APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL
The Artist and the Filmmaker
(From March the 5th to April the 2nd, 2022)
By Menene Gras Balaguer
Within the framework of the exhibition project that Fabra i Coats: Centre d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona presents of the artist, under the name Perifèria de la Nit, Casa Asia organizes a program with the 27 short films that Apichatpong Weerasethakul considers to be most relevant among the works he has made with this format. The proposal that came to us in four programs and will be screened every Saturday in March is one of the indispensable proposals, because it completes the exhibition that Joana Hurtado brings to Barcelona, with an important selection of works by this key artist of experimental and independent cinema, most of them in the form of video installations. From the time we started talking about a possible collaboration on behalf of Casa Asia, we proposed the activity that we have maintained until now, despite the obstacles that we have finally managed to overcome, certainly alien to all parties, but that inevitably occur when it comes to projection formats, subtitles and other details to be taken into account with a project of such characteristics as the one we wanted to propose.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul was born in Bangkok in 1970, but lived in Khon Kaen, in northeastern Thailand, until he started university. In 1993, he made his first short film, followed by a few more until he made his first feature film in 2000. Since being awarded in 2010 with the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Critics’ Prize at the Sitges Fantastic Film Festival for his film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives, the filmmaker and the artist has not ceased to dialogue in the persona of Apichatpong. That same year, 2010, he also received the Asian Art Award in Seoul, where he exhibited a large installation on this occasion. It was there that I met him and I was surprised that he had not yet been awarded in Cannes but at that time he was considered the best Asian artist and nobody knew that he would continue collecting awards that same year. Since then to this day, the ephemeral meetings in festivals where he presented his new works have been happening. Over time he has become an unquestionable figure, whose style we have come across in different parts of the world. When he received the Prince Claus Award in Amsterdam, I was a part of the group that participated in proposing the candidates for the awards, and in that very edition, we met again at the award ceremony where he spoke of his private life and his work as if it were a character in one of his films, arguing that the two were inseparable.
An architect by training, when he finished his studies in Thailand, he travelled to Chicago to enroll in the Master of Fine Arts program at the School of the Arts Institute. In the artist’s career, there are stages before and after 2010, in which successes have followed success, and where one can find the precedents of all the works he has done, and the numerous collective projects in which he has collaborated, along with the reception they have had respectively. Luminous People (2007) is one such work filmed on a Super 8, which he made under the commissioning of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation of Portugal to commemorate its fiftieth anniversary; and Mobile Men (2008) is his contribution to the film History of Human Rights to commemorate the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both shorts are part of the four programs we now present. The career of this prolific artist and filmmaker recognized worldwide for his continuous contributions begins with Blissfully Yours (2002), with the Un Certain Regard Prize at Cannes, and his work becomes a kind of trending topic starting with A Tropical Malady (2004), which won the Jury Prize at Cannes as well, followed by Cemetery of Splendour (2015) and Memoria (2021), winning the Jury Prize at the same festival. It is not surprising that his first feature film, Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), has become a precedent whose rescue was urgent and has been taken on by the Film Foundation presided by Martin Scorsese and the Austrian Film Museum, which have committed to its restoration.
It is not a question of mentioning here all his feature films or all the awards he has received in different parts of the world over the course of the last two decades, because those mentioned here are sufficiently representative of his entire career. The twenty-seven short films presented here were produced between 1997 and 2020, although his first work in this format, Bullet, is from 1993, a title without sound where the artist immerses himself in the contemplation of the relationship between light and time. Somehow his short films are linked to all his poetics, to all the characters of the dreamlike worlds he has created and to the singular and personal atmosphere that characterizes him. Shot in Super 8, 16 mm, 35 mm, digital video or by cell phone, his productions are comparable to complementary writings that are perfectly integrated into the whole of his work as independent stories that are recognized as part of the same body of work.
The total length of the four programs amounts up to 380 minutes, with each story varying as much as its narrative. But his short films are inseparable from the process by which he creates sensitive representations of what we see, dream or remember, and therefore their discovery is essential to explore the aesthetic discourse that underlies everything he does. Autobiographical memory and visions without physical form, as well as myths and legends, constitute a starting point for their estrangement and for the multiple unfoldings that the images replicate. I believe that this anthology, also conceived as a retrospective of his short films, is a unique opportunity to approach the entire work of the artist and the filmmaker who actually coexist in that self that is their maker, far from thinking that they are residual works. On the contrary, they can be understood as small great works comparable to illuminations that always precede great ideas, with an extremely elaborated production, without this being explicitly stated.
