Un cinéma sans image: Palimpsestic Memory and the Lost History of Cambodian Film

Summary

The Cambodian film industry that flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s disappeared with the arrival of the Khmer Rouge regime. Of the nearly 400 films released between 1960 and 1975 and the 30 cinemas scattered across Phnom Penh at the time, only a handful of traces remain. The old cinemas have become karaoke bars and tenement buildings, while the surviving films – copies of copies in various formats and generally in very poor condition – circulate among a few fans connected by the Internet. Davy Chou's documentary, Le Sommeil d'or [Golden Slumbers] (2011), is the first attempt to reawaken this dormant industry whose history was unknown to Chou, who was born and raised in France, despite the fact that his own grandfather, Van Chann, was a well-respected film-maker of the period.

Chou was born in Fontenay-aux-Roses in the south Parisian banlieue in 1983. His parents had come to France as students in 1973 – two years before Pol Pot took Phnom Penh – and, like all those who found themselves overseas in April 1975, were unable to return. Chou made his first short film in 2008, and as his passion for cinema grew, so too did his interest in the family's history. The origins of Le Sommeil d'or can in fact be located within this history, for it was only in asking about his grandfather that Chou discovered the explosion of Cambodian film-making that took place in the decades prior to the Khmer Rouge. The year 2008 also marked Chou's first visit to Cambodia, which had occupied only the most distant and indistinct psychic spaces of his adolescence. In an interview included in the DVD's supplementary materials, he recounts a moment during this visit when he found himself travelling at night along a dirt road with his mother and a driver. Though he did not speak Khmer at the time and was lulled both by its sounds and rhythms and the gentle bouncing of the vehicle, he recalls instinctively understanding at a certain point that his companions were talking about Cambodian film. He carried this moment – at once familiar and unfamiliar, reassuring and disorienting – as a talisman as he undertook preparations for and began filming Le Sommeil d'or. The opening sequence of the film, he notes, is an attempt to recreate the moment for the viewer.