On a morality of filming: a conversation between Rithy Panh & Deirdre Boyle.

Boyle, Deirdre

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Rithy Panh is Cambodia's leading filmmaker and foremost chronicler of the genocide that decimated his country forty years ago when the Khmer Rouge took power and pursued a draconian scheme to create an agrarian utopia through terror. He has made over 20 award-winning films--both documentary and fiction works--and written several books about them and his experience surviving that genocide. He is best known to English speakers for two documentary films, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and The Missing Picture, the latter of which won Un Certain Regard at Cannes and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards in 2014. Panh was a special guest of the Visible Evidence conference held in Toronto in August 2015, where he screened The Missing Picture at the TIFF cinema and engaged in a discussion of his work with Deirdre Boyle, a documentary scholar and media historian, who had just returned from Phnom Penh where she had interviewed Panh for a book she is writing about his films. What follows are highlights of that conversation.

Deirdre Boyle: One of my colleagues, Leshu Torchin, has written a wonderful essay for Film Quarterly about The Missing Picture. She begins by making reference to Primo Levi's book, The Drowned and the Saved, which begins with a quotation from Coleridge. It's a wonderful association, calling up the way in which you're using the water imagery at the beginning of the film, and how that becomes an important device throughout, an effective wipe between spaces.

For me, it had a very different meaning. It really took me into childhood, and I think it's a kind of universal experience, if you've ever been to the beach as a child in the waves, holding on to the hands of someone who's keeping you safe, and suddenly the wave comes and hits you and you lose their hand, and suddenly, completely, you don't know which end is up and which end is down. It's a terrible experience.

I was wondering about the process for you of discovering that image and how you went about using it.

Rithy Panh: I remember Jankelevitch (1) talked about this sensation to be drowned again and again. For us, genocide is continuous, you get it for all your life. At the beginning when you come out, you have to fight first to rebuild everything, your capacity to be a human being again, because the process of dehumanization is so strong. It is like you are drowning and you cannot breathe. Psychiatrists call it a panic attack, but it's much more than a psychiatry problem. It's something that you must integrate in yourself when you live. Part of me says, "Don't talk about this again," but another part says, "No, you have to talk about it." I have been making films now for more than 30 years. I respect people who can change their life and not talk about the genocide or remember. Unfortunately for me, it's not possible. I don't feel better after making a film but making it is a necessity, like a process for me to rebuild my humanity.

DB: We've had several papers here at the conference talking about The Missing Picture. The idea of redemption comes up and reclaiming humanity. I think you are not reclaiming your humanity. You are reclaiming the humanity of all those who died. Would you agree?

RP: Yes. When I make a film, I don't think about philosophy, or about aesthetics. The only thing I focus on is the dignity of people and ethics, some few things that can compose a morality of filming. This element, I have to integrate in myself before filming. When I film, I let things come, I go with that. That why it's takes me a lot of time for each film.

DB: I remember you were telling me that one of the reasons why the figurines were freeing was that you felt you couldn't ask anybody to act the experience that you had. It was an ethical consideration that you couldn't direct actors to experience what you had been through.

RP: Yes. Maybe one day I could do it, but today, no. I don't know how to ask a fictional perpetrator to kill a victim. I know what happens. I know exactly the gesture, et cetera, but there's something blocked in my mind.

For me they are not really figurines. They are something else: a representation of the people, like a soul. An African mask is not a mask. It is a soul, a spirit. When you go to the temples in Angkor Wat, you have a lot of Buddhas, a lot of statues, but if you put one in the museum here, it's art, just a piece of art, but for us they represent a spirit. With these figurines, I can do things. I can imagine.

DB: You told me that you make several documentaries, and at the end, there's a culmination of a cycle, and then there's often a fiction film. In your-fiction films, you can express your thoughts and feelings, but in the documentaries you must be faithful to the facts.

RP: Documentary or fiction for me is film. It's subjective. It's something for you to show another person and to show yourself at the same time. I very much like documentary film because you negotiate with reality, with your own reality, with history. When I make documentary, you are so close to your character, but life is very cruel. Sometimes when you shoot somebody very poor, for example, at the beginning you can help them. You can continue to have a relationship with these people, but two years, three years later, they disappear.

