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Addressing the Mediation of Images and Their Implementation in the Construction of Truth in the Works of Rithy Pahn

‘Images are never transparent windows onto the world. They interpret the world;

they display it in very particular ways; they represent it.’ (Rose 2001: 6)

‘Il n’y a pas de vérité, il n’y a que le cinéma. La révolution, c’est du cinema.’ (Panh 2013, 1:00:46)

Regimes of power produce discourses of truth, and this is never more evident

than in totalitarian systems like that of the Khmer Rouge. This is due to the inseparable

and cyclical relation between power and knowledge elaborated notably by Foucault, in

which power equates to the ability to establish which discourses of knowledge are held

up as true within society, and the truth produced in this way subsequently sustains and

justifies these systems of power (1975: 36; 1976: 112; 1976 in Gordon 1980: 93). In

Democratic Kampuchea this cycle of pouvoir-savoir manifested itself in an apparent lack

of visual evidence of the atrocities committed by the regime, made possible by

dictatorial power structures asserting the necessity and benefit of their ‘egalitarian’

social order while suppressing conflicting evidence of its barbarity. This perpetual

sequence of perpetrators producing knowledge and concealing victims’ testimonies

produced a régime de vérité in which genocidal practices could be exercised, yet

responsibility for them denied.

The difficulty of breaking this cycle is exacerbated in an age in which visual

evidence has become a way of certifying experience and a lack thereof suggests the

non-existence or even denial of that experience (Sontag 1977: 6). Belief in the power of

images to accurately and truthfully represent realities facilitated the continued

dismissal and denial of the horrors of the regime and allowed the influence of the

Khmer Rouge dictatorship to persist even after its fall, as the reality it had built seemed

insubvertible. Visual documentation of the regime’s activity consisted primarily of

propaganda, which only served to support the ‘truth’ it had fabricated, while the lack

and concealment of photographic or filmic evidence of the atrocities suffered by its

victims seemed to hinder any possibility of undermining this dominant discourse. This

lacuna left Cambodia at risk of never being able to move pass the practice of genocide

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denial or repression to confront the horrors that had been inflicted upon it, and thus

never being able to ensure justice, reconciliation or progression.

However, film director and survivor of the Khmer Rouge Rithy Panh repeatedly

challenges the ‘official truth’ and documented history of Democratic Kampuchea

through cinema. He exploits the inadequate visual evidence left to him and presents it

in new contexts in order to meditate upon the ‘truth claim’ of images (Beattie 2004: 10)

and the ways in which they enter into the production of knowledge. Throughout his

works Duch, le maître des forges de l'enfer (hereafter Duch, le maître) and L’image

manquante, Panh refines his approach to this task in order to ultimately train the

viewer in a critical, active analysis of imagery.

Duch, le maître aims to disintegrate the master narrative established by the

Khmer Rouge and supported by its propaganda through the use of diverse sources of

evidence and testimony. These multiple and conflicting documentations of life under

the regime contrast the perspectives of perpetrator and victim to reveal discrepancies

that undermine the credibility of the state-constructed ‘truth’. The documentary style

film consists primarily of interviews with infamous S-21 prison leader Comrade Duch, a

war criminal undergoing trial for crimes against humanity at the time of filming due to

his involvement in the Tuol Sleng torture and detention centre. By referring to the

supporting novel L’élimination for concrete insight into what Panh aims to achieve

through these interviews, we discover that ‘[il] ne fabrique pas l’événement. [Il] crée

des situations pour que les anciens Khmers rouges pensent à leurs actes. Et pour que les

survivants puissent dire ce qu’ils ont subi’ (2011: 17, 78).

