Film: The Missing Picture, Rithy Panh, 2013.Communications & Media.

The Missing Picture
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The Missing Picture
The Missing Picture is a Cambodian-French documentary film by Rithy Panh that recreates the horrors committed by Khmer-Rouge between 1975 and 1979 through clay diorama figurines, animation, and archival footage. Panh’s imaginative ways of using tiny carved models, narration, music, propaganda footage, and photos to recreate the atrocities of Pol Pot’s regime strays from established canons of documentary production. The Missing Picture is part documentary and part memoir, and it presents Panh's memories of the genocide and its impact on Cambodia. Panh's effort at "finding his childhood" and creating the missing images of that period when his family was taken to labor camps and where he lost most of his kin to starvation and exhaustion. Panh realized that he did not have any photographs from 1975 to 1979 that could truthfully depict the horrors of the genocide, and so he decided to use ceramic figures that would take the place of the missing photographs. The diorama figurines tell the story of death, torture, hunger, and fear set in schools, cinemas, dance halls, and rice fields. Combining these hand-painted clay figurines with archival footage, Panh tells the story of Khmer Rouge's terrible past in a manner that is both detached and uncomfortably intimate.
The Missing Picture breaks the mold of traditional documentary making and can be considered peripheral. The autobiographical documentary is not necessarily linked to an inferred Western norm but asks to be evaluated in its way CITATION Ior10 \l 1033 (Iordanova, Martin-Jones, & Vidal, 2010). Panh returns, in his way, to the killing fields of Cambodia and his peripheral documentary explores the distinctive iconographies that envisage the silenced voices and hidden stories of many Cambodians who lost everything during the genocide. Panh focuses his film entirely on recovering the childhood taken away from him by the Khmer Rouge. Using his stylized approach, Panh offers something far more complex and meaningful than a simple documentary. His narration segues between intimate recollections, historical recounts, and broader criticism using the savagely naïve but haunting clay figures as the missing photographic record of the Khmer Rouge's human horrors. Unlike his previous documentaries on the genocide where he interviewed former torturers and survivors, Panh intelligently avoided playing historian and instead took a subjective turning where he l...