Itinerant Cinema
2011; Routledge; Volume: 25; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09528822.2011.608973
ISSN1475-5297
Autores Tópico(s)Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies
ResumoAbstract Commentary on Apichatpong Weerasethakul's work to date leaves much to be desired. At best, it affords a survey of his feature filmography in terms of Western art cinema aesthetics, and sometimes of a ‘New Asian Cinema’; at worst, it descends into exoticism. Despite his experimental leanings, and constant appearance in galleries and biennials, engagements from the side of contemporary art have done little to deepen the ahistorical contemplation of his work. This article seeks to contextualise Apichatpong's practice with reference to Thai political and cultural histories, as well as some touchstones in Western modernism. Taking as a starting point his first feature-length film (Mysterious Object at Noon, 2000), the author begins by establishing an ethno-political background for his practice, and follows this with two detours: the first, art historical, explores Apichatpong's putative alignment with a certain Surrealism; the second is psycho-geographic, and brings into relief a poetics of itinerancy in his work. At issue is the question of the moving image's amplitude as a social historical channel; and of what critical purchase an ‘itinerant cinema’ may have on Thailand's fractious political present. Keywords: Apichatpong WeerasethakulThailandSurrealismMysterious Object at NoonDogfahrSang SattawatphumibunIsaanLas HurdesApinan Poshyananda Notes 1. Montri Umavijani, Sunthorn Phu: An Anthology, Office of the National Culture Commission, Bangkok, 1990, p 68 2. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, in Illuminations, Harry Zohn, trans, Fontana, London, 1992, p 86 (emphasis added) 3. Lively discussions take place on web-boards and social networking sites. Some more considered writing appears on blogs such as Filmsick, http://filmsick.exteen.com/ and Twilight Virus, http://twilightvirus.blogspot.com/; and in Sonthaya Subyen, ed, Unknown Forces: The Illuminated Art of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Filmvirus/Open Books, Bangkok, 2007 (all in Thai). Several articles and interviews from the Thai film magazine Bioscope are available in English translation on the excellent webzine Criticine: http://www.criticine.com/. 4. A recent edited volume exemplifies the impasse: historical (let alone art historical) contextualisation is scant in James Quandt, ed, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Synema/Austrian Film Museum, Vienna, 2009. 5. Primitive (2009) was a cross-media project exhibited online and in installation form at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville (Paris), FACT, Liverpool and Haus der Kunst, Munich. 6. Three artists of comparable international stature would be Rirkrit Tiravanija, Navin Rawanchaikul and Surasi Kusolwong. 7. Interview with the artist, 14 February 2010, hereafter simply ‘interview’. 8. Apichatpong says the idea of adapting this technique to film was deliberate and immediate (interview). 9. While his characterisation of Dogfahr is sound, Quandt overstates Apichatpong's reservations about documentary, asserting that he ‘quite utterly [rejects] the very notion’. The artist's statements on the matter are more qualified. He rejects documentary's claim to truth, but clearly not its aesthetic. Whatever his reservations, Dogfahr was both proposed and marketed as ‘a documentary’, and won second prize at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (2001). James Quandt, ‘Resistant to Bliss: Describing Apichatpong’, in Quandt, op cit, p 35. 10. Ibid, pp 31–42 and 132–142, respectively. For a more searching treatment, see Matthew P Ferrari, ‘Mysterious Objects of Knowledge’, MA thesis, College of Fine Arts, Ohio University, 2006. 11. John Clark, Modern Asian Art, Craftsman/G + B Arts, Sydney, 1998, pp 84–85 12. Corrado Feroci (1892–1962), known to the Thais as Silpa Bhirasri, founder of the first academic art school in 1933, which became Silpakorn University in 1941. 13. Field Marshal Plaek Phibulsongkram (1897–1964), military leader and Prime Minister (1938–1944 and 1948–1957). Thongchai may be right to recuperate Plaek's republican credentials, versus the monarchic revival narrative that has highlighted his fascist tendencies. But the aesthetic leaning of the public art he patronised, still conspicuous in Thai cities today, speaks for itself. Thongchai Winichakul, ‘Toppling Democracy’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, vol 38, no 1, February 2008, 11–37. See also Apinan Poshyananda, Modern Art in Thailand, Oxford University Press, Singapore, 1992, p 46. 14. Jit Phumisak, alias Somchai Preechacharoen (1930–1966). See Apinan, op cit, p 160. This reproach had a strong basis in literary criticism. As president of the Association of Literature, Phibun himself bolstered the primacy of the classical chan metre – a sophisticated verse form associated with elite learning – thus privileging the written over the spoken, and prestige over popularity. See Manas Chitakasem, ‘Poetic Conventions and Modern Thai Poetry’, in Manas Chitakasem and Andrew Turton, eds, Thai Constructions of Knowledge, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 1991, pp 43–46. 