Personally, I feel guilty that I have not had success to transforming people with this process of filming, to get them out of poverty or prostitution, for example, but I know the film is not made for that. We are not God. We can just show. We can sometimes make small changes, but filming doesn't change the world.

DB: How have your films been received in Cambodia? Have they been seen widely and have they made changes?

RP: At the beginning, nobody watched my films. It's normal for people who have just come out from the Khmer Rouge. I make a film about the Khmer Rouge, about the genocide, and it's normal that people don't want to watch it because they want to forget, they want to start a new life.

When I screened a film, sometimes I would see one Cambodian, but little by little, the new generation grew up and wanted to know their history. Now my films are watched by young people, and so the old people now come back and watch my films because their children watch the films, so it's okay.

The films now are available in Cambodia, in pirate copy, or you can see them also at our Bophana Center. Young people want to know what happened, where do they come from, and why their grandparent is not here today.

DB: Your films have helped to perpetuate consciousness, not just in the mass population but also toward creating a genocide tribunal that's still going on. S-21, (2) in particular.

RP: I don't know exactly, but when I started to make S-21, nobody was thinking if there's a necessity to judge the Khmer Rouge or not. It wasn't the right time to talk about a trial. It was a time when people talked a lot about reconciliation. The problem for me is: who do I reconcile with? If you talk about reconciliation, it must be between the victim and perpetrator. If you do not know who the victim is and who is the perpetrator, how can you reconcile?

Now most people think that the perpetrators, in a certain way, are also victims. So who am I? If they are victims, who am I?

DB: That's what Vann Nath says ...

RP: Yes, that's Vann Nath.

DB: ... in S-21.

RP: You have to work on your memory. It's a long journey.

DB: I remember-reading that Khieu Samphan, who had written his memoir claiming not to have known that there were any mass killings, after seeing S-21 admitted that, yes, it had happened.

RP: It's good that he admits it, but he lies. He knew about it.

DB: He knew. All along.

RP: Yeah, he knew. He knew it, but it's good the film gave him the possibility to pronounce these words, it's okay.

DB: I said last night that most English speakers know 5-21. It's the one film of yours that, until The Missing Picture, has gotten attention and has shaken up the way people think about re-enactment in documentary. Fewer people have seen Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell, and yet it's as important a film. Can you talk a little bit about your making of that film?

RP: Maybe we are all interested by horror. I try not to make a horror film, but genocide is horrific. And it captures our attention more.

I think that in 5-27, for example, that there is much more than just the reenactment. A lot of film directors were influenced by this film, even my friend Joshua Oppenheimer with his The Act of Killing, for example. When I made the film, I didn't think about reenactment. I thought about memory. I shot with these people for many months, and most of the time they told me that, "Ah, I forget. It's a long time ago."

One time, I asked one of the chiefs of the guard how many people they killed, for example. He could not explain this to me. I understand that they cannot tell me the number. I cannot ask how many, or if the first person he killed was a man or a woman. It's very complex, so I worked another way. I tried to ask him the first time he killed, if he remembered the smell.

He said, "Yes, I smelled blood. After, I didn't smell anything. It's just a job." This means that he went there many, many times but he can't tell me if he killed two or three people or five.

Memory is not something fixed. You know it also changes. It's like a photographer's loop, bigger than reality. It transforms everything. There are things that memory keeps in your body. I had a wound and I couldn't walk for a year. I just couldn't stand up. Ten years later, I still felt this pain even though it had already healed.

When I interviewed one of the Khmer Rouge, the guy was my age, so he was in S-21 when he was 13. He could not speak to me. He would just give me a word here, a word there. It's very difficult to understand him, but he made a lot of gestures. I told him: "You can complete your words by showing me what happened," and it became a re-enactment. I am not asking people to act. I just try to take the memory out of the body, what your body keeps, what your body feels.

I asked him, "You worked at night. Did you have a light or not?" and I tried to create the conditions of what happened for him 25 years ago. If his guard shift was at midnight, I went back to S-21 at midnight. I let him do what he wanted. He just explained to me what happened and it went like that. It's very strange because at the end, he had a big fever, like something came out of his body. A big, big fever. I remember. It was very strange.

DB: That scene in the film is one that almost everybody writes about and thinks about, and it has so much to do not only with his remembering, his physical remembering, but the way you keep the camera outside of the room. You never cross into the room. Would you say something about that? Also, how did you communicate with your DP (Director of Photography)? Was it Prum Mesa who was the cameraman?

