CIFF Review: The Missing Picture

“The Missing Picture” screened as a part of the Chicago International Film Festival. This early review is merely an impression of the version screened. It does not yet have an American release.

For Rithy Panh, the memories that haunt his mind belong only to him, not to history. The images he sees exists nowhere else, and in order to be rid of them, he needs to create them, throw them to the wall and display them for the world.

In his documentary “The Missing Picture” it is noble that he’s done so. Panh’s film is harrowing and artistic, but the medium in which he has chosen to convey his message is impersonal and cold. “The Missing Picture,” the winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes film festival, has grand ambitions, but it is a dreary slog without an emotional core to grasp.

Panh lived through the Khmer Rouge era in Cambodia in which hundreds were killed in a genocide because of the Communist government’s social ideas. They operated on the ideology that a shared agricultural system complete of rice pickers would eliminate class, corruption and poverty in their utopian society. The reality was famine, drought, a lack of medicine or resources and deaths throughout the region.

But the images that exist from this period are largely propaganda films. The images do not match up with the history, and Panh’s memories are merely figments. What he’s done with his film then is acknowledge that what he remembers is unique, that there is no truth, “there is only cinema,” he says.

To depict his dour history, he’s constructed elaborate dioramas with carved, clay figurines. Complete with whole villages and colors, the blank faces that befit his sculpting style show bleak emptiness and hunger. His photography to capture it is impressive, achieving scope and size with empty wide shots, tracking shots across the figurative landscape and leaves and trees that pass in front of clay carts to simulate rickety motion.

What we see is strictly observational, not political or a sketch of the truth. The figures are mostly faceless, and he removes any context or even personal touch from his army of figures. They express conformity and magnitude, but inherently, these staged scenes are set pieces.

Panh essentially removes a human center from the film. They are his images, but he is only loosely a character in his illustrations. With devastatingly powerful sculpture after sculpture, “The Missing Picture” becomes a litany of horrors that never seems to relent.

It does not deaden the blow to hear Panh’s dialogue, as narrated by Randal Douc. “These barefoot people of the sand and dust,” he says like a morbid Terence Malick voiceover, “They are a fertilizer for the rice field.” “Color has vanished, like laughter, song and dance.”

His words are poetic and metaphorical, but they hit like a brick wall in their impersonal tone. They serve as a narration to some art house gallery rather than a human testimony and remembrance.

The obvious comparison to “The Missing Picture” will be “Shoah,” another grueling documentary in which the images that would depict the history aren’t used or don’t exist. Claude Lanzmann’s film however is starkly personal, invasive even at getting into the heads of these human beings. Panh’s film lacks any present day human figure, with faces only appearing in archive footage.

It actually feels closer to the documentary “Marwencol.” That film was about a man who photographed and created a miniature village from toys and action figures, and it too towed the line between art gallery piece and a personal object that reflected the artist’s psyche.

Panh has put his heart and soul into “The Missing Picture,” but he is absent from it. It deposits his images to us so he can be free of them, and although that is his right, it is far from being an educational film or an entirely emotional autobiography, and it only does so much for the world to unearth this tragedy.

2 stars