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ABSTRACT
This essay aims, first, to describe the under-theorized recent remarkable renaissance of post-Khmer Rouge (KR) cinema generated by women directors, which emerged after the KR regime (1975–79) murdered most of the filmmakers and demolished almost the entire Cambodian film industry; and, second, to analyze first- and second-generation post-traumatic autobiographical (or semi-autobiographical) fiction and non-fiction films that deal with the almost-tabooi-ized issue of perpetratorhood within the family (or symbolic family). Defining the term autogenocide will serve as the basis for an analysis of two prominent films that render narratives of encounters with low-ranking perpetrators in the shadow of the ongoing controversy over the remit of the KR tribunal (ECCC) to try only high-ranking perpetrators. Sotho Kulikar’s fiction film The Last Reel (2014) and Neary Adeline Hay’s non-fiction film Angkar (2018) propose postgenocide ethics embodied on a spectrum of forgiveness from aporetic reconciliation to un-forgiving. It is through this latter inclination towards un-forgiving that second-generation women’s cinema subverts the first generation’s reconciled attitude towards the perpetrators, and, most importantly, the perpetrators’ denial and lack of accountability and atonement. Thus, the new wave of Cambodian women’s cinema advances the possibility of cinematic creation of ethical communities, moving Cambodia towards a culture of accountability.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by THE ISRAEL SCIENCE FOUNDATION grant no. 467/13. I am truly grateful to the ISF for this funding. Thanks also to Sotho Kulikar and Neary Adeline Hay for their valuable assistance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Some films depict the consequences and ramifications of the genocide on modernization, such as Kalyanee Mam’s A River Changes Course (2013). Women are also involved in various other projects: For example, Ung Loung co-wrote with director Angelina Jolie the script for First They Killed My Father (2017), based on her autobiographical novel; Kauv Sottheary is the scriptwriter and leading actress in Chhay Bora’s Lost Loves (2010); eight short-short films made by women are part of the One Dollar Project: http://onedollar.bophana.org/en/.
2. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Citation2002, 283) terms the child-survivor the “1.5” generation.
3. In 2010, Kaing Guek Eav (nicknamed Duch), the head of the government’s internal security branch (Santebal) was found guilty of crimes against humanity, torture, and murder. In 2012, his sentence was extended to life imprisonment (Case 001). On 2014, Nuon Chea, the chief ideologist of the KR and the Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea (“Brother no. 2”, second-in-command to KR leader Pol Pot, who was the general secretary of the party during the Cambodian genocide and “Brother no. 1”), and Khieu Samphan (Cambodia’s head of state, “Brother no. 4”), were found guilty of crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and sentenced to life imprisonment (Case 002). In 2018, the court found both of them guilty of genocide against the Vietnamese people and the Chams. See http://www.eccc.gov.kh/en/keyevents.
4. Following the demand to try lower-ranking perpetrators (Cases 003 and 004 against regional leaders Meas Muth, Yim Tith, and Ao An), in 2010 Prime Minister Hun Sen expressed his notorious disapproval of the notion that the court’s remit extended beyond Case 002, and threatened an inevitable civil war if this should happen. See https://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/hun-sen-warns-of-civil-war-if-eccc-goes-beyond-limit-78757/.
5. I chose to use the term “autogenocide,” following Ervin Staub (Citation1992, 7, 191), from among other terms, such as “politicide” or “ideocide” (Arjun Appadurai [Citation2006, esp. 1–13]) because it seems to me to be the most appropriate term when considering the extraordinary Cambodian context. My use of autogenocide henceforth in this article is not evaluative, and using the concept means addressing the Condition Inhumane of the extermination of the other who pre-revolution was myself.
6. In Panh’s film Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (Duch, le maître des forges de l’enfer, 2011), Duch says: “The KR word kamtech has its own meaning. It doesn’t only mean kill, it means kill and leave no trace, to reduce to ashes, so that nothing left remains.”
7. In Angkar, for example, after the film’s title appears, we hear a woman’s voice-over saying in French: “I was three months old when we left Cambodia. I grew up in France, in your silence.”
8. On the relation between the concept of Karma, the Cambodian king’s power to pardon, the 1996 pardon of Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary, and the tribunal see Ashley Thompson (Citation2004). Thompson’s analysis of the formation of the Khmer geobody has particular resonance in the discussion of perpetratorhood suggested by these films. For a thorough analysis of linga-yoni and male-female binarism see Ashley Thompson (Citation2016).