RP: Yeah, yeah.

DB: How did that happen?

RP: We have some code. I touch him [he reaches out his hand at ami's length]. First we determine a good distance and a good distance for me is that you can touch your subject. Logically, Mesa must follow him at this distance everywhere. When the guard went inside to beat the prisoner, I don't know why I stopped Mesa, but I just put my hand on his shoulder, and he knew that he had to stop following him.

You must have this kind of ethic in your heart, because when you are filming, things go too fast. I don't know, I see people. I see the prisoners. The room is empty, but I see people, so I just put a hand on Mesa's shoulder. "Don't walk on people. We cannot walk on people who are lying there, who ask for help, who ask for water."

At that moment, I didn't know how important this was, but when I watched the rushes, I understood, okay, you can continue to make the film, because if you followed the guy, that means that you had become a perpetrator yourself:

Making a documentary is like dealing in faith. It's like a religion. I don't practice religion, but I live documentary-making like a faith. If you don't believe, you cannot see people laying on the ground.

Sometimes there's some phenomenon, very rare, but when I film sometimes the birds come. That night birds came, one or two, and after, a family of birds came watching us. Maybe for people it's nothing, but for me, it is the souls of the victims who came here to watch what I'm doing. A very rare bird. When we finished shooting, they flew away.

DB: Shall we talk about your fiction films?

RP: I'm not very lucky with fiction films because people love my film three years after it has been released. I say: "I would like you to love it when it is released." But they don't go to see it then. But three or four years later, they say, "Ah, I saw your film. It's amazing." Yes. "Thank you."

I like very much to direct people. Fiction film is a way for me to tell myself that I'm not completely destroyed. I can make a fiction. It means I can imagine, I can transcend, I can direct people, I can think, I'm alive. They cannot destroy me.

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DB: I was thinking today when I was looking at the clip from The Missing Picture and saw the figure of your brother flying out to the moon, I was thinking, this is by a man who studied fiction film and there's a memory of Melies here as well as your experience as a boy watching the Apollo launch and then being punished for telling that story later on. The distinctions between the world of fiction and the world of documentary in our lives are never quite so separate. They coexist in us.

RP: Yes. It's good. You see, Nanook is a fiction film. It's more a fiction film than my documentary film. It's all fiction film in Nanook, but we consider it-the origin of the documentary.

DB: Changing the subject for a moment, you've worked with great collaborators. You have your cinematographer, you have Marc Marder as composer, you have wonderful editors. How do you communicate with them? You talked about a code with the cinematographer. I remember you and Marc laughing about how you communicate when you're developing the score for your film. Maybe you could talk about that.

RP: We were much too serious at the beginning. "Ah, this note must be here!" Now we have changed the idea of how to work. Marc is very good and he is more than a friend. He's like a brother. He started to work with me 30 years ago now. He gives me a lot of liberty, a lot of freedom.

I don't ask him for specific music. Sometimes I ask, "Can you do for me a track like this one?" I cannot read music, but I try to communicate with him with my words or I sing something or I send him some sounds. He has given me permission to edit the music, so sometimes I put 10 music tracks of Marc's together or 20 or only one.

I'm lucky because he allows only me to do that. Most of the time he composes normally for other films. He understands that he must let me do what I want. It's like a sculpture, and I put a sound here and a sound here.

It's the same with Pram Mesa, my DP. I've trained him. In the beginning, we started shooting the film at six in the morning and at midnight he finished cleaning the equipment. From midnight to two, we analyzed the film, and we woke up at six to go to shoot again. That was a very hard time.

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We know each other now and I just ask him, "What is the direction of the light?" I ask him to step into the light, and if he feels it's good, it's okay.

DB: What about the editing? Is it still Marie-Christine Rougerie?

RP: Marie-Christine is now retired. Sometimes I ask her to come work with me for one or two weeks like that, just to destroy what I'm doing. She is someone who started editing with the workprint.

DB: On a Steenbeck. (3)

RP: For such editors, the perception of time is not the same compared with people who only know how to edit in digital. This kind of editor is disappearing little by little. Time is not the same now with digital editing. We have a lot of technique, good technicians and good IT, but we have lost the notion of time. I watch an Antonioni film. There's one shot, a classic, powerful, beautiful shot, and you just go: "Ah! How can they do that?!" If you watch on TV or in the big cinema now, it's a different rhythm.

