No documentary has ever been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, but awards for 2013 saw this movie receiving only the second such nomination in the foreign-language category. The other one was the animated Waltz with Bashir; it’s perhaps not entirely a coincidence that both films use non-traditional techniques to tell personal stories of war. Both films can be seen as visual memoirs, but Cambodian-born Rithy Panh’s story is less linear and more impressionistic. The narration (read by Christophe Bataille in French) is like a long, poetic essay about the longing for a lost childhood.
According to the film, Panh last saw his home on April 17, 1975, the day before his eleventh birthday and the day Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces overran the capital of Pnom Penh. The film well decribes the effects of the relocation, forced labor, agrarian “reform” and other policies inspired by the Chinese communists, but with the focus on the personal rather than the historical forces at work. To supplement the mostly black-and-white footage that exists from the period, and to tell the more personal aspects of the story, Panh uses clay figures and small-scale re-creations of many historical scenes. This is more effective than I might have thought.
For me, The Killing Fields remains the most indelible film about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime. My taste would have preferred either a more historical film or a more detailed personal one, perhaps telling us of how Panh escaped to Thailand and became a filmmaker. It’s not a long movie, but perhaps is a bit long for the sort of gauzy remembrance it is. Where it did impact me was in importing the power of ideology. Greed and lust for power are enormous forces, but ideology was the motivating force that created the most murderous movements of the 20th century, from the totalitarian communism to the Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide.
IMDb link
viewed 4/10/14 7:15 at Ritz Bourse and posted 4/10/14
No comments:
Post a Comment