Earth as Archive: Reframing Memory and Mourning in The Missing Picture

Abstract:This article investigates the archival status of the earth as a medium and metaphor for the writing of the Cambodian disaster as depicted in Rithy Panh's autobiographical account of the Khmer Rouge regime, The Missing Picture (2013). Drawing on transnational film theory and the geological turn in media studies, it confronts Western and non-Western conceptions of trauma to ultimately demonstrate how the film's handcarved clay figurines embody both the materiality of mourning in Cambodia and the environmental implications of Pol Pot's failed agrarian utopia.