DB: Can we take a question from the audience?

Speaker: Thank you for your film last night. I was incredibly moved by it and, of course, thought about it late into the evening, and what I was thinking about is exactly what you said. How is it possible, that we go into a trance where in fact they're not figurines anymore, they become people?

I was thinking that one of the elements is your writing, the text, the voice. Just beautiful writing. I'd like you to talk a little bit about how you write, when you write. Do you like to write?

RP: I don't write, and that's my big problem. I know writing, but I don't want to do it. I don't know it I can continue to make films, for example, because people ask me more and more to write, and I don't want to write.

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You can't lie to people, but you can lie to a producer from time to time but not three times-:

I'm laughing but I am serious. I don't know if they will believe me for the next film to be accepted. "Ah, Rithy Panh, maybe we can give him money because anyway he will do something, so we accept his idea." The world changes, and the TV channels, and the program heads. I am not nostalgic. I accept that the game has changed, but I remember 20 years ago, when you had a subject, you would go to see a producer. "Can you give me three boxes of 16 mm film just to do something?" and you could get it. Now you cannot.

I read a lot of books. I read a lot, a lot, a lot. I go to cinema very rarely. I don't like to go to the theater, but I go sometimes. My source of energy comes from books, from poetry, and from painting and photography.

I have a great admiration for photographers and poets. Just to nourish your imagination and connect it to your subject, and sometimes an idea comes. Sometimes it doesn't come immediately. You must wait. The image is not something that comes to you. You must be patient and you must go to find the image.

The Missing Picture I did in eight months, but I started two years before. When the idea is good, when the story is there, when I am clear, I go very quickly. I have a journal where I take some notes, but I prefer to talk to people.

Everybody knows, the one, the only guy who sees the film is the film director. It's not the DP, it's not the producer, it's not the editor. Only the director knows what his film is. I am a little bit lucky because I made some beautiful films when I was younger, like The Land of Wandering Souls, for example. I think it is one of my best films, but people don't talk about this one. Site 2 is a great film, but people talk only about .S'-2/ or The Missing Picture.

When I started to make films, I was lucky because some producers believed in me and let me do what I needed to do, like Catherine Dussart at CDP. Sometimes she asked me, "Can you show me something?" but that's all. I owe her everything.

Pratap Rughani: Thank you so much for your films. They're just so significant for many of us, and also thank you to Deirdre for helping curate this conversation and bring it to our community so meaningfully.

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I had a question, or just an area that I'd really appreciate exploring a little bit more, and it's to do with that moment of touch. You described a touch on the shoulder of your camera person and deciding to stay outside of the room and how that seemed like an embodied response rather than a conscious response.

You were saying that you can't have that in your mind and heart just in the moment of directing or of presence, but it's something that's cultivated over a long period. You used the word "dignity" and the word "ethics." I'm just interested to hear more about that. How has your approach been formed through your responses to these events? How have you come to be the shape that you are, if you like, as a director?

RP: For me, at that moment, I just see people. I see people laying on the floor, the victims. Why do I see that, I don't know, but it happens for me like that. For the documentary filmmaker, you must learn to have a lot of generosity. If you have no generosity, you cannot see things. If your eyes are very like the horse, blinkered, you cannot see.

Generosity, it's not rare in my life and cinema. In my life I am not afraid to go with people. I'm not afraid to offer something to people. This brings you back something like a miracle to keep your eyes open in life.--If you do not have generosity, your eyes are always closed because you don't want to see people. You close your eyes and you cross the street. It's okay. You are safe.

But if you share something with people, they teach you to keep your eyes open, and when your eyes open, you can see a lot of things, visible and not visible. You talk about visible evidence, but there's invisible evidence. In this case, it's invisible evidence. Maybe for another film director, it's just an empty room.

Irina Leimbacher: I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about your early trajectory, your decision to go to film school, how you developed your earliest visions of what you wanted to see, what you wanted to say, what you wanted to share visually with the rest of the world.

RP: When I started at 1'IDHEC, (4) everybody wanted to make fiction films except me. In the school, you have only three months of documentary practice in three or four years ... this is nothing.

