Recencies van critici

Matched with the film's images—sometimes beautiful, most often all the more harrowing because of the gentleness of the effigy-like figures—the text takes on a savage, bitterly melancholic poetry that recalls the incantatory matter-of-factness of Jean Cayrol's text for Alain Resnais's Night and Fog.

Recurring images of crumbling film canisters remind us of what film can and can't record. "I wish to be rid of this picture, so I show it to you," says the narrator, after one shattering recollection. Panh's technique achieves things a conventional documentary could not, as when he pans across dozens of the clay figures jumbled in a box, in a shot that calls up both the toys of childhood, and graves.

The most original, thought-provoking, and gut-wrenching film memoir in years, Rithy Panh's The Missing Picture tells a riveting story whose very form addresses the interface of history and cinema—a document at once of utmost political relevance and of emotional and psychological truth.

The audacity of "The Missing Picture" — a brilliant documentary about a child who held on to life in Cambodia's killing fields — is equaled only by its soulfulness... There's a distinctly Brechtian quality to how the figurines are deployed that initially recalls Todd Haynes's "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," a 1980s film in which Barbie dolls are used to narrate the singer's death, The figurines in "The Missing Picture" are more sober and nakedly sincere, more touching and horrifying.

The conceit is tremendously daring, but one with a huge payoff, suggesting an evil that can't be fully processed by young eyes. Elsewhere, Panh includes crumbling b&w footage of the actual camps, shot by official cinematographers who were tortured for poor exposure or for letting depressing realities seep in. Either via clay dolls or fragile flesh, the truth is unmissable—as is Panh's film itself.

With meticulous direction that seems to bring the film's little dolls to life, [Panh] tells the story of his parents' death and recounts the dehumanizing horrors that he, among other survivors, endured... With a tribute to Ang Sarun, a cameraman who paid for his images with his life, and bitter recollections of China's support for the regime and Western receptivity to its slogans, Panh honors the Khmer Rouge's victims while staging the agony and responsibility of memory itself.

The use of hundreds of dolls to detail the plights of famine, torture, and grief is perhaps odd, but it isn't that different in practice from using human performers to portray a historical scene... And yet, with the inanimate clay dolls cut away and painted to represent a mostly forgotten time, a haunting image is produced that may create a longer-lasting impression than more conventional documentary strategies.

This absence of visual documentation [of the Khmer Rouge killings] is the "missing picture" of the title—a void Panh seeks to fill with his carefully, skillfully framed tableaux. Far from a distancing device, these snapshots of suffering somehow feel more vivid, more real, than the grainy celluloid material. They suggest raw memories molded into physical form, history brought alive one evocative still image at a time.

The figurines in dioramas play on a number of associations: childhood (in the work camps, children grew up seeing family members perish), the official notion that these were model sites of ideological purification, and the hand-worked clay's associations with the land, earth, burial. Panh's sense of loving duty helps fill in the aching void of this history's many missing pictures.

This kind of restaging of the past is in many ways antithetical to the reenacted scenes of murder as directed by the executioners in Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing, and not only for the differences in the historical specificities of Cambodia from 1975–79, and Indonesia from 1965–66. Where Oppenheimer, in his concern for the psychological justifications for murder enabled by power, dwells on the horrifying creativity of the perpetrators, Panh addresses the annihilating force of genocide.

Your film is not just any documentary, but a special kind that is my favorite: an essay film. As an essay filmmaker, you don't just tell us a story by showing us images. You also make us reflect on the way you are telling and showing. This is important because the only surviving images of your past are the propaganda movies made by the Khmer Rouge, which only tell their version of what happened. Your images challenge their images, but they also question the power of any image to tell the truth.

Panh believes deeply in cinema and the restorative, communicative power of moving images. Though their use is visually repetitive at times, these dioramas become an act of defiance in the face of an unmovable mountain of history. The ultimate insult, then, is to see how the Khmer Rouge's version of cinema was a total lie...