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The essays in this groundbreaking collection examine how celebrated Cambodian director Rithy Panh counters the abstraction of mass violence with a cinema anchored in the body, the physical trace, the direct testimony, and the living landscape. They explore his unique aesthetic sensibility, examining the dynamic and sensuous images through which he suggests that “everything has a soul.”
List of contents
Chronology
Introduction: Rithy Panh and the Cinematic Image
Leslie Barnes and Joseph Mai
Part I: Aftermath: A Cinema of Post-War Survival
1. The “Mad Mother” in Rithy Panh’s Films
Boreth Ly
2. Resilience in the Ruins: Artistic Practice in Rithy Panh’s
The Burnt Theater Joseph Mai
3. The Wounds of Memory: Poetics, Pain, and Possibilities in Rithy Panh’s
Exile and
Que la barque se brise Khatharya Um
Part II: From Colonial to Global Cambodia
4. Rithy Panh’s
The Sea Wall: Reinventing Duras in Cambodia
Jack A. Yeager and Rachel Harrison
5. Rithy Panh as
Chasseur d’images Jennifer Cazenave
6. Aerial Aftermaths and Reckonings from Below: Reseeing Rithy Panh’s
Shiiku,
the Catch Cathy J. Schlund-Vials
7. Cambodia's "Wandering Souls": Migrant Labor and the Promise of Connection
Leslie Barnes
Part III: The Question of Justice
8. Archiving the Perpetrator
Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier and John Kleinen
9. Creating Duch: The Projects of Duch, François Bizot, and Rithy Panh
Donald Reid
10. Rithy Panh, Jean Améry, and the Paradigm of Moral Resentment
Raya Morag
Part IV: Memory, Voice, and Cinematic Practice
11. Looking Back and Projecting Forward from
Site 2 Lindsay French
12. Bophana’s Image and Narrative: Tragedy, Accusatory Gaze, and Hidden Treasure
Vicente Sánchez-Biosca
13. Memory Translation: Rithy Panh’s Provocations to the Primacy and Virtues of the
Documentary Sound/Image Index
David LaRocca
14. Rithy Panh: Storyteller of the Extreme
Soko Phay
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the author
LESLIE BARNES is senior lecturer of French studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. She is the author of
Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature. Her current project studies literary and cinematic narratives that engage with questions of sex work, mobility, and human rights in Southeast Asia.
JOSEPH MAI is an associate professor of French with an affiliation in world cinema at Clemson University in South Carolina. He is the author of
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne and
Robert GuÉdiguian. His scholarship examines intersections between ethics, aesthetics, cinema, and literature.
Summary
The essays in this groundbreaking collection examine how celebrated Cambodian director Rithy Panh counters the abstraction of mass violence with a cinema anchored in the body, the physical trace, the direct testimony, and the living landscape. They explore his unique aesthetic sensibility, examining the dynamic and sensuous images through which he suggests that “everything has a soul.”