I liked watching Wiseman or the Maysles or Jean Rouch at the time. I like Wiseman very much, but I was not impressed by some of those films. The first documentary I made for the school, it was catastrophic. Really catastrophic. Shameful. I think that I successfully destroyed it. It was so bad because it misunderstood what documentary film is.

Site 2 is my real first film. I decided I needed to create a good distance, a distance where you can touch your people. You don't need commentary. If you are good, everybody watching your film will understand.

I wanted to go to Site 2 (5) but the Thai military didn't want me to go. They kept me outside the camp for months. Every two or three days, I went to see the military in Bangkok. They refused me again and again. I was very naive. I believed in the UN. I went to see the UN, and I said, "Help me, please, you are the UN." I was really naive. They didn't help me. They just sat me in a chair, "Wait here. We will help you," but nothing ever happened.

One day I was very angry because I had run out of money. I went back to see the Thai and said, "Maybe I will not make the film, but I will see you, you will be my neighbor. I will see you one day." I went out, and the guy comes after me, "I give you three days." Three days to make Site 2.

I went to Site 2. I didn't have a ride to go back. I went to the camp and they have a military post. They kept me there. I could not go inside. When you closed your eyes, you could hear the murmuring of the city. There are 180,000 people inside 5.7 square kilometers.

Small place, big town. You cannot see the camp, but you can hear the murmuring. I started to make the film with these sounds, to imagine how people live.

When they gave me the possibility to go back to Site 2, we only had three days. The first day, I did not shoot. It was a situation where I knew I should not do that, but I was young. I did not shoot the first day, but I told my team that, "You can use three boxes of film 12 minutes each, but shoot something that is interesting for you, that you have never seen or something that you can see people fighting to survive or to protect themselves or something like that."

I started to walk in the camp. I met this woman who I think had waited for me for five, six years already. I started to make the first take, and this became the first scene of the film, and we went on like that, and the story kept coming, coming, coming, coming.

We keep our exact distance. We don't change the lens. It's not a rule, but something that I must respect, that you make a film with people and not about people. When you make a film with people, you must be with them. When they are in the rice field, you are in the rice field. When they are in the water, you will be in the water.

This rule continues today. All my team learn to do that, all my young students. You can go to the website for my center, Bophana Center, B-O-P-H-A-N-A, and you go to One Dollar Project and you see the young students who make seven minute, five minute films about how people can earn one dollar a day and what they can buy, how they can live with one dollar a day.

DB: Do you want to tell people a little more about the training you do at Bophana?

RP: Yes. I think that people in Cambodia, now most of them are young people. They are 30 years old and less and they are seventy percent of the population. They don't read books. They read less than one book a year, but they use social media a lot. I don't like this, but I do it. I have Facebook, I have Twitter, I have everything. I follow them, they follow me.

I try to understand what kind of language I can use to communicate with them. Now we try to train all the young people to make these films, seven minute films, but with a strong subject of social or political project.

The films we make, we have no chance to broadcast on TV Of course, TV is like karaoke, but reality is not TV. TV is not reality. Maybe social media can bring reality and reflection together. We must train our young people to use this medium, so we use the internet.

Now these are the subjects in One Dollar. When you are poor, you forget your quality. Most of the time, you don't like yourself, but every human being has some grace, has some quality, a gift that they don't know because they are so poor that they don't see it in themselves.

We try to film this grace and to make people understand that even poor, you have something unique that other people do not have. Maybe you can use it to escape from your poverty.

DB: I just looked at my watch. We have gone way over time, so I want to thank the audience, but especially I want to thank Rithy ...

RP: Thank you.

Notes

(1) Vladimir Jankelevitch, a French philosopher and musicologist.

(2) S-21 was the notorious secret prison where it is estimated that 14,000 Cambodians were tortured, interrogated, and executed. Today, S-21 prison is known as the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide. In 2003, Panh made S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. In Cambodia, the film was a catalyst in sparking a historical and judicial reckoning about the genocide.

(3) A Steenbeck is a flatbed 16mm or 35mm analog film editing machine.

(4) L'IDHEC, the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques, is now known as La Femis, and remains France's premier school for the training of filmmakers. It is located in Paris.

(5) Site 2 was a large refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border. Panh was himself a refugee in this camp when he escaped from the Khmer Rouge.