9. Being aware of the enormous difficulty faced by survivors who attempt after the event to narrate their experience as victims, Primo Levi (Citation1959) distinguishes between his “camp-self” and his “survivor-self.”
10. Sotho Kulikar is the first Cambodian woman to direct a fiction film since Ung Kanthouk (10,000 Regrets [Mouy Mern Alai, 1970s]).
11. The film won The Spirit of Asia Award at the 2014 Tokyo Film Festival and was submitted to the 88th Academy Awards.
12. This is the local term for a gang member who is not considered a gangster. (Thanks to Kulikar Sotho for this information).
13. Dy Saveth starred in over one hundred Cambodian films throughout the 1960s and 1970s until the communist takeover in 1975, and later from 1993 to the present.
14. She is seen lying in bed, incessantly repeating KR slogans like “Do not speak, do not listen, do not know, do not ask … We are the youth, we are liberated, and on a bright road, the road of Revolutionary Communism!”.
15. Helen Jarvis (Citation2002) notes that since Buddhism was restored as the official religion of Cambodia, stupas have been built in various wats around the country (97–98). In Trapeang Sva, Tonle Bati, a new stupa was built in 1999.
16. The script was written by Ian Masters.
17. During my conversation with Kulikar Sotho (on November 26 2017), the director told me that she was a very young child during the KR regime, and that her mother refused to talk about the past until the film’s premiere. In many respects, her mother’s thirty-five-year silence became the reason for making the film.
18. During the KR dictatorship, and especially after 1978, more than five hundred thousand young women were forced into marriages, often with KR cadres. The circumstances of these forced marriages have been suppressed and covered up for four decades. See, e.g., Trudy Jacobsen’s (Citation2008, 223) analysis of the rituals of marriage. Jacobsen indicates that the correct way for husbands and wives to call each other was mit p’dai (comrade husband) and mit prapuan (comrade wife). See also Peg LeVine (Citation2010). Based on her anthropological research, the author relates to arranged marriage’s conventions and other cultural rituals, but hardly emphasizes the horror of the phenomenon of forced marriage and rape.
See the chapter on forced marriage and rape in my forthcoming book Perpetrator Cinema. Confronting Genocide in Cambodian Documentary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
19. “To keep you is no gain to destroy you is no loss” (Dith Pran Citation1999, 13).
20. Old People is the KR term for the class of peasants from rural areas who were considered the privileged class of Base/Ancient People, pure and unstained by what the KR regarded as the corruption of capitalistic city life. This stands in contrast to the New People, the KR term defining the new class of Cambodian civilians, like Khonsaly Hay, which, broadly speaking, included anyone who was from an urban area and thus impure, perverted by Western ideas: the middle class, intellectuals, and artists (as well as ethnic minorities). Deported from the cities to the countryside on April 17 1975, they were made a new people.
21. Her father stayed in the village and met his former acquaintances. From time to time she joined them with a small video camera. It was just the two of them, with no extra film crew. (Personal conversation with the director via Skype on August 17 2018).
22. Who removed human livers and regularly drank the bile from the gallbladders of their victims.
23. The director told me that the atmosphere was similar to that felt in Lars Von Trier’s Dogville (Netherlands/Denmark/UK/France/Finland/Sweden/Germany/Italy/Norway, 2003). Moreover, a young man showed up and told her he would disclose all the truth and tell her “who did what,” but when she came to the meeting they set, he disappeared (Personal conversation via Skype on August 17 2018).
24. The bystander-perpetrator-victim triangle, mainly constituted by Raul Hilberg (Citation1993), is the most common model referred to in the huge literature on genocide and its aftermath. On the entanglement and differentiation of these social categories/subject positions see, for instance, Dominick LaCapra’s reflection on the Goldhagen debate (Citation2001, 114–140), Zygmunt Bauman’s (Citation[1989] 2011) analysis of the situation in which some individuals occupied all three roles, and Tristan Anne Borer’s taxonomy of victims and perpetrators following the TRC trials (Citation2003, 1088–1116).
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Raya Morag
Raya Morag is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. She is the author of Defeated Masculinity: Post-Traumatic Cinema in the Aftermath of War (2009), The Defeated Male. Cinema, Trauma, War (2011), Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema (2013), and Perpetrator Trauma and Israeli Intifada Cinema (2017). Her book Perpetrator Cinema: Confronting Genocide in Cambodian Documentary is forthcoming (2020). E-mail: [email protected]