Phantoms of Nabua is a film by Apitchapong Weerasethakul, a filmmaker and artist from nothern Thailand. This short film recently showed at Tokyo’s Scai the Bathhouse and i wrote a review of it for Art Review (HERE). I thought the film was a very strong work, casually mesmerising because of it’s use of simple symbols and actions – boys playing soccer with a ball on fire. I watched it on repeat in the gallery for over an hour. It has now travelled to BFI in London. You can see the film itself (which premiered online last year) HERE.

I said:

“With Weerasethakul, everything begins as a story. The Primitive series draws on his own memories: a firefly entering a room, his father’s death, a dead brother’s immolated body and a subsequent search for his reincarnated form (the identifying sign: a small black mark behind the ear). This tale is told in the opening pages of the artist’s book Cujo, also on show. If these memories invite quick, easily shelved (and forgotten) explanations via labels like ‘Buddhism’, ‘rebirth’ and ‘Eastern philosophy’, the work itself absorbs and transcends such categorisations, presenting elemental images and abstracted actions that echo Eastern mysticism but are really adjuncts to Weerasethakul’s personal and intuitive symbology.”

Many people are writing about Apitchapong now thanks to his recent win of the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the showing of ‘Phantoms of Nabua’ at the BFI. But the most interesting and astute words i have read about the Thai filmmaker were written by David Teh, a researcher and writer on Thai film and video art. Much of my review was influenced by an email interview with David. The following excerpt is from a paper he wrote while at the National University of Singapore “A moving image that can remember its past lives…” By David Teh (National University of Singapore).

He said:

…The cinéphile commentary on Apichatpong has left many stones unturned. There’s a lot of what [Walter] Benjamin called “histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious”; not much “profane illumination”. The worst gap, though, is an almost complete failure to contextualise these films that tell us, however undidactically, so very much about the people that are at their centre. Let me outline three characteristics of what I’m calling an ‘animate’ cinema – permeability, itinerancy and historicity. … I’ll confine myself today to the question of historicity, by way of a rough pre-history of cinema in Thailand – to which Apichatpong is more alert than most artists – but which should serve to introduce all three points…

…Part of the appeal of Apichatpong’s work in the west lies in its demonstration of the sheer permeability of the cinema – as against the sealed production spaces of industrial filmmaking – yielding a radical candour that can’t be reduced to the use of non- professional actors or the lack of scripts. Permeability traces many vectors:
- it’s architectural;
- it’s in the lighting;
- it’s textual (the texts are permeable to other texts;
- But most permeable of all are the people: the porosity between cast and crew; overlapping from one project to another. These collaborators are multi-channel mediums not just for storytelling, but also channeling other people, a spiritual permeability.
- and finally, the animation of the inanimate world, its transmissions, while rendered more subtly than our ghost festival, perhaps no less promiscuous…

… Apichatpong’s works are always studies of/in media, a reflexivity not lost on his early interpreters. This has lent confidence to auteurist accounts, allowing anchorage to canonical moments in art-cinema history, a dish then garnished with that je ne sais quoi, the surplus that exceeds the conventions of Euro-American film aesthetics and makes Apichatpong Apichatpong, cultural-exotic, Buddhist-transcendent, and so on. The problem is that this movement from formal (and international) base to aesthetic (and local) superstructure tends to confine the matter of a reflexivity about media to the medium of film, overlooking the many other media – and media genealogies – that inform his filmmaking. These would include (in the spirit of our ‘expanded’ mediumship): visual art (as distinct from film), sound and architecture; the ‘old’ broadcast media: TV, and radio in particular – its formats, its voice, so central to the imagining of national community in what is still a largely oral polity. He also taps the older oral and performance traditions – ghost stories (Haunted Houses), the Likay folk opera (Dogfahr) – whose memes have found such traction in electronic media.”