Cinema World Tour, Film #43
Country: Cambodia
Rating: 6.5/10
A film like a tour in the museum, seriously. The clay figures are the exhibition, the original footage the supporting visuals explaing the exhibited clay figure scenes, the narration is the audio guide. Rithy Phan seriously has a talent, what he makes is genuine art and The Missing Picture is extremely „enjoyable“ to watch – of course not the director's story is enoyable, but the style and look of the film.
Most of all, the concept is amazing. While showing the pictures filmed for propaganda purposes by the Khmer Rouge regime, he recreates the missing pictures with his clay figures. The missing pictures are the ones that the regime camermen obviously didn't take – the ones of terror, hunger, suffering and death. It's a clever contrast: the original footage – the propaganda – cut together with the recreated scenes – the reality.
The film has some serious problems, though. Rithy Phan himself calls his film at the end political, but exactly there's the main flaw. At one point, he shows a recreated scene of him and his family as clay figures, starving. He asks: „The people in Paris, who like our slogans, did they see this picture?“ This phrase does reveal a lot about the filmmaker's ideology and political perspective: there is none. The director may call it a political film, but on political level, this film is pure nonsense. You can tell that he's good in making clay figures , but he can't really explain what exactly he's showing in this film.
For Rithy Phan, Polpott just arrived from nowhere. He can't explain the exact way how the Khmer Rouge got to power, what was before and how they managed to shape the country like they did. Only at one point, he explains how the poor supported the revolution, trusted the aspiring dictator's false promises – „the same ones who still dig in the dirt today“, he says. For him, before the Khmer Rouge, everything was lovely and perfect and the world was great just because he had a nice big house and the streets were full and the colors colorful and the people smiling. And nowadays, for some „mysterious“ reasons, the poor end up working dirt again – as if that's the fault of the dictatorship. As you see, the filmmakers don't understand anything about ideology and political systems. In the film, Communism is portrayed as some evil: Communism is only paroles, starvation and death. Lenin, Marx and other authors of those important masterpieces are obviously just bad memories of propaganda pictures on the walls for Rithy Phan.
I absolutely understand if you just want to make a documentary just on your very personal experiences from your personal point of view, but as soon as you call it a political film and criticize the Communist Scene in Paris, it becomes a different thing. The director doesn't understand: Polpott may have used the pictures and slogans of the famous communist writers, but that apart from that, his totalitarian tyrannism had absolutely nothing to do with actual Communism. The attrocities the director portrays in this film are even the complete opposite of Marx' main principle: Everyone should work according to his capability and take according to his needs. (I'm not a Communist and don't think that Communism is the right system for the world, but) Marx and Lenin definitely dreamed of a free society, not a totalitarian one. What most people associate nowadays with Communism – the USSR, (former) China and former Cambodia - have absolutely nothing to do with actual Communism. Same for the Communist Scene in Paris: they dreamt of a good and just society, of course no Communist would support hunger an death – these are typical aspects of a capitalist society, where the lowest classes have nothing but debts. So when Phan asks „The people in Paris, who like our slogans, did they see this picture?“, he actually means „How can these people support communism when communism creates the suffering what I experienced?“. As you see, that's obviously nonsense. For Phan, Communism is probably exactly the same as Fascism, just an extremist form of terror. This point of view is so politically wrong and uneducated as saying that left-wing radicalism is as dangerous as right-wing radicalism.
Once you understand that the director just wanted to tell his story without consulting a political scientist or expert first, you can see that this documentary is actually pretty dull and empty. He gives almost no informations at all, The Missing Picture literally tells only a story. The longer it gets, the more does he use pseudo poetic phrases, until he reaches an unsatisfying end with even more absurd narration: „And now, I hand it over to you“, bla bla. There is nothing intellectual, nothing politically interesting about this documentary. Don't get me wrong: it is absolutely legitimate to tell your story without any background information and without any political analyse. But then, you should neither call your film „political“ during the film itself nor criticize real Communists just because the tyranns who were responsible for your misery also called themselves Communists. If that's your personal opinion, that's absolutely fine by me, but Rithy Pan made his point very public: he's literally indoctrinating thousands of viewers with his anti-communist attitude.
So, after a lot of criticism, back to an objective point of view: The Missing Picture is basically a good documentary. It is beautifully made, extremely creative and touching, it is something different than what you usually watch. Phan just made the mistake to label his own film „political“ and to make some embarassing remarks. But I'll be happy to forgive him – I understand that after burying your whole family and after years of listening to a fanatic dictator who pretended to be a Communist, you're not really in the mood anymore to find out what real Communism actually is about.
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