For his strictly artistic practice, Apichatpong can be found in major international public and private collections, such as the Tate Modern or the Louis Vuitton Foundation. His installations and video installations have been seen at the Venice Biennale, the Documenta in Kassel and other international events where artists from all over the world gather. Through the company he created in 1999, Kick The Machine Films, he not only produces all his films, but is also dedicated to the promotion of independent and experimental cinema by supporting its authors. In 2010, Xcèntric presented at the CCCB a programme of ten short films under the title Mysterious Objects, in a single session, to show a production of the most experimental artist, whose discovery was essential to better understand a cinema that until then was barely known. Some of the titles that were presented such as Mobile Men, Ghosts of Asia, The Anthem and Vampire can be seen again in one of the four sessions that we present and that Apichatpong himself wanted to organize and reorganize. Respectively, in 2018, the Spain Moving Images festival presented four short films in the Retrospective is dedicated to the filmmaker at the CBA (Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid). They were A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, Ashes, Emerald and Ablaze, which are also collected in the selection we present on this occasion. We wanted to respect the order that he himself has established because far from being arbitrary, the public will be able to see the logic of the structure in which he has put together the twenty-seven chapters of this anthology, which can be considered as the most extensive that has been seen so far in our country.
For the artist and filmmaker, ghosts are a reality, and fantastic cinema is a very useful resource to question what we understand as real and reality, because often, according to him, we involuntarily trick ourselves when we want to convince ourselves that there is no other reality than the one we touch and see. He starts from the premise that what we understand by ghost is a double of what we believe to be real, and that this does not make it less real, but on the contrary. Memory in all ages of life is the source of all the indecipherable voices that speak inside all his characters, and opportunely become atmospheric or fluvial monologues that flood the images, even when they are silent. Apichatpong makes them coexist, both in his short and feature films, fantastic realism, dreams and personal memories, along with legends and myths of the local tradition, taking advantage of the tools provided by digital technologies. Cinema is always a trick, he says, that’s why I like special effects and time control. The short film Cactus River that is part of this program is a poem in black and white, where the artist demonstrates his ability to represent the tension between temporality and timelessness, as well as the limitless speeds of time through the moving image.
Curated by:
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Menene Gras Balaguer, Director of the Department of Culture and Exhibitions CASA ASIA & Director of the Asian Film Festival Barcelona | AFFBCN.
Coordinated by:
Rodrigo Escamilla Sandoval, Coordinator of the Department of Culture and Exhibitions CASA ASIA & General Coordinator of the Asian Film Festival Barcelona | AFFBCN.
Film Traffic Management:
Priyanka Ragji
Translation and Subtitling into Spanish:
Priyanka Ragji
Rafael Montón
Acknowledgments:
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Max Tersch, Partner / Post-Supervisor of the White Light Studio.
Joana Hurtado, Director of the Fabra i Coats: Centre d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Programa general
Programme 1 | 104’15’’
Saturday, the 5th of March 2022 at 8pm
Programme 1A | 24’76’’
The Anthem | 2006 | 5’ Cinetracts | 2020 | 2’10’’
Footprints | 2014 | 5’50’’
Blue | 2018 | 12’16’’
Programme 1B | 79’39’’
La Punta | 2013 | 1’33’’ M Hotel | 2011 | 11’50’’
Emerald | 2007 | 11’
Mobile Men | 2008 | 3’15’’
Cactus River | 2012 | 10’09’’
Worldly Desires | 2005 | 42’32’’
Programme 2 | 100’49’’
Saturday, the 12th of March 2022 at 8pm
Trailer for Cindi | 2011 | 1’21’’
Ashes | 2012 | 20’28’’
Vampire | 2008 | 19’
Haunted Houses | 2001 | 60’
Programme 3| 84’99’’
Saturday, the 26th of March 2022 at 8pm
thirdworld | 1997 | 16’38’’
Empire | 2010 | 2’
My Mother’s Garden | 2007 | 6’42’’
Ghost of Asia | 2005 | 9’11’’
Monsoon | 2011| 3’11’’
Luminous People | 2007 | 15’
Nimit |2007| 15’57’’
A Letter to Uncle Boonmee | 2009 | 17’40’’
Programme 4 | 90’04’’
Saturday, the 2nd of April 2022 at 8pm
This and a Million More Lights | 2003 | 1’
Malee and the Boy | 1999 | 26’45’’
Nokia Short | 2003| 2’
Ablaze | 2016 | 4’46’’
Mekong Hotel | 2012 | 56’13’’
Total: 27 Shorts | 379’67’’
The four programs that make up this Retrospective will be screened at CINEMES GIRONA (C/Girona, 175, 08037, Barcelona) from March, the 5th to 26th, 2022.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Shorts Retrospective
1997-2020
Programme 1 | 104’15’’
Programme 1A
The Anthem | 2006 | 5’
In Thailand, before each film screening, there will be a Royal Anthem before the feature presentation. The purpose is to honor the King. It is one of the rituals that imbedded in the society before certain events to give a blessing to something or someone. The Anthem is part of Artist Cinemas, commissioned by the Frieze Art Fair, UK. It is a film that praises and blesses the theater and the approaching feature for each screening. (VOSE).
