Imagens de uma busca: genocídio e representação nos documentários de Rithy Panh

Abstract

Revisit the past, search for traces, reframe painful experiences, learn from them, resume the word, the gesture, the sensitivity and, throughout this process of rupture fulled with difficulties, the result is the construction of a new home and the opening for new possibilities. That is the message of Rithy Panh in his cinematographic narratives that accomplishes all of those things and still leaves a legacy of resistance against authoritarianism, against the retrenchment of freedoms through the institution of the self, the perseverance of encountering into another paths and the conception that reality can be what one makes out of it. The purpose of this research is to accompany his trajectory through the documentary films S21 - The Killing Machine of the Khmer Rouge (2003) and The Missing Picture (2013) produced with the intent of investigating the determining conditions of the Khmer Rouge totalitarian regime (1975-79) and the genocide impacts to cinematographic representations. By following the filmmaker transgressions, these discussions will address to the efficiency of the archive documents, the testimony and the image to inscribe historical catastrophes as a way to conceive an ethical understanding about its annihilation context, the unrepresentable, the traumas and the accumulation of violence in his representational methods. Thus, in reviewing the theme of historical catastrophes, this thesis aims to analyze concepts such as metafiction, metaimages and reflexivity due to the interruption conditions that constitute its context. It departs from the notion that such concepts are founded epistemologically by the hybridization between fiction and reality in cinematographic representations, and therefore, translates the strategies with which the director elaborates on the totalitarian past and the dynamic experience in prison and concentration camps. Genocide and representation are taken as interdependent parts in historical revisions through the cinematographic device.