June 3- 9, 2004

movies

A Hole in Their Soul

MUST I PAINT YOU A PICTURE: S-21 survivor Vann Nath with his work.

Khmer Rouge killers face their own amnesia in S21.

S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine

by Sam Adams

A quarter-century has passed since 1.7 million Cambodians died under the Khmer Rouge, but it was not until very recently that the first of the Stalinist group's former leaders publicly acknowledged that one of the 20th century's most notorious genocides had even taken place. Like most of the Khmer Rouge commanders, KR supremo Pol Pot died a free man, never forced to answer for his crimes. Belated attempts by the United Nations and the Cambodian government to set up a war-crimes tribunal have been hampered by political instability and lack of funds.

From Nuremberg to the Abu Ghraib hearings, such tribunals serve a dual purpose: to determine the truth, and to make its determination public. The second is arguably more important than the first. As director Rithy Panh says in the press notes for S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, "Justice is only one stage of the process. The trial must be accompanied by an effort of memory to protect future generations."

Rithy Panh's documentary represents just such an "effort of memory," at the same time demonstrating the consequences of national amnesia. The setting is the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, better known as the notorious Khmer Rouge "security bureau" S-21. From 1975 to 1979, some 17,000 prisoners were tortured and executed within its walls. As few as 14 prisoners are thought to have survived, and only three remain alive.

Despite its museum setting, S21 contains not a frame of archival footage; photographs of KR atrocities appear only incidentally. Apart from its subjects' words, the film's most prominent representations of the horrors of S-21 are the paintings of Vann Nath, one of two survivors interviewed in the film, and its de facto guide. As a prisoner, the paintings saved his life: Vann Nath recalls how he used to paint the camp commander, with "pink skin like the skin of a young virgin." Now he paints his memories, such as a line of blindfolded men, bound together at the neck and wrists, being pulled through the prison gates.

Vann Nath is the only survivor who can bear to return to S-21, but for his former jailers, the trip back is all too easy. As they return to the scene of their crimes, they slip effortlessly into their old habits and rhetoric, even when Vann Nath confronts them with their own illogic. They were, they say, just following orders, and as much in fear for their lives as the men they tortured and killed. They were, one says, "victims." (Rithy Panh, perhaps in an effort to place all his subjects on an equal footing, does not reveal their names until the end credits.) Vann Nath responds with almost preternatural calm to their outrageous claims: If they were victims, he asks, then what of the prisoners, who had often committed no offense. They were "secondary victims," the former jailer replies. "Here, if you didn't obey, you were dead for sure."

Without the purgation of public trials, the stench of genocide lingers. Poeuv, a former S-21 guard, doesn't just demonstrate his former routine for the camera. He seems, quite authentically, to be reliving it, as if his past is always waiting to erupt into the present. Using a beaten relic of a bowl, he shows how he would place water on the floor between several parched prisoners and let them fight each other for it, but it's as if, in his mind, the prisoners are still there, still scrabbling. His pantomime conjures the ghosts of those whose presence he helped eliminate: When he yells into an empty cell, you half-expect the camera to pan over and find a man still crouching in the corner. Skeptical viewers might wonder if Poeuv has been coached, but no actor ever gave so convincing a performance. In Rithy Panh's words, "Something clicked into place inside him: Like a forgotten automatic mechanism that was suddenly switched on again, he began to repeat the gestures of the past."

With equal ease, and a similar lack of self-consciousness, Poeuv's comrades regurgitate the twisted rhetoric that allowed them to execute hundreds of thousands of their countrymen, not to mention their families, as alleged enemies of the state: "We could tell enemies from friends; we didn't hesitate." "We had to believe in sabotage operations, or we couldn't arrest the enemy." "My heart never checked my brain." The prison's former record-keeper recalls, "When they came here, I knew they were dead. I never thought of them as living human beings."

More than an attempt to restore Cambodia's memory, S21 exposes the conditions that have allowed that memory to languish. It was after seeing the film that former Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan admitted that there could "no more doubt left" that genocide had taken place — not because the movie marshals irrefutable evidence, but because it so conclusively demonstrates that the decades-old language of denial has finally unraveled. The void must be filled.

S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine Directed by Rithy Panh A First Run Features release Opens Friday at Ritz Five

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