Missing

The camera sweeps slowly over carved, painted figures in diorama landscapes: a city street, a rice paddy, a muddy pit, a dark courtyard, a hut or hospital interior. People are playing music, are planting rice or, in  teams, are carrying big slung rocks, are sprawled sleeping, are slowly becoming gaunt with starvation and fatigue, are being shot, are being buried again and again.

There's music and the voice-over, but a silence, a kind of black, smothering, sewerish ooze, seems to well up from these tiny scenes that might otherwise appear in museum anthropological displays with titles like An Aboriginal Village. Thoughts of  model railroad displays, or perhaps perky Lego scenes of castles or sci-fi locales briefly come to mind, and are set aside.  

Rithy Pranh's The Missing Picture uses these tableaux images to represent his memories of the Kampuchean slave labor camps, missing from the Khmer Rouge's triumphalist propaganda films of happy hurrying hod carriers and hand-clapping cadres.

The gun-slinging soldiers, the haranguing cell captain have their place, but there's plenty of film footage to record them. Who acknowledges the rows of kneeling people, torn from their cities, pelted with promises and threats, forced into complicity with their own destruction as they are worked to death by day and preached to death by night, their bodies emaciated, their faces hollow, empty, perpetually aghast?

As the accused war criminals of Pol Pot's regime defend themselves by disputing the genocide, Pranh's testimony is essential, lest the second death of oblivion befall the victims. Photographic evidence of the suffering may have been removed,  destroyed, but these haunting arrangements of hand-sculpted figures--men, women, girls and boys--fill the gap, allowing Pranh to address his fellow-sufferers, his family, his parents, himself, to do now what he could not do then.

There, his father, a former teacher who loved reciting French poetry/ (Cheveux noirs, cheveux noirs...) who said one day, 'I refuse to eat animal food. I am a man,' and fasted to death. There, his mother who found her daughter dead in the 'hospital' and stayed to die herself. He speaks to the stretched out man and the curled up woman figures with grief, bafflement, compassion, and finds the small defiances that kept them human. It's as if they are allowed to die again, but this time with the dignity that comes from loving regard, however long after the fact.

Shaping those figures in their various poses from upright to slumped, in their various garbs from business suit to black rags, his fingers must have been reciting their names, infusing the raw material with the memory of them: you, you, you.