However, throughout the course of his work Panh becomes increasingly aware

of the slipperiness of Duch’s testimony (2011: 95), of his frequent unwillingness to

admit wrongdoing and of his blatant denial of participation in crimes. A cycle of

assertion and negation thus arises at multiple points throughout the documentary and

the novel, wherein the perpetrator is continually forced to defend himself against

evidence contradictory to what he maintains to be true. ‘Je n’ai jamais interrogé moi-

même… je suis la dirigeant, j’enseigne la théorie’ (00:44:39), Duch asserts in the film,

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despite the assurance of a prison guard in the following scene: ‘j’ai vu Duch intérroger

un prisonnier’ (00:46:06). ‘Je lui soumets ainsi une photographie, prise à l’époque par

un des photographes de S21’, Panh recounts in the novel, ‘on distingue parfaitement

des taches de sang par terre et sur le mur. Duch me répond qu’il na jamais vu de sang

dans les bâtiments’ (95). Even when faced with testimonies that undermine his own,

then, Duch continues to believe his word is indestructible: ‘on me repousse à connaître

les contre-vérités… le témoin peut continuer a parler [mais] aucun document ne preuve

ça’, he declares (00:31:02-00:31:52) he responds defensively to accounts of immoderate

violence in the M13 torture centre, continuing his denial of witness or participation in

torture activities in Panh’s written account: ‘si on me force à dire la non-vérité, ça je

refuse. Ja fais une dernière déclaration, pour la dernière fois et publiquement: je n’ai

jamais torturé’ (134).

He seems impervious to the materials meticulously gathered and presented by

the author-director, the stacks of photos, handwritten reports and video recordings

intended to disable his subject from skirting around the truth and assert: ‘attention, je

ne sais plus que tu ne crois, ne me mens pas’ (2011: 77). He even blatantly admits to his

evasion, saying that ‘parfois, on refuse de dire la vérité, on en dit la moitié et on enterre

la moitié. Parfois on transforme – dans un intérêt, parce qu’on a peur, parce que… on a

honte’ (01:36:03). Having reached this impasse, in which Duch’s lies and ommissions

‘constituent, à force, une négation du crime’ (123), Panh adjusts his approach, and

though he maintains that he ‘ne cherche pas la vérité, mais la parole’ (14) his montage

editing attests to a different aim. Precisely through the immediate contrast of Duch’s

statements with contradictory testimonies or evidence, and by cutting and editing his

speech, by exploiting the ‘jeu de répétitions, de croisements, des échos ’ (242), Panh

undermines the truth constructed by the perpetrator to replace it with a new truth, a

truth attesting to victims’ perspectives and experiences.

For example, when Duch affirms the restrained, deliberate actions of the

torturers in S-21, of torturer Mam Nay who ‘savait frapper avec reflection…

modérément ’ (00:28:33), Pahn directly follows this account with that of a disagreeing

witness: ‘je l’ai vu exécuter un homme avec un AK47’ (00:29:45) he counters, describing

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the terrorization of onlooking prisoners who were covered in the victim’s blood.

Sometimes the director insinuates the untruth of Duch’s words simply by layering them

over conflicting images: while disputing the witness’s claims of this bloody execution for

example, in which the prisoner was tied to ‘le poteau de la victoire’ in a measured

preparation for the act, Panh provides a fleeting image of a young, thin boy with hands

behind his back, wrapped around a familiar stake (00:31:47).

‘Il n’y a qu’une vérité’ (2011: 242) becomes his new outlook, his new approach

to representing the regime. And though his revelation of multiple perspectives serves to

prove that the ‘truth’ related by the Khmer Rouge was never absolute and unmodified,

rather intentionally constructed through the suppression of nonconformist discourses ,

his cinematic resistance attacks only the surface of the problem. In playing off truth

against lie Panh ultimately begins to play off one fabrication of truth against another –

his work constructs and imposes a new régime de vérite rather than criticizing this

process as a whole, and thus fails to uncouple truth and power, merely changing the

source of power.

L’image manquante however refuses to make the same mistake, exposing the

mediation inherent within photography and film and disputing their illusion of accuracy

and truthfulness in order to reveal and undermine the process of truth construction. In

this way he demonstrates ‘how lies function as partial truths to both the agents and

witnesses of history's trauma’ rather than deconstructing and rebuilding discourses of

truth, and can thus train the viewer out of his habitual belief that images are windows

onto reality, encouraging a more critical visual methodology (Rose 2001: 5, 15, 32).