15. May Adadol Ingawanij, ‘Transistor and Temporality: The Rural as Modern Thai Cinema's Pastoral’, in Catherine Fowler and Gillian Helfield, eds, Representing the Rural: Space, Place and Identity in Films about the Land, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 2006, pp 80–97 16. The northern city of Chiang Mai, where Apichatpong now lives, has long been a major node of this activity. The Chiang Mai Social Installation, for example, was a key breeding ground for experimental art in the early 1990s. Chiang Mai also hosts the famed eco-Buddhist art initiative The Land Foundation. Apichatpong's practice is only tangential to this scene, but by no means alien to it. Mindful of Thailand's privileged place on a certain artworld circuit, Quandt rejects the association with ‘relational aesthetics’, as championed by Nicholas Bourriaud and exemplified by the likes of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Philippe Parreno. Apichatpong did in fact collaborate with the latter, at The Land Foundation in 2003, though Quandt seems to be unaware of this. See Johnny Ray Huston, ‘Weerasethakul Talks Hospitals, Aerobics, and a Boy from Mars, SF360, 9 April 2007. http://www.sf360.org/?pageid=7793 17. For a nuanced account of the controversy, see Benedict Anderson, ‘The Strange Story of a Strange Beast’, in May Adadol Ingawanij and Benjamin McKay, eds, Cinema in Southeast Asia Today, South East Asia Program, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, forthcoming. 18. Chulalongkorn was the fifth king of the present Chakkri dynasty. See generally Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation, Silkworm Books, Chiang Mai, 1995. 19. Charles F Keyes, Isan: Regionalism in Northeastern Thailand, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 1967, p 283. Keyes traces this rebel archetype back as far as the late seventeenth century. See also Yoneo Ishii, Sangha, State, and Society: Thai Buddhism in History, Peter Hawkes, trans, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1986, pp 171–185 20. This loose arrangement applied not only to the north-east: historian Craig Reynolds points out that even parts of the central flood plain around Bangkok were but ‘lightly governed’ at the time. ‘[P]olitical realities in 1900 forced the central government to out-source government to local leaders of all stripes.’ Craig J Reynolds, ‘Review of Peerasak’, New Mandala, 12 March, 2010, http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2010/03/12/review-of-peerasak/. See also James C Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2009, pp 20–21. 21. Charles F Keyes, ‘Millennialism, Theravada Buddhism, and Thai Society’, Journal of Asian Studies, February 1977, vol 36, issue 2, p 283. Ishii (op cit, pp 182 and ff) highlights the millenarian foundations in old, apocryphal byways of Buddhist doctrine, noting that at these moments of crisis Theravada thought seems to play an untypically disintegrative role in the development of national community. 22. From the 1960s to the 1980s, income disparity between Isaan people and their lowland compatriots grew drastically. Despite an economic boom in the 1980s, the World Bank found more Isaan people below the poverty line at the close of that decade than at its beginning. See Peter Rogers, Northeast Thailand: From Prehistoric to Modern Times, DK Bookhouse, Bangkok, 1996, pp 220–223. 23. Keyes, Isan: Regionalism in Northeastern Thailand, op cit, p 55 24. Karen Newman, ‘A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives: Installations by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’, in Quandt, op cit, pp 143–152 25. Exemplary of the ironic-critical trend are Vasan Sitthiket, Manit Sriwanichpoom and Sutee Kunavichayanont. 26. Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, in The Return of the Real, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996, pp 171–203. ‘Just as the proletkult author according to Benjamin sought to stand in the reality of the proletariat, only in part to sit in the place of the patron, so the ethnographic artist may collaborate with a sited community, only to have his work redirected to other ends. Often artist and community are linked through an identitarian reduction of both, the apparent authenticity of the one invoked to guarantee that of the other’; p 198. 27. Quandt, op cit, p 35. In a recent discussion about Dogfahr's marginal subjects, it was suggested that the documentary agenda lay in presenting counter-images to the national tourism authority's ‘Amazing Thailand’ campaign, in full swing at that time. The artist expressly refutes this, countering that the sense of discovery during his dérive made him feel he was a tourist himself (interview). I will suggest below that this sense of journeying is essential to his practice. 28. See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1988. On anthropological film, see David MacDougall, ‘Visual Anthropology and the Ways of Knowing…’, in Transcultural Cinema, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998, pp 61–91. 