Objects of pleasure: Epistephilia and the sex worker in Rithy Panh’s Le Papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise

Abstract

Prostitution in contemporary Cambodia is historically linked to the violence of the Khmer Rouge regime and the degradation of Cambodian society. And yet, while other attempts at official reconciliation have been made, prostitution remains largely shrouded in silence. Rithy Panh’s 2007 documentary, Le Papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise, counters this silence by focusing on a group of prostitutes in Phnom Penh, seeking not only to give them voice, but to contribute to the healing of the Cambodian people. However, in making the prostitutes the subject of their own intimate discourse rather than the object of a broader social discourse, Panh’s film fails to satisfy the viewer’s expectations – expectations that are attendant on the documentary genre and bound to epistephilic desires and the pleasures of non-fiction. In humanising its subjects, Panh’s film paradoxically defamiliarises the film’s subject matter, in a Brechtian sense, interrupting the process through which the viewer projects his moralising pity or righteous indignation.