In order to understand how Panh undermines the truth assumption of

photography and film however it is firstly important to clarify why it is that we

habitually consider images as reliable evidence of truths, and why we live in an age in

which ‘looking, seeing and knowing have become perilously intertwined’ (Jenks 1995:

1). Our belief that such images depict realities and thus provide irrefutable evidence of

truth stems principally from what Peirce labeled the ‘indexicality’ of the image (1984).

He noted that photographs ‘are in certain respects exactly like the objects they

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represent’ (1998: 5), visual likenesses of their content that possess a degree of accuracy

and ‘truthfulness’ that other, iconic signs cannot attain (Sadowski 2009: 1). This

verisimilitude gives them the illusion of being traces, miniature pieces of reality that

pass for incontrovertible truth that something has happened, since there is always a

presumption that ‘something exists, or did exist, which is like what is in the picture’

(Sontag 2001: 2, 3). In the case of Democratic Kampuchea, this assumption was a

significant factor in facilitating the dismissal and denial of the horrors of the regime, as

propaganda served as concrete, tangible proof of what life was like under Pol Pot’s

dictatorship, and a lack and suppression of visual evidence to the contrary undermined

victims’ testimonies of famine, deprivation and torture.

However, this perspective oversimplifies the nature of photography and film and

the power they have to interpret and mediate reality, constructing truths rather than

reflecting them. Sontag directly challenges the common presumption of veracity and

accuracy associated with these mediums, explaining that ‘although there is a sense in

which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as

much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are’ (2001: 4). She

argues that the camera both interferes with and interprets the scene it captures,

altering reality by intruding on the event and thus changing how it transpires or evolves,

and consciously framing incidents in order to capture specific perspectives and so

recount particular stories (2001: 8). Rose furthers this argument, noting that an

additional layer of mediation is present even after pictures are captured since the

meanings of an image are not only technologically and compositionally but also socially

determined (2001: 32), meaning the discourses into which these images are

subsequently assimilated equally alter their interpretation.

Panh is acutely aware of these levels of mediation, and aims to promote

recognition of them in his work to lend to the force of his argument rather than let

them control it. His skill in undermining the discourse in which an image has become

embedded and with which it seems irreversibly linked, allowing a single, reductive

interpretation of its meaning, is demonstrated strikingly in L’image manquante. The

conflicting combination of documentary conventions and surreal imagery in the film

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aims to critique the truth claim of images and tactics used to transcribe hegemonic

ideologies and construct truths.

Traditionally, the claim or assertion at the centre of documentary depictions is

that their content is a factual depiction of reality and their representation of the world

is verifiable and accurate (Beattie 2004: 10). This forms a trust relationship between

production and reception (2004: 11) that leads viewers to approach such works with

expectations regarding their authenticity and veracity (2004: 12). Panh subverts these

conventions and our ingrained trust in them specifically to discourage our uncritical

acceptance of the information presented to us, firstly by employing but modifying

documentary conventions such as the use of the authoritative voice of a seemingly

omniscient narrator. Throughout L’image manquante the guiding commentary

therefore does not dictate what we should believe based on what we are seeing, rather

encourages an enquiring, sceptical approach to the images.

The voice alternates between explicitly questioning the reliability of the footage

it narrates, sarcastically confirming the gloriousness of the Khmer Rouge as reflected in

these images to expose their unreliability, and simply relaying the assurances provided

by the perpetrators about the success of their regime for viewers’ contemplation and

dispute. Thus, while Panh deploys propaganda footage in the exposition of the past, he

does not give it authority (Mullen 2014), rather explicitly and repeatedly interrogates its

‘evidentiary status’ (Torchin 2014: 38). For example, at 1:04:24 the voiceover enquires

of an apparently realistic, state-produced clip: ‘ces sacs de riz… étaient-ce des

accesoires de cinéma, des sacs de sable?’, contemplating the apparent wealth of

supplies that victims of the regime somehow never benefitted from, and encouraging

viewers to equally question this discrepancy. The narration continues to prompt us to

look beyond surface impressions, closely analysing another clip that appears to flaunt

the efficiency and success of the Kampuchean workforce to identify that that:

‘À bien regarder dans ce mouvement, on voit la fatigue, les chutes, les

visages maigres, on voit la cruauté, on voit que certains ne peuvent

plus travailler’ (0:54:15).

