Film Studies

In Thai cinema, nature and country life are traditionally often depicted as an opposition to the urban sphere, forming a contrast in ethical terms. This dualism is a recurring and central theme in traditional Thai culture and an important carrier of Thainess.
Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul offers a new take on the nature theme. Significant parts of his work are set in the jungle and the forest. The wilderness is a radically different realm than the agricultural sphere that Thai culture tends to focus on. It takes on a life of its own: spirits and mystical, half-human beings pervade it, offering the characters an entrance to their own secrets, dreams and irrationalities. The wilderness, as depicted here, becomes the scape of the Other, linked to Thai spirit belief, legends, and folklore. The borderline between human civilization and the wilderness is fluid, allowing humans to transgress between the worlds on inner and outer journeys, and social and rational categories to loosen.
This paper aims to inquire into the ways nature, especially the jungle, is portrayed in the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. To deepen this investigation, I shall focus on Apichatpong’s aesthetics of nature and how the jungle figures as a borderzone, as sphere and as topography. Further, I shall discuss how these nature aesthetics negotiate Thai nationhood and the role of the state.

Shyaporn Theerakulstit, also known by the name Shy, is a Thai-American actor and filmmaker whose short video clips focus on the topics of popular culture, mediated identities, performativity and parodism. Several of them humorously reflect on US discourses on Asianness, hyphenated identities and political correctness, drawing from the filmmaker’s diasporic perspective that enables him to simultaneously partake in and critique these discourses. This article aims to introduce Shy’s work and analyses three of his short films, concentrating on questions of cultural stereotyping, identity construction, and ethnicity as performance.

In Mingmongkol Sonakuls Isarn Special (2002) the passengers on a long-distance bus start acting out the radio soap opera they are listening to. In doing so, they take turns performing a story that parallels that of their own lives, eventually merging with it.
The film’s double dramatic structure refers back to acting and narrating techniques familiar to Thai drama traditions, such as ensemble acting, shared storytelling, and improvisation. A further reference point is the live dubbing practised extensively in Thai film history. The reflection of indigenous dramatic and film traditions is mirrored in the film’s use of local popular entertainment, namely the radio soap format and the local star system.
These key concepts of regional storytelling traditions are played upon similarly in Apichatpong Weerasethakuls short films Like the Relentless Fury of the Pounding Waves (1996) and Haunted House (2001) or his feature debut Mysterious Object at Noon (1999). These films work in an experimental mode, involving the audience in multilevel narration and leaving it to figure out a coherent narrative. In being independent productions, they are free of constraints of the mainstream and less pressured by box office return. Thus, they move beyond genre prototypes, the use of stars and having to appeal to audience expectations that are strongly linked with the formulaic mainstream.
After elaborating on these examples, this paper asks if independency of the Thai studio system can be understood as a pathway to alternative creative spaces and the involvement of local forms of entertainment.

Since the late 1990s, Southeast Asia has seen the rise of a vivid new independent cinema movement: small production teams working with shoestring budgets produce innovative films that are shown at festivals around the world. The rise of this movement shows the impact of digital video and high-speed internet, technological innovations that open up new possibilities for filmmakers working independently of the big production companies. Its recent success, meanwhile, is currently shifting its (self-) positioning from a marginal, noncommercial, locally embedded cinema to a more commercial, transnational one that targets global audiences.

This essay examines the ways Southeast Asian Independent Cinema can be located – or, perhaps, de-located –, departing from traditional concepts of film studies, by examining the discourse on this cinematic movement as it is shaped by local and foreign voices. The paper focuses on the nexus of independence, political involvement and regionalism and asks how these meanings are negotiated in their transfer from various previous concepts of cinematic independence and alternativeness into the local context. As Southeast Asian Independent Cinema challenges conventional notions of film studies (the frame of national cinemas; the binary system of Hollywood vs. World Cinema; and the pre-digital cinematic apparatus), it presents an opportunity to rethink and expand traditional concepts and the underlying epistemologies in an innovative, non-Eurocentric way.

In Southeast Asian cinemas and its theorizations, ghosts have come to occupy an important role as figurations of a precolonial or premodern age. As beings with temporalities „out of joint“, they blur the linearity of time and history and often appear as carriers of memory and trauma. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film „Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives“ (TH 2009) deals with the traumatic past of the Thai Northeast. Focusing on an analysis of a dream sequence from the film, I will show how „Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives“ features various ghost and spirit characters that stem from a reimagination of the premodern and at the same time refer to modernist cinema – namely, the work of Michelangelo Antonioni and Chris Marker – and its critique of modernity’s belief in the evident and veracious photographic image. From this interplay arises a nexus of meanings that is charged with a critique of the state politics of repression and image control.

In Thai cinema, nature is often depicted as an opposition to the urban sphere, forming a contrast in ethical terms. This dualism is a recurring and central theme in Thai representations and an important carrier of Thainess (khwam pen Thai). The filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul offers a new take on this theme. Significant parts of his work are set in the jungle, a realm radically diff erent from the agricultural sphere that the mainstay of Thai representations tends to focus on. In Apichatpong’s work, the wilderness becomes a liminal space, on multiple levels. This paper focuses on how this liminality translates into Apichatpong’s aesthetics of the jungle and on how this aesthetics and the films’ narrations negotiate Thai nationhood via the perception of the spectators.

Shyaporn Theerakulstit, also known by the name Shy, is a Thai-American actor and filmmaker whose short video clips focus on the topics of popular culture, mediated identities, performativity and parodism. Several of them humorously reflect on US discourses on Asianness, hyphenated identities and political correctness, drawing from the filmmaker’s diasporic perspective that enables him to simultaneously partake in and critique these discourses. This article aims to introduce Shy’s work and analyses three of his short films, concentrating on questions of cultural stereotyping, identity construction, and ethnicity as performance.