The Missing Picture: How American Cultural Imperialism Dictates Historical Cinema

            The Missing Picture is Rithy Panh’s latest effort at recreating his past as a child living under the Khmer Rouge, in an attempt to come to terms with his severe survivor’s guilt. Having lost his whole family to Pol Pot’s regime, Panh laments the fact that there are no pictures of them for him to remember them by, instead having to rely on his own faulty childhood memory. When Pol Pot banned all extravagances from his newly-acquired country, cameras were one of the first things to go. In other words, he took away the people’s ability to remember, thus destroying a large segment of their cultural memories. The only pictures that remain of the people are those of the dead, which were taken by the regime moments before their deaths.

            In order to go back, as an act of rebellion against the dead regime, Panh recreates his childhood with handmade clay figurines, who begin the film looking lifeless and ambiguous. However, with the brutal poetry of Panh’s narration, these figures begin to show emotions through their haunted (and haunting) expressions. These figurines, at the same time, use their artificiality to distance the audience, never allowing them to relax or ignore what is in front of them, causing an absolutely exhausting viewing experience. Panh seems to note that his latest experiment with recreating the past was a failure, as he realizes that he cannot go back, instead deciding that the only way to keep the past alive is to pass it on.

            This last point is a major issue with the cinematic art form. Cinema has always been the art of the proletariat and the illiterate. Cinema has always been meant to be used as a way to spread information, whether that information is educational or propagandistic. In modern times, the cinema has used this ability to inform people about a variety of wars and atrocities, in what makes up its own genre of the “atrocity film”. The atrocity film can overlap with other genres, like the war film, or subgenres, like the Holocaust film, but what all atrocity films entail is a focus on an event in human history that resulted in a large number of deaths, shown in large detail. The atrocity film genre often leaves many atrocities by the wayside, abandoning them to continue as footnotes in history books. While the Khmer Rouge massacre has only been covered by Panh, filmmakers are continuing to make films about World War II, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War and, most recently, the Iraq War. These topics have been practically tapped out, being observed from every side and vantage point. Meanwhile, the events of many atrocities have been cinematically ignored within mainstream cinema, relegating them to obscurity outside of their own nations. Some events have been cinematically represented in their own countries. Some of the more well-known and celebrated examples include Patricio Guzman’s The Battle of Chile, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces and Bahman Farmanara’s Tall Shadows of the Wind. There is a reason that these films are the representatives here. They are all films made by independent filmmakers as a reaction to political changes in their nations, made with sub-Hollywood equipment. They are also films which are hardly-seen by the general public, particularly in the “first world”, and are only known among political cinephilic crowds. These three films all tell the tale of political upheavals in their countries. Guzman’s film is about the Chilean communist government (the film also happens to catch the coup d’état that destroyed their utopian dreams), Solanos and Getino’s film is a study of neocolonialism and Farmanara’s film is about the spread of Islamism in the country.

All of the above mentioned phenomena have more in common than immediately visible. Firstly, they can all be related back to American, and occasionally British, actions. The Khmer Rouge could mislead Cambodia so easily because of the American bombing campaigns that preceded it. Chile’s communist government fell after a coup by CIA operatives, which led to the tyranny of Pinochet. Iran’s Islamic Republic can be connected to the CIA and BP-sponsored coup that removed Mossadegh and reinstated the Shah. These and similar events often share an American approval which aids and abets the furthering of the atrocities involved. These are also events that the Americans would rather ignore. Other than the obvious reason, however, this is also heavily because these events lack American human involvement. There is a difference between American human involvement and American machine involvement in this concept. Human involvement is focused around soldiers and other hearts and minds, while the machine involvement consists of warplanes, tanks and bombs, as well as corporations and intelligence agencies.

Americans will only tell tales of atrocities which have American, or at least Americanesque, human involvement. The American here can be defined as a white man from America, whereas the Americanesque can refer to an individual who fits that description while being from a different country, often conforming to the form of the white American male, occasionally going so far as to fit his mannerisms and speak his English language. There are certainly exceptions to this. One could name Hotel Rwanda, but even there, the characters have to make a number of concessions. While the witness to the atrocities is black, he still has to be an American man who speaks English, rather than the actual languages spoken by the Hutus and Tutsis. More frequently, the white American man does show his face repeatedly in atrocity films, showing his bravery to the “lesser” people of the world.

