New Forms of Genocide Documentaries: The Duel and the Quiet Interview

Abstract

This essay aims, first, to put forth two new forms of genocide documentaries: The Duel and the Quiet Interview (my terms). These forms emerged from two of the major non-Western catastrophes of twentieth-century Communism — the Cambodian autogenocide and the Chinese Maoist Revolution (respectively). In both the Duel and the Quiet Interview, the directors search for historical truth, which, in both societies, has been silenced, taboo-ized and censored for circa 40 years. Second, despite the obvious differences between their historical-traumatic-cultural contexts, and their addressees, I contend that both forms shed light on the failure of post-Holocaust Western paradigmatic literature – initiated most prominently by Felman and Laub (1992), Hilberg (1993), LaCapra (2001), Felman (2002) and Wieviorka (2006) - to recognize these non-Western catastrophes as an immanent part of the Age of Testimony. I further contend that both forms expand the ethical boundaries of trauma, trauma cinema studies and related fields of research. Finally, dealing with collaboration as an undertheorized subject position in the West, this essay calls for the constitution of collaboration studies alongside perpetrator studies.