The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul

Description

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. Contents Chronology Introduction: Rithy Panh and the Cinematic Image • Leslie Barnes and Joseph Mai Part I: Aftermath: A Cinema of Postwar Survival 1 The “Mad Mother”in Rithy Panh’s Films • Boreth Ly 2 Resilience in the Ruins: Artistic Practice in Rithy Panh’s The Burnt Theatre • Joseph Mai 3 The Wounds of Memory: Poetics, Pain, and Possibilities in Rithy Panh’s Exile and Que la barque se brise • Khatharya Um Part II: From Colonial to Global Cambodia 4 Rithy Panh’s The Sea Wall: Reinventing Duras in Cambodia • Jack A. Yeager and Rachel Harrison 5 Rithy Panh as Chasseur d’images • Jennifer Cazenave 6 Aerial Aftermaths and Reckonings from Below: Reseeing Rithy Panh’s Shiiku, the Catch • Cathy J. Schlund-Vials 7 Cambodia’s “Wandering Souls”: Migrant Labor and the Promise of Connection • Leslie Barnes Part III: The Question of Justice 8 Archiving the Perpetrator • Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier and John Kleinen 9 Creating Duch: The Projects of Duch, François Bizot, and Rithy Panh • Donald Reid 10 Rithy Panh, Jean Améry, and the Paradigm of Moral Resentment • Raya Morag Part IV: Memory, Voice, and Cinematic Practice 11 Looking Back and Projecting Forward from Site 2 • Kindsay French 12 Bophana’s Image and Narrative: Tragedy, Accusatory Gaze, and Hidden Treasure • Vicente Sánchez-Biosca 13 Memory Translation: Rithy Panh’s Provocations to the Primacy and Virtues of the Documentary Sound/Image Index • David LaRocca 14 Rithy Panh: Storyteller of the Extreme • Soko Phay Acknowledgments Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index