Historical Blanks and Missing Pictures An introduction (of sorts) to Jacques Rancière’s “Documentary Fiction”

The Missing Picture (Rithy Pahn, 2013)

Information isn’t memory, asserts Jacques Rancière in the essay “Documentary Fiction” reprinted in Wuxia 1-2, 2014. Rather; “[m]emory is an orderly collection, a certain arrangement of signs, traces, and monuments.” The same definition could be applied to film – also commonly described as a system of signs. And the French philosopher and cinéaste is of course aware of these overlapping definitions of memory and film, as he goes on to discuss Chris Marker’s quizzical homage to the Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin in The Last Bolshevik (1992). For just like films, memories too can be produced and distributed – if we follow Rancière’s train of thought.

But what does it mean to create memory – rather than preserve it – as Rancière argues film can do, exemplified via Marker? We don’t need to look further than to two landmark films from 2013 that sought to do just so, that is, to re-create visual memories of grotesque historical incidents actively suppressed by their perpetrators: The much discussed and widely distributed The Act of Killing about the genocide in Indonesia, and Rithy Panh’s so far underseen The Missing Picture, a personal account of his childhood years on the Cambodian killing fields. By doing so – creating new memories – the films join the global hybrid moment, broadening the scope of the documentary. Following Rancière, The Act of Killing and The Missing Picture would fit nicely into his suggested category “documentary fiction”, a variant of the hybrid film, or hybrid documentary.

Since moving images documenting the genocides in Indonesia and Cambodia are few, if any, the two films attempt to establish fictional memories in lieu of so-called documentary truth or visible evidence. That is to say, in the absence of images-as-witnesses, the films create new images as mnemonic witnesses, insisting the audience absorb that “this did indeed take place” – the motivational statement underlying both projects. This way, upon meeting their audiences, the films create new witnesses to horrendous historical acts, sharing traumatic and suppressed memories with the public at large. Where there initially were few public memories and official recollections, Rithy Panh and Joshua Oppenheimer (with co-directors Christine Cynn and Anonymous) have created new “memory units” to be shared with their films’ audiences.

Errol Morris, an executive producer of The Act of Killing, asked in Slate [1] last year whether it actually is “possible to kill 1 million people and then forget about it? Or if it has been erased from consciousness, is there an unconscious residue, a stain that remains?” Answering the question himself, Morris suggests that “the idea that by re-enacting the murders, he, the viewers of the movie, and the various perpetrators recruited to participate could become reconnected to a history that had nearly vanished into a crepuscular past. Oppenheimer has the optimistic thought that the past is inside us and can be brought back to life.”

Rather than claiming to be straightforward documentary accounts, The Act of Killing and The Missing Picture both employ elements of fiction as a means of re-creating the memory of the filmmaker or its subject(s). The films thus become personal and subjective archives, platforms for private recollections. From a very subjective starting point, the films seek to approach objective truths that have long been suppressed. And what the filmmakers found lacking in traditional archival material, they replaced by new imagery. This is where the toolbox that traditionally belongs to fiction film, becomes so useful to documentary.

While The Act of Killing infamously uses re-enactment – song and dance numbers, as well as killers showing themselves off as gangsters – to an extent that is both (intentionally) shocking and provoking, the much more subtle The Missing Picture relies on clay figurines to describe the filmmaker’s personal history. Panh shows how the clay figurines are made and arranges them in tableaus. The absence of animation and motion allows the viewer to meditate on the lingering images, while the poetic narrative told via voice-over, comes to the foreground. Unlike Joshua Oppenheimer, Rithy Panh uses some archival footage, as a contrast to the clay figurines representing his own personal recollections. The scarce propaganda material that exists shows a radically different version of reality than what Panh himself experienced during his childhood years as a worker on the fields.

In the century of cinema, as Rancière nicknames the 20th century, film was the main recording device for human history. It therefore makes sense, that film – documentary fiction – is becoming a central arena for re-creating history, and in extension, re-creating memory. While the cinéphile French philosopher, political theorist and historian has not mainly concerned himself with film studies, his “amateur interventions” in the field are nonetheless significant.

Contrary to most contemporary film theorists and critics, Rancière does not believe that film is either dead, nor dying. Rather, his positive take on the state of film is that cinema keeps reinventing itself. In this spirit, as well as in sharing Rancière’s belief in documentary fiction as a site for reenactment, re-telling and re-investigating history, we chose to re-print the key essay “Documentary Fiction”, which first appeared as a chapter in the book Film Fables (2001).

Printed in Wuxia 1-2, 2014