Aesthetic Means of Ethical Engagement in Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture

Abstract

In the context of the sensorial fatigue caused by the media’s saturation with representations of violence, Rithy Panh’s film The Missing Picture (2013) stands as a reinvigorating alternative of addressing trauma through aesthetic means that inscribe the affect within ethical dimensions. Panh’s testimony of surviving the death of his family through Pot Pol’s ‘killing fields’ is built around images of stylized clay figurines filmed in realistic dioramas. Forced labor, starvation and death make living a luxury – life fades away from the bodies of figurines that lose color and flesh, but is reaffirmed through the lush nature of dioramas and the resiliently colorful presence of the hero, the surviving storyteller. Khmer Rouge archival footage of carefully choreographed masses of people works as abstract imagery of an unreal reality. In an unmediated expression of affect, the sound mixes revolutionary choirs with electronic effects registering a fading daily life, and voice-over commentary that recuperates the words of propaganda slogans and shapes them into a personal narrative of wonder, pain, anger and guilt of survival. Panh achieves here “a formulation of affect understood as a radical act of interpretation in the face of unwilled subjugation”, in Judith Butler’s words on the poems of the Guantanamo detainees. (Butler 61) By mobilizing the realm of the affects through aesthetics, Panh fulfills what Simon O’Sullivan calls “the ethical imperative of art [that] involves a kind of moving beyond the already familiar (the human), precisely a kind of selfovercoming”. (O’Sullivan 129) Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture works as an art organism that leads us to recover our subjectivity through the detour of a necessary perception of our objectivity. It allows us access to the position of subjects concerned about the others only through the mediation of our occupying the position of objects perceptible as others.