Ghost World

One of the key factors still differentiating cultures is how people conceive of their ancestors. Are the dead gone for ever, surviving only in our memories? Are they still present in some other dimension, watching over us and influencing our lives? Or have they taken on a new identity and been reincarnated?

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s most recent film, Syndromes and a Century (2006), addresses just such issues. In one scene we see two men talking somewhere in rural Thailand. A singer and a monk, they don’t have much in common except for a vague physical resemblance, which the singer perceives in the features of the monk, and which leads him to wonder whether the monk might be his dead brother. The scene is of particular interest because it occurs at the midpoint of the film, at the moment when it is essentially split into two halves. For during the encounter between the singer and the monk the scenery changes, and Syndromes and a Century starts all over again. However, where the film originally opened with a shot of a male army physician being interviewed by a female doctor for a job at a country hospital, it is now the woman who is in the frame while the man’s replies are heard off-screen. It looks just like shot and counter-shot, yet the second half of Syndromes and a Century is not simply a mirror-image of the first. Rather, it seems to be a re-enactment, but in the updated context of an urbanized, technologically advanced country. So it would appear that there is not only a geographical hiatus between the two parts of the film but also a temporal one. As with all of his films, Weerasethakul leaves a lot of room for interpretation, but one possible reading is that the second part is somehow under the spell of the first. Or, to use a term that has figured prominently in his work, it is haunted by it.

At the 2001 Istanbul Biennial, Weerasethakul presented his Haunted Houses Project: Thailand, a one-hour video in which he asked people from villages near his home town of Khon Kaen to re-enact scenes from the popular Thai television series Tong Prakaisad. Ordinary people were thus able to play the roles of the characters whose fictional destiny they had followed with awe on the small screen. In his commentary on the project Weerasethakul spoke of ‘medium addiction’, undoubtedly employing the noun ‘medium’ in both its senses, for Thailand is a country in which people fervently believe in ghosts and in the existence of a world parallel to the everyday. It is precisely at this juncture between traditional ways of understanding the world and new ways of mediating it that the filmmaker positions his art.

Having started out making short films and video installations, Weerasethakul has since emerged as his country’s major art filmmaker, although he continues to show his work regularly in exhibition spaces. Like the other ‘tiger’ states of South-east Asia, Thailand belongs to the group of booming nations that have overcome the economic crisis of the late 1990s and are now a thriving part of the world economy for goods and financial services. Cinema is not least among these goods, and Thailand has successfully made its entrance into the system of global image circulation, mainly by producing highly competent action films. Weerasethakul’s realm is not the collective imaginary that is populated by super-heroes and first-rate fighters, however. He is more interested in everyday life and how it is ‘haunted’ by stories and fantasies from ‘beyond’. In today’s mediated societies the super-reality inevitably becomes intertwined with the broadcast unreality, and for Thais soap operas are a kind of second reality, populated by characters that seem almost to belong to their households like kin.

In his work Weerasethakul seeks to encourage ordinary members of the public to enter into the secondary reality of fictitious appearances – most significantly in a short video he did with sometime collaborator Christelle Lheureux after the 2004 Tsunami struck Thailand. Metonymically hinting at one of the main threads of interest in Weerasethakul’s film work, Ghost of Asia (2005) has kids from a remote island off the Thai coast direct a short film with an actor who was provided by the artists and who took the role of a ‘ghost’ wandering along the seashore. Normally one might imagine children would be afraid of a spectral presence of this kind, but under the direction of Weerasethakul and Lheureux they took the initiative and made him act out their own story.

This preoccupation with involving spectators in the production process is also evident in Weerasethakul’s first feature-length piece, Mysterious Object at Noon (2000). Part documentary, part fiction – and ultimately a documentary about fictionalization itself – the film tells the story of a disabled boy and his teacher, Dogfahr, through the many perspectives of the numerous people who take up the narrative thread. While the film may initially seem to be a parody of the radio soap operas that it references explicitly at the beginning, the random nature of these seemingly endless narratives endows it with the qualities that are particular to a work of the collective imagination. In this sense Mysterious Object at Noon takes the Modernist idea of a story searching for its authors and elevates it to a national level: the people of Thailand invent a melodrama for themselves. Instead of placing himself on some pedestal of enlightened critical theory and disparaging popular culture, Weerasethakul puts his trust in the imagination of the radio-soap audience. He doesn’t consider whatever they come up with – the boy turning into a giant, the woman becoming a supernatural ‘witch tiger’, the boy miraculously surviving an air crash – as tainted or unfeasible. Instead, he plots this rather vague storyline using a variety of methods, from straightforward filmings of theatrical performances acted out in a village square to some sections of found footage. For once Thailand’s media-fixated society becomes a source of invention instead of a system of illusion and distraction.

