For many years, Rithy Panh looked for the missing picture: a photograph taken between 1975 and 1979 by the Khmer Rouge when they ruled over Cambodia. On its own, of course, an image could not prove mass murder, but it could give us cause for thought, prompt us to meditate, to record History. Panh searched for it vainly in the archives, in old papers, in the country villages of Cambodia.Today he knows: This image must be missing. He was not really looking for it; would it not be obscene and insignificant? So he created it. What he gives you in The Missing Picture (Cambodia-France, 2013, 90 minutes) is neither the picture nor the search for a unique image, but the picture of a quest: the quest that cinema allows.
Nathalie Rachlin is Professor of French at Scripps College, where she teaches courses on French literature, culture, and cinema, as well as a variety of Core courses. She holds a PhD from Princeton University and MAs from Princeton and the Université Paul Valery (Montpellier, France). She is currently working on a book about contemporary French documentary cinema; her most recent publication is a special issue of the journal SubStance, co-edited with Rosemarie Scullion, entitled French Cinema and the Crises of Globalization (2014).
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