L'immagine mancante

History, it is said, is written by the victors. But sometimes, it is the victims - or more accurately, the survivors - who get to do the writing. That is the case with Rithy Panh, a Cambodian who survived the horrors of life under the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. Panh was a mere child when he suffered the loss of his parents and siblings in the various grueling work camps to which they had been consigned. As an adult, Panh went on to become a documentary filmmaker dedicated to telling his story to the world. It was a purge aimed mainly at the intelligentsia of Cambodian society - the well-off and educated - who posed the greatest threat to the regime's vision of a collectivist agrarian utopia.

Where, Panh asks, are all the pictures of children starving, of people being worked into the grave that more accurately portray the reality of this 20th Century holocaust? Somehow, those were not recorded and preserved for posterity. Instead, we get a series of grainy propaganda images - of workers seemingly happy in their toil, of leaders of the revolution inspiring the masses with their promises of a Communist paradise - that were officially sanctioned by the government. So Panh has taken it upon himself to provide the "missing" pictures the Pol Pot regime failed to provide to the world.

The Oscar-nominated documentary "The Missing Picture" is a stark, haunting illustration of what life was like under Pol Pot's brutal dictatorship. The director alternates between grainy, mostly black-and- white footage taken at the time and diorama-style re-creations using strategically arranged and intricately carved clay figurines. These frozen, expressionless figures, with their searching, unblinking eyes, lift the suffering that the actual people endured to a near-surreal level, while the wistful, soft-spoken narration by Jean-Baptiste Phou echoes the human tragedy at the core. Indeed, the approach Panh has taken manages to personalize a holocaust that, given its enormous breadth and scope - an estimated one to three million people died under the regime - would otherwise be incomprehensible to the human mind. "The Missing Picture," by "going small," paradoxically helps us to see the tragedy writ large.

The Khmer Rouge tried to leave no traces of the Cambodian genocide (1975-79). It could be a crime for anyone outside the Party to have pencil and paper, not to mention camera or tape recorder. Scarcely any images got out.

Rithy Panh was thirteen when his family was rounded up. along with the other residents of Phnom Penh, and sent to "re-education" camps and then five years of starvation and rural labor. Now as a survivor looking back at those years, he uses simple clay figures to represent the people who died unrecorded. He juxtaposes them with scraps of propaganda films and other footage, and with manufactured landscapes, while narrating a major 20th century horror story that's also a personal and national tragedy.

The film takes all kinds of aesthetic risks: the images are complexly beautiful, but they dare to seem simplistic or naïve, or to skirt "bad taste." The simplicity is more than justified though, as The Missing Picture does recapture a lost time, the artistic triumph inseparable from the human triumph.

"A picture can be stolen - a thought cannot" states the narrator of this documentary about the atrocities committed by Khmer Rouge in late 1970s Cambodia. While not actually narrated by him for reasons unknown, the script for the film is written by director Rithy Panh, a survivor of the atrocities, in an usual touch, Panh uses clay figures to depict incidents he experienced but for which no archive footage exists. Going back to that earlier quote, the film stands up as a testament of the human mind to recall personal horrors in great detail as one's thoughts can never be stolen. The clay figures are remarkably detailed and especially effective in a moment when Panh recalls drinking muddied water while watched by seemingly stunned local herds. Unique as the film may be though, it outstays its welcome long before it is over. The narration is extremely repetitive and as the film keeps focusing on emotions that its director personally felt, it crosses the border into maudlin territory while ultimately becoming less a document of the times and more the faded memories of a single man. The film is very deliberately paced too so one really needs to be in the right mood to appreciate it. The clay work is, however, never less than remarkable and as the film takes time to focus on Panh also creating all the models, sculpting then painting them, it is hard not to admire the care and consideration put into them. This was clearly a very personal film for Panh and the fact that the film makes one want to read up more about the Khmer Rouge horrors certainly says something.

