I’m beginning to think that the most effective way to depict autobiographical stories of atrocities is to not recreate it in dramatic depictions with professional actors, but in documentaries using unexpected mediums. In The Missing Picture, Rithy Panh depicts his childhood in one of Pol Pot’s labor camps in rural Cambodia.
The Missing Picture seamlessly blends archival footage with hand-carved painted clay figures to depict himself, his family, the people that he encountered and his surroundings, but the result is anything but wooden. In one scene, the masses of clay figures are standing in a wide city street depicted in black and white film in the background as they are led away from their homes to propaganda, dehumanizing forced labor, starvation and death.
The Missing Picture does not always tell Panh’s story in a linear narrative. Panh often compares and contrasts the reality of the world outside Cambodia with the real versus the propaganda propagated by the Khmer Rouge. Sometimes an experience is a segway to a memory of better times or present day as he tries to cope with his memories and survivor’s guilt.
The Missing Picture was originally in French, but the version that I saw was in English. I would suggest using subtitles since some of the terms used are already confusing since some things get lost in translation, especially when you’re talking about a surreal and torturous experience in reeducation.
Not since Marwencol have I been so unexpectedly shocked by the seemingly rigid figures effectively communicating the emotional and psychological reality of the director to the viewer. The Missing Picture is must see viewing so see it before it expires on Netflix. The Missing Picture is also a timely cautionary tale for anyone who happily demonizes intellectuals or experts and would rather listen to anyone else, particularly the mythic man on the street. As Khmer Rouge discovered, such action only leads to famine and death.