Issue 8: Winter 2011
Haunting: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Phillina Sun
The word 'haunt', in its etymology, mingles several senses - routine, home, the supernatural. Its earliest origins are probably Proto-Germanic, from haimaitjanen, 'to house, bring home'. For the nomads of ancient Europe, home was the place to which one returned, or frequented. The Gothic haimatjan, 'to lead home', became Old French hanter, which, by the thirteenth century, came to mean, through the Middle English haunten, 'to reside, inhabit, use, frequent, resort to'. Only in the nineteenth century did the word acquire its metaphysical sense: 'to make uneasy, so as to haunt one's thoughts or memory'. This intermingling of home, habit/practice, and the extramundane finds its visual embodiment in the oeuvre of Thai artist and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
I first encountered Apichatpong's work at his first solo London exhibition at the BFI Gallery in May 2010. In a dark room, viewers sat on big pillows piled on the floor as a short video, Phantoms of Nabua (2009) (1), played. Nabua is located in northeast Thailand, the site of Apichatpong's youth and of anti-Communist military operations from the 1960s to the 1980s. As a cipher for home, Nabua recurs in Apichatpong's work, whose histories, memories, and textures are reconstituted cinematically and via multimedia installations.
In the video, trees bend and froth under a darkening sky. Lightning strikes grass. Thunder, more lightning leaps. Then a break occurs - shadowy figures coalesce in front of what we finally apprehend as a screen, a projection within a projection. Glowing embers trail after the young men of Nabua, as they kick a football that has been set aflame. We sense a disaster about to happen, and it does: the football hits the screen, which ignites and burns, consumed by flames. Through a gap created by the flames, a spot of light shines, the light of a projector, here a steady mechanical consciousness beaming what is now past, history as ever in tension with the living.
The experience of history as the absence of others is the locus for the short film Letter to Uncle Boonmee (2009) (2). The camera slowly moves around the interior of a sparsely furnished house and looks through its windows at an empty village and the forest that surrounds it, as a letter is read off-camera by a man, then repeated twice by other men. Soldiers strike the earth, for some unknown and disconcerting reason, as the letter tells us that the military once occupied this place, killing villagers and forcing others to flee. Framed photos of people acquire significance, of a significant absence, as we are confronted with the dissonance of looking. Only in hindsight do we understand what we're seeing. Apichatpong structures his sequences so that the viewer experiences the past and present as intertwined. In one shot, the image of a rooftop in the village appears, followed by a shot of a soldier in repose on the floor, seemingly gazing at it, but quite possibly not. The next shot is of a pink canopied mat on the floor, which is a prop in the full-length film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010).
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)
In that film, the eponymous character, dying of kidney disease, recalls his past lives. Here, memory functions to reincarnate people. His son returns as a monkey ghost, with dark fur and scarlet eyes. Huay, his dead wife, comes to dinner as a ghost. Although surprised, the living easily accept the presence of these spirits. It is a gentle haunting, a homecoming of sorts. Memory resurfaces as matter, with a visual presence that is acknowledged and respected. "So it's like a sketch about memory," Apichatpong has said about this work. "I wanted to make a film that had aspects of memories of previous lives. I wanted to make the film itself a kind of time machine." (3) This image of the time machine recurs elsewhere in his work. For the Primitive (4) project, teenagers from Nabua construct a time machine. In Letter to Uncle Boonmee, a mysterious pod-like construction smokes among the trees.
Indeed, time is the matter of Apichatpong's work. Or, rather, matter is time: time after time, time atop time, simultaneously composing, composition, decomposing, compost, in a state of ever-changing, where centuries seep into each other. The organicity of time for Apichatpong is best understood by looking at how nature functions in his work. When Uncle Boonmee, his sister-in-law and a nephew descend into a cave at the end of his life, it is represented as a journey into a different time, time as unfathomable, full of mysterious accumulations and absorbingly private beauties. For Apichatpong, this film addresses alienation from nature and the fear of what we used to know - 'going back to origins', even if returning means encountering spectral traces.
The time of cinema is not natural time, even as it creates an illusion of linear and apparent time. The artificiality of cinematic time is suggested by a sequence of still images or photographs which show a group of teenagers in t-shirts and jeans, walking through the jungle in military uniforms, or posing with a man in a monkey ghost costume. These are souvenirs, Apichatpong says, from his time researching and filming in Nabua. They constitute a returning to home that is also a haunting, as in habit or practice, as he re-uses images, characters, and themes which in turn haunt Apichatpong's audience, as experience by proxy.
A Letter To Uncle Boonmee (2009)
The time machine itself is an apparatus for haunting, this time by the future. Uncle Boonmee recounts a dream of a future in which he arrived by way of a time machine. 'An authority capable of making anybody disappear ruled the future city. When the authorities found ‘past people', they shined a light at them. The light projected images from their past onto a screen until their arrival in the future. Once these images appeared, these ‘past people' disappeared.' In this vision of an authoritarian future, history in the form of matter, in the flesh of the past, is made to disappear. The 'who can recall' of the film's title obliquely refers to the political dimension of memory. With its sinister authorities and 'disappeared', the politics of the dreamt-of future is continous with those of the contemporary past.
True to haunting in all its senses, a gentle and persistent ecology underlies Apichatpong's oeuvre, in the way themes and figures recur, suggesting an inherent connectivity between all things, times, and places. Out of necessity, Apichatpong's cinematic narratives are open-ended, meditative rather than expository; unsurprisingly, reincarnation recurs as a theme or point-of-conversation, so as to suggest an open-endedness to the soul's future. Of Syndromes and a Century (2006), Apichatpong has said, 'Time is collapsed to mimic a pattern of remembering and to manifest my belief in the idea of reincarnation. We are constantly reborn, amassing our karma, and we learn from our successive lives in order to one day finally experience a true happiness.' The structure of Syndromes is two-fold - the first part recreates the relationship between Apichatpong's parents, both doctors, in a rural hospital, and the second part is a variation of those circumstances, this time in an urban hospital. The conceptual schema of linear time proposes that we leave the past further and further behind, while reincarnation as a theory is used by Apichitapong to stress endless variations of experience for any soul. The stories of Syndromes have no apparent conclusions, only intimations of possibility. Architecture emerges as the apparatus by which lives - amorous encounters, desires, wishes, dramas, deaths - are structured.
Haunting is explicit in three videos in the installation For Tomorrow For Tonight. A muddy boy haunts the nights of Jenjira, an older woman with one leg that is shorter than the other. He is at the same time mischievious, scolded, watchful. The actress is familiar - she appears in Syndromes and Uncle Boonmee as a permanently wounded or crippled woman, the steady intelligence throughout her different incarnations. She is a kind of stand-in for Apichatpong, returning to the same places as part of her practice, as actress, as character, haunted and even haunting.
Phillina Sun is a poet, reviewer and researcher. She is often seen watching birds along the waterways of Galway
E-mail: phillina.sun@gmail.com