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At times, the narrator provides viewers no guidance at all, rather encourages them to

dispute his remarks: ‘les récoltes sont glorieuses, il y a du grain… je vois enfin la

révolution qu’on nous a tant promise!’ (1:03:25) he declares, as scenes of lush rice fields

and apparently healthy workers are presented to the audience – an invitation to draw

the same conclusion as he does, that this revolution ‘n’existe qu’en images’ (1:03.30).

Finally, he offers pure information for our consideration and assessment:

‘Voici ce qu’en dit Pol Pot: actuellement nos coopératives dont des

unités de collectivisme déjà solides, en politique, en esprit, capable

d’accomplir toutes les directives de l’Angkar… ces coopératives vivent

une existence parfaite en terms de nourriture, de santé, d’hygiène, de

culture, d’études, d’éducation’ (1:05:25)

With these techniques Panh urges us to challenge hegemonic perspectives, contest

dominant discourses established by dictatorial structures and instead think critically and

independently, exploring images and declarations and interrogating them rather than

assimilating them as they are presented.

Panh’s defiance of documentary expectations extends further still to his

rejection of perceptual and observational realism (Beattie 2004: 15, Jordan 2013). Such

styles accentuate and exploit the ‘truth claim’ of photographic and filmic images to

render their arguments and claims persuasive (Beattie 2004: 14), using the perceived

indexicality of images to propose a single, simplified argument based on their content.

Using these techniques gives the illusion that the images presented are completely

unmediated, distracting from the inherent artifice of the medium and discouraging

critical interpretation. Panh’s chosen modes of representation, conversely, draw explicit

attention to the fabrication of the film. He firstly highlights its physical construction

through the use and uncensored modeling of clay effigies and elaborate dioramas, and

the employment of meta-cinematic devices that expose the films production, such as

‘behind the scenes’ glimpses of scenes being shot.

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Even from the opening scenes of the film Panh familiarizes the viewer with

cinematic materials, depicting tangled stacks of spoiled filmstrips and rusty canisters

(00:00:10), to immediately encourage a dialogue on the processes of creation involved

in filmmaking. To assure the exposure of this fact he even incorporates meta-cinematic

scenes – the dancing lady, who appears at the beginning of the film (00:01:00) and

mesmerises the young clay Panh in later scenes (00:36:52), is exposed as the product of

a film set. Her elegance and quiet isolation, which make the clip so entrancing, are

starkly contrasted with the presence of crowds of spectators in the previous diorama

(00:35:03 onwards), a director instructing her movement over megaphone, lights and

cameras perfecting the angles and ambience of the sequence. Panh’s most notable

metaphor for cinematic ‘construction’ however is his persistent use of clay figures and

their uncensored modelling. Throughout the film the viewer is candidly confronted with

the carving and painting of these miniature effigies, which he then immediately sees

performing roles in the following scenes (00:03:03, 00:12:15), producing a commentary

on the manipulation of material in the production of knowledge.

Moreover, he exposes the documentary’s cinematic composition and editing,

called to attention by the surreal, layered superimposition of music or images and the

manifest stitching together of photographs to create panoramic frames . At 00:06:16 for

example, clay floating figures are clearly edited into the scenes, and no attempts are

made to liken them to their backdrop – their bright colours and cartoonish shapes

provide a striking contrast to the aged, black and white footage of real human activity.

