The 14 essays in this volume examine the work of Cambodian director Rithy Panh, particularly his quest to make meaning of the genocidal period in Cambodia and preserve memory for its victims and survivors. They focus on themes like empire and colonialism, global capitalism and labor, gender, diaspora, and human rights, and also analyze documentaries like The Missing Picture, and S21 and his earlier or less frequently discussed films. They address post-war survival in his work and his depiction of the humanitarian crises during the 1970s in Rich People, One Night after the War, The Burnt Theatre, Exile, and Que la barque se brise, que la jonque s'entrouvre; how his films acknowledge supranational cultural, political, and economic contexts in terms of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, including The Sea Wall, La France est notre patrie, Shiiku, the Catch, and The Land of the Wandering Souls; justice in his work in Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell, S21, and Graves without a Name, and in comparison to Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing; and his filmmaking approaches in Site 2, The Missing Picture, Exile, and Graves without a Name. Contributors work in a variety of fields, including history, genocide studies, film studies, and philosophy, in Australia, Europe, the US, and Israel. Annotation ©2021 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
The essays in this groundbreaking collection examine how celebrated Cambodian director Rithy Panh counters the abstraction of mass violence with a cinema anchored in the body, the physical trace, the direct testimony, and the living landscape. They explore his unique aesthetic sensibility, examining the dynamic and sensuous images through which he suggests that “everything has a soul.”
Nominated for 2022 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Book award
Born in 1964, Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh grew up in the midst of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal reign of terror, which claimed the lives of many of his relatives. After escaping to France, where he attended film school, he returned to his homeland in the late 1980s and began work on the documentaries and fiction films that have made him Cambodia’s most celebrated living director.
The fourteen essays in The Cinema of Rithy Panh explore the filmmaker’s unique aesthetic sensibility, examining the dynamic and sensuous images through which he suggests that “everything has a soul.” They consider how Panh represents Cambodia’s traumatic past, combining forms of individual and collective remembrance, and the implications of this past for Cambodia’s transition into a global present. Covering documentary and feature films, including his literary adaptations of Marguerite Duras and Kenzaburo Oe, they examine how Panh’s attention to local context leads to a deep understanding of such major themes in global cinema as justice, imperialism, diaspora, gender, and labor.
Offering fresh takes on masterworks like The Missing Picture and S-21 while also shining a light on the director’s lesser-known films, The Cinema of Rithy Panh will give readers a new appreciation for the boundless creativity and ethical sensitivity of one of Southeast Asia’s cinematic visionaries.
