History & Cambodia : The Last Painter of Cambodia's Golden Age Cinema
- Editorial team
- Mar 2
- 4 min read
As a teenager, the self-taught artist Moeun Chhay earned the tidy sum of 900 riels per month painting advertising hoardings for Cambodian films shown in Battambang. Disappeared in 2018, the artist was probably the last living representative of this pre-Khmer Rouge craft.
Moeun Chhay's house is nestled against the Golden Temple Cinema on Street 2 in Battambang. The neighboring buildings had been repainted—Chhay's in blue and the cinema in a sickly yellow—to recreate the impression of a lively pre-Khmer Rouge town for the filming of Angelina Jolie's "First They Killed My Father."
For Chhay and his wife Choup Somaly, this transformation was surreal. They remembered this street from a time when the bustling scene wasn't a masquerade, and the Golden Temple wasn't a ruined building masked by a fresh coat of paint.
In the 1960s, in Battambang, cinema was Chhay's livelihood as a teenager. From the age of 16, he was part of a small group of artists employed in a singular activity: painting posters. It involved copying a film's "calling card" onto large canvases, which were then mounted on the cinema's facade.
From the late 1960s until 1975, he personalized those famous faces and fantastical ghouls that gazed down on the streets below—often the public's only clue as to what to expect from the films being shown.
Chhay was the only artist of his kind still alive in 2018.
"The other artists who made the posters were older than me. I'm the only one still alive," he said.
After the Khmer Rouge, only 30 of the roughly 400 films made during the Cambodian cinema "golden age" remained intact. And clues about the artworks that accompanied them are even rarer. At the end of a film's run at the cinema, Chhay would take his canvas to the river, wash off the powdery colors, and start over.
Among the younger generation, nostalgia for that era reached new heights after the 2011 release of Golden Slumbers, the film by Franco-Cambodian director Davy Chou about Cambodia's lost cinematic heritage.
For the 2013 Birds of Paradise exhibition, artist Kun Sotha and Preah Sorya Group cinephiles had also scoured all available archives to try to recreate the old posters. In the absence of nearly all the originals, they relied on Thai translations and recovered ticket stubs to reconstruct the style and atmosphere of the time.
Chou, the exhibition curator, felt there was "maybe something a little magical" in this quest. "I felt it was something to do to revive some memories," he said.
Chhay wasn't prone to the same nostalgia:
"I wasn't sad to wash the illustrations. It was normal to save money," he said. In fact, he didn't even particularly like watching films:
"When they handed out lobby cards in front of my school or house, I was only interested in the still images," he confided.
His story as an artist is one of remarkable perseverance. Chhay never studied art, but as a teenager, he hung around the men working at the cinema until he understood their craft.
It took two years before he was deemed talented enough to join the group, after which he earned 900 riels per month—a salary well above the average for his age group.
Cambodian films, with their flying pigs, medusa-haired women, and monsters, were a rich source of income and full of kitsch.
One of Chhay's best "tricks" was designing a poster for a low-budget film about a mother and baby ghosts. He made a severed arm that was attached to a rope inside the theater. When workers pulled it, it looked like the mother was rocking her pale child.
The horror film's poster became an attraction in its own right.
"Some people brought chairs and sat outside the cinema to watch the poster move," he recalled.
At that time, he learned music the same way he had learned to paint: by observing musicians and imitating them.
When Chhay spoke about his life, he gave the impression of a man for whom things seemed to go right even when they were going wrong. It was the bombings of the early 1970s that allowed him to meet Somaly, then a young cloth merchant from Phnom Penh.
A business trip to Battambang was extended because it was too dangerous to go home. She met Chhay there and married him.
Khmer Rouge
Then, during the Khmer Rouge period, his creative sense saved his life. When village spies spread a rumor that he was a pilot and should be killed, he explained to the commune chief that he was just a chapei player (traditional stringed instrument). The commune chief was delighted by this discovery.
Chhay spent the rest of the Democratic Kampuchea era as a musician, playing reworked traditional songs glorifying Angkar, and occasionally Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Serey Sothea numbers for high officials.
He confided that he had heard stories of artists gathered to "meet the king" who were then shot, and knew he had been lucky. But, he said, "not all Khmer Rouge were bad people."
In the 1980s, life continued apace. Chhay found a job at the Ministry of Fine Arts, which gave him the house next to the Golden Temple Cinema.
He returned to painting for a while, but work slowed, then dried up completely with the arrival of commercial printers in Battambang.
No matter, Chhay had already moved into the more lucrative business of music production. He created a successful production studio called Dararoth Music.
Despite all his talent, Chhay approached pop culture pragmatically. And Dararoth Music occupied surprisingly similar territory to Chhay's golden age, bridging art and mass consumption.
Despite all the retrospective prestige they enjoy, most Cambodian films of the 1960s were produced quickly and often almost interchangeably: "station novels" made on small budgets, but full of charm and kitsch...
Vandy Muong and Harriet Fitch Little with our partner The Phnom Penh Post