Objects of pleasure: Epistephilia and the sex worker in Rithy Panh’s Le Papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise

Near the end of Rithy Panh’s 2007 documentary, Le Papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise, the camera focuses on a small group of Cambodian prostitutes seated on the floor around a bowl of rice and a few simple dishes. Ravaged by drug use, illness and violence, scorned by their families, and relegated to the margins of Cambodian society, these women come together in this scene not just to share a meal, but also to reinforce the fragile sense of community they have forged in the dilapidated tenement building they call home. The women chat about happiness and regret, and gently tease each other as they prepare and then enjoy their meal. As is customary in Cambodian society, they use kinship terms to address each other. After a brief moment of silence, one of the women, Môm, says, ‘Quand on mange ensemble comme ça, on dirait qu’on est une famille’ (Panh, 2007: 230). This community is of course an impossible one, and the image of family they create for themselves has disappeared by the end of the film, when the viewer learns that most of the women have died, have been arrested, or have left to work in factories or for other pimps. The luckiest of them has married a Japanese man and moved away. And the viewer is left only with a shot of the self-made memorial the women have left behind, a memorial as fleeting as the beauty of the young models and film stars whose photographs the women have taped up in their rooms. It is a series of ‘portraits’ painted in lipstick and eye shadow directly onto the wall, the women’s names written beneath in marker-pen.

In the preface to the book, which was published in conjunction with the film, Panh presents his project as an attempt to counter the silence that surrounds prostitution in Cambodia today and to give voice to the anonymous disaster affecting over 30,000 women (Panh, 2007: 10). He says:

Parce que le silence est toujours pour les ‘putains’, j’ai voulu qu’on entende celles et ceux dont on parle plus souvent en termes de statistiques, de rapports d’ONG, de population-cible, ceux qui s’effacent derrière de vastes (et nécessaires) politiques de lutte contre le sida, contre le trafic d’êtres humains. J’ai voulu qu’on les regarde avec d’autres yeux. Un visage, une voix, un nom. Être avec. (2007: 16–17)

Composed from over 300 hours of footage, Panh’s film does not speak to us about prostitution in Cambodia; instead it asks a group of Cambodian prostitutes to speak to each other about their intimate experiences. And in its sustained concentration on the words and gestures of these women, the film contributes to what Sarkar and Walker (2010) have called the ‘global archives of suffering’ a document that focuses on the sex worker without reducing her to the victim/agent dichotomy. Instead, the women emerge in the film as women – as sisters, daughters and mothers – as women who have bought and sold, who have been bought and sold, who have followed opportunity and wasted opportunity, who have compromised their virtue in order to feed their families. They are sex workers, and their stories reveal the extent to which these extremes – victim and agent – are often intimately connected. Further, in its attention to the complex local realities determining each of their trajectories, Panh’s film demands that we confront globalisation on the micro level: that is, as an embodied, human phenomenon sanctioned and suffered by individuals.

While the film has generated little scholarly interest, ¹ it has provoked some scathing popular criticisms, and in this essay I seek to understand why. After briefly introducing the filmmaker and presenting the film and the criticisms it has received, I will focus on the narrative and stylistic techniques with which Panh renders intimacy on the screen, drawing his viewers in so that they might ‘be with’ the prostitutes. And I will suggest that in making the prostitutes the subject of their own intimate discourse rather than the object of a broader social discourse, the film fails to satisfy the viewer’s expectations – expectations that are attendant on the documentary genre and bound to questions of desire and the pleasures of non-fiction. In humanising its subjects, Panh’s film paradoxically defamiliarises the film’s subject matter, in a Brechtian sense, interrupting the process through which the viewer projects his moralising pity or righteous indignation. The result is a film that fails to offer the object of identification necessary to sustain the viewer’s fantasy of saving these women from exploitation.

