[film] "The Missing Picture"

This film has stuck in my mind. It is about this Cambodian geezer Rithy Panh looking back over his childhood during the years of rule by the Khmer Rouge, those crazy fun-loving communists who embarked on one of history's most bizarre reigns of terror. Mr Panh (or Mr Rithy as it might be) was one of the people who was forced out of Cambodia's cities when the Khmer Rouge took over. He was then sent to a rural area where he and his family lived in slave-like conditions as starvation gripped them.

The presentation of the story is highly unusual. Panh does not dramatise his childhood with actors or present the narrative as a conventional documentary, with the camera panning over the gulag he called home or the fields in which he toiled while a variety of talking heads tell us all about the wacky Khmer Rouge. Instead everything is presented through unmoving clay figures and model dioramas of the situations under discussion. The camera moves across these model scenes and landscapes but the figures in them are static. Combined with the deadpan narration, the effect is deliberately distancing, lacking the pornography of horror we often get to enjoy with narratives of awful experience. The only moving images are taken from footage made by the Khmer Rouge themselves. These fall into two categories: newsreels of the Khmer Rouge leadership and clips from propaganda films made by the regime. Excerpts from a Khmer Rouge film depicting the struggle against the US occupiers suggest that their film industry was run by people who would have dismissed Fatal Deviation as too slick and polished.

For me the one moment where the mask of detachment slipped was when they played the song 'Jam 10 Kai Theit' by Ros Sereysothea (later recorded as 'New Year's Eve' by Dengue Fever). Ros Sereysothea was a popular singer in Cambodia; like most of her kind she was exterminated by the Khmer Rouge. As I have often said, there is something terribly sad about the uplifting sounds of pre-KR pop music from Cambodia and the terrible fate its practitioners met when the communists seized power. Perhaps because the emotion in Ros Sereysothea's voice contrasted so much with the detachment of the narration, her song triggered a strong emotional response in a way that the rest of the film did not.

As you know, the Khmer Rouge were led by Pol Pot, the Brother Number One. He had started life as Saloth Sar and spent time as a student in Paris, where he studied under Louis Althusser and was active in left wing circles. I do not think he was considered particularly remarkable then, as there were so many other earnest young men in Paris who dreamed of sweeping away the bad old world and building something new and better. I suspect that many people who knew him in Paris would have been surprised and aghast at the horrors he unleashed in his homeland. But when I think of that, I think of my own friends in the world of the far left, and I wonder which of them had it in themselves to become Ireland's Pol Pot had the dice rolled differently here. There is no way of knowing, and I bet it's not the ones you think.


image source (a review of the film by Daniel Kasman)

Dengue Fever 'New Year's Eve'

An inuit panda production; this post appeared in issue 138 of Frank's APA.

v/a "Groove Club Vol.3: Cambodia Rock Intensified"

This is of course another compilation of pre-Khmer Rouge pop music from Cambodia - vaguely psych sounds with soaring vocals and infectious grooves. One might to some extent buy this by the yard, but it still sounds very different to anything else you will ever hear, unless you are a keen follower of popular group Dengue Fever. There is one total stormer of a track on this - 'Gunya Rouh Sroh' (Miss Beautiful in English) by Ros Sereysothea. This driving tune would be worth the price of admission on its own, especially if you were one of those "disc jockey" fellows who likes playing records for people to "get on down".

v/a "Groove Club vol. 2: Cambodia Rock Spectacular!"

This is a compilation of pop music from Cambodia from before the Khmer Rouge came to power – cue the usual stories about how everyone involved in making the songs here were killed in the years from 1975 to 1979, when what might be the most extreme human society that has ever existed turned on anyone associated with the former regime or Western decadence. This features top tunes from the likes of Sinn Sisamouth, Pan Ron, Ros Sereysothea and other less well-known artists, sometimes on their own and sometimes with the others. It also has extensive notes, including attempts to piece together the sad ends to these people's lives during the Democratic Kampuchea* period.

Still, I think it is possible to look beyond the unfortunate fates of the performers and enjoy it for what it is – a recording of mainly up-tempo groovers by people making a very vague approximation of Western pop music. It sounds almost like what you would get if some talented musicians read about the Beatles in a book and decided to make something like that themselves, without ever hearing the originals.

The focus in discussions of Cambodian pop music tends to be on the singers. While the likes of Pan Ron, Ros Sereysothea, and Sinn Sisamouth are clearly vocalists of great talent, it is often the backing that music that strikes on this record – both the playing and the production (with the latter probably filtered through several generations of tape copies, as the original studio masters were even less likely to escape the Khmer Rouge than the musicians). Some of it reminds me a bit of the beatier end of the music on the Éthiopiques compilations, to call to mind another musical scene shut down by maniacal far-leftists. Most of these would make great floor fillers for leftfield retro discos, or for party scenes in films set in a world of hipster nostalgia.

Individual songs? Well, is it worth mentioning them? You'll probably never hear this record, so what do you care? Even so, I can mention a few. 'Yuvachon Yuvatey Samai Tmai (New Generation Youth)' is a charming duet between Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea that glides along, the melody leaping gamely from one voice to another in a manner familiar to anyone who has heard Dengue Fever's 'Tiger Phone Card'. 'Tonight Dance' is a hymn to the talents of Ros Sereysothea, her voice climbing to reach notes that should be beyond the range of human hearing, while her 'Oun Chong Rom Leng Ning Bong (I Wanna Dance With You)' adding her vocal talents to a tune that sounds like something early 60s beat Serge Gainsbourg might have served up.

To reflect again on Cambodia's sad history, these people may not have survived Democratic Kampuchea, but their music did. The perpetrators of the terrible crimes of that period are now dead or facing imprisonment for the rest of their lives, but some of us are still listening to this music they tried to eliminate.

image source

* The name by which the Khmer Rouge referred to the country they ruled.

An inuit panda production