Central Arguments, Issues, and Themes Emerged in The Missing Picture

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Film and Reading Response
Film: L’image manquante/The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh, 2013, 92m)
Reading: Iordanova, Dina, David Martin-Jones, and Belén Vidal. “Introduction: a peripheral view of world cinemas.” (2010): 1-22.
The Missing Picture is a 2013 Cambodian-French documentary movie about Khmer Rouge written and directed by Rithy Pahn. In 1975 when Pahn was 13 years old, his family and millions of other people were forced out of their homes in Phnom Pehn to work in labor camps to achieve a communist dream of the Cambodian administration. “A Peripheral View of World Cinema” argues technological innovations and theory films in the periphery cinema. This piece analyzes the film and the reading, comparing their social, cultural, political, and historical issues. It also describes the technical language the film uses to develop its plot.
What are the central arguments made by the films and/or the texts and how do they relate to each other?
The central argument in the film is how lousy leadership and rogue regimes can bring suffering to their people. Pahn, his family, and the rest of the people suffered in the labor camps to create the communist utopia. The capitalists do not care about the welfare of their workers. Instead, they want them to work hard in unpleasant working environments. Pahn lost both his parents while in the camps, a painful experience to undergo. His father protested the suffering by going on a hunger strike, opting to starve to death instead of eating animal feeds. Pahn suffered the loss of her mother when he had opted to break the law to feed her. He goes to steal a fish and comes back to find his mother had died just before enjoying the fish (L’image manquante/The Missing Picture). These are examples of how the regime is heartless. Rouge only cared about creating wealth and using people without creating a conducive environment for them to work.
The central argument in the reading “A Peripheral View of World Cinema” is the potential periphery cinema compared to mainstream cinemas. The authors challenge the dominant narratives about how cinema has changed over time. The reading asks a fundamental question about the position of the periphery and the center of the film. The cinema industry is segmented into the mainstream and the peripheral (Iordanova et al. 14). The mainstream films cover the major cinema streams that highlight popular culture, American innovations, and other related subjects. In contrast, peripheral cinema highlights issues affecting marginalized groups like migrants speaking an accented language within a vast and more dominant society.
What social, cultural, political, or historical issues are brought into focus in the films and how?
The film presents numerous soc...