Cambodia's 2013 entry to the Best Foreign Film category of the 85th Academy Awards, The Missing Picture, concerns a dark topic of history you probably didn't learn about in your high school world history/global connections course. Or perhaps you did learn about it but it quickly escaped your mind, like many other pieces of information. It concerns the tragedy of the Khmer Rouge uprising in 1970's Cambodia, and such a tragedy has never been explored quite like it has been in this particular film.

A reading program I was forced to use my freshman year in high school hard an entire unit devoted to the Khmer Rouge and the events surrounding a time of unimaginable darkness for a country many, including myself, know tragically little about. I, admittedly, likely couldn't point to the country on a map. The unit was my personal favorite, as it talked about a journalist by the name of Dith Pran, who found himself victim to the merciless "Killing Fields" that the Khmer Rouge set up during this violent uprising. However, The Missing Picture documents a much more personal story than the highly-publicized Pran story, and instead, focuses on a filmmaker's tragic experience with the event in a style that is highly meditative and deeply fascinating.

It was April 17, 1975 that the Khmer Rouge, a communist regime, seized the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. From that day forward, thirteen-year-old Rithy Panh would never be the same, with him, his parents, his relatives, neighbors, and villagers all being led into internment camps, stripped of their belongings and personal possession to be clothed in black cloaks and given a number that would serve as their identity. They endured this abusive and crippling hell for four years, many of them dying or being killed in the process.

Thirty-nine years later, Panh has found the courage and strength to create a surprisingly artful picture that literally paints vivid dioramas and ideas as to what endured under the Khmer Rouge regime, led by Pol Pot, an active member of the communist party. Panh employs the use of rare and haunting archival footage, providing the idea for life under Khmer Rouge better than present-day interviews ever could, but Panh's original technique comes in the form of impeccably detailed clay dioramas that provide us with an almost contradictory whimsy to such horrific events.

Panh also shows himself painstakingly constructing these unique little clay figures, even getting emotional as he constructs clay figures that represent his deceased parents. He paints them with the lovely imperfections of real humans in terms of color, but paints them with unfathomable accuracy in terms of facial structure and torso-build.

What is even more unfathomable is how Panh updates these figures little-by-little overtime, having their ribcages protrude out more, their facial features begin to wither, as well as showing their stomachs enlarge due to the horribly inadequate conditions the Khmer Rouge bestowed upon the communities, and this attention to detail, combined with the absolutely original and unique presentation qualities for a documentary make The Missing Picture a beautifully made film in the visual department.

If there's one detractor, it's Panh's narration, which can best be described as monotone and occasionally droning. When the subject matter fits, however, the voice can work to compliment what is going on in the film, but there are times when the film could use a bit more excitement or even identifiable emotion, especially when Panh begins to talk about the alternative routes, good and bad, that could've also happened to Cambodia in the 1970's. When the narration becomes distracting, I found myself sinking out of the exposition and into the visuals or archival footage, which leads me to say this film is much more a visual/audio trip than anything else.

Yet this shouldn't distract too heavily from the great qualities The Missing Picture provides us, be them visually or narratively, as it tells us a story many of us haven't heard from a perspective we never quiet expected.

Directed by: Rithy Panh.

"The Missing Picture" is a very unusual documentary and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It's so unusual because filmmaker Rithy Panh tells the story both with archival footage AND little figurines that he created for the film! Perhaps this was a way to make the horror of the Khmer Rouge easier for the audience to watch, as an hour and a half of footage of atrocities would be just about unwatchable considering how brutal this regime was. And, since you don't see live actors in the film-- just narration and film clips, seeing it in its original French language or the optional English language form is a roughly identical experience, or at least I assume so.

While I enjoyed how unique this film was and figure its uniqueness probably led to its Oscar nomination, I must confess that the narration made an exciting story very, very slow and a bit tedious. Perhaps the French language version is better, I don't know. All I know is that a film like "The Killing Fields" or a regular documentary about the subject is something I could have enjoyed or at least stuck with better.