Rithy Panh was born in Phnom Penh in 1964. When the Khmer Rouge took over the capital in 1975, his family were stripped of their belongings and identity papers, and evacuated to the countryside as part of Pol Pot’s radical collectivisation initiative. This was the beginning of the dehumanisation of the Cambodian people, a process that would eventually lead those deemed to be a threat to the new state to the killing fields. In 1979, having witnessed the death of his parents and siblings, Rithy Panh left Cambodia, spending some time in a Thai refugee camp before eventually making his way to France. In Paris, he studied at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, finding in cinema a means of rupturing the silence that not only paralysed him in the years following his escape, but that for so long also surrounded the Cambodian genocide. Indeed, each one of his films, with perhaps the exception of his 2008 adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ Un barrage contre le Pacifique, bears the indelible mark of this moment in Cambodia’s recent past. Though he still calls Paris home, Panh returned to Phnom Penh in 1990, and in 2005 he opened the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Centre, an organisation devoted to recovering and preserving the images and sounds of the Cambodian memory, and to imagining a collective future: ‘Il ne s’agit pas seulement de restaurer la mémoire, mais aussi de renouer la trame insaisissable d’une identité multiple et vivante, celle de la société cambodgienne contemporaine.’ ²

Like many of Rithy Panh’s films, Le Papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise was a multinational endeavour. The film was released in co-production with the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel and Catherine Dussart Productions, with the participation of France 3, France 5 and Bophana Productions, and in association with the Sundance Channel. It was distributed worldwide, appearing on French television and in French cinemas, and in film festivals everywhere from Bangkok to Boseman, Montana. The film’s title comes from a Khmer proverb about the inevitability of truth revealing itself: just as a piece of paper cannot wrap smouldering embers, the country’s collective trauma cannot be denied by a desire to forget. ³ Panh connects the work of this film – and the work of all his documentary films – to the general work of memory and identity in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, arguing that the fear and exploitation which mark the country today have grown like weeds out of ‘the ruins of [the country’s] social cohesion’ (Panh, 1999: 30). For Panh, the prostitution and trafficking of Cambodian women and children is a violence directly linked not only to the incomplete, and often empty, process of justice in the country (a UN-backed tribunal was established in 2006, but to date only three convictions have been made: one in 2010 and two in 2014), but also to the systematic destruction of Cambodian memory that began in 1975 and that has left the country unable, or perhaps simply unwilling, to confront its past. Panh says, ‘If you can’t grieve, the violence continues’ (1999: 30).

The film opens with an establishing shot of the capital city and then cuts to a long shot of a lone woman standing on the roof of a building, her back to us. She gazes out over the city, which, like most South-East Asian capitals, is a study of economic disparity: the cityscape is marked by squalor and yet is dotted with satellite dishes, construction sites and other signs of relative prosperity. But the larger structural and economic factors contributing to prostitution in Cambodia are ultimately of secondary interest in Panh’s documentary, and as such, this glimpse of the outside world is brief. Instead, within minutes, the camera moves indoors, where it focuses on the details – the faces, stories and identities – which the filmmaker deems essential to his project. The filming takes place in the women’s accommodation – the dimly lit, sparsely furnished spaces that the women occupy in intimate ways. Filming takes place during the day, and the scenes portray the women in small groups of two, three or four. They are often seated or lying on straw mats, and engrossed in simple daily activities: eating, napping, smoking, bathing, drawing, crying, brushing their hair, applying makeup, painting each other’s nails or attempting to reduce the swelling of an unfortunate friend’s black eye. Most importantly, they are talking. Indeed, the majority of the film is composed of conversations in which the women focus intently on speaking and being heard. They share details of their past lives and village traditions. They tell of how they got started in prostitution: some were sold by loved ones, while others turned to prostitution to support their families and, just as often, their drug addictions. They commiserate with each other about violent pimps and clients, and lament the constant threat of AIDS, which, as one woman, Da, notes, doesn’t seem to bother ‘ces salauds de Blancs [qui] n’ont pas peur de mourir’ (Panh, 2007: 122). Finally, the women’s conversations allow them to testify to each others lives, which they know are expendable:

On se donne entièrement. On leur confie notre corps. Ils peuvent nous pendre, nous étrangler, nous égorger, nous tuer dans la guest-house, si on meurt ça n’intéresse personne … Il n’y aura rien d’écrit dans les journaux … le cadavre de la fille est incinéré et c’est fini. (Panh, 2007: 117–18)

