Resumo

CASALE, Marta N. R.. La imagen faltante, de Rithy Panh, testigo y cineasta. El genocidio en primera persona. Cuad. Cent. Estud. Diseñ. Comun., Ensayos [online]. 2019, n.77, pp.118-131. ISSN 1853-3523.  http://dx.doi.org/10.18682/cdc.vi77.1014.

For more than a decade the Cambodian director has been addressing the issue of genocide in his country during the Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979) in different documentary films, always with the intention of recording the atrocities of the regime. In all the works before The missing picture (2013), the film in which we will focus on this paper, this approach is made by taking distance from the events described, events in which, however, Rithy Panh was directly involved, considering that he and his family were prisoners in forced-labor camps, being him the only survivor.

As happen with all the films that attempt to document genocide, Panh brings back to the fore the issue of the possibility or impossibility (ethics, material, psychological) of accounting for a phenomenon that destroys human dignity and carries the cruelty to extreme limits. Is it lawful to turn a massacre into a “spectacle”? Is it inevitable to do it when you want to represent it? What happens when the testimony is in the first person? Is subjectivity an obstacle? The Cambodian director chooses to use clay figures instead of people in his film to replace -in the existing images of what happened- what they lack: torture, exploitation, murders. It is the story of a child (he was 13 years old when he was ripped out of his house and his memories are those that stitch together the story), but also the story of a filmmaker and, because of this duality, the reflection on the image have, in addition to theoretical depth, a simplicity that makes it, at the same time, more brutal and more poetic. It is questioning (what happened, but also, how to represent it or represent himself), but above all, it is testimony: it replace what was left out of the picture, covered up, hidden behind the revolutionary fanfare.

Palavras-chave : Panh; genocide; testimony; image; documentary.

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