In recent years, filmmaker-artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul has distanced himself from Thailand. First he announced in 2015 that he would no longer make feature films in his homeland due to the climate of censorship under military rule (a coup d’état had taken place the previous year). Then he made his next movie in Colombia, a country he was initially drawn to on account of the qualities it shares with Thailand, among them its thick jungles, syncretic belief systems, and history of state repression.
This directorial gamble is now paying off: Memoria (2021), starring Tilda Swinton, won the Jury Prize at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and has been selected as Colombia’s nomination for best international feature at the 2022 Oscars. Meanwhile, it looks certain that his first film shot abroad, which is also his first in a foreign language (the dialogue is a blend of Spanish and English), and the first since The Adventure of Iron Pussy (2003) to star professional actors, will not be the last. ‘I’m in love with Latin America in general,’ he tells me. ‘Working in a country with a similar sociopolitical history has confirmed to me that Thailand is not so special.’ After years of feeling alienated due to the dire political situation, he now feels more at peace. ‘In the past I always felt I was in the wrong country because of the dictatorship and all this nonsense,’ he says, ‘but I now realize you can never find that utopian place.’
But Weerasethakul has not given up making art in Thailand altogether, as demonstrated by 'A Minor History', a two-part exhibition at Bangkok’s 100 Tonson Foundation. Part one revolves around A Minor History (2021), a three-channel video installation that dramatizes an unresolved case of abduction and murder in the country’s northeast, Isan: the region where Weerasethakul grew up and which has been a source of inspiration and site of production throughout his career. Through playful spoken word voiced by a young Isan poet, Weerasethakul invokes the story of two anti-government dissidents whose mutilated bodes were found floating in the Mekong River in December 2018. The blunt trauma of this brutal episode in Thai politics is evoked by the abrasive sound design, as well as the allusive lyricism of an emotionally charged yet humorous narrative about a man and his lover strolling along the banks of the Mekong. Over 17 minutes, the real yet taboo issue of extrajudicial killings in Thailand is poetically entwined with the myth of the naga, a semidivine serpent that, Weerasethakul hints, enjoys more credence in official narratives.
Delivered in the loose style of old Thai radio dramas and cinema dubbing, this dialogue joins three channels of elegiac footage captured on an Isan road trip that Weerasethakul took between lockdowns. On the two main screens, interior shots of a crumbling abandoned cinema in Kalasin province alternate with scrolling Thai and English text. A smaller vertical screen in the center of the gallery, nearer the viewer, blends hypnotic nocturnal images of the Mekong, a derelict hotel, and the neon lights that light up temple fairs. Unfurled at the back of the gallery is a painted backdrop of a royal palace interior, borrowed from a local mor lam theater troupe whose leader is himself a dissident. More than an archly political statement, the piece is also an elegy to Isan’s changing ecology: a psychogeographic essay documenting a litany of losses – cultural, architectural, natural, personal – in this fast-developing region.
In early October, Weerasethakul screened SILENCE at 100 Tonson Foundation for five days, concurrent with A Minor History: a 21-minute installation commemorating the 45th anniversary of the 6 October 1976 massacre, when leftist protestors – mostly students from Bangkok's Thammasat University – were shot by Thai police or lynched by right-wing paramilitaries. Blending old advertising footage and poetic text with black and white archive images of mutilated corpses, this visceral work further confirms that Weerasethakul is in a reflective mood when it comes to minor histories touching on Thai macropolitics. While part one of A Minor History surveys remnants of Isan’s recent past, part two will look forward, turning its attention to the region’s youth. The artist tells me that the student-led protest movement that has intermittently rocked Thailand’s political establishment and urban centers over the past year and a half has emboldened and energized him. ‘I’m activated by the students, the younger generation,’ he says.
This is not the first time Weerasethakul has returned home with a sense of renewed purpose. After initially training in architecture, he left Thailand in the mid-1990s to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he discovered avant-garde filmmakers such as Bruce Baillie and absorbed the works of Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Abbas Kiarostami, among many others. In the years after returning to Thailand he began making films that attempted to fuse the structural iconoclasm he had grown to admire with a personal and even nostalgic point of departure, namely Isan’s folk narratives and storytelling traditions.
His first feature, Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), deployed the Surrealists’ exquisite corpse method for a docu-fiction hybrid fueled by stories gathered during another road trip across rural Thailand. Shot on black and white 16mm film, it did something rare within Thai cinema: drew attention away from the capital, Bangkok, and toward the voices of those marginalized within the nation’s political and cultural landscape. Focused on a couple enjoying the earthly pleasures of a picnic, the melancholic follow-up, Blissfully Yours (2002), revealed a preoccupation with the Thai jungle that would be even more richly and ruminatively explored in Tropical Malady (2004): a shape-shifting diptych, equal parts love story and sylvan folk tale, that sealed his auteur status on the cineast world stage.
Over the next 11 years, he released two films set in hospitals. Syndromes and a Century (2006) – parts of which were deemed too controversial to be shown in Thailand by the country’s censors – and Cemetery of Splendor (2015), about a group of comatose soldiers suffering from a mysterious sleeping sickness. Both melded elements of his doctor parents’ lives with a fabulist sensibility that mines Buddhist and animist beliefs. However, it was with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) that his serene formalism, off-the-cuff dialogue, simmering political undercurrents, and shaman-like connection with Thailand’s spirit world earned him the Palme d’Or.
Like these Thailand-set films, Memoria is a mood piece, a floating world of feelings that transcends national borders and reverberates with a sense of geological deep time and human history. Its story, however, came from an unusual source. Typically, Weerasethakul coaxes elliptical narratives out of his non-professional actors, which are distilled during pre-production, shooting, and editing. But this time, a rare sleep disorder he has suffered in recent years, known as exploding head syndrome, led him and Swinton to invent the story of a Scottish orchidologist, Jessica, searching for the source of a strange sound she keeps hearing. ‘This sound guided me through Colombia,’ he says. A rumbling noise – brought to life by sound designer Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr – repeatedly interrupts Memoria’s otherwise tranquil veneer.
Throughout his career, Weerasethakul’s feature films have coexisted with other forms of art making, especially short films, video installations, photography, and books. This parallel trajectory – partly born of necessity (namely, the inherent difficulty of funding movies) and from his interest in abstract forms of expression – thematically complements his auteurship. Memoria is no different. 'Periphery of the Night', an exhibition of his work finishing soon at the Institut d’art contemporain in Lyon, France, has included two single-channel video works derived from images captured during the film’s production: Durmiente (2021) shows Swinton sleeping in a bedroom as the shadows grow longer, and Memoria, Boy at Sea (2017) comprises images of waves on a circular screen, over which aquatic landscapes and geometric shapes are superimposed. Future projects in Latin America will, he says, further explore his fascination with the science of consciousness and sleep.
Weerasethakul’s interest in testing and expanding the parameters and possibilities of traditional filmmaking can also be discerned in Memoria’s ambitious theatrical release plan, recently announced by US distributor Neon. The intention is to screen the film across the US one city and one cinema at a time. There will be no DVD release, nor will it be available on streaming platforms. ‘This way, the film is seen the way it’s supposed to be seen,’ he says. ‘After almost two years of not being able to sit together in the dark, it is so precious.’
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Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Still from Memoria, 2021. 2 and 3. Installation view of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's exhibition 'A Minor History', 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok, 2021. © 100 Tonson Foundation, 2021. Photo by Supatra Srithongkum and Sutiwat Kumpai. 4. Installation view of Durmiente (2021) and async-first light (2017) at Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s exhibition 'Periphery of the Night', Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne, 2021. Courtesy of Studio Hans Wilschut.