Perpetrator Cinema: Confronting Genocide in Cambodian Documentary, by Raya Morag. Wallflower Press/Columbia University Press, 2020, 312 pp.

Abstract

The book under review is not brand new. In fact, it was published during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, 2020, as a follow up to the author’s 2013 study, Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. Having started this series of investigations with 2009’s Defeated Masculinity: Post-Traumatic Cinema in the Aftermath of War, Morag has worked on the matter of “paradigms of perpetratorhood”, scrutinising representations of the figure of the perpetrator and the bystander as they confront the victim face-to-face in documentary film from places of conflict from around the globe for quite a few years. She continues to do so now.

Keywords

• perpetrator cinema
• ethnic cleansing
• genocide
• war and cinema