The ambivalence of the eyewitness testimony of the spectacles of horror has often been problematic field of study. Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985) made a pivotal turn in the representation of genocide: Lanzmann chose to represent the machine rather than its victims, and made the film in the present. In a film S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) director Rity Panh followed Lanzmann’s insights but deviated in his insistence not to oppose witnesses to archives for that would have been to miss the functioning of the killing machine inlaid in the discursive apparatus and the filing system. Thus Panh puts discourse and the bodies of the survivors and former Khmer Rouges guards in action via reconstructing the intolerable spectacle of Tuol Sleng prison, and making them both react to various sorts of archives and perform the past events in the present. Panh reverses the gaze of the camera to perpetrators: guards repeat and undergo the past events in simulation. This liberates the affects and records the dehumanization transition through words, gestures, and reactions.
The aim of the paper is to discuss the temporal aspects of the individual and the communal memory – trauma, forgetfulness and amnesia – related to experiencing and representing the genocide. I will do this by interpreting Rity Panh’s film through Jacques Rancière’s writings on aesthetics and politics. Panh’s mission to actualize the past experience reconstructs a counter-memory of the genocidal event in the present. This actualizing process is based upon circulating usage of intolerable images that are a matter of dispositif of visibility. I am interested in what kind of social bonds Panh’s film dismantles and establishes. Can the truthfulness of the film act as a ceremony and removal of bad karma for the nation by creating new social bond between the victims and perpetrators?
