Apichatpong Weerasethakul, edited by James Quandt (Vienna: Austrian Film Museum/Synema, 2009)
Reviewed by Dianne Daley

With four features – Mysterious Object at Noon, Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady, and Syndromes and a Century – since 2000; a collaboration with Michael Shaowanasai – The Adventure of Iron Pussy; another feature – Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives – on the way; and somewhere in the vicinity of 33 shorts and video installations, Thai filmmaker Apichatpong (also known as Joe) Weerasethakul shows no sign of running out of steam. Indeed, with his multi-platform Primitive project – a multi-screen video installation and two short films (one, Phantoms of Nabua, online) – showing in Europe and the UK in 2009, along with several retrospectives and publications, 2009 could well be dubbed "The Year of Apichatpong Weerasethakul," as Keith Griffiths (a director of London-based Illuminations Films, which has been involved in producing the Primitive project) has suggested.

On this wave of interest comes the first book in English about the filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, edited by prominent North American film critic and curator James Quandt. The book provides an excellent overview of Apichatpong's work from a number of angles. With over 200 illustrations and printed on matte paper, the book makes a strong, organic visual impact, starting with a pink cover that refers visually to the fact that the filmmaker is gay. The inclusion of Apichatpong's writings on film, politics, and ghosts, together with interviews conducted by Quandt, give the book the personal touch that is a hallmark of his films, which are passionate and perplexing. They appear to disregard conventions of cinema and slip easily through any film-theory nets.

"More than almost any other figure in contemporary world cinema," writes Quandt, "Apichatpong presents a phalanx of critical problems and unpickable contradictions, like Pasolini did in his day. Paradoxically, this difficulty both helps to elevate his stature to the international art house elite, and prevents him from entering its empyrean." As Quandt says, those accustomed to tracing the influence of Bresson in the films of Jia Zhang-ke, or Ozu in the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien, may be confounded by Apichatpong's debt to the indigenous. He exemplifies what the art world calls a "glocal," as his work draws on the international language of modernism while remaining rooted in his native culture. His debut feature, Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), provided a convenient hook for critics, who have often resorted to calling his films mysterious objects. Many claim that any attempt to analyze Apichatpong's work is misguided, even injurious. This sort of attitude, says Quandt, is a comfort for those baffled or bewildered by Apichatpong's work. "Despite their mystifications, his films demand close analysis; they turn out not to be apparitional, unknowable relics, but works of great deliberation and intricate design," he says.

Quandt describes Apichatpong as one of the great pop poets of road travel, with a fondness for traveling shots despite a reputation for having a static, long-take aesthetic. Apichatpong says: "I want to give the audience the freedom to fly or float, to just let their mind go here and there, to drift, like when we sit on a train ... It is liberating, and also the audience understands that they are not watching a routine, three-act narrative." In a similar vein, Apichatpong Weerasethakul transports the reader through the films, installations, and life of the filmmaker. The book is a collection of tales from a diverse range of good-humored, expert, and admiring writers, with the common purpose of presenting a picture of the evolving career and work of a most unusual artist and filmmaker.

As Alexander Horwath notes in the preface, Apichatpong and his films seem to bring out the best in people; the passion that abounds in Apichatpong's work appears to rub off on many fans and critics. "Coordinated swoon my pal," Tilda Swinton (cinephile, activist, and performer), signs her letter to Mark Cousins (author, filmmaker, and curator). Their letters, which engage in some free association about Apichatpong's work, start the book off in a light-hearted way that alerts the reader to expect the unexpected. According to Quandt, "There is no more generous vision in contemporary cinema… So rapturous is his desire to share everyday delight …that even the critic resistant to bliss finds himself yielding to nothing less than sheer, unaccountable joy." Where Quandt sees "intimations of violence" underlying the apparent calm and contentment in the latter part of Blissfully Yours (2002), Apichatpong says he was thinking about the fragility of Orn, Roong and Min – the three characters of the film – and about their happiness. The opening sequence of Tropical Malady (2004), with a group of reservists on patrol posing for photos with a corpse they've discovered, leads Quandt to recall photos taken by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, but Apichatpong's tone is playful.

Quandt offers detailed descriptions of the films, dealing with key motifs and themes such as hospitals and ailments (Apichatpong's parents were doctors), political subtext, tone, repetition, use of time and off-screen space. Ultimately, mystery remains, as illustrated in Quandt's analysis of Syndromes and a Century (2006): "Not surprisingly, despite the radiant clarity of the images, the film quickly proves enigmatic, the narrative given to often inexplicable disappearances, displacements, digressions."

Mysterious Object at Noon, shot on a journey through rural Thailand, was modeled on the French surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. The story is passed on from one narrator to the next and embellished. This film has frequently been called a documentary, a label Apichatpong rejects. "I don't believe in documentary as it is viewed formally. I don't believe in reality in film. For me there's no reality, because filmmaking is a very affected medium." Even what is called documentary is too subjective to represent the truth, according to Apichatpong. "So I think the films are just my expression of my life, but it doesn't necessarily mean truth, or a kind of assimilation of appreciation of being alive. But I wouldn't call it documentary," he says.

Quandt remarks on the paradox of a documentary realism in scenes such as the chopping of vegetables which are added to a weird skin cream in Blissfully Yours and an ice cutting sequence in Tropical Malady. "But this realism becomes surreal, almost dreamlike in its matter-of-factness," Quandt writes. As Apichatpong explains, "In Thailand, reality is that way. There is no sense of being strange or surreal. The architecture mixes everything, like Greek columns, with other styles, but no one sees it as unusual."