Indebted to the tradition of direct cinema and combining elements of observational, participatory and reflective documentary practices, Le Papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise assumes an unobtrusive filming ethos. The film is not narrated, and there are no ‘talking head’ interviews. Not once, in fact, do the people on the screen acknowledge the film crew’s presence. There is no archival footage of any kind, and the only socio-historical data given comes from occasional comments made by the women themselves about the Khmer Rouge refugee camps, UN peacekeeping forces, and current economic hardships. In fact, the film’s departure from such traditional documentary conventions coupled with the total absence of the filmmaker within the everyday universe of the women has led a number of viewers and critics to express discomfort with its visual polish, seamless editing and contrived intimacy; the women, some seem to suggest, are almost too articulate. And a few have openly condemned Panh for the film’s ostensible dishonesty and unreliability. The following review, published after the screening of the film at the Portland International Film Festival in the United States, serves as a particularly striking example of such criticisms and deserves to be quoted at length:

Paper Cannot Wrap Ember [CAMBODIA] And I cannot wrap my head around director Rithy Panh’s apparent disregard for ethics and empathy. Paper Cannot Wrap Ember is something entirely new: a feel-bad documentary about suffering humans shot in the manner of The Hills. Panh’s portrait of prostitutes on their days off is never less than ideally lit, and the sad subjects regale each other with woeful tales in seamless shot/countershot setups. The fabrications would be fine if Panh paused to consider the troubling implications of making a documentary that treats wretchedness as a melodramatic act. Or at least fed his subjects better lines. (Stamm, n.d.).

Such comments allow us to revisit the questions of aesthetics and the ethics of representation within the field of documentary film: are we to understand the film’s potential dramatic frame as duplicity on the part of the filmmaker? Do performance and visual appeal necessarily hinder a document’s ability to bear witness? What would it mean for the viewer to apprehend the truth revealed in the film not as absolute and mimetic, but as poetic and performative? Reviews like the one cited above obviously ignore the extent to which, as Michael Renov has argued of documentary film, ‘fictional and nonfictional forms are enmeshed in one another – particularly regarding semiotics, narrativity, and questions of performance’ (Renov, 1993: 2). They insist erroneously on the irreconcilability of authenticity and creative intervention. Moreover, for Deirdre Boyle, who has studied Panh’s controversial use of historical re-enactment in his most famous documentary, S21: La Machine de mort Khmère rouge, the blurring of a film’s genre is deliberate on the part of non-Western filmmakers seeking to ‘creatively mine the crack between one reality and the other’ (Boyle, 2010: 156). The lack of documentary footage is not surprising, given the Khmer Rouge’s near total elimination of the Cambodian audio and visual industries that flourished in the decade prior to year zero. But it is equally likely that the absence of interviews and socio-historical data is a pointed allusion to the relative lack of official political or social engagement with the phenomenon in Panh’s native country today. In its sustained focus on the women, and on the extant physical and emotional scars of their prostitution, Panh’s film creates a space for the emergence of the individual stories absent in the official records, aligning the deeply personal and the deeply political, and metonymising intimate experience for the history of modern Cambodia.

Further, the criticisms levelled at Panh’s film urge us to consider the stakes involved in labelling a film in which the sex workers tell each other their stories as ‘disturbingly false’. ⁴ Such comments rely on the incommensurability of truth and beauty within discussions of documentary poetics, but they also raise important questions about the viewer’s expectations. Why might the viewer feel he has been deceived by this film? The implicit claim in these reviews is not that the filmmaker has deceived his subject; indeed, I would argue that the critic cited above demonstrates little concern for the ethical relationship between Rithy Panh and the prostitutes he films. Rather, I would suggest that the disappointment communicated derives from the film’s failure to satisfy the viewer’s expectations – expectations that are attendant on the pleasures of non-fiction, which engage the viewer’s voyeuristic urges and his quest for knowledge, while also sustaining his fantasy as an engaged participant in the historical world.

