by Beatrice Camp
The revival of Cambodia’s traditional Royal Ballet, nearly annihilated under the Khmer Rouge, is due in part to a film produced by the US government in the 1960s. The film, along with tens of thousands of others, was the work of the US Information Agency (USIA), which was merged into the State Department in 1999.
Rebuilding Relations after the Khmer Rouge
As Southeast Asia desk officer for USIA in the early 1990s, I handled a crazy quilt of countries. We were still a few years from normalizing relations with Vietnam, while Burma and Laos were mostly closed. Cambodia was just pulling out of the devastation caused by the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese takeover, and the ensuing political uncertainty. The embassy in Phnom Penh had closed in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge overran the city, assumed control, and began a four-year genocide.
The US restored full relations in September 1993; when I visited on my orientation tour, the US Information Service (USIS) in Phnom Penh was a new, one-officer post feeling its way in difficult political and living conditions. The embassy offices there were minimalist, as were programs. The Cambodians needed everything. Restarting cultural and educational exchanges posed huge challenges.
While Embassy Phnom Penh was focusing on the new era, there was growing interest in reconstructing some of the past history of US-Cambodian relations. David Chandler, an Australian expert on Cambodia, contacted USIA in search of three films the agency had produced about the Cambodian royal family in the 1960s–Royal Wedding, Royal Funeral, and Royal Ballet.
Genesis of the Royal Films
USIS Phnom Penh had produced these three films at a time when the United States was trying to lure Cambodia and its once-and-future King Sihanouk away from neutrality and into an anti-communist alignment. Sihanouk had abdicated his throne in 1955 to participate more directly in politics; the throne went to Sihanouk’s father, Norodom Suramarit, whose 1960 funeral is the subject of one of the films. That one, Royal Funeral, contains a fascinating segment with the young Sihanouk putting ceremonial kindling on his father’s cremation pyre.
Working with the National Archives, my colleagues and I were also able to recover a filmed performance by the Royal Cambodian Ballet, most of whose dancers lost their lives under the Khmer Rouge. (According to Wikipedia, 90 percent of all Cambodian classical artists perished between 1975 and 1979.)
The film was the brainchild of USIS Regional Motion Picture Officer Stan Moss, who wrote a proposal for a ten-minute film on the training of a Cambodian ballet performer after seeing a performance in 1959. It took three years to get a response, at which point Queen Sisowath Kossamak became the producer. According to a 1995 article by Moss in “USIA World”, the queen “enlarged the project to become a history of the Khmer people as told through the dance.”
Filming was difficult, involving scrounged equipment, elephants, heat, and rain. Moss recounted that:
“The Cambodian heat precluded any dance performances during the day. All the filming at Angkor Wat took place after sunset…It was monsoon season, and there were heavy rains every day. Tons of rice hulls were trucked-in to sop up the puddles in the temple area. My telegram informing the office of the queen that we were packing it up and returning to Phnom Penh was rejected outright. Instead, the queen cabled back to hold us in Siem Riep to allow a Boung Suong — a special Cambodian prayer — to be performed to stop the rains. We immediately had 12 days of perfect weather!
The queen frequently expressed her concern that the end of the Cambodian Ballet was very near, and she wanted this recorded before it was all over. When we finished the very rough editing copy, the queen would not wait a month or so for the final clean print. She insisted on a showing at the palace for high-ranking members of the Cambodian government and the diplomatic colony. She was tearful through the whole film – 1 hour and 20 minutes.”
Although we were unable to track down Royal Wedding, our office made copies of the other two films for Embassy Phnom Penh as well as for David Chandler. The embassy presented the films to Sihanouk, who had re-assumed the title of king in 1993; although he had received copies in the 1960s, all were lost in the Khmer Rouge era.
The Legacy of USIA Films
Today, the National Archives is digitizing a number of USIA films, which are proving invaluable to researchers. According to an article in The Journal of e-Media Studies, “The United States Information Agency (USIA) worked in over 150 nations and sixty languages, employed thousands of multinational artists and administrators, and at its peak reached nearly one fifth of the world’s population annually. However, its history rarely registers within our accounts of the Cold War. Tasked with “telling America’s story” throughout the world, USIA created, circulated, and curated several media through a robust bureaucratic and technological infrastructure. Among these media, motion pictures served as one of the agency’s most prolific, expensive, and (according to some) effective outlets. Between 1953 and 1999, USIA produced or distributed approximately twenty thousand moving image titles throughout the world. “
Beatrice Camp‘s 32-year career as a foreign service officer was evenly split between the U.S. Information Agency and the U.S. Department of State, with assignments in Beijing, Bangkok, Stockholm, Budapest, Chiang Mai, Shanghai, and Washington, DC.