Genocide as Suspended Time:

Deleuze and the Becoming of the Time-Image in Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot

Abstract

Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot (2024) by Rithy Panh through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s film theory. Drawing on the concept of the time-image, it examines how Panh deconstructs conventional narrative structures to create a suspended time that confronts the viewer with the memory of horror. The film moves between the movement-image and the time-image, integrating archival footage and clay figurines as strategies to represent trauma. Thus, it is argued that Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot not only exemplifies the consolidation of the time-image but also its transformation into a death-image as a way of confronting the unrepresentable. Furthermore, the study explores the figure of the " Lazarean subject," characterized by their transition between life and death, and their role in constructing a filmic discourse that suspends chronological time. Through an intermedial approach that combines fiction and non-fiction, Panh reconfigures the representation of genocide through a poetics of absence. This analysis demonstrates how Panh’s cinema aligns with a tradition of cinematic representations of trauma and redefines the boundaries between image, memory, and history.