Psychoanalytic film theory has contributed much to our understanding of the elements of cinematic pleasure, and as Renov has noted, has much to offer in our assessments of documentary film (1993: 6; 1999: 321). In narrative cinema, one aspect of the viewer’s pleasurable experience depends on his projection and identification with the idealised object on the screen. As theorists like Christian Metz (1977) and Laura Mulvey (1985, 1989) have demonstrated, the cinematic apparatus encourages the viewer to identify with the subject position of the protagonist (historically a strong male) and to encounter the film from that position. Documentary film, on the other hand, produces a different mode of cinematic pleasure, one that is directly tied to its promise to deliver knowledge. The viewer, as Bill Nichols observes, approaches the documentary film under the assumption that it will satisfy his desire to know: ‘He-who-knows (the agent has traditionally been masculine) will share that knowledge with those who wish to know’ (1991: 31). Following the claims put forward in psychoanalytic film criticism, Nichols offers the term ‘epistephilia’ to describe such a desire to know, and argues that epistephilic satisfaction is achieved through identification with the agent of the documentary film. This agent is often the filmmaker, male or female, who has directly or indirectly adopted a persona in the film by appearing before the camera or by including a narrative voiceover. ⁵

In both narrative and documentary film, this pleasure is connected to the gaze, and involves differentiating between the subject and object positions. In the documentary, this differentiation creates a distance which allows the viewer to separate himself from and acquire knowledge about the object on the screen. Rithy Panh’s film, however, does not allow for the creation of this distance. First, as noted above, the ‘he-who-knows’ not only fails to present himself as the agent of the film, but he neglects to acknowledge any of the creative and material processes involved in its construction. This is undoubtedly what has led sceptics to accuse Panh of Roland Barthes’ illusion référentielle: in other words, of trying to present the referent as though she were actually speaking for herself. The absence of the filmmaker and the seemingly hybrid nature of the documentary mode, somewhere between the observational and the participatory, raise questions about the film’s authenticity, leading to complaints that the film is a scripted docudrama about the miserable. More importantly, perhaps, the filmmaker’s absence also deprives the viewer of his expected object of identification: that is, it does not allow the viewer to identify with the subject position of the documentary’s protagonist, the ‘he-who-knows’ and who can thus enact change. This is in stark contrast with film such as Born into Brothels, where the viewer is encouraged to identify with the filmmaker’s position and thus is allowed to sustain his fantasy as an empathetic, morally just liberal working to rescue the victimised children from Calcutta’s red light district.

Second, the filming techniques favoured by Panh obscure spatial relations both within the diegesis and between the film and its viewers. The women’s conversations are filmed in interior spaces, and the scenes are generally illuminated by diffused natural lighting that creates gentle contrasts between light and shade. This lighting flattens the colours in each scene, casting a greyish tint over the women and the decor surrounding them, and often reduces the depth cues that give the viewer a sense of space within the composition. At the same time, the subtle play between shade and natural highlight accentuates the contours of the women’s faces and bodies, which are filmed regularly in tightly cropped close-up shots. These close-ups achieve a dual and, in fact, conflicting purpose. On the one hand, they exaggerate the isolation and fragmentation of the individual body in the sex industry: these women are defined by their bodies and their body parts, becoming, as they themselves observe, objects of pleasure, denied by their pimps and clients of their identities as mothers, sisters and daughters. The insistence on the body communicated in these shots is also, however, a way of re-humanising prostitution in Cambodia. Capturing the details of individual embodied experiences, details revealed in the women’s scars, tattoos, wrinkles, tears, shaking hands and sweating brows, Panh explores the intimate traces of a collective memory. Indeed, violence, sexual or otherwise, is rooted in and recorded on the human body. Together, these elements compromise spatial integrity within the film and contribute to the sense of confinement established by the film’s decor à huis clos.

Though the framing techniques used to capture the women’s conversations vary, Panh often uses level, straight-on angles in filming. Moreover, in addition to the frequent extreme close-ups, multiple scenes are composed of medium close-up shots which cut from one woman to another as they speak. The combination of camera angle and zoom in these shots not only drastically reduces the emotional distance between the viewer and the women on the screen, but also passes the responsibility of testifying onto the former. Indeed, such scenes give the viewer a sense of being included within the intimate space of the group, and the viewer, thus interpellated, is implicated in the conversations taking place there. Rather than identify with the subject position of the filmmaker, who observes the women from afar, the viewer is encouraged to identify with the subject position of the prostitute: that is, with what he would otherwise encounter as the object of the film’s discourse. He is, as Panh notes in the manuscript version of the project, ‘with’ the prostitutes. But if the director uses certain framing techniques to draw the viewer into the film, he does so in order to then suspend him there. Though the film is primarily composed of intimate conversations which work to align the perspective of the viewer with that of the prostitute, these scenes are interspersed with more meditative images highlighting the liminal position of the women within Cambodian society. Such scenes place both the prostitute and the viewer in windows, doorframes and hallways: in other words, spaces where neither is fully granted nor denied agency, innocence or the possibility of a future beyond the tenement walls.

