Produced by John Pirozzi and Andrew Pope; film editing, Daniel Littlewood, Matt Prinzing and Greg Wright; original music score, Scot Stafford; executive director, Youk Chhang. New York; Argot Pictures; presented by Harmony Productions/Primitive Nerd/Pearl City, 2014. 1 online resource (106 mins.) In English, French, and Khmer with English subtitles. Url: http://www.dtifcambodia.com/.
At first blush, Cambodian rock music might seem like an unlikely topic of fascination for North American listeners. Until fairly recently, few outside of the Khmer diaspora knew that a full-blown rock-and-roll culture had developed in 1960s Phnom Penh, or that this music was still widely remembered in contemporary Khmer communities, and painstakingly maintained as a cherished archive representing a golden era of prewar Cambodian popular culture. Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll (2014; director John Pirozzi) reveals a hidden history of musical innovation, bringing viewers into the rapid efflorescence of a shimmering creative and social world just as abruptly torn apart by war and genocide.
In the course of exposing viewers to this little-known musical scene, the film presents an engaging and informative history of modern Cambodia. Norodom Sihanouk, crowned king of Cambodia in 1941 at the age of 18, represents a poignant and recurring through-line in the film’s development, which traces his tragic path against the country’s sickening disintegration into violence. In the 1950s, immediately after having successfully negotiated a peaceful transition from French colony to independence, Sihanouk appears as a dapper cosmopolitan, proud of his country’s dedication to the arts, and to peace and neutrality during the nascent Cold War. The music reflects the mix of forces shaping mid-century Cambodia. As a composer, singer, and saxophonist himself, Sihanouk was deeply passionate about music, forming Western-style and Cambodian traditional orchestras, and also encouraging the local production of pop music that emulated the French chanson and pop styles of Edith Piaf and Johnny Hallyday, as well as the Afro-Cuban influences of cha-cha-cha. Nightclub culture thrived in Phnom Penh throughout the 1960s, where vocalists Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Serey Sothea were the undisputed stars of the scene; guitar bands like Baksey Cham Krong brought the surf sounds of the Shadows into circulation; and by the early 1970s groups like the Drakkar Band and Yol Aularong tuned into the hard rock and soul influences (Santana, Wilson Pickett) flowing in from US Armed Forces radio in Vietnam.
The atmosphere of the film slowly tightens as the escalating war next door begins to simmer, and then boils over into Cambodia. As Viet Cong forces pour across the border in 1970, Sihanouk’s thinly veiled police state is deposed by US-backed Lon Nol. Musicians are forced into writing propaganda songs for the newly militarized society: one chilling lyric demands, “My friends/don’t be afraid to kill/chase and slaughter/pick up a weapon now.” The urban culture of Phnom Penh becomes increasingly isolated, as the Khmer Rouge slowly builds (joined by the desperate Sihanouk) in the wake of massive US bombing campaigns, and eventually overruns the city in 1975. The film is perhaps most effective in having built up so slowly to the horror of the genocidal purge that drove musicians, artists, and intellectuals into exile, and in many cases, execution.
The emotional climax, then, seems to arrive suddenly and shockingly, as surviving musicians and fans capture, in few but powerful words, the traumatic destruction of their lives. As they remember families slaughtered overnight and a world silenced by violence and the brutal authoritarian social order of Pol Pot, Pirozzi juxtaposes their brief testimony with increasingly abstract images of violence, backed with eerie original soundtrack music that heightens the sense of incredulity and displacement. When the Khmer Rouge are finally driven out in 1979, Sihanouk, disgraced and in exile, appears in a tragic coda on French television, voice shaking at his deception and enumerating his own numerous losses of children and grandchildren murdered by the Khmer Rouge.
Director John Priozzi dedicated over a decade of work to the production of Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten, and it shows: the film’s rapport with its subjects is far deeper than the less substantial examples that dominate the growing field of music documentaries over the past decade. Having first come to the region as a camera operator on the 2002 noir City of Ghosts, shot in Thailand and Cambodia, Priozzi returned to document the popular LA-based Cambodian rock revival band Dengue Fever in Sleepwalking Through the Mekong (2007), which chronicles the group’s 2005 tour of Cambodia. Simultaneously, he worked with the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) and other archival sources to uncover a trove of footage that reveals the sophisticated urban world of mid-century Phnom Penh, conducting interviews with surviving musicians and fans, and gathering rare recordings to flesh out the vibrant and tragic story of the city’s music scene in the 1950s and 1960s (many of which are featured on the film’s soundtrack, released by the award-winning Dust-to-Digital label).
Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten will undoubtedly spark interest in this music, but also in the personal history of the lives pushed underground by genocide and war, and the survivors who have begun to emerge to speak, and sing, through this film. Several premiere screenings of the film in spring 2015 featured performances by surviving members of Baksey Cham Krong, The Drakkar Band, as well as Chom Nimol of Dengue Fever and Sinn Sethakol, grandson of Sinn Sisamouth. When I spoke with Pirozzi in May 2015 for a radio interview, he told me that at the Los Angeles screening, one of the audience members approached him after the film and identified himself as Yol Aularong’s brother. Other recent screenings have brought Khmer families together to recollect, and reconsider Cambodian rock as part of a diasporic legacy.
The film, then, does more than document a lost moment in time—it may also generate new knowledge and connections through its circulation, as the historical picture continues to be filled in by survivors and Khmer populations. Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten is a moving and valuable project that works on many levels: as a “Cambodia 101” for those unfamiliar with the nation’s tragic modern history, as a touchstone of memorialization for survivors and their families, and as a well-deserved celebration of a classic, and surprisingly fresh-sounding, repertoire of Cambodian rock music.
David Novak
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
pp. 512-514