World War II and the ensuing Holocaust have their own canonical documentaries in the world of cinema, with Shoah and The Sorrow and the Pity being seen as equals to the works of Panh. It is when these events made it to the world of narrative, feature filmmaking that the white man invaded. This is certainly not a recent phenomenon. In fact, perhaps the most famous and celebrated Holocaust film falls into this trap, with Schindler’s List’s focus on Oskar Schindler, who is the white, Americanized, Anglophone hero of the film, suffering and showing humanity, while millions died around him. This is where the human involvement comes in. Rather than allowing the audience to empathize through the victims of the Holocaust, the viewer has to empathize through Schindler. This is also by no means an isolated phenomenon. This empathy through the majority is a constant in Holocaust films, whether the empathy surrogate is the white, Americanized male (Boy in the Striped Pajamas) or merely a clearly white American actor, portraying the empathetic figure, so as not to intimidate the viewer (Exodus). This is certainly a large problem with the Holocaust film, but it somehow gets worse with the more cinematic wars that followed it, particularly Vietnam and Iraq.

The films based on the atrocities of the Vietnam War were unique in that they often portrayed the “enemy” as a sympathetic victimized group. Unlike the war films that preceded it, films from the Vietnam War were from a more cynical time, which was not necessarily concerned with patriotism and clear-cut “good versus evil” storytelling. Instead, filmmakers were given more room to tell ambiguous tales of misinformation and self-destruction in a time of war. Despite all of this freedom, these films still fell into the same trap as earlier. The majority of films about the Vietnam War followed the same basic plotline, wherein a white, American (the war plotline allowed for American characters, no longer having necessity for Americanized Europeans) man goes to the big war, sees the suffering of those around him and realizes the futility of it all. Certain films, like The Deer Hunter, even went so far as to try to remove the aspect of American slaughter of the Vietnamese, instead painting all villainous characters as Viet Cong. This is however a rare exception. Vietnam was an attractive war for many filmmakers, either because they fought in it or because they fought against it. This is why it’s equally obvious and unusual that the films on this war do not break the pattern. The Vietnam War atrocity film is in fact somewhat boring as a study, as it always follows one of two patterns. The first, which is of little interest to this writing, is the film that sees the American soldier come back crippled or mentally disturbed and follows his recovery. The second sees an American soldier go into battle, see the slaughter of hundreds of people and somehow become the victim by the end of the film. Charlie Sheen sees the horrific slaughter of many Vietnamese people in Platoon, but he only grows when he sees a fellow American get killed. Even then, he becomes the ultimate victim, having to come to terms with what has happened. In the end, the audience is never meant to empathize with the people slaughtered in their homeland. Instead, the viewer is supposed to look at Charlie Sheen or Martin Sheen or Robert de Niro and say “poor guy”, because he has had to realize the evils of the world and because he is an easier figure for the target audience to empathize with. One last note on the Vietnam film is that one person realized that the only way to avoid this trap is to remove the Vietnamese from the Vietnam War atrocity film. Stanley Kubrick realized that this is the only way to tell such a tale to an American audience without alienating them or dehumanizing the victims of the atrocity. This led to the creation of Full Metal Jacket, a film which had a Vietnamese screen time of less than a minute and which told the story of the American figures themselves, rather than pretending that it is the tale of the enemy/victim.

