What a waste of my time!!!

Am I Missing Something?

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

I love me some slow, moody, atmospheric and introspective films. Yet I found this to be really, really slow at times. The premise of using clay figurines is a great one, and at times it really added to the film's power by not forcing images and allowing us to use our imagination, but it was used a lot and together with sort of ho-hum archival footage, and the dreamy narration, I'd be lying if I said I didn't find the film to be really slow to watch at times. It just got a bit repetitive and the subject matter wasn't presented in a more fascinating way. Still, I found some of it effective and the film is pretty original in that way so I have to give it props where they are due.

I watched The Missing Picture (2013, dir. Rithy Panh) last night and thought how clay figures can't compensate for missing pictures. I thought I was going to enjoy the film when it opened with poetic narration and a mesmerizing piece of archival film depicting a Cambodian dancer and the years prior to the Pol Pot takeover. However, as the film started relying more on static clay figures and less on archival footage I began to lose interest. Panh's story is remarkable and beautifully told, but the clay figures, although quite expressive in their design and arrangement, reminded more of an award winning high school diorama than the visuals for an award winning documentary film.

This is a documentary about one person's experiences under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia between 1975-1979 when the country was called Kampuchea. The trauma of the horrors visited upon survivors of this period do not make for an easy telling. The film maker opted for an unusual and novel approach; recreating the story and events using miniature figurines that he hand carved. Lots and lots of figurines with hand made sets to accompany them. The images reminded me at times of the war/hell scenes for which the Chapman brothers are famous. It is a most effective medium for drawing a person into an arena of horror.Anyone with knowledge of trauma survivors knows that retelling a traumatic story is not always a good course for the survivor. Using the figurines to depict the worst moments witnessed by the film maker facilitates the story in a way that is more separate. The separateness allows the survivor to engage without traumatising themselves further. Bravo to the film maker for finding the means by which to bear witness. This is one of those films where the form is the most significant feature of the film.Accompanying the stunning visuals, which includes archive footage and photographs also, is a narrator whose speech is spare and poetic. I stopped my DVD and wrote out many of the lines; so simply and beautifully did they express a thought or feeling. One of the most important underpins some of the motivation for making the film: "To hang on you must hide within yourself a strength, a memory, an idea that no one can take from you. For if a picture can be stolen, a thought cannot." Later he says: "There are many things that man should not see or know. Should he see them, he'd be better off dying. But should any of us see or know them then he must live to tell of them." In a situation where everything is taken from you and you are left with but two things - an outfit of black clothing and a spoon for eating meagre amounts of food - to be able to retain something of one's self, which includes people known, places visited, experiences, memories of a physical home and possessions, becomes essential to survival with mind intact. Furthermore if one survives an atrocity then the survivors have a duty, unsought but one nonetheless, to bear witness so that the atrocity might be known, acknowledged and learnt from. The film maker did both. At age 13 the film maker and his family became prisoners of the Khmer Rouge when they invaded the capital city. During their years of hypocritical rule, as seems to be the case for every dictatorship, the film maker lost his dad, who chose to die, his mother, his siblings and his large extended family. He was one of those chosen to bury the dead in mass graves and knows not how he endured such a life but his retelling is piquant to say the least. The Khmer Rouge regime reminded me of the Nazi concentration camps. It reminds me that the Holocaust was not a defining moment in human history for such evil has happened before and since.The title, the missing picture, is the main theme. It is a trope for the film maker's means of bearing witness. The archive footage is mostly propaganda. It does not show the effects of the society being promoted. The film maker had no photographs of his father withered from his fatal hunger strike. He has no photos of the minuscule food portions given to the adults and children whose lives consisted of endless hard labour. He has no photographs for the mud he drank in lieu of water. So he is recreating these photographs with his figurines and puppet sets. He is showing us the photographs in the only way he can; it matters that we see what he saw and heard and felt.One would not expect such a film to be beautiful but this is; from the images, the form, the narration, the film maker's weary and collected wisdom. I was startled by the descriptions, photographs and songs from Cambodia pre-Khmer Rouge, or perhaps I should say from Phnom Penh - its capital, because it was so westernised. It was shocking to see what the leaders of the Khmer Rouge did to the city and its people. The film maker concludes: "This missing picture I now hand over to you so that it never ceases to seek us out." Humans seem destined to visit atrocities upon one another. If we cannot avoid such a fate then at least we can attend to the witnesses of this aspect of human life.

Rithy Panh fled his native Cambodia for Thailand in 1979, and soon after his family died in a refugee camp. Panh ended up in Paris and became interested in film. Life under the Khmer Rouge and its legacy became the subject matter of his new life as a film director in France. His latest documentary "The Missing Picture" deals with those who were children from 1975 to 1979 when the communist movement seized the Cambodian capital and introduced a system of death resulting in a society so impoverished that private property was reduced to slogans or empty promises. In one of the film's most chilling mise-en-scènes, bank notes fall from the sky in Phnom Penh."The Missing Picture" invites us to a faraway country of nostalgia, where clay figurines represent, in many cases, the dead. The figurines find their place in the imagination somewhere between painting and animation; it's stop motion without motion, but by holding the figurines still, it is the heart that moves, or at least that's the idea. This is a difficult film to watch. Part of what you make of a film is what you bring to it, contrary to the belief that all films screen in the mind on a tabula rasa. "The Missing Picture" requires patience, imagination and a considerable amount of effort toward empathy because it's nearly impossible to identify with extreme suffering from genocide. You have to wonder if it's not the job of the director to make this easier? Does Panh overindulge in telling a story? But more importantly, is this a story that can be told? Panh has very few pictures from the genocide; he uses a French, first-person narrative; and there are no witnesses from his family that can testify of his highly personal memoir. Why should we believe him? After all the narrator, Randal Douc says, "there is no truth, there is only cinema". Only by using this radical lens to look at Panh's work can we gauge the level of loneliness in Panh. In a way it is madness, a vision of purity alien to the world, and Panh has nothing to show for it, hence, the title "The Missing Picture".From passages of this film you realize that it takes little to satisfy man: work and food. And it is only in man's dreams that complexity arises. "It starts with purity, and ends with hate," says the narrator. Aren't the two, hate and purity, just different sides of the same coin? Many atrocities have been carried out in the name of purity. At intervals, throughout the film, waves wash over the screen as a symbol of purity. The freedom that Panh's father died for, is tragically a pretense of purity. When the families share their food, there is more hunger than food so they mostly share their hunger, and hunger is a pretense of purity. Reeducating people in the rice fields--after being forced out of their homes and into the countryside--is a pretense of purity. "Childhood is a constant refrain" says the narrator, but childhood is also a pretense of purity. There is something missing in all this, purity. And tragically all there is to show is hate.