The story of the atrocities in Cambodia in the 1970s is one worth telling, but by using static clay figures, The Missing Picture just looks silly.
France/Cambodia
2*
Director:
Rithy Panh
Screenwriters:
Rithy Panh
Christophe Bataille
Director of Photography:
Prum Mesa
Running time: 90 minutes
Original title: L’image manquante
“There is no truth, there is only cinema; revolution is cinema”, is a woolly quotation from The Missing Picture, which is a documentary that uses some archive footage but mostly clay figures to depict the terrible events that took place during Cambodia’s re-education programme under the Khmer Rouge in 1975–79.
Made by the Cambodian-born French filmmaker Rithy Panh, the subject’s importance is unquestionable. One of the best-known films of the 1980s was the unforgettable The Killing Fields, which followed one man – who worked as an interpreter for The New York Times – from the moment the capital, Phnom Penh, fell to the communist forces, through the desperate times working in the rice paddies in the countryside with little or no food for long stretches of time, until he finally escaped across the border to Thailand. It was a true story, beautifully brought to life by director Roland Joffe.
Panh’s hundreds of clay figures, which occupy extremely detailed sets, almost never move, except when they are involved in some cinematic process. They are frozen in place, seemingly devoid of spirit, but when Panh shows us a cameraman shooting film or a film director doing his job, these figures start moving.
The quotation at the top sounds like something Jean-Luc Godard would have said, and whatever you think of its poetry, it is important to note how the director contradicts himself only a few moments later, when he observes how films were used as propaganda by the Khmer Rouge to show people smiling while they work in the fields that offer what they would describe in their language of exaggeration as an “extraordinary, glorious” harvest.
Panh also doesn’t dig into the absurdity and hypocrisy of the Khmer Rouge showing films to educate the country’s people about Marxist ideology and reading books by Lenin while they themselves denounce any and all Imperial (i.e. Western) devices and call anyone who deigns to read books a pig. We even get some archive footage of pigs parading around in front of the National Library to sear this idea into our heads.
The Missing Picture is Panh’s story of his own life under the brutal form of communism that turned the country into a mass Gulag camp run by the all-powerful entity called Angkar, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (the country’s name under the Khmer Rouge). People were forced to work in the fields, manually transporting dirt and rocks from one place to another throughout the day, every day. They lost their possessions and sense of individuality and were encouraged to act and think collectively.
Panh was 13 years old at the time the Khmer Rouge took over, and the few scenes that compare the bustling markets of Phnom Penh before the invasion with the shots of a completely deserted capital during the years of Khmer rule are absolutely riveting.
At various points throughout the film, he attempts to fuse the archive footage to his clay figures in order to bridge time and create a reconstruction that is tied together across the span of history, and he does this by superimposing the figures on the black-and-white footage from the time. The idea has merit, but don’t expect a Forrest Gump–like experience; sometimes, it is effective, but more often than not it just looks ridiculous.
The worst offence is a scene in the second half of the film in which three children die from malnutrition. At first, we see the clay figures dissolving away to disappear completely from their beds. It is a powerful moment, but this scene is followed immediately by colourful shots of clouds and the clay figures flying like superheroes across the sky as they presumably make their way toward heaven.
The film contains a great deal of information, shared with us via voiceover that pretends to be the director, as the text is written in the first person, but late in the film when someone is interviewed on television and we learn it is Panh himself, we are disorientated because the voice and especially the accent is so pronouncedly different. In fact, the voiceover was done by co-writer, Christophe Bataille.
What may have sounded like an intriguing proposition for a film is actually a frustrating viewing experience that contains many cringeworthy scenes. The Missing Picture was clearly born out of a very personal experience for the filmmaker, but the viewer learns very little and does so in a way that does not rely on the unusual approach to storytelling on display here.
Viewed at the International Film Festival Bratislava 2013.