This emphasis on liminality, however, has implications beyond the immediate lived experience of the film’s subjects. Indeed, as demonstrated in one of the most artful scenes of the film, it encourages us to examine the ideologically fraught processes of interpretation involved in the production of knowledge. In this scene, Da is seated on an old leather chair talking to her mother and infant daughter, who stand behind her and behind the camera, but who are captured in the large mirror facing the chair. The mother has come to ask Da for money. During their conversation, the young prostitute sees herself where she is not, first in the virtual space created by her reflection (she is simultaneously here in the chair and there in the mirror) and, second, because her mother and daughter also appear in the mirror’s reflection, in the impossible space of her family, from which she is irrevocably removed. The mirror allows Da to temporarily envision herself where she is absent, but this moment of misrecognition reminiscent of Lacan’s discussion of the mirror stage is lost when the child ruptures the virtual space and comes to sit on her mother’s lap. While the physical presence of the child only further underscores the division between the woman’s imagined place as mother and daughter and her social position as sex worker, this image asks us to confront and accept her identity as both mother and prostitute, or as somewhere between these two clearly defined roles. The scene captures the contradictory position of this particular woman, who later in the film notes that she was duped into prostitution and that no woman wants to sell her body, and then admits to having subsequently sold her 15-year-old sister, Phirom, who is now dying of AIDS. For her, this is the truth: poverty is to blame, she claims, but so is she.

Further, this contradiction, which is at the heart of most of the women’s stories, is central to recent debates about human rights and the status of sex workers around the world. Over the last few decades, research on prostitution and trafficking has focused increasingly on the proliferation of the industry as a response to ‘economic globalisation’ and ‘the global restructuring of capitalist production’ (Kara, 2009; Doezema, 1998). Globalisation, as understood in these studies, is a macro phenomenon enacted by states and markets. Critics cite the dire economic conditions caused by global economic integration – the collapse of local markets and currencies, the widening gap between the rich and the poor – as key factors in the precipitous increase in domestic and international migration. And these economic considerations, combined with the historical disenfranchisement of women, have subsequently facilitated the surge in sex work and the trafficking of women and children, particularly in the developing world. But while critics agree on the link between the political and the libidinal economies, they often differ on their classification of the subjects implicated in these overlapping markets. Are these women victims or agents of their exploitation? Should we speak of exploitation or of opportunity? Is this prostitution forced or voluntary? And to sum up a relatively recent debate in France, is the abolitionist stance a reactionary one? ⁶

What is perhaps most interesting about these debates is the dogmatic approach each camp takes with regard to the other’s position: the anti-trafficking and abolitionist groups claim that all forms of prostitution are coercive and they recoil at the idea that any woman would choose to sell her body, while the sex workers’ rights groups argue for the prostitute’s right to self-determination, with some suggesting that the issue of trafficking does not warrant the scholarly or policy-driven attention it currently receives. Indeed, for Jo Doezema, the highly mediatised plight of those sold into prostitution is a cultural myth: ‘When subjected to scrutiny, the image of the “trafficking” victim turns out to be a figment of neo-Victorian imaginations’ (1998: 44). Each asserts that the other’s findings are dubious or insignificant and their claims legitimised only through the repetition of false numbers and elaborate rhetoric. In each instance, ideological assumptions are mobilised to create knowledge on the subject of sex work and, more importantly, on the individual subjects involved in sex work. On both sides of the issue, the historical events and processes connected to global prostitution are rendered intelligible by the distinctly ‘modern ideologies’ used to present them. As Hayden White claims in his discussion of the historical sublime:

these ideologies deprive history of the kind of meaninglessness which alone can goad the moral sense of living human beings to make their lives different for themselves and their children, which is to say, to endow their lives with a meaning for which they alone are fully responsible. (White, 1982: 128)

White locates the sole possibility for a ‘visionary politics’ in the acceptance of history’s confusion and contradiction, something neither the abolitionist nor the pro-rights stance is seemingly prepared to do when the history in question is that of prostitution.

