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

antti.j.vesikko@student.jyu.fi

2

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

2 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.

3

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

4

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.

5 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

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.

6

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…”.

7

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 archival-

propaganda 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.

8

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.

9

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.

10

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. 22

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.

11

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). 25

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 19th

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.

12

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.

13

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 re-

enacts 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-spaces-

what-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. 38

Panh, Rithy 2004. 39

Ibid. 40

Gilles Deleuze 1985/2005, 182.

14

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. 42

Ibid. 43

Ibid. 44

Marks 2000, 62.

15

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. 46

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.

16

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. 49

Lanzmann 1991, 85. 50

Panh 2006, interview with Lekha Shankar. 51

Panh 2006a, interview with Scott Rosenberg.

17

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.”

18

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.

Literature

Anderson, Benedict (1983/1991) Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism. Verso, London.

Bevernage, Berber (2012) History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and

Justice. Routledge, New York & London.

Guaraldo, Olivia (2001) Storylines, History and Narrative from an Arendtian Perspective.

SoPhi, Jyväskylä.

Lanzmann, Claude (1991) Seminar With Claude Lanzmann 11 April 1990. Claude

Lanzmann, Ruth Larson and David Rodowick (1991). In Yale French Studies, No. 79,

Literature and Ethical Question, pp 82–99. Yale University Press.

Lim, A. C. H. (2012) Reassembling Memory: Rithy Panh’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing

Machine. In S.O. Opondo and M. J. Shapiro (eds.) The New Violent Cartography: Geo-

analysis After the Aesthetic Turn (pp. 118–133). Routledge, New York. On-line:

http://www.academia.edu/394510/Reassembling_Memory_Rithy_Panhs_S-

21_The_Khmer_Rouge_Killing_Machine_

19

Marks, Laura U. (2000) The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the

Senses. Duke University Press, Durham & London.

Panh, Rithy (1999) Cambodia: a wound that will not heal. Interview with Unesco Courier.

Internet archive Wayback Machine.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070702170154/http:/www.unesco.org/courier/1999_12/uk/doss

ier/txt07.htm

Panh, Rithy (2004) S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) Presskit. First Run

Features. http://www.firstrunfeatures.com/presskits/s21_press_kit/s21_pk.pdf

Panh, Rithy (2006) Rewinding memory. Interview with Lekha Shankar 3 February 2006.

Thai Day. http://www.manager.co.th/IHT/ViewNews.aspx?NewsID=9490000015095

Panh, Rithy (2006a) Exclusive interview: Cambodian film director Rithy Panh – “Angelina

Jolie, come visit the Audiovisual Center Bophana!” Interview with Scott Rosenberg,

Monsters and Critics. http://www.monstersandcritics.com/movies/features/article

_1234058.php/Exclusive_interview_Cambodian_film_director_Rithy_Panh_–_Angelina_

Jolie_come_visit_the_Audiovisual_Center_Bophana

Parvikko, Tuija (2008) Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past. Finnish Political

Science Association, Helsinki University Press, Helsinki.

Rancière, Jacques (2003/2009) Are Some Things Unrepresentable? Translated by Gregory

Elliott. In The Future of the Image (2009). Verso, London & New York. Original Le destin

des images (2003).

Rancière, Jacques (2008/2011) The Intolerable Image. Translated by Gregory Elliott. In The

Emancipated Spectator (2011). Verso, London & New York. Original Le Spectateur

émancipé (2008).

20

Rollet, Sylvain (2012) Embodies Archives: the Torturers’ Testimony in Rithy Panh’s ´S21´.

Translated by Precious Brown. Presentation (21, November 2012) in International

Conference of the Foundation EVZ and Freie Universität Berlin “Preserving Survivors’

Memories - Digital Testimony Collections about Nazi Persecution”.

http://www.preserving-survivors-memories.org/media/presentations/Sylvie_Rollet_ Embodied_

Archives.pdf?1355229923

Said, Edward W. (1994) The Pen and the Sword: Culture and Imperalism. In Edward W.

Said & David Barsamian (edit.) The Pen and the Sword. Edward W. Said. Conversations with

David Barsamian. AK Press, Edinburgh.

Internet

Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). The official website:

http://www.eccc.gov.kh/en

Office of the Co-Prosecutors (2007) STATEMENT OF THE CO-PROSECUTORS. Phnom

Penh, 18 July 2007. Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia / Office of the Co-

Prosecutors http://www.yale.edu/cgp/downloads/Statement_of_Co-Prosecutors18-July-2007.pdf