The unrealistic nature of these scenes is further reinforced at times by their

unconventional panoramic backgrounds, formed by simply connecting archival

photographs of Phnom Penh in an unmerging string. These images stubbornly refuse to

blend into one believable backdrop – the edges of buildings are matched up to the

branches of trees, and black and white photos are placed alongside red-tinted, sepia

ones (00:06:49, 00:06:53). Finally, Panh’s use of extradiegetic sound serves to ridicule

the ‘truth claim’ of the propaganda images over which it is played. This is particularly

notable at 01:01:13, when the upbeat disco music from the previous scene bleeds over

into the next, making the actions of flag-waving, gun-wielding citizens seem like

dancing. The comic effect this achieves in fact conveys a serious message – that what is

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seen can be adapted to serve any need, and thus should not be instantaneously taken

as true.

By problematizing the notion of documentary filmmaking through these

combined techniques, Panh is able, by extension, to problematize the notion of

producing truth. Williams suggests that postmodern documentaries ‘cannot reveal the

truth of events, but only the ideologies and consciousness that construct competing

truths – the fictional master narratives by which we make sense of events ’ (1993: 13),

and this is exactly what Panh’s film does. He recognises that ‘the process of developing

a world view that differs from the dominant world view requires active intellectual

work’ (Ladson Billings in Strega 2015: 121), and so strives to provide the tools for such a

deconstruction of hegemonic discourses. In this way, he does not fall into the trap of

playing off truth against lie, or playing off one fabrication against another, ‘rather, [he]

show[s] how lies function as partial truths to both the agents and witnesses of history's

trauma’ (Williams 1993: 17).

Panh’s cinematic techniques and style epitomize what Rose defines as a critical

approach to imagery, ‘an approach that thinks about the visual in terms of the cultural

significance, social practices and power relations in which it is embedded’ (2001:3), and

it is by using this critical methodology that he is therefore able to initiate a discussion

that invites victims to participate in the creation of a new politics of truth while

discouraging the idea that any such new régime should be absolute. More importantly

still however, he imparts the tools for this approach to viewers, and in this way, his film

can serve as instrument of knowledge with the capacity to hinder the future possibility

of hegemonic discourses of truth and the subsequent perpetuation of totalitarian

regimes. By familiarizing the audience with the mediation inherent within visual

imagery, Panh thus contributes to an important subversive discourse that may

ultimately modify our relationship with images.

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Bibliography Primary Sources: Panh, Rithy & Bataille, Cristophe (2011) L’élimination, Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle

Panh, Rithy (dir.) (2011), Duch, le maître des forges de l’enfer, France: Catherine Dussart

Productions, Institut national de l’audiovisuel, France Télévisions, Bophana Production Time marks correspond to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaWParqYqso

Panh, Rithy (dir.) (2013), L’image manquante, France: Catherine Dussart Productions, ARTE France, Bophana Production

Books and Chapters from Edited Collections

Beattie, Keith (2004), Documentary Scenes: Non-Fiction Film and Television, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Foucault, Michel (1975), Surveiller et punir , Paris: Éditions Gallimard available at:

https://monoskop.org/images/2/22/Foucault_Michel_Surveiller_et_Punir_Naissance_de_la_Prison_2004.pdf

Foucault, Michel (1976), ‘La Fonction politique de l’intellectuel’, Dits et Écrits Tome 3

Text No. 184, pp. 109-114 available at:

https://monoskop.org/images/3/3b/Foucault_Michel_Dits_et_ecrits_3_1976-1979.pdf

Gordon, Colin (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 By Michel Foucault, New York: Pantheon Books. Gunning, Tom (2008), ‘What’s the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photographs’, in Beckman & Ma (eds.) Still/Moving: between Cinema and Photographed, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 23- 40. Hamilton, Anne (2013), ‘Ethics and Aesthetics in the Cinema of Rithy Panh’, in Bangert, Gordon & Saxton (eds.) Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium, Oxford: Legenda, pp. 170-190. Jay, Martin (1993), Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century

French Thought, London: University of California Press.