Cinetracts | 2020 | 2’10’’
Each filmmaker created a work in response to the turbulent sociopolitical climate of 2020, a reflection on or reaction to the zeitgeist as the artist perceived and defined it. As with the original Cinetracts project, participating filmmakers worked within a set of guidelines that included a running time of no more than two minutes, a schedule of one day to make the piece, and an explicit reference within the film to the date and geographic location. The completed project acts as dynamic index of places and a compelling record of our time and perhaps a provocation for what comes next. (No Dialogues).
Footprints | 2014 | 5’50’’
Weerasethakul’s contribution to an omnibus production exploring analogies between football and everyday life. The project was created by Mexican film director Daniel Gruener and originally broadcast during the 2014 FIFA World Cup. (No Dialogues).
Blue | 2018 | 12’16’’
A woman lies awake at night. Nearby, a set of scrolled theatre backdrops unrolls to reveal two alternate landscapes. Blue offers a deceptively simple, choreographed dance of scrolls and a portrait of feverish slumber between dream and reality. Filmed during 12 nights in the heart of a Thai forest. (No Dialogues).
Programme 1B
La Punta | 2013 | 1’33’’
A drive through the tropical rain. La Punta is part of «Future Reloaded», a collective cinematic tribute to the 70th edition of the Venice Film Festival 2013. (No Dialogues).
M Hotel | 2011 | 11’50’’
Two men are in the room 1702 of a hotel named M, which situated in the heart of Yau Ma Tei area. They are the film crew members who has visited Hong Kong for the first time. They spend their afternoon in the room doing souvenir portraits. Below in the park outside sits their team member with a microphone clipped onto his jacket. The man later leaves his bench and wanders around the area. (No Dialogues).
Emerald | 2007 | 11’
Dreams and memories reverberate in the dilapidated and abandoned Hotel Emerald in Bangkok, ghostly light reigns in the empty corridors. Its heyday came in the 1980s, when the economy developed rapidly and Cambodian refugees flocked to Bangkok. However, after the Asian financial crisis of 1997, dreams of a better future shattered. Weerasethakul lets three actors talk about their dreams, hometowns, sad moments and love stories to fill the Emerald with new memories. (VOSE).
Mobile Men | 2008 | 3’15’’
Two young men in a pickup truck are filming themselves. Belonging to different parts of the world, through the use of a camera they are discovering each other. In a windy atmosphere, they initially film each other with close ups on parts of their bodies, then, little by little, they shoot their full figures. As the camera lenses change, a landscape of rice fields and a cinema crew get into the frame. The camera then reshoots the road and the men, as if we were witnessing a film rehearsal. When the frame goes back to shoot one of the two main characters who has tattoos over his body, the man lifts his shirt up and tears off a wired microphone that is taped to his chest. He then pastes it on the tattoo and cries out from the top of his lungs. The microphone picks up the heavy wind noise and the camera moves to captures his face. He looks directly at the camera, smiling. (VOSE).
Cactus River | 2012 | 10’09’’
Cactus River is a diary of the time I visited the couple – of the various temperaments of the water and the wind. The flow of the two rivers – Nach and the Mekong, activates my memories of the place where I shot several films. Over many years, this woman whose name was once Jenjira has introduced me to this river, her life, its history, and to her belief about its imminent future. She is certain that soon there will be no water in the river due to the upstream constructions of dams in China and Laos. I noticed too, that Jenjira was no more. (No Dialogues).
Worldly Desires | 2005 | 42’32’’
A couple escaped their family to look for a spiritual tree in the jungle. There is a song at night, a song that spoke about an innocent idea of love and a quest for happiness. Worldly Desires is an experimental project where I invited a filmmaker friend, Pimpaka Towira, to shoot the love story by day and the song by night. The story, Deep Red Bloody Night, was written by my assistant who wanted to reprise a forbidden love story in a more romantic time in the past. I picked a pop song, Will I be Lucky? to convey a sense of guiltless freedom one feels when being hit by love. The video is a little simulation of manners, dedicated to the memories of filmmaking in the jungle during the year 2001-2005. (VOSE).
