the infernal visions of Rithy Panh

ARTE – THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 8 AT 11.15 P.M. – FILM

In 2013, we discovered The Missing Image, last part of the trilogy that filmmaker Rithy Panh devoted to the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. While the first two films, S21, the Khmer Rouge death machine (2003) and Duch, the Forgemaster of Hell (2011)used the classic means of documentary, The Missing Image, personal experience of Rithy Panh – he saw his whole family perish in the camps of Angkar –, used figurines modeled in clay to represent the tragedy.

This film available on Arte.tv is essential to understanding our time. And no doubt it is also essential to apprehend Everything Will Be OK, the latest feature film by the Cambodian filmmaker, presented at the Berlinale in February and broadcast by Arte without having been shown in theaters.

Role reversal

Cinematographic essay, angry, frightening and disconcerting poem, Everything Will Be OK again uses the medium of these small motionless sculptures around which the camera revolves. This time, it is no longer a question of materializing memories and pain, but of imagining the future, in the form of an allegory. This borrows first from George Orwell. As in animal farm, Rithy Panh imagines that the beasts have wrested power from men. Unlike what happens in the novel, they have enslaved them. Complex compositions that mix technology and barbarism imagine the reversal of roles: transport of goods, scientific experiments, sadistic distractions, humans are good for everything.

The shots of these kinds of nightmarish dioramas are mixed with documentary images. While he has always been careful not to show death itself, Rithy Panh here uses the iconography of totalitarianism, the executions perpetrated and filmed by the Nazis or the Stalinists, to exacerbate the anger and the terror which tend its subject by arranging these nadirs of the human condition in mosaics or hypnotizing montages, accompanied by a soundtrack that oscillates between dissonance and derision. The effect is deeply disturbing, especially since its purpose remains uncertain, between prophecy and discouragement.

Everything Will Be OK (title which we will have understood that it comes from the antiphrase) is accompanied by a sometimes inspired, sometimes trivial text, despite the distanced reading made by Rebecca Marder. And the last sequences, which evoke a possible reconciliation – between humanity and the world in which it lives – appear more as a concession to the viewer’s damaged sensitivity than as a glimmer of hope.

Everything Will Be OK, film essay by Rithy Panh (Fr.-Camb., 2021, 100 min). On Arte.tv until November 6.

The Missing Image, documentary by Rithy Panh (Fr.-Camb., 2013, 92 min). On Arte.tv until December 13.

Thomas Sotinel