29. Catherine Russell, ‘Surrealist Ethnography: Las Hurdes and the Documentary Unconscious’, in Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, eds, F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth's Undoing, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2006 30. Clifford, op cit, pp 25–28; Russell, op cit, p 99 31. Ibid, p 105. See also James F Lastra, ‘Why is this Absurd Picture Here? Ethnology/Heterology/Buñuel’, in Ivone Margulies, ed, Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina and London, 2003, pp 194–195. 32. See Russell, p 107. 33. One influential account of this patchwork characterises it as ‘post-developmentalist’. Aihwa Ong, ‘Graduated Sovereignty’, in Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina and London, 2006 34. Foster, op cit, p 173 35. Apinan, op cit, p 164 36. Ingawanij, op cit. The monarchy, meanwhile, has had more success articulating a place for the farmer in its cinematic utopia. See David Teh, ‘The Art of Interruption: Notes on the 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol 25, no 7–8, pp 309–320 (2008) 37. Apinan, op cit, pp 141–142 38. Georges Bataille, ‘The Moral Meaning of Sociology’, in The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, Michael Richardson, trans, Verso, London and New York, 1994, p 105 39. Translation from Montri, op cit, p 67 40. Craig J Reynolds, Seditious Histories: Contesting Thai and Southeast Asian Pasts, University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 2006 41. Ibid, p 86. On the origins of the nirat, see Manas, op cit; and Nidhi Eoseewong, Pen and Sail: Literature and History in Early Bangkok, Chris Baker et al, trans, Silkworm Books, Chiang Mai, 1984, pp 114–146. 42. Nidhi, op cit, p 134, notes that in earlier nirat the actual experience of travel is ‘not considered worthy of description’, and it is sometimes not even clear where the author is going. 43. Klaus Wenk, Thai Literature: An Introduction, Erich W Reinhold, trans, White Lotus, Bangkok, 1995, pp 35–36. Jit described this as a movement from ‘subjective romanticism’ to ‘naturalism’ and ‘realism’. See Reynolds, op cit, p 88. 44. Reynolds, ‘A Seditious Poem and its History’, in Seditious Histories, op cit, pp 80–121 45. Ibid, p 87. In Thai, ‘to miss’ (kit theung) is the same phrase as the less sentimental ‘to think of’. The word theung exemplifies the Thai sense of distancing, which is irreducible to either the temporal or the spatial: meaning ‘to arrive at’ or ‘to reach’, its span may be temporal, spatial or conceptual. 46. A full typology of the nirat artist will require an essay of its own. Most conspicuous is Navin Rawanchaikul, a Thai of Indian descent from Chiang Mai, working globally and based partly in Japan. His celebrated ‘taxi museum’ projects (1999–2006) had an extensive, international itinerary, as did Fly With Me to Another World (1999–2009). The latter retells the 1960s European motorcycle odyssey of artist Inson Wongsam, through an itinerant programme of installations, conferences, comics and other publications. Of today's emerging artists, two are exemplary of the nirat tendency. Arin Rungjang's collection of neon tubes from art spaces in Thailand and abroad (Neons from Art Spaces, 2006) may be read as a minimalist nirat; he is the most literary (and epistolary) of the younger generation, and frequently cites Sunthorn Phu as a major inspiration. Pratchaya Phinthong's first installation upon returning (again, overland) from studies in Germany (Missing Objects, 2004) documented this journey by way of collected objects and a written memoir; and his ongoing Dong-na project (with Pattara Chanruechachai, started in 2005) emerged from a journey into the most remote reaches of Isaan, to a village that had been omitted from official Thai maps. Of these four artists, only one (Arin) is from Bangkok. 47. Visual anthropologist Rosalind Morris notes that transportation and ethnographic inscription were ‘mutually entailed’ from the moment a premodern sense of distance began to collapse, with the construction of railways in the 1890s. Rosalind C Morris, In the Place of Origins: Modernity and its Mediums in Northern Thailand, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina and London, 2000, p 209. 48. Clark, op cit, pp 85–86. Ishii, op cit, shows that religious itinerancy has been inhibited by the Thammayudt sect, founded in the fourth reign and ascendant in national religious affairs ever since. It perhaps resurfaces (as farce?) in today's domestic cultural tourism, eg around sites like Chalermchai Kositpipat's famous White Temple (Wat Rong Khun) in Chiang Rai; and in the ‘socially engaged’ Buddhism that informed the practice of Montien Boonma, laying fertile ground for today's ‘relational’ practices. 49. Benjamin, op cit, pp 84–85 50. Morris, op cit, is the best guide to this transition in which a communicative field was transformed – disarticulated, as much as reconfigured – by the spread of new media, and to how early modern literature reflects it. 51. Benjamin, op cit, p 89 52. Ibid, p 95
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