The Killing Fields Analysis

1053 Words3 Pages

The Killings Fields is a chilling film about the Cambodian genocide and the regime of the Khmer Rouge. Released in 1984, five years after the end of Pol Pot’s reign, the film tries to capture the chaos, devastation, and unrelenting violence that occurred in Cambodia a country that was thrown into conflict by the reverberations of the Vietnam War. Throughout the film, thoughts of fear and violence flood the viewer through scenes of bombings and guerrilla warfare to the dangerous score that plays behind Pran’s time in the labor camp. The Killing Fields uses understated depictions of violence to show the viewer how it affected the Cambodians and to explain how genocides occur as a whole. Within the first ten minutes of The Killing Fields, there
David Chandler explains that many Cambodians saw “their country as essentially a happy place, being visited by war.” He also says they were stunned by the soldiers of the Khmer Rouge, who “‘didn 't even look like Cambodians, they seemed to be from the jungle, or a different world.’” In the film, the Khmer Rouge close in on the capital city by cutting off the road to the airport. During this scene, which includes Schanberg and Pran darting in and out of a Coca Cola factory while citizens are fleeing the area, a young girl’s cries can be heard over the din of machine guns and mass exodus. Though children often cry, it is easy to see how Joffé wanted her tears to mean something more, to show the despair of a country tearing itself
The Killing Fields provides them with a screen that bears the words: “Cambodia’s Torment Has Not Yet Ended. The Refugee Camps on the Thai Border Are Still Crowded with the Children of the Killing Fields.” The violence inflicted upon Cambodia’s people would not be validated until 2014 when the leaders of the Khmer Rouge were formally charged with genocide, which means that in many ways, especially psychologically, violence was still being inflicted upon the victims of the Khmer Rouge and their families. Stephen P. Marks describes this phenomenon in his article that documents the history of the elusive justice of victims of the Cambodian Genocide. There were several show trials about the Genocide after the Khmer Rouge collapsed. Pol Pot was put on trial by members of his own party in 1997. When UN officials asked that the Khmer Rouge surrender him, he died, quite suspiciously, of a heart attack. That trial and the trials in 1979 conducted by Vietnam were internal, corrupt affairs. An International tribunal, Marks explains, would lead to better post trial peace building and would validate the suffering of the Cambodians lost in the killing fields. In one title screen, The Killing Fields implies that for years Cambodians have been quietly violated as they waited for

Open Document