Programa 2 | 100’49’’
Trailer for Cindi | 2011 | 1’21’’
In the trailer for the fifth Cinema Digital Film Festival in Seoul, the border between curtain and screen blurs in a playful way. (No Dialogues).
Ashes | 2012 | 20’28’’
Weerasethakul filmed Ashes with a LomoKino, a then new, cheap and easy to use 35mm camera. The bumpy images look like a home video, the fast cuts differ from the slow, meditative images of many of his films. In terms of content, he contrasts rural, intimate everyday scenes with the darker sides of social reality in Thailand. (VOSE).
Vampire | 2008 | 19’
Nok Phii, a mythical bird, feeds on the blood of other animals. In stories it appears as an aggressive nocturnal predator, small, with huge eyes even attacking humans. When the inhabitants of a remote mountain village in northern Thailand reported in 2007 that they had spotted a Nok Phii couple, the film crew set off in search of this rare creature. The dreamlike journey takes them into the habitat of a bird that has never been captured by anyone and that may not even exist. (VOSE).
Haunted Houses | 2001 | 60’
Haunted Houses is one of the four works that Apichatpong deals with various forms of media addiction in the Thai cultural landscape. In this particular work, the narrative was directly scripted from two episodes of a popular Thai military television channel called Tong Prakaisad. The series mainly deals with love and the problems of the wealthy. The filmmaker then traveled to the villages near his home and asked villagers to participate by acting, according to the script. All 66 villagers from six villages participated resuming roles. The story was continuous, but the actors who played the characters were constantly changed as the filming location moved from one village to another. In their familiar surroundings, villagers in the northeast of Thailand re-enact two episodes of a Thai TV soap opera. While the story is told continuously, the actors change constantly as the locations shift from village to village. Thus, the contrast between the soap about love and the problems of the rich and the simple villages in the province becomes obvious. (VOSE).
Programa 3 | 84’99’’
thirdworld | 1997 | 16’38’’
Weerasethakul describes thirdworld as a «reconstructed documentary» since the whole sound was recorded without the knowledge of the protagonists. In a raw quality metaphorical and actual landscapes of the island Panyi in the south of Thailand are seen, combined with stories, dreams and fantasies of the inhabitants of the island. The title parodically alludes to the western term for Thailand and other «exotic» regions. Some footage in the film was taken from the material shot for Mysterious Object at Noon. (VOSE).
Empire | 2010 | 2’
Empire is a film about searching and finding. As the camera feels its way along the walls of a cave or grotto, we see a diver wearing a gleaming white helmet and a hand diving into the sand to pick up some shells, playfully sliding them through his fingers. The images are accompanied by a polyphonic roaring, hammering and rattling. Has the diver been looking for something and has someone else found it? (No Dialogues).
My Mother’s Garden | 2007 | 6’42’’
The film is an impression of a Jewelry collection by Victoire de Castellane. The pieces in the collection are inspired by various types of dangerous flowers and carnivorous plants. Each piece has a hidden mechanical movement. Most of the film’s image comprise of extreme close-up shots of the jewelries. The film is also a tribute to a garden of the filmmaker’s mother, with wild orchid’s roots, bugs and various organisms. (No Dialogues).
Ghost of Asia | 2005 | 9’11’’
Influenced by the 2004 tsunami, the filmmakers developed the character of a living ghost wandering along a rocky coast. On an island in Thailand, they invited local children to direct the film by directing the actor-spirit like a puppet. By projecting their ideas onto the half-real, half-invented ghost figure, the children’s fantasies gain substance, the actor becomes a projection of possibilities. (VOSE).
Monsoon | 2011 | 3’11’’
Monsoon is a video response to the earthquake and the tsunami which hit the Tohoku region of Japan on 11 March 2011. A man is Skyping to the other side of the world. He discovers a firefly and shows it to his partner. This video is a lullaby for a monsoon night, for a loved one far away, and for an empty field outside the window. (No Dialogues).
