"Rithy Panh, a survivor of Cambodia's civil war and the Khmer Rouge regime, has earned a world-wide reputation for his innovative work in both fiction and documentary film. The Cinema of Rithy Panh begins with a timeline weaving Panh's life and career with Cambodia's tumultuous history. Bringing together a wide range of renowned interdisciplinary scholars, the book explores the scope of Panh's career, including well-known films such as The Missing Picture and S-21 as well as less frequently studied works. Their approaches deepen our understanding of Panh as a filmmaker dealing with personal tragedy and memory, but also push beyond such intimate frameworks in order to situate Panh's work within broader discussions of globalization, justice, imperialism, diaspora, labor, gender, and aesthetics. Panh approaches these themes with deep ethical sensitivity and artistic creativity, constructing dynamic and sensuous images that explore the imbrication of history and memory, the individual and the collective, andthat suggest, as Panh has, that "everything has a soul.""--
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.&;
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 Kenzaburō Ōe, 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.
