Calcutta 71. Dir. Mrinal Sen. 1972.
The Missing Picture. Dir. Rithy Panh. Bophana Studios, 2014.
As the course of politics steers through the public and the private, I have been hibernating in front of my computer with DVDs from around the world. Please check out Traina’s big collection in the 2nd Floor Multimedia Library. This week I am focusing on the cinema of witness, in a general sense, the bigger things happen and to some extent we bear witness to cause-effect. In these two cases of cinema, the extreme takes over, as socio-economic and political strife is witnessed, by both us (the spectators) and the makers.
The Missing Picture is a personal narrative of the director, Rithy Panh, and is set in 1975-79 when the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia was accountable for the deaths of over 1.7 million of its own people. Hundreds of carefully carved clay figurines are used to tell the story of the dead. The re-creations are meant to stand in for the eponymous lost images: the concrete dams and paddy fields where former city dwellers were forced to work, the meager rice yields they were handed, the neglect they were shown when sick, and the tortures and executions that seemed to occur casually. The result is a meticulously arranged catalog of cruelties. Rithy Panh’s choice to represent the trauma of the Cambodian democide using clay figurines is significant- it distances the viewer from the subjects of the film so that they are not emotionally absorbed in a specific aspect in a way that eclipses the greater picture of general iniquity.
He reinforces his cinematic testimonial by alternating sequences from propaganda movies (shot by Khmer Rouge cameramen) with stills of the clay sculptures. By resorting to archive footage that run parallel to the story, he anchors his narrative in reality. In some parts, the footage represents itself as examples of regime propaganda; and in others parts the archival images work in synthesis with the clay figures to articulate ‘missing’ events; in this way Rithy Panh creates his own visual-historical archive in the film. In order to locate ‘the missing picture’ outside of memory, he utilized a ‘cinema of witness’, which ‘through its memorialization of loss can function as a work of mourning which is also an instance of self-inscription’. The film then becomes a way of communicating shared trauma and anguish in order to refuse their obliteration from national/social discourse or memory.
Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta 71 is a set of four different stories of abject poverty tied together by the death of a young man. The transcript of the film reads: ‘A young man, eternally 20, walks through history, through poverty, squalor and death. Eternally 20 and killed so many times -- killed because he has been protesting and has remained an agent-provocateur’. He comes and goes, between stories- each story set in a different decade and with different characters, but all stories point to the same reality: Poverty and Degradation. While the appearance of poverty and hunger remains unchanged, minds and attitudes towards it change with each succeeding diegesis. In the final sequence, the dead youth appears again and reveals his crime- his crime he says was to have seen everything- ‘exploitation, death, and destruction… everything. For ages, for thousands of years, in this age of 20, I have seen. I am seeing’. In the end, he urges the spectators to no longer be idle and instead react.
Panh traces his memory to confront a shared trauma and historical catastrophe while Sen’s film attempts at confronting the catastrophe of history- the history of the poor which is also the history of exploitation. Panh’s ‘The Missing Picture’ is rooted in his ‘point of view’ and is marked by its its claims for truth. Conversely, Sen’s film is dialectic in form- in that it aims to understand an event in all its movement, change and interconnection- this is why it consists of five diegesis spread out over forty years. In spite of the difference in terms of form and ideology the films share visual techniques and the notion of cinematic witnessing. Sen is also searching for missing pictures- for antecedents- to explain the calamity of history. He proposes that, poverty, exploitation and debasement are eternal realities and that the untold suffering of the nameless multitudes is what make up the missing pictures of history.
The traumatic experiences of survivors demand consideration when the events are recuperated or recreated through cinema. In her essay Witness and Recuperation, Hamilton states that by doing so, ‘witnessing then becomes a way of bringing to collective communication moments of traumatic intensity in order to refuse their obliteration’.