It's appropriate, or perhaps merely coincidental, that Apichatpong's essay "Ghosts in the Darkness" comes close to the center of the book. Apichatpong's predilection for halves is demonstrated in his features and receives ample commentary in the book: in Blissfully Yours the titles make a surprising appearance around the halfway mark; a lengthy cut to black divides Tropical Malady in two; and Syndromes and a Century has one half set in a hospital in the past and one half in the present. "Ghosts in the Darkness," originally published in Thai, works along similar lines to his films, interweaving earliest memories with happy experiences with cinema and details of cinematic influences. In reference to Thai directors Vichit Kounavudhi and Cherd Songsri, Apichatpong says, "Even when they filmed buffalo, they were beautiful. … you could smell the earth. … It was as if I was seeing the beauty of the jungle where I lived for the first time." Apichatpong calls cinema audiences ghosts – an idea that came from a story he heard of a man with a traveling cinema in rural Thailand. Once the man arrived late and set up in the dark. The audience arrived in the dark and sat silently watching the screen. Next day he discovered he was in a cemetery and had shown a film for ghosts.

The essay includes other tales: a visit to Taipei's Spot Cinema, an art house cinema run by well-known film director Hou Hsiao-hsien, whom Apichatpong calls "a god"; the story of a cave at Cat Ba Island, Halong Bay, Vietnam, where soldiers hid during the war. The cave housed a cinema. Somehow these disparate cameos are perfectly at home together, and there is the feeling of getting to know Apichatpong. He is the consummate storyteller, even though his films have no clear narrative. His note on the Primitive project begins: "There is a temple not far from my home named Sang Arun, meaning the Light of Dawn. As I write this text in Munich, I can imagine the trees, the wind, and the heat over there. Outside my hotel window, the snow is blowing hard in the frigid night. The image of this far away temple appears as I try to summarize the Primitive project. This temple was the place where a monk – who lived in an air-conditioned room – told me about ghosts."

Both internationally and locally, scholars and critics have struggled to find an appropriate way of discussing Apichatpong's work. Kong Rithdee provides insight into the impact of Apichatpong's international success and Western scholars' comparisons of him with past European masters. In Thailand, he says, this has led to concerns of being "high-minded" and "Western." (In Thailand, questioning the system generally is frowned upon and mostly is conducted by high-status academics and professionals engaging with international ideas.) Such criticism has resulted in much writing defending Apichatpong's honesty and authenticity. Benedict Anderson looks at why both Cannes viewers and rural Thais liked Tropical Malady, while many in Bangkok didn't, drawing on the findings of what he describes as an "amateurish research trip" to interview workers in video stores a short drive from Bangkok. For Tony Rayns, "Buddhist thought touches everything from the films' bipolar structures to their random operating procedures." However, in one of the many apparent contradictions of Apichatpong's work, there's no overt Buddhist content in his films. Rayns concludes with a reflection on the difficulty of writing about Apichatpong's films without relying on words of doubt, such as "seeming," "apparently," "enigma," or "opaque."

A detailed and illustrated annotated filmography, compiled by Simon Field (writer, lecturer, curator and a director of Illuminations Films) and Alexander Horwath (Austrian Film Museum director) brings in additional perspectives of experts from around the world, such as Jonathan Rosenbaum, Luis Miranda, Toshi Fujiwara, Andrea Viliani and Bert Rebhandl. 

There are a few flaws in the book. Quandt's description of Syndromes and a Century mistakenly describes the monk, Sakda, as desperately wanting to atone for having accidentally caused his brother's death at age eight and needing to believe the dentist, Ple, is his reincarnated sibling. In fact, it is the dentist who caused his own brother's death and asks if the monk is his brother reincarnated. Quandt says that the two exchange gifts, a horse for a CD; in fact, the dentist tries to give his brother's horse to the monk, who says he can't accept it, whereupon the dentist offers a CD. Describing Tropical Malady, Quandt places the tiger on a tree limb in upper right frame and the soldier in lower left frame. After several viewings and much rubbing of eyes, I've determined that the reverse seems to be the case.

The elimination of some stylistic inconsistencies would have helped avoid confusion. The treatment of film titles varies greatly, with a mix of styles reflecting the original publications of the contributions, rather than adopting a uniform style for this book. Sometimes the titles are given in English only, or Thai only; or English with Thai in brackets, or footnotes; or English and later Thai. As an editor's note explains, the use of a different transliteration in Benedict Anderson's essay means the spelling of Thai film titles and other words differs from other essays in the book and the filmography. Some illustrations have captions, others don't. The renowned monk Buddhadasa Bhikku is referred to as Bhikku (meaning monk), rather than the usual Buddhadasa. Wrinkles such as these surely will be addressed in the second edition.

Near the start of the book, Quandt raises the problem of where to place an extraordinary figure like Apichatpong in contemporary cinema. By the end, this question, along with others, remains. Those looking for definitive solutions or theories to apply to Apichatpong's work won't find them. Much remains mysterious and bewildering, like the "perplexing distant shot of a naked man" that Quandt refers to in his description of Tropical Malady. Which is not to say the book fails, but rather is an indication of what a challenge Apichatpong presents. Apichatpong Weerasethakul is sure to rouse hungry ghosts eager to embark on a journey of discovery.

Dianne Daley
© FIPRESCI 2010

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