The Missing Picture and A Peripheral View of World Cinema

Assignment 2: The Missing Picture and A Peripheral View of World Cinema

With the prize for outstanding foreign language film, Rithy Panh’s Missing Picture was recognized for its depiction of the filmmaker’s own struggle to re-imagine the memories of childhood. As a primary target of the Khmer Rouge administration, Pahn’s parents and siblings were slaughtered in labor camps, forcing him to battle memory problems. This is a very well-known remembrance of one of his nation’s worst moments. The filmmaker worked on a documentary for several years, which analyzed the crimes done in the course of Khmer Rouge’s era. An orientation to Panh’s viewpoint is provided through the use of old cinema canister photographs as opening titles, which is a self-aware and self-reflective opening to Panh’s perspective. After then, the scenes are just like crashing waves against the lens, reminiscent of past memories that were previously forgotten. These opening sequences indicate the beginning of the Ruminative Masterful Cinema section, and they also demonstrate the seriousness of the subject matter. Because of a strong sensation of grief, the remainder of the image is carried away from the subconscious feeling. The live-action segments serve as a prelude to the fundamental concept of the film. A tough and emotionally demanding subject, the crimes committed against the people of Cambodia by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, is tackled by Panh in an intimate, imaginative, and at times strangely beautiful manner.

As a result of his observations and observations of catastrophes, Panh conveys them in a manner that they appear disturbingly accessible: He constructs massive dioramas out of clay figurines that have been meticulously hand-carved and lovingly painted. There are hundreds of photographs, each with a unique set of emotions and perspectives: females carrying produce, boys running with a dog, armed personnel, and starved, dying laborers as the army advances on the Cambodian capital city, among other things. He regularly juxtaposes and seamlessly combines these data with official propaganda videos, demonstrating the disparity between propaganda and truth, as well as with newly discovered video footage of day-to-day existence in the concentration camp. The result is striking in its originality, with impressionistic imagery, lyrical narration, and a fascinating sound design that draws the viewer in.

A Peripheral View of World Cinema is an anthology that seeks to address such fresh and ever-shifting alignments of cinema, nation, historical experience, globalization, and identity. The concept of ‘periphery’ in connection to the practice and conception of cinematography and cinema history is the book’s starting point. Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones, and Belén Vidal, co-editors of the book, advocate for critical encounters with “irregularities in history” that provide historiographic challenges to entrenched hierarchical views in cinema appreciation (3). Thus, their book proposes and implements media/film research that uncovers and celebrates a dynamic collection of different voices and ways of communicating that originate and reside above and beyond the popularly acknowledged cultural centres (3). The central theme addressed by Panh’s Missing Picture is that of war crimes and ways to reenact history through film and art. Iordanova, Martin-Jones, and Vidal advocate for the uncovering of previously unrevealed facets of cinematography and cinematic creation. Panh does exactly this by using an unusual method to tell a story and a side of history previously ignored.

It’s more difficult to categorize The Missing Picture. It’s can be said to be both a documentary as well as a personal essay. yet, it has all the elements of a historical reconstruction, featuring video poetry, and a therapeutic practice in one. Panh’s endeavors to vaguely remember a contemporary Cambodian civilization that was viciously disrupted by the Khmer Rouge regime and now would seem as forgotten as Atlantis. The film is largely an individual recollection of the Khmer Rouge period and its atrocities.  On a decomposing, imploding spool of ancient film, a traditionally costumed female performer sinuously shifting into what is likely a modern film variant on old steps. The dancer, who appears briefly in Panh’s film, degree of consistency, enjoyment, sexual orientation, religion, art, and cultural history. The film is exactly what Iordanova, Martin-Jones, and Vidal describe as a new wave of cinema production that opens up the world of cinema to imagination and innovativeness.

Because actual photos of these times do not exist, The Missing Picture’s idea is that the film’s horrible history, as well as the brighter era that came before it, must be recreated using whatever basic items are suitable. The Khmer Rouge obliterated not only contemporary Cambodian society, but also its culture and visuals of itself, whereas the regime’s own filmed images are deceptive: scripted misinformation vignettes of Pol Pot, his innermost circle, and his ostensibly loyal multitudes, but never accurate depictions of the conditions wherein Cambodians have been made to live. Instead, Rithy Panh creates clay figurines, seemingly childlike squatting relics colored to imitate actual or representative persons and organized in realistic surroundings, to re-create authentic representations of the world he recalls.

Works Cited

L’image manquante/The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh, 2013, 92m) Film.

“Introduction: A Peripheral View of World Cinema,” Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones, Belén Vidal. Reading