In this chapter, I propose an analysis of Rithy Panh's documentaries, S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (2003), Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (2012) and, to a lesser degree, The Missing Picture (2013), as what I term ‘perpetrator documentaries’ – that is, documentaries that focus on the figure of the perpetrator, while unravelling the long-time enigma of the ‘ordinary man turned perpetrator’ (Browning [1992] 1998: 159–89). I suggest that the survivor–perpetrator encounter staged at the heart of S21 and Duch is a major characteristic of Panh's perpetrator documentary cinema, aiming at undermining the perpetrator's ideology of extermination and reconstituting the human condition. This encounter is built on a conjuring act, in which the dead play the third, meaningful other: they are participants. Furthermore, I describe the cinematic strategies through which these three post-genocide documentaries constitute a cinematic ‘archive of truth’. Identifying the major tropes that most potently mobilise this archive examines the role of Panh's perpetrator documentaries as a transgenerational site, one that confronts the post-1979 generation with the double enigma: of the ‘ordinary perpetrator’ and self-genocide. In the midst of Cambodia's struggle over the post-Khmer Rouge national narrative, Panh, the survivor, has put forward a new episteme with which Cambodia's collective post-traumatic memory should be re-established.

PERPETRATOR DOCUMENTARIES

S21, Duch and, to a lesser degree, The Missing Picture represent a unique case of perpetrator documentaries, because of the post-traumatic ways by which the director – a survivor of the Cambodian genocide who lost his family – identifies his major mission: to confront the perpetrator. In S21, made after years of searching for perpetrators in hiding in rural Cambodia, Panh interviews ten low-ranking perpetrators who worked at the Phnom Penh torture and execution centre, Tuol Sleng, code-named S21:1 former guards, an interrogator, torturer, photographer, doctor, security deputy, Head of Registers and driver.2 Panh questions the former guards about their part in Tuol Sleng's technologies of death together with former prisoner Vann Nath, whose paintings of Pol Pot enabled him to survive S21. S21 stages the survivor–perpetrator confrontation in a series of interviews mixed with the former guards’ re-enactments of their daily routine in Tuol Sleng.