Taking responsibility: Testimonial practices in Rithy Panh’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine

Abstract

Genocide films have long contributed to public criminology’s exploration into ethics, responsibility and witnessing after atrocity. Whereas post-Holocaust theorisations of testimony have focused on victim testimony (and its limits), a recent wave of documentary films are instead centering on the perpetrators of atrocity. These are raising the question of how to engage with that shared by a person who experienced an atrocity not as its victim but as its perpetrator. This article examines this question through a close reading of Rithy Panh’s documentary film S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing machine (2003), a film that ‘compare[s] eye-witness accounts’ of a handful of men who all experienced notorious Khmer Rouge security centre S-21 either as its prisoners or its staff. I suggest that the confrontations and the bodily gestures by the former staff in S21 constitute forms of testimony, something which has implications for the understanding of both testimony and responsibility, as well as for the positionality of the spectator. The film, I suggest, provides a way to listen to the experiences of the perpetrators of the atrocity, without diminishing the suffering they caused.