The refusal to conform to the expected narrative frames is precisely what makes Le Papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise such an effective, if troubling, documentary. To be sure, the women in Panh’s film discuss instances of trafficking and the economic and political forces that have forced them to sell their bodies, but rarely do they linger on the morally loaded questions of victimisation or individual agency. For these women, these are just words. And as Da notes, ‘La langue n’a pas d’os, alors elle remue’ (Panh, 2007: 160). Rather than posit an understanding of prostitution as victimisation or self-determination, Panh’s film focuses on the intimate corporeal and emotional experiences of the prostitute – her pastimes, family pressures, worries and betrayals – and asks his viewer not only to accept, but to identify with the contradictory nature of her existence. Panh does not seek to educate his viewer, and, as such, his film eschews the interviews, statistics and analyses often found in traditional documentary films about such social phenomena. And he constructs this unconventional narrative without once alluding to the artifice of the construction, a self-referential technique commonly expected from more self-conscious, postmodern documentary filmmakers. Moreover, in creating a space in which the prostitutes might emerge as speaking subjects, he fails to present himself as the agent of the film, with whom the viewer expects to identify. Instead, Panh’s filming techniques humanise the subjects of his film and thereby eliminate the distance between the women on the screen and the viewer. Without this distance to be traversed, the expression of the latter’s passive empathy is blocked, and the pleasurable experience of being carried away with the fantasy of enacting change through the accumulation of knowledge is foreclosed. This, I would suggest, is what alienates the viewer, rendering unexpected and strange his experience of the film. In eliminating the distance upon which the viewer’s pleasure relies (in relation to the documentary film, the pleasure of knowing connected to the filmmaker’s treatment of the subject matter), Panh’s film imposes a distance of another nature, and indeed a pleasure of another nature.

The techniques by which Rithy Panh humanises the subjects of his film also serve to defamiliarise the film’s subject matter in a manner analogous to Bertolt Brecht’s ‘pleasurable learning’. We might understand pleasurable learning as shifting the focus from the accumulation of knowledge, which is ‘a commercial transaction … acquired in order to be resold’ (1992: 72), to the development of reasoning skills and to the activity of learning itself. For Brecht, ‘epic theatre’ provided just this kind of instruction ‘through a process of alienation: the alienation that is necessary to all understanding’ (1992: 71). By cultivating the alienation effect, epic theatre appeals not to the viewer’s emotions, but to his reason. In blocking the viewer’s emotive response, it encourages him to ‘come to grips with things,’ to interrogate not only what takes place on stage or on screen, but also in his own life (1992: 23). Brecht’s alienation effect relies on techniques that are well known: the unexpected use of textual cues, projections or song to reinforce an idea, an actor’s breaking of the fourth wall, or any unnatural or self-referential gesture designed to make the viewer conscious of the contrived nature of the work’s construction. These techniques are not to be found in Rithy Panh’s film. But it is precisely, and perhaps paradoxically, by not pointing to the creative interventions involved in the construction of his film that Panh leads his viewer to actively look for them throughout the film, to question the relationship between authenticity and artifice, and thus to engage critically with the material. It is by drawing the viewer in that he distances the viewer in the Brechtian sense. The viewer is repeatedly reminded – through his own experience of doubt – that he is encountering an enactment of reality and not reality itself. As viewers, we cannot submit to the experience of Panh’s film uncritically, enjoying the pleasure of knowing facilitated by the expected processes of identification and the fantasy such processes sustain. Instead, we are put in the uncomfortable position of learning, of coming to grips, without any sense that by watching the film we are participating in a solution to the problem. Instead, we are asked to be consciously with the problem, the dis-pleasure of which may actually lead to a new way of thinking and a new response to the global exploitation of sexual and emotional labour.