Luminous People | 2007 | 15’
Luminous People is a recreation of an event to commemorate the presence of the dead and the decayed memories of the living, of filmmaking. A group of people is in a boat traveling along Mekong River that stretches along the Thai-Laos border. They are running against the wind, anticipating a farewell. In the middle of the river, the lady head of the family casts the ashes off into the stream. The white dust merges with the muddy water. The boat makes a u-turn at the bridge that links two countries. The passengers are tired and start to drift off into their own world. The film disintegrates. The crew and the cast wander off in the river of simulation. The border links the worlds of the dead and of the living. The memory of an anonymous dead father lingers. The boat still moves on as the dusk arrives. Apichatpong and his crew traveled to Nong Khai, a small town near Mekong River, and recruited local villagers to participate in the project. For two days while on the boat, the crew and cast reconstructed a fake ceremony and find a narrative. Later, some of the crewmembers watched the footage and their conversations were recorded. During the process, one of them reprised a story of his dead father who came to visit him in his dream. Apichatpong asked him to sing for the film. (VOSE).
Nimit | 2007 | 15’57’’
On the occasion of the 80th birthday of the Thai king, Nimit was created within a series of nine films by different filmmakers. Starting from the constant presence of the image of the king in his childhood, Weerasethakul shows images from the everyday life of his family and thus builds a bridge to the goodness of the king. (VOSE).
A Letter to Uncle Boonmee | 2009 | 17’40’’
This short film is a personal letter describing my Nabua to Uncle Boonmee. The film is comprised of shots of the houses’ interiors in the evening. They are all deserted except one house with a group of young soldiers, played by some teens of Nabua. Two of them impersonate me by narrating the film. (VOSE).
Programa 4 | 90’04’’
This and a Million More Lights | 2003 | 1’
This and a Million More Lights is one of several one-minute artists’ videos made for the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s 46664: Give 1 Minute of Art to AIDS campaign. Among the contributing artists were A K Dolven, Alfredo Jaar, Berni Searle, Bill Viola, David Krippendorff, Matali Crasset, Matthew Barney, Santeri Tuori, Seydou Keita, Tere Recarens and William Kentridge. Premiered at the “46664” Concert, Cape Town, South Africa, 29 November 2003. A strobing fluorescent light inter-cuts scenes from an urban swimming pool; a young boy tempts the water. The work is one of the early experimental films by Apichatpong, produced while he attended the school of the Art Institute of Chicago. It is based on a long distance telephone conversation between the filmmaker and his mother in Khon Kaen. Apichatpong collaged his mother’s old photograph when she was young with the image from his apartment in Chicago. The appearance of his mother’s image not only recalls pieces of memories, but also conveys the artist’s strong yearnings for her. Hometown and foreign land, past and present, reality and memory, these are interlinked with each other through the superimposed images. Technically, four layers of B&W films were photographed frame-by-frame in an optical printing machine. The exposure setting of each frame was calculated to reflect the intensity of the voices, which were previously mapped on the magnetic audio film strip. This ‘sculpting’ process reflects the influence of Apichatpong’s architectural background and his immersion into structural filmmaking. (No Dialogues).
Malee and the Boy | 1999 | 26.45’
Originally called Malee and the Boy and His Microphone and a Hungry Satan, this is a collaborative project dealing with image/sound apparatus. The subject is a 10 year old boy who is in charge of the microphone. He roams to places around Bangkok to gather sounds for the video. The sound indicates the direction he headed during the filming and displays his point of interests. The filmmaker is in charge of the image, film roughly along at the boy’s locations. The narrative of the film, presented in texts, is taken from a Thai comic book available around the place of the filming. This faces and places documentation can be viewed as a one-afternoon diary of a day out in Bangkok. (VOSE).
Nokia Short | 2003 | 2’
Recorded with a Nokia mobile phone, the video plays with the imperfection, the inability, the random and the confusing. The short film doesn’t aim to produce a video by other means, but to explore a new area of the moving image, emphasizing the shortcomings of the mobile phone camera rather than concealing them. The images of a beach convey a light and cheerful atmosphere, the poor resolution and the filters used create a dream-like visual world in which the viewer loses himself. Nokia Short was financed by Nokia Thailand as an advertisement for its first phone with an integrated camera. (No Dialogues).
Ablaze | 2016 | 4.46’
A moving painting, brushed with black shadows on white. A man and a woman standing in the dark wood. They’re looking for something but the man blocks the woman’s vision. A mysterious blaze is burning bright, but she will not be able to see. (No Dialogues).
Mekong Hotel | 2012 | 56.13’
Mekong Hotel is a portrait of a hotel near the Mekong River in the north-east of Thailand. The river there marks the border between Thailand and Laos. The film shuffles different realms, fact and fiction, expressing the bonds between a vampirelike mother and her daughter, the young lovers and the river. Mekong Hotel – since it was shot at the time of the heavy flooding in Thailand – also weaves in layers of demolition, politics, and a drifting dream of the future. (VOSE).
