with antique propaganda newsreels showing bumper harvests that never go where they're needed. Panh is in search of the "missing picture", the lost piece of the puzzle, whether that be the history that Pol Pot expunged or the death of family members that the director can still barely bring himself to look at. If he doesn't come away with all the answers, that's probably to his credit.Midway through, as starvation takes hold, he starts chiselling ribs into the torsos of his figures and intercuts his factual reconstruction with antique propaganda newsreels showing bumper harvests that never go where they're needed. Panh is in search of the "missing picture", the lost piece of the puzzle, whether that be the history that Pol Pot expunged or the death of family members that the director can still barely bring himself to look at. If he doesn't come away with all the answers, that's probably to his credit.
The Missing Picture is more about the journey than the closure; it's about finding what was lost and examining it afresh. It brings out the dead and then holds them up to the light.The Missing Picture is more about the journey than the closure; it's about finding what was lost and examining it afresh. It brings out the dead and then holds them up to the light.
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