One of the great advances in this age of the internet is the fact that we have so many more things at our fingertips—movies, books, television shows. I feel like an old fogey pointing this out…but back in my day, if you missed a movie, gosh darn it, you were ass-out.  You missed it.

That feeling of urgency—that feeling of your heart beating in your ear drum—as you run to the theater to make it in the nick of time is a thing of the past, not something that little kids can ever feel today. But sometimes I recapture the thrill of that old-timey feeling when I try to catch foreign flicks, especially obscure ones that play in art houses.

For instance, last year, the movie “The Missing Picture” by the Cambodian-French director Rithy Panh was showing across town at the NuArt Theatre for a limited engagement.  It was the only movie theater in the city showing it.   And to boot:  it was critically acclaimed.  I really wanted to see it in the way that young boys burn with the desire to see Star Wars. All my friends were talking about making an occasion of it. But I got a little lazy.  I didn’t want to drive across town.  I didn’t get the timing right and before I knew it, the movie had vanished into thin air.

Now, the movie is on Netflix and I have a second chance and, yes, I highly recommend it. For those who don’t know: “The Missing Picture” won the highest prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It tells the story of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge—the Communist party lead by its bloody dictator Pol Pot.

So let me quickly get you up to speed on history:  Under the Khmer Rouge, a radical campaign against anything Western was waged. To the revolutionaries that had recently rid the country of French occupation, the West was seen as a defilement, a form of pollution. Anybody with even the slightest traces of decadent Western influence could be put to death.  If you wore glasses, if you carried a pen in their pocket, if you owned a book, you could very likely be killed.

All manner of people were killed for big and small reasons that seem capricious and tyrannical by today’s standards. Writers were killed.  Teachers were killed.  Movie directors were killed–and an entire industry that employed actors, costumers, sound men, was wiped of the emerald landscape of this Southeast Asian country.

Skulls at Sang Prison

If you’ve seen the movie, “The Killing Fields”–a movie that follows the story of a journalist–than you might be familiar with the grisly turn of events, which resulted in mass genocide. “The Missing Picture” stands in counterpoint to such a movie, because it is less concerned about documentation and more obsessed with philosophical questions, like the fallibility of memory and the meaning of loss and the slipperiness of realistic representation.

The title—“The Missing Picture”—is about the absence in all representation. The actual French title points to this obsession more strongly: —“L’image Manquante” means “frustrated” and “lacking,” not just simply missing.

The look of the film is that of Claymation—but crudely done Claymation that makes the characters look like the grotesques of outsider art–artists like Grandma Moses and Henri Rousseau.  These Claymations appear up and against archival Cambodian movie footage (what remains of it) that forms the backdrop in a way that looks like a collage. Over all this, hovers the voice of an actor who stands in for the director—a director who remembers his childhood under the murderous regime.  Tellingly, the director chooses to represent his own speech with a broken accent.

In other words, this is the kind of art that is not about illusions of traditional cinema:  illusions that suck you into a world whose artifice appears real—a world about seamless transitions and a sense of dimension that comes from technically sophisticated clay modeling. No, this is an art that is deliberately flat. In the scenes, there are even props—a car, for instance–that are simply cardboard cut-outs that caricature automobile shapes.  There is something wonderfully mismatched and jarring about these juxtapositions.

The crudeness of the image—an image which is literally lost, missing, broken—is also an image produced with care. The thing we know about Claymation is that it takes forever to produce—much longer than a flickering image that is captured on celluloid. And the genius stroke of “The Missing Image” is that the care that is taken in bringing back that which is lost pays homage to the preciousness of what is gone.

So, I’m glad that I had a reprieve. You should check it out on Netflix, because Neflix often changes its rotation and soon “The Missing Piece” will go…well…missing.