The more modern Iraq War atrocity film has several differences from the Vietnam War atrocity film. While Vietnam War films began showing up a few years after the war, Iraq War films were being produced during the war. Furthermore, they were often directed by people who had no personal stake in the war. These films were also made during a time when right-wingers were screaming about the liberalization of Hollywood. This clearly does not show in the films, which follow the basic paradigm of the Vietnam War atrocity film, with a larger focus on the soldier, who is now, during a time of war, placed in the film as a harbinger of democracy. Whereas the Vietnam War film would occasionally show the soldier as exhibiting immoral characteristics, the new fetishized soldier can do no harm. In an age of almost fascistic patriotism, questioning the soldier is tantamount to treason. Perhaps the one film which dared to question the soldier during this time, Brian De Palma’s Redacted, was ignored and vilified for this very reason. De Palma took a real incident and made a film about that incident occurring in a time of war and there was his mistake. In a time of war, the white American soldier is never wrong. This fetishization is always followed by censorship. Once you are disallowed from questioning the soldier, you can no longer question his occupation: war! This results in inane films like The Hurt Locker, wherein soldiers’ activities are shown without a clear position on the war, which, looking at the filmography of its director, Kathryn Bigelow, can only be “pro-war”, a ludicrous statement, if there ever was one. This film again falls into the same trap of seeing suffering through the eyes of the white American male protagonist, whose experience is what the audience sympathizes with. In this film, the empathy figure takes the form of an American soldier, portrayed by Jeremy Renner, whose job is to disarm bombs. In possibly the most famous scene in the film, Renner is tasked with disarming an Arab man who has been adorned with explosives to act as an unwilling suicide bomber. The man, standing in the centre screams a litany of Arabic, which, lacking subtitles, might as well be gibberish to an American audience. A black soldier and an Arabic-speaking soldier scream back at him to stay back and not do anything that might get him killed. It is here that the empathy figure for the audience, the white male American soldier comes out to save the day. Renner walks over to the Arab man, again as an unquestionable figure who continues to aid the poor non-American individual, even though he plans to kill him. The Arab man, laying on the ground and mumbling prayers to himself, is seen through the eyes of Renner, never having any agency himself, figuratively or literally, merely acting as a device to show the selflessness of the American soldier. Finally, Renner realizes that he is unable to help the Arab man. This is a moment when the audience might empathize with the Arab, but the film does not allow him to be the sole source of empathy. While he gains a minimal empathy, the major empathy figure is Renner, whose “apology” to the man, for being unable to help him is the pathetic (as in pathos) source of the scene. When the Arab, moments later, disintegrates, Renner once again becomes the sole source of empathy, having had to go through “that”. Again, the hero becomes the empathy figure in a faraway land, because the audience is invited to see the film through his point of view, where it is he who suffers through the pain of having to see others, people who are not like the audience, suffer pain.

One final film that needs to be looked at in this context is a film which falls under American machine involvement. Argo, another heavily-lauded film about an American conflict with another country and another type of people, could not get away with not mentioning the American machine involvement in the desolation of another society. While Americans can ignore Cambodia or Chile, due to these countries not having produced any major American myths, this is difficult with Iran, which has contributed to a few American myths, including the one that led to this contemptible film. In order to tell a tale of the American hostages after the Islamic revolution, one must provide some backstory, which must include the event of the coup that unseated Mossadegh. Basically, in order to tell another tale of the suffering American, the film must explain what led to that suffering which, in this case, does not bode well for Americans and has no human element to act as an empathy figure. The film works around this snag by dedicating the first two minutes of the film to these events, only sparing a scarce ten seconds to the actual coup. Coming full circle, the short sequence has no choice but to show pictures of the coup, as these pictures are not missing. The film includes two shots of the coup and its unrest, one of a series of faceless individuals, their faces obscured behind gas masks, shooting into the distance, and another of an unidentified man punching someone on the ground. These images show no political allegiance and give no context. Furthermore, the two shots are bookended by drawings of the coup organizers and the Shah, who was later reinstated. In other words, the film fulfills its necessity of explaining the events, but does so in such an artificial manner, that the audience can ignore the information almost immediately. This short segment is, of course, followed by an American fantasy of the white American man once again going into a strange land and rescuing civilians, this time sparing the locals. That does not, however, stop the filmmakers from portraying the locals in an unflattering light, to compensate for the fact that they cannot be slaughtered and the film cannot be turned into an atrocity film. Oddly enough, the film manages to “whitewash” the importance of the Canadian and British individuals involved with the rescue as they are simply not American enough!

The Missing Picture laments the fact that the images that it portrays are “missing” due to the lack of indexical proof. That has never stopped certain events from reaching the screen. These events, often focused around white figures or Americanized individuals, will continue to live on in the hearts and minds of people for one reason: American cultural imperialism has deemed them culturally and historically important. When a group of communists or Muslims or another group that is vilified by the Americans is slaughtered, it is not deemed historically important. In a fair world, this would not matter. However, in this world, America tells the stories. Other countries tell tales, some more successfully than others. However, to the general viewing audience, to the proletariat and the illiterate, to the middle class suburbanite, American cinema is the informer, the entertainer and the indoctrinator. If Americans do not believe an event to be important, their cinema will not tell that tale and that event will disappear from “popular” history, another fleeting historical event, another missing picture.