Director Rithy Panh uses dioramas to fill in the gaps in Oscar-nominated THE MISSING PICTURE
THE MISSING PICTURE (L’IMAGE MANQUANTE) (Rithy Panh, 2013)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
March 19 – April 1
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.themissingpicture.bophana.org
Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture is a brilliantly rendered look back at the director’s childhood in Cambodia just as Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge began their reign of terror in the mid-1970s. “I seek my childhood like a lost picture, or rather it seeks me,” narrator Randal Douc says in French, reciting darkly poetic and intimately personal text written by author Christophe Bataille (Annam) based on Panh’s life. Born in Phnom Penh in 1964, Panh, who has made such previous documentaries about his native country as S21, The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell and wrote the 2012 book L’élimination with Bataille, was faced with a major challenge in telling his story; although he found remarkable archival footage of the communist Angkar regime, there are precious few photographs or home movies of his family and the community where he grew up. So he had sculptor Sarith Mang hand-carve and paint wooden figurines that Panh placed in dioramas to detail what happened to his friends, relatives, and neighbors. Panh’s camera hovers over and zooms into the dioramas, bringing these people, who exist primarily only in memory, to vivid life. When people disappear, Panh depicts their carved representatives flying through the sky, as if finally achieving freedom amid all the horrors. He delves into the Angkar’s propaganda movement and sloganeering — the “great leap forward,” spread through film and other methods — as the rulers sent young men and women into forced labor camps. “With film too, the harvests are glorious,” Douc states as women are shown, in black-and-white, working in the fields. “There is grain. There are the calm, determined faces. Like a painting. A poem. At last I see the Revolution they so promised us. It exists only on film.” It’s a stark comparison to cinematographer Prum Mésa’s modern-day shots of the wind blowing through lush green fields, devoid of people.
The Missing Picture is an extraordinarily poignant memoir that uses the director’s personal tale as a microcosm for what happened in Cambodia during the 1970s, employing the figures and dioramas to compensate for “the missing pictures.” Like such other documentaries as Jessica Wu’s Protagonist and In the Realms of the Unreal, Michel Gondry’s Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol, and Zachary Heinzerling’s Cutie and the Boxer, which incorporate animation, puppetry, and/or miniatures to enhance the narrative or fill in gaps, Panh makes creative use of an unexpected artistic technique, this time concentrating on painful history as well as personal and collective memory.
Writer-director Matt Wolf (Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell) and cowriter Jon Savage (England’s Dreaming) explore the explosion of youth culture in the first half of the twentieth century in the innovative documentary Teenage. Based on Savage’s 2007 book, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, and various other sources, the film concentrates on the social, economic, cultural, and political development of boys and girls who came of age before, during, and after WWI, the Great Depression, and WWII. Using 135 photographs, 272 rare footage excerpts, and four dramatic re-creations, Wolf, editor Joe Beshenkovsky, and cinematographer Nick Bentgen create a virtually seamless chronological examination of how the young generation took shape from the slavelike child labor of the early 1900s and transformed throughout various movements that ultimately led to a new kind of freedom post-WWII. Narration adapted from original sources is delivered by Jena Malone as an American girl, Ben Whishaw as a British boy, Julia Hammer as a German girl, and Jessie Usher as an American boy; the re-creations feature Leah Hennessey as Brenda Dean Paul of England’s Bright Young People, Ivy Blackshire as Melita Maschmann (voiced by Daniela Leder) of Germany’s Hitler Youth, Ben Rosenfield as Tommie Scheel of the Hamburg Swings, and Malik Peters as Warren Wall, who represents the African American experience. The film delves into the beginnings of the Boy Scouts (preparing America’s youth for military service), the effects of jazz and swing music on the younger generation, fashion trends, consumerism, drugs, race, unemployment, and eventual public rebellion as “teenagers” — a word that didn’t exist until around 1921 — started to take responsibility for themselves as they lost faith in their parents, authority, and the government. Teenage, whose form and structure recall the work of such filmmakers as Bill Morrison, Guy Maddin, and Ken Burns, offers unique insight into the growth of youth culture, making compelling and sometimes surprising connections without stating the obvious or using overly familiar visuals, all set to a subtle score by Deerhunter leader Bradford Cox. Teenage opens March 14 at the Landmark Sunshine, with Wolf participating in Q&As following the 7:40 and 9:45 screenings on March 15.
Ira McKinley has had plenty of opportunities to give up on life and turn his back on society. His father was shot and killed by the police when Ira was fourteen. He suffered through a crack addiction, has PTSD after serving in the Air Force, spent three years in prison for attempted robbery, and has been homeless and jobless for virtually all of his adult life. But he was determined to not end up just another throwaway, someone with no present and no future. “They look at you like you’re nothing, like you’re, like I said, a throwaway. And they expect you to fail,” McKinley says in the powerful hour-long documentary The Throwaways, which he codirected with Bhawin Suchak. “That’s when I started my activism. I told people, ‘Listen, you’re in here messing with the wrong person.’” McKinley went to Northampton, Massachusetts, where he learned about filmmaking at a public access station. He then went out with his camera, using it as a “tool,” a “weapon,” and an “equalizer” as he talked to people in the abandoned streets of Albany, attended press conferences by Van Jones, mayor Jerry Jennings, and police chief Steven Krokoff, and met with such activists as Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, a book that has had a profound influence on McKinley. He also visits places from his past that are filled with a mix of painful and poignant memories. The documentary was initially supposed to be about social justice in the state capitol, but the focus turned to McKinley when Suchak couldn’t line up enough talking heads — and, perhaps more important, because McKinley, a big bear of a man, proved to be such a fascinating character, one who the camera is naturally drawn to. McKinley has been through it all, so he’s not afraid to get up in people’s faces, which is not always the best way to try to implement change, but he’s determined to show the government and society at large that human beings should not be thrown away like yesterday’s trash and that something can be done about it.
