What is the mysterious force in the universe that every so often creates a bond between us and some exotic corner of the world that we've never laid eyes on, and most likely never will?
Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll, John Pirozzi's relentlessly sad but engaging and detailed account of the fate of victims of the 1970s-era Cambodian auto-genocide, opens Friday at San Francisco's Balboa Theater. It reminds me that my own adult identity, like that of the 15 million citizens of the Southeast Asian nation of Cambodia, was shaped in the ever-expanding shadow of America's post-WWII pop culture, particularly rock-n-roll radio. Pirozzi, whose earlier film Sleepwalking Through the Mekong captured the sights and sounds of the LA rock band Dengue Fever's journey to Cambodia and their engagement with the fledgling Cambodian rock culture, now sets about a kind of cultural restoration project whose legacy may well upstage his new film.
Pirozzi's "instant history lesson" takes us through hundreds of years of history, from Cambodia's once-magnificent Khmer Empire to its more recent wars with its former colonies and now neighbors. From ancient kingdom to French colony to abrupt independence (1953) to the authoritarian era of Prince Sihanouk to the first baby steps towards democracy in the 60s, undermined by the chaos of the war next door in Vietnam �" especially the Nixon Administration's illegal bombing raids against Viet Cong forces seeking refuge in Cambodia �" Pirozzi describes a great civilization undergoing a century's worth of change in the blink of an eye.
Pirozzi recounts how the country's capital Phnom Penh experienced the convulsive shocks of the French departure, followed by an American cultural invasion symbolized by young people clutching transistor radios blaring the latest Western music fads courtesy of American Armed Forces Radio. Following the dictator Pol Pot's nearly successful attempt to eradicate Western culture in his country by killing millions of its fans, the country went through a kind of return to the Dark Ages that was finally ended after a Vietnamese invasion led to the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge killing machine.
The power of the film lies in the survivors' tales, first-person accounts by now middle-aged and elderly people of how they left the country for French or American exile carrying little pieces of their country's short Pop era with them: records, song sheets, posters, but most importantly, accounts of the tragically short careers of Cambodian musicians and singers murdered by Pol Pot. An intriguing sidebar to the story of war and exile is the discussion of how Cambodian rockers managed to assimilate Western rock, at the same time giving it a distinctively Cambodian accent.
One of toughest challenges faced by the children of those who perished under the dictator is never learning the exact fate of their relatives. A son no longer young relates the conflicting accounts he has received about his late dad. "About 30 people told me that during the Khmer Rouge they worked, slept and ate with my father. But each one said he died in a different place. It's not possible. You can't die in 30 different places."
Back in the late 80s, I had the privilege of chatting with the late American monologist Spalding Gray, whose comic-tragic one-man show Swimming to Cambodia provided a personal perspective on the foreign conflagration that many have considered the responsibility of disgraced former President Richard M. Nixon. For anyone wishing to regard this modern disaster in a kind of prose poetry, I recommend Gray's special voice.
"So five years of bombing, a diet of bark, bugs, lizards and leaves up in the Cambodian jungles, an education in Paris environs in strict Maoist doctrine with a touch of Rousseau, and other things that we will probably never know about in our lifetimes �" including perhaps an invisible cloud of evil that circles the Earth and lands at random in places like Iran, Beirut, Germany, Cambodia, America �" set the Khmer Rouge up to commit the worst auto-genocide in modern history."
Gray explained why Americans should care about this historic injustice beyond whatever guilt we may share.
"It was Shangri-La before it was colonized. Thailand was a Nordic country compared to Cambodia. Cambodians knew how to have a good time getting born, a good time growing up, a good time going through puberty, a good time falling in love, a good time staying in love, a good time getting married, a good time staying married, a good time having children, a good time growing old, a good time dying �" they even knew how to have a good time on New Year's Eve!"
Don't Think I've Forgotten and Swimming to Cambodia will someday comprise a perfect Castro Theatre thematic double-bill.