For years, people in the arts or in journalism have, in conversation, said of their vocation, “I didn’t choose it; it chose me.” At times this is an at least half-glib attempt to rationalize the often nonremunerative nature of their endeavors. But the truism gains some heft if looked at from a different angle.
Consider the film artists whose work could not escape, even had they wanted it to, a world-historic trauma that also had a profound personal meaning for them. One thinks of Claude Lanzmann and the Holocaust. One wonders what the Russian filmmaker Aleksei German would have done had Stalin never existed, or what the filmmaker Edward Yang’s oeuvre might look like had the specter of the militaristic Kuomintang government not haunted it.
Yang and German were fiction filmmakers. Lanzmann was a documentarian. The Cambodian-born director Rithy Panh, whose impetus for filmmaking was Pol Pot, works in both fiction and documentaries; the documentaries are especially distinctive and imaginative, and in recent years, more and more personal.
Panh’s father was a minister of education in the regime preceding that of the Khmer Rouge, which brutalized his family after coming to power. Panh escaped Cambodia as a teenager and discovered filmmaking during his education in France. His 2014 feature “The Missing Picture” grappled with his family tragedy and depicted its personages, including his mother and father, in the form of artful clay figurines.
In “Graves Without a Name,” Panh sets himself on a mission that he had to understand as impossible: to locate his parents’ burial sites. The movie’s opening scene shows the filmmaker having his head shaved during what appears to be a Buddhist prayer ritual. In a land that became known for its killing fields during Pol Pot’s reign — a land where today, we learn, farmers plowing their fields turn up stray human teeth and bone — finding specific victims of genocide is an undertaking that may require supernatural means. Late in the film, in one of its most strange and moving scenes, a woman conducts a séance of sorts in which she tells Panh of the spirit she’s conjured: “He recognizes his son.”
There is no archival footage in this picture, a strategy that recalls one of Lanzmann’s methods. Panh has interviewees tell harrowing stories of starvation, forced labor, executions, even desperate cannibalism. He intersperses these with poetic and sometimes enigmatic images: an old snapshot going up in flames, at first slowly, then disappearing in a sudden “whoosh”; small piles of rice neatly arranged on a piece of cloth; a row of carved wooden figures of humans yoked together by a rope, each one wearing a blindfold. In French, Randal Douc reads a text derived from Panh’s own 2013 memoir, “The Elimination.”
The accretion of detail — narrative, visual and verbal — gives the movie an unusual density. The depiction of human cruelty is appalling, but the way “Graves” makes the viewer feel the necessity of its filmmaker’s calling is profoundly moving.
Graves Without a Name
Not rated. In French and Khmer, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
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