The Killing Fields
Introducing The Killing Fields | Shahim Sheikh
The first film screened as part of the series, “Screening Vulnerability,” was Roland Joffé’s 1984 film The Killing Fields, which was presented under the theme of Genocide. It is a film that is about the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power and the early years of its totalitarian regime which saw some of the most terrible crimes ever committed against humanity. The film is taken from the perspective of two journalists – Sydney Schanberg, a correspondent for The New York Times who covered the Cambodian Civil War, and the Cambodian journalist and interpreter for The New York Times, Dith Pran.
With its documentary style of realism, The Killing Fields shows the vulnerability of human rights in the face of autocratic systems, as well as the role of identity in such contexts. The portrayal of the Khmer Rouge’s ”Year Zero” policy shows the vulnerable nature of history in such political regimes and the risks its recording runs into as it goes from experience to text. Dith Pran’s survival in a Khmer Rouge labour camp is brought to life by Haing Somnang Ngor, a doctor from Cambodia who had no previous experience as an actor and was himself a survivor of a Khmer Rouge concentration camp. In terms of its role as a film, The Killing Fields belongs to the number of films that arrived in the wake of New Hollywood whose gruesome visuals contributed to the formation of how violence, war, torture, human rights violation and other such excesses are imagined and depicted on film. The fact that despite its distressing subject matter, it is a film whose most pressing concerns are friendship and how human beings survive against insurmountable odds made it an easy choice for the topic. It portrays its subject matter with utmost seriousness while also providing a resolution where filmic values about endings triumph, which in this case was the actual outcome of the incidents portrayed.
Ethics of Witnessing in Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields
Arjun Raj V
Roland Joffé’s 1984 British biographical film The Killing Fields problematises the witnessing of human suffering in art. The nature of witnessing and the representation of suffering in the art that deals with human rights violations determine its ethics. For art to be ethical, it is imperative that the experiential reality of various kinds of victims/witnesses is not flattened and that the account of trauma is kept open. This film highlights how vulnerabilities springing from different subject positions of witnesses affect the nature of witnessing they undertake. Although the movie makes questionable attempts to cater to the Western audience by neatly packaging a population’s trauma under the overarching frame of a noble friendship between Dith Pran, a Cambodian journalist, and Sydney Schanberg, a US journalist, the varied witness positions and witnessing it presents leaves open the possibility of multiple readings of the traumatic event. Pran and Schanberg are both vulnerable; however, Pran’s vulnerability as a Cambodian citizen in a totalitarian regime inches towards helplessness as the movie progresses. Pran’s insider status and heightened vulnerability offer his witnessing an intimate nature. In contrast, Schanberg is a distant witness who is accused of being apathetic by his colleagues from time to time. The juxtaposition of these two attitudes towards witnessing exposes how the politics and ethics of witnessing change based on the subject positions of the witnesses. It further helps to bring out the contradictions inherent in witnessing and thus keep the account of trauma open to multiple readings.
On Identity and Identification in a Genocide
Atul V. Nair
Shortly before the release of Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields in 1984, Granta (Autumn, 1984) carried essays by James Fenton and Someth May on the Cambodian genocide of the Khmer Rouge regime. Fenton’s “Cambodia and Someth May,” which mentions Joffé’s soon-to-be-released film, narrates his association with his Cambodian colleague Someth May, anticipating the Sydney Schanberg-Dith Pran story on which the film is based. May’s “The Field Behind the Village” is a survivor’s account of the Cambodian killing fields, much like Pran’s narrative which forms the second half of the film. This ‘prequel’ to The Killing Fields in Granta needs to be read alongside Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile” in the same volume, in order to understand the historically recurrent sequence of genocide, survival, and exile. Said captures his lived experience as an exile in an insight that is equally true for genocide: “it is produced by human beings for other human beings” (160).
The OED definition of “genocide” is the “deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of people from a particular group identified as having a shared ethnicity, nationality, etc., with the intention of partially or wholly destroying that group” (emphasis added). The key word here is “identified,” which suggests that the process of identification is a crucial precursor to mass extermination, when the identity of an entire population becomes the source of their vulnerability. In Schanberg’s and Pran’s cases, their identity as journalists compounds their vulnerability. Identification, therefore, becomes an act of power, which exploits the identity of a group and renders them vulnerable by denying them their right to identify themselves as human beings and thus claim human rights—rendering them personae non gratae.
Works Cited
Buford, William. Editor. Granta 13: After the Revolution, Autumn 1984.
“genocide, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2023,
www.oed.com/view/Entry/77616. Accessed 15 May 2023.
Complicating the victim-perpetrator binary: The Killing Fields
Bhadhra R Nath
Roland Joffé’s 1984 film The Killing Fields obfuscates the binary between pre-established victims and perpetrators of the Cambodian genocide, prompting the audience to think whether anyone’s designated role and identity is safe in a genocidal regime. He does this by attaching symbolic value to persistent images that undergo significant variations in meaning in the course of the film.
In one of the earlier scenes, we see Sydney Schanberg and Dith Pran – the two war correspondents from whose perspectives the story is told – conversing with a young Cambodian army officer who knows American English and is fascinated by Mercedes cars. To his delight, Pran gives him the car’s hood ornament. The director gives us more clues to the boy’s identity. For instance, he seems to favour the colour pink. We see him wearing a pink scarf over his uniform and he has an orchid of the same shade sticking out of the muzzle of his rifle.
We encounter the same boy again, as the Khmer Rouge guerrilla who saves Pran’s life. Only now, he has defected to the party, is dressed in its black garb and stripped of all the markers of his individuality. He is indistinguishable from any of the others. We recognize him only when he makes a reference to the hood ornament. By repeating this picture, Joffé’s telling us that in a genocidal regime, victims easily turn into perpetrators. The obverse is also true. A perpetrator can fall victim to the regime, as is evidenced by the local Khmer Rouge leader who is shot when he tries to stop the senseless killings.
This film helps revise our understanding about the vulnerability of everyone who operates within a genocidal regime. It shows us how identities and individual subjectivities are simultaneously lost on all sides of a conflict, only to be yoked forcefully along an ever-changing victim-perpetrator binary.