Jenks, Chris (1995), Visual Culture, London: Routledge. Juhasz, Alexandra & Lebow, Alisa (eds.) (2015), A Companion to Contemporary

Documentary Film, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Inc. Levinson, Paul (1997), The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution, London: Routledge.

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Peirce, Charles S. (1998), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 2, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Rose, Gillian (2001), Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials, London: SAGE Publications.

Sontag, Susan (1977), On Photography, New York: St Martins Press.

Strega, Susan (2015), 'The View from the Post-structural Margins: Epistemology and Methodology Reconsidered', in Brown & Strega (eds.), Research as Resistance: Critical,

Indigenous, and Anti-oppressive Approaches, Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc., pp. 119-152.

Tsang, Hing (2013), Semiotics and Documentary Film: The Living Sign in the Cinema,

Berlin: Walter der Gruyter Inc.

Articles and Papers

Boyle, Deirdre (2009), ‘Shattering Silence: Traumatic Memory and Reenactment in Rithy

Panh's S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Vol. 50, No. 1/2, pp. 95-106. Hamilton, Anne (2013), ‘Witness and Recuperation: Cambodia’s New Documentary Cinema’, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, Vol. 39, No.1, pp. 7-30.

Lamy-Rested, Elise (2014), ‘Dénier, théoriser, éliminer : le « travail » de Duch Sur

L’élimination de Rithy Panh avec Christophe Bataille’ Texto ! Textes & Cultures, Volume XIX, No. 1, pp. 1-7.

Norindr, Panivong (2010), ‘The Sounds of Everyday Life in Rithy Panh's Documentaries’, French Forum, Vol. 35, No. 2/3, pp. 181-190.

Prince, Stephen (1996), ‘True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory’ Film Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 3., pp. 27-37.

Sadowski, Piotr (2009), ‘The iconic indexicality of photography’, The Seventh

Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature, Toronto. available at: http://www.semioticon.com/virtuals/iconicity/sadowski_1.pdf

Torchin, Leshu (2014) ‘Mediation and Remediation: La parole filmée In Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture (L’image Manquante)’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 1, pp. 32-41.

Williams, Linda (1993), ‘Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3, pp. 9-21.

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Online Resources Bradshaw, Nick (2015), ‘Memories of Murder: Rithy Panh on The Missing Picture’ available at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/memories-murder-rithy-panh-missing-picture (accessed 20 April 2016)

Hoffman, Jordan (2013), ‘Cannes Review: The Missing Image’ available at: http://www.mtv.com/news/2770697/the-missing-image-review/

(accessed 21 April 2016) Jordan, Randolph (2003), ‘The Gap: Documentary Truth Between Reality and Perception: The Notion of Documentary Truth’, Off Screen, Vol. 7, No. 1 available at: http://offscreen.com/view/documentary#ref-25-a (accessed 20 April 2016)

KMThomas (2006), ‘The Battle of Algiers: Image and the Construction of ‘Truth’’

available at: https://kmthomas.wordpress.com/

(accessed 17 April 2016)

Mullen, Pat (2014), ‘DiverCiné Review: 'The Missing Picture'’ available at: http://www.cinemablographer.com/2014/03/review-missing-picture-i-

mage-manquante.html (accessed 27 March 2016)

Radsen, Rune Bruun (2015), ‘When Fiction Points The Finger – Metafiction in Films and TV Series’ available at: http://www.kosmorama.org/ServiceMenu/05-English/Articles/When-fiction-points-the-finger.aspx

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Appendix: Duch, le maître des forges de l’enfer (2011):

Boy tied to stake 00:31:47

Surrounded by documents

00:28:33, 1:18:51

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L’image manquante (2013):

Clay effigies being painted 00:03:03, 00:12:15

Surreal superimposition of clay effigies over photo-stitched backgrounds 00:06:16, 00:06:53

Disco music overlayed over propaganda footage 01:01:13, 01:01:17

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Exposure of the dancing lady as a result of cinematic production

00:35:03 onwards, 00:36:52

Explicit portrayal of cinematic materials and of the creation of the film

00:00:10, 1:16:21, 1:33:34