Irradiated (Rithy Panh, 2020) (Patreon)

Just a few days ago, Strand Releasing picked up the U.S. rights to this film. This surprises me, because from what I've read and heard, the response to Irradiated was overwhelmingly negative when it premiered last year in Berlin. But I must say, I'm glad that more people will have the chance to see it. I certainly don't mind when my own opinion of a film differs from the voice of the majority. But here, I find myself in a more uncomfortable position. Most of the bad reviews I've read strike me as having fundamentally misunderstood the film. I don't like to be a scold, or come across like "I know something you don't know." But with Irradiated, it may be unavoidable.

Numerous reviews have mocked the film, saying its message boils down to "war is bad." Some have leveled a more serious charge against Panh, arguing that Irradiated indulges in some kind of war pornography. It's true that Irradiated is very difficult to watch. At several moments I genuinely felt sick to my stomach. But I don't think this, in and of itself, is what Panh is after here. The appropriated footage that comprises most of Irradiated -- Nazi films of concentration camps, news footage shot by the Khmer Rouge of their atrocities against their fellow Cambodians, and, in the final third, documentation of the aftermath of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- is without a doubt gruesome and appalling. So why does Panh want us to look at it for 90 minutes?

A key to Panh's purpose, it seems to be, lay in his decision to organize most of the film as a visual triptych. Often, the same bit of footage is shown across all three panels, producing synchronized gestures of brutality and horror. One of the statements made in the film by the male narrator (Andre Wilms), "abstraction leads to death," seems pertinent here. This footage of human misery, frequently showing the human body in states of unthinkable agony and mutilation, becomes abstract, to a certain point, when Panh presents it in triplicate. It's difficult not to see these images formally, in terms of broad gestures, undulating waves of bodies, and shifting patterns of light. 

This means that the viewer experiences the footage as a kind of visual chiasmus, which in turn produces an ethical quandary. In order to resist Panh's abstraction and really see these suffering souls, we have to deliberately adjust our vision, forcing ourselves to see these shadows as records of violent death. But then, by making this effort to see the carnage, we risk falling prey to ghoulishness, our sight implicitly aligned with the bloodlust that produced these images in the first place.

A few reviews have questioned, or outright mocked, Panh's decision to include original footage of "mimes" responding to the horrors of war. But they aren't mimes. These figures, who appear in the Hiroshima section, are Butoh performers, and their presence here has a very specific historical and cultural meaning. Butoh is a dance / performance style that developed in post-World War II Japan as a direct response to the unspeakable traumas of that war, and of the atomic bomb in particular. Butoh drew inspiration from earlier Japanese theatrical styles (Noh, Kabuki) but also from Western theorists like Antonin Artaud. The purpose of this silent, stylized form of performance is to depict states of being that exceed the conventional bounds of representation. It is an art of traumatized, spectral figures who occupy the stage as placeholders not only for the dead, but for the trans-human magnitude of history itself.

Panh explored the problem of unrepresentable horror in his (quite well-received) film The Missing Picture. With Irradiated, he is doing something related but almost diametrically opposed. The footage Panh uses in Irradiated depicts unspeakable barbarism. Sometimes, as with the Nazi footage, the films were shot by the perpetrators of the violence in question, as a proud historical record of their achievements. The images themselves are abstractions, in the sense that they are not attached to individual names or souls. They literally depict the process of dehumanization. 

So what does our culture do with these images? Most of the time, we simply avoid them, knowing they exist but feeling no pressing need to confront them. They become the Unwatchable, those representational extremities that demand of the viewer an utterly impossible ethics of spectatorship. This is something a bit different than Night and Fog, which positions us as guardians of the future. Irradiated appears 65 years later, to confront us with a sobering, unpleasant truth. We had a moral obligation, and we failed.