[lit-ideas] Communism Has Only Killed 100 Million People. Let's Give It Another Chance!
- From: Brian <cabrian@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 21:28:57 -0500
Movie Reviews
S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine
(Reviewed May 19, 2004)
Rating:
There is an oriental quality about the look of the Cambodian director
Rithy Panh?s documentary, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. But
the movie?s purpose is very Western. Mr Rithy Panh ? who, after
escaping from the killing fields at the age of 15 in 1979, was
educated in France ? wants to know why the Khmer Rouge murdered two
million people, a quarter of the population of Cambodia, between 1975
and 1979. Why? From the Zen-like sense of slowness and spaciousness
conveyed by his long takes and stationary cameras, cutting against
the emotional tendency of the human drama being described, you might
expect Asian fatalism rather such a technocratic inquiry. Not that
that means he?s going to produce an answer in the end.
The film?s most impressive scenes are those in which former Khmer
Rouge guards are taken to a now-deserted prison in Phnom Penh ? the
S-21 of the title, also known as Tuol Sleng ? and invited to act out
their role there during the period when their function was to process
shoals of prisoners on their way to execution. We watch as one middle-
aged man explains how he would do his rounds, looking through the
peep hole, or unlocking the door to take in water or the can used as
a toilet, all the while uttering threats: "If I have to come back,
beware," he says again to the empty room. "Sleep without moving, you
scum," he calls through the peephole. "Here?s the can; if you spill
it, I?ll get the club." And so forth. Like most other things in the
film, this spooky pantomime goes on for much longer than you would
think necessary to make the point. But the effect is to make it seem
like the only reply the former guards have to make to the reproaches
of their victims.
Principal among these is a white-haired painter called Vann Nath, who
managed to survive by painting portraits of the Khmer Rouge big-
shots. The film introduces us to him as he paints a scene from the
interior of the prison in its worst days. Then it records both his
own reminiscences and his confrontation with the ex-guards. Their
faces, on which the camera lingers as Vann Nath speaks to them of
what they did, are unforgettable. Again and again they say that they
were only following orders. If they hadn?t done as they did, they
themselves would have been executed. Yet they also confess to being
ashamed of themselves.
At one point the guards almost eagerly explain that the reason why,
although in the countryside, execution was usually summary, in the
prison great stock was put in obtaining the prisoners? confessions,
even though everyone knew these were obtained by torture and entirely
fictional. "In Democratic Kampuchea," says one, "the Party?s line was
to govern justly. When you make a revolution, you want justice for
the people, and when you arrest someone, you need a reason. The Party
has eyes everywhere. It makes no mistakes. It arrests rightly." The
prisoners? fantastical confessions, like those of the victims of the
Moscow show trials, were meant to demonstrate this truth.
It was all part of the grammar of tyranny and murder. Later, Vann
Nath reflects on the Party?s favoring the word "destruction" for its
enemies, rather than "killing." He says: "If you think about the word
?destruction? it?s more than cruel. In the word ?kill? there still
seems to be a moral aspect, but in ?destruction? there?s nothing
human left. We become dust, just particles blowing in the wind." From
the now-empty site of a mass grave where one of the guards explains
how he killed the prisoners ? by striking them from behind with an
iron bar then cutting their throats and pushing them into the already-
prepared grave where they died ? to the final scene of the empty
prison with the wind sweeping through it and blowing the dust about,
the film dramatizes this observation. It never does answer the
question, "Why?" No one ever really can. But it is hypnotically
watchable.
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