![]() The look of these tiny figurines is innocent and childlike, and therefore immediately quietly disturbing. Abstract live-action images give way to the introduction of the film’s central conceit as we see a series of matter-of-fact close-ups of hands sculpting the clay figures that will become our main ‘characters’. Thankfully this feeling of self-consciousness is quickly abated by the deep sense of melancholy that carries through the rest of the film. “I seek my childhood like a lost picture,” we hear in contemplative voiceover, “or rather it seeks me.” These opening moments suggest that we may be entering Ruminative Masterful Cinema territory, with all signs pointing towards the deeply personal, potentially grandiloquent and at least mildly irritating, despite the obvious weight of the topic. The next sequence is of waves crashing against the camera, a nicely visceral if slightly overwrought metaphor – one that recurs throughout the film – for memories flooding back into the consciousness. The Missing Picture begins, under the opening credits, with images of old film canisters and strands of stray celluloid, a directly self-reflexive and self-conscious introduction to Panh’s way of seeing. The result is at once limited and brutally effective in communicating the emotional stasis of memory and the dehumanisation that comes from the ruthless enforcement of pure ideology. The film, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2013 Cannes festival and has been selected as the Cambodian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 2014 Academy Awards, uses motionless clay statues to create dioramic scenes of happiness, atrocity and poetic expression. With The Missing Picture, Panh attempts to fill this vast emptiness by recreating his lost images in an original, poignant way. ![]() These images (family memories, birthdays, dance films – evidence of more human times) are gone forever, so the irresolvable disconnect and hurt remain. But these images, of course, hardly exist, mostly because so many films and photographs were destroyed, and nearly every camera after 17 April 1975, the day the communists took Phnom Penh, was an instrument of lies and propaganda for the new regime. “In the middle of life,” the narrator (and director’s stand-in) says in the opening minutes of The Missing Picture, “childhood returns.” And for this survivor of unimaginable violence, so too return feelings of guilt and anger and a burning need to share images. Now, as he approaches 50, the pursuit of understanding has led him to look inward. A celebrated chronicler of his country’s darkest times, he has spent nearly 25 years making documentaries that explore the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge era from all angles, notably his indispensable 2003 film S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. Panh, who himself suffered under the Khmer Rouge and whose family perished in labour camps, still has memory sickness. French theatrical title L’Image manquante
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