Weerasethakul has subsequently moved on to make more conventional narrative films, but these remain peppered with unusual twists. In Blissfully Yours (2002), for instance, the title credits do not appear until 37 minutes into the film (effectively splitting it into two parts), when Min, a young man with a skin disease, and his girlfriend, Roong, drive into the countryside. Min wants to show the girl a beautiful part of the forest, where he immediately takes off his clothes to ease the itching that he has constantly to endure. They eat berries from the trees, and some food that they have brought with them. Later Roong gives the boy a blow-job beside a small river, while a second, older woman, Orn, looks on. Drawn to the couple, she has followed them, as if to force herself into their paradise. There is no closure in Blissfully Yours, except for a short coda that relates the whereabouts of the characters after the last image of the film, in which they are seen resting by the waterside, dozing off or looking into the sky.

The contemplative stillness of Blissfully Yours is also at the core of Tropical Malady (2004), Weerasethakul’s third feature film and his breakthrough work as a major filmmaker. The bipartite structure that he later returned to in Syndromes and a Century is also already there. The film tells the story of two men who are in love with each other. They meet in the city and later go the countryside. Half-way through the film one of them disappears without a trace. He may have fallen victim to a dangerous tiger, but he may also have become this very tiger – the film is inconclusive about his fate. The entire second part of Tropical Malady is a brooding experience of the jungle. A lot of the imagery is dark, which makes it all the more open to interpretation. The jungle is Weerasethakul’s ideal landscape, not only because it is so attractive visually and aurally, but also because it is the scene of the unknown – a dangerous paradise of sexual experience and transgression.

The vanishing character helps to create a very powerful narrative in Tropical Malady, particularly since the mystery remains unresolved. But what is at the heart of the mystery exactly? It is probably the discrepancy between individual longing and yearning and the overwhelming transcendence of nature. In a way, Blissfully Yours and Tropical Malady are twin films. In both of them Weerasethakul takes controversial subjects (Min, from Blissfully Yours, is an illegal immigrant from Burma, a displaced person in terms of national identity; the protagonists in Tropical Malady are gay and are thus displaced persons within the accepted national culture), but he does not propose any solutions. He prefers instead to take his stories to the next level of imagination, to take them out of time and into the jungle.

Weerasethakul also addressed gay issues in the camp satire The Adventure of Iron Pussy (2003), which he co-directed with Michael Shaowanasai. But this homage to popular cinema is a rare exception in a body of work that otherwise owes a lot to the more recent trends of Asian auteur-ist cinema. Weerasethakul’s observational style, his preference for the long shot, which immediately makes everything happening in front of the camera slightly enigmatic, is something he shares with filmmakers such as Hong Sang-soo, from South Korea (whose Tale of Cinema, 2005, similarly split a story in half and made the second part a twisted mirror image of the first), or Tsai Ming-liang, from Malaysia (who has an equal fascination for pathologies and supernatural possibilities, as seen in The River, 1997). The proliferation of video installations within the field of art in recent years has probably contributed to a visual style in cinema that owes a lot to ambient moods and which prefers atmosphere to plot. But Weerasethakul, despite having attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, roots his imagery in the culture that he comes from. For although he discovered his talents as a visual artist during his studies in the West, he fully realized his potential only when he went back to his homeland – and even then not to the capital, Bangkok, but to Khon Kaen, in north-east Thailand, where he grew up.

Syndromes and a Century, however, sees a departure from the kind of thinking that informed Tropical Malady, perhaps prompted by the latter’s success and Weerasethakul’s subsequent desire to move beyond it. Every aspect of Syndromes and a Century is so tense that the film seems almost overloaded with philosophy and formal ideas. For instance, the atmosphere of its haunted country hospital setting – something Lars von Trier evoked so powerfully in The Kingdom (1994) – is enriched by Buddhist themes: the characters are constantly thinking about their previous or future incarnations. With the deadpan irony that informs his visual sense Weerasethakul seems to believe in reincarnated images as well: Syndromes and a Century is full of rhymed imagery, the most impressive example being the correlation he effects between a solar eclipse and the opening of a tube in a basement room of the hospital. In a single tracking shot the tube forms the exact mirror-image of the sun being eclipsed by the moon. Everything corresponds with everything in this film: Weerasethakul creates a non-teleological universe in which even images have ancestors and doppelgängers, and in which the gap between this world and the next can be traversed in the blink of an eye (or a splice of celluloid). Ultimately, though, we never leave Thailand. Weerasethakul’s films are at once random and specific, and here, somewhere in the web of logical connections that unite these two narrative modes, lies the key to their compelling mystery.