webbed feet, web log

webbed feet, web log

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blog Cambodia; blog the planet.

Jun 16, 2004

'S-21' Reviews

'S-21' Reviews 'S21': Cambodia's Bloody Hands By Ann Hornaday, Washington Post Staff Writer As movies enter their silly season, "S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine" arrives like a sobering splash of cold water. This devastating, elegantly simple documentary about the ravages of the communist regime in Cambodia during the 1970s testifies not only to human dignity and resilience but to cinema at its most intellectually honest and morally necessary. In 1975, the independent state of Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge, an agrarian communist movement that had engaged that country in a civil war since 1970. For the next four years, the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, instituted a series of murderous purges throughout the country, ultimately taking nearly 2 million lives. S21, the main Khmer Rouge "security bureau" in the capital, Phnom Penh, was the main detention center of the regime, where about 17,000 men, women and children were tortured and killed. Only a handful survived. One of those survivors, an artist named Nath, is the center of "S21," a gripping cinema verite account of his emotional and troubling reunion with his former guards and interrogators. Now a genocide museum, the bleak concrete barracks of S21 serves as the spare backdrop while Nath and several of his captors sift through prison records, photographs and artifacts of one of the most brutal genocides in history. With no narration and only a few titles explaining historical context, "S21" trains the camera on victims and victimizers as they tell their own unvarnished stories to each other and, indirectly, to the world. The result is a deeply moving, provocative meditation on cruelty and suffering, all the more effective for being so starkly rendered. >From Nath and a fellow survivor we learn of the unspeakable atrocities they and their countrymen suffered the arrests, the interrogations, the torture, the ritualized "confessions" of counterrevolutionary treason (even falling in love, one man explains, was considered a crime against the state). Their accounts of lying for hours with the corpses of fellow prisoners, of catching crickets in their mouths and being beaten until they spat them out, of being starved and humiliated, are wrenching. But perhaps even more painful are the narratives of the guards - some of them recruited and indoctrinated as teenagers - who impassively describe their methods of questioning and abuse. In the film's most breathtaking passages, the guards physically reenact their savage routines, their bodies unleashing memories that had been buried under years of twisted political rhetoric and rationalizations. The most frightening and dispiriting aspect of "S21" may not be the atrocities themselves but the ease with which otherwise decent men were able to commit them and their resistance to their own accountability. As a study in human psychology, the film may strike viewers as distressingly relevant in light of recent reports from Iraq. But "S21" never makes such glib equivalencies, nor does it offer up easy catharsis or closure. Director Rithy Panh, who was forced to work in Khmer Rouge labor camps at 11, has provided a vital historical record in the face of decades of denial (Khmer Rouge officials didn't admit to the genocide until last year, after one of them had seen this film). But on another level, Panh has done something more difficult in addressing the proper role of an artist in the face of unspeakable acts. That role, he seems to say through this compelling, heartbreaking film, is fulfilled by choosing simply to bear witness. S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine - (101 minutes, in Khmer with subtitles, at the Avalon) is not rated. It contains adult material and images of death and torture.[End] 'S21': Unspeakable Crimes By Desson Thomson The Washington Post Friday, June 11, 2004 WHEN a documentary tries to focus on evil, when it zeros in on the people who committed unspeakable acts, there's a frustrating diffusion. It somehow never finds the target. The evil is always somewhere else. There's the testimony of Nazis, for instance, who insist they were only following orders. It was the fault of their superiors. They seem so reasonable, so disquietingly normal. Or the mass killer who speaks with detachment about his (usually his) victims and, quite often, the extenuating circumstances (abused as a child, etc.) that turned him into a killer. Suddenly the humanity of the person, the distancing of time, and the fact that this conversation is taking place in civil circumstances, all combine to pollute the moral clarity we desperately seek. The same disquieting phenomenon occurs in Rithy Panh's "S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine," a modest but nonetheless devastating documentary about the kind of brutality that was official procedure in Cambodia a generation ago. In its conquest and occupation of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge army slaughtered approximately 25 percent of the Cambodian people between 1975 and 1979. Its methods of interrogation, as we learn, were not only cruel but absurd. Prisoners were beaten and abused until they revealed the names of enemies of the new state: the Communist Party of Democratic Kampuchea. Unable to think of anyone, the victims would simply name the people they knew. Those named people were then hauled in for systematic cruelty and inevitable death. All were killed, no matter what they said. As the movie shows, one of the central points for this inhumane activity was in Phnom Penh at the S21 "security bureau," where 17,000 detainees were killed. (A total of 1.7 million Cambodians perished.) Barely more than a dozen survived; and only three, it seems, have survived to give their testimony for this film. It's a white-knuckle experience to listen to these former prisoners, to watch them break down emotionally as they visit this place (now it's the Tuol Sleng museum) after many years. One survivor, an artist, relates how he was allowed to live because he could render flattering portraits of the guards. Director Panh, who managed to escape from Cambodia in 1979 and now lives in France, also talks to young men who were the guards of this hell. They were also executioners. They dug graves, killed people and buried them. Back then they were teenagers, instructed to beat, torture and kill. Now, they are still relatively young. But they cannot permit themselves to take the blame. Had they not complied with orders, they say, they would have been executed by the Angkar, or Organization, as well. And yet, in the most surrealistic of moments, one of those guards reenacts -- with a sickening authority no professional actor could achieve -- his routine of feeding, harassing and yelling at the prisoners. He does it with a fluidity and a joy of performance. It's harrowing and enlightening. And somehow the evil floats away. Leaders such as Khieu Samphan, Nuon Chea (the Khmer Rouge's chief ideologue), Ta Mok and Kaing Khek Iev, all await trial for genocide. They are not in this film. We see only their work. And their underlings. And once again, evil remains elusive. S21: THE KHMER ROUGE KILLING MACHINE (Unrated, 101 minutes) -- Contains harrowing anecdotes of a truly disturbing nature. In Khmer with subtitles. At the Avalon Theatre. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Andy Brouwer's S-21 page http://andybrouwer.co.uk/s21.html Google Search http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=S-21+%2B+Rithy+Panh

- jinja Link

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