Missing Pictures: History and Poetic Imagination in the Cinema of Rithy Panh

“As a filmmaker, you don’t wait for reality; you call it to the camera.” —Rithy Panh

Summary

This microseminar frames the October 2017 visit of filmmaker Rithy Panh to the University of Washington as a Walker-Ames Scholar. Panh is known for his innovative practice that includes re-enactments, animation, and improvisation in addition to more traditional techniques of documentary and narrative cinema. His films deal with genocide and its effects, memory, living at the margins of Cambodia's present modernity, and French colonialism in Indochina and in Africa. His 2013 Film The Missing Picture won the Jury prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, and was nominated for an Oscar.

Rithy Panh is also an archivist and educator. He co-founded the Bophana Center, which is dedicated to repatriating and preserving film, photography, and audio materials related to Cambodian history.

The microseminar provides the opportunity for Masters and PhD students from multiple disciplines to think with each other and Rithy Panh about key themes in his work. Students are required to read in preparation for seminars; participate in screenings and colloquia during Panh’s visit; and complete a two-page paper or one-minute film.

Meeting Times and Location

• November 14, 9:30-11:20 am 
• November 21, 9:30-11:20 am 
• November 28, 9:30-11:20 am 
• December 5, 9:30-12:30 pm: Seminar, screening, and lunch with Rithy Panh
• December 7, 9:30-11:20 am: Colloquium and screening with Rithy Panh

All sessions meet in Communications 202

Jenna Grant is Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Her work focuses on science, technology, and medicine in urban Cambodia and in Southeast Asia borderlands. She is currently writing a book manuscript titled “Seeing Clearly: Medical Imaging and Its Uncertainties in Phnom Penh.” The book, based on more than two years of ethnographic and archival research in Cambodia and France, examines contemporary medical imaging services alongside histories of technology within postcolonial health development projects

Questions? Contact Jenna Grant (jmgrant@uw.edu).