Apichatpong Weerasethakul

The generosity of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films, performances, and installations begins with the ease by which viewers enter into his worlds. More stylistically akin to realist cinema than to the oftentimes highly manipulated, observational gaze of popular film, Weerasethakul’s body of work revels in observation, full of shots that linger past the action they contain, with few noticeable big-budget effects. These scenes settle within scripts and acted performances that gently explore the humanity of their respective characters, even as the plot jumps into seemingly unrelated tangents or contrasting moments at the blink of an eye.

A careful poetry of place, bodies, and time is central to Weerasethakul’s filmmaking: “It’s always about time. When you approach a building, you need time to go from point A to B. Buildings are designed as a journey and films are the same, you have an opening that you come through, an angle you follow, maybe a disruption in space.”¹ For Weerasethakul, viewers enter into the architecture of a film, a notion that is perhaps unsurprising given his training in Bangkok as an architect, followed by an MFA in filmmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While there, Weerasethakul gravitated toward American experimental filmmakers including Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol, who likewise took the structure of filmmaking itself as a central consideration in their work.

Though substantiated by this legacy of Western film, Weerasethakul’s combination/contrast of disparate scenes also resonates with his upbringing within the animist culture in Thailand. “We are living not only in the regular plane but also the spiritual plane,” he has explained. “For me, I don’t believe in that, but the observation of this belief makes the culture very interesting—these layers of the indivisible. The trees and every object have other spirits, something that affects your life.”²

Weerasethakul’s cinematic method holds both of these sources simultaneously, engaging with a playful whimsy that slides fluidly from ordinary realism into uncanny spiritual scenes that are treated with equal seriousness. His 2004 film Tropical Malady presents a gay romance in contemporary Thailand alongside a mythic fable of pursuit between a soldier and a tiger shaman. Weerasethakul’s 2010 feature Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives adapts a 1983 book by the Buddhist monk Phra Sripariyattiweti, following a dying patriarch who is visited by his dead wife, as well as his son, who has been transformed into a monkey spirit. Fabulous vignettes, including one where a monkey-like character is hunted by men in military garb, lend Uncle Boonmee another layer of haunting: the film is part of a mixed-media series titled Primitive, which explores the Northern Isan province and its history of violent crackdown by the Thai military on local communists. Privileging regional experience outside of the Southern Thai cultural elite, Uncle Boonmee enmingles this brutal history with Thai animism, Buddhism, and the structure of banal, everyday life and death.

However indirectly, Weerasethakul sees his work as a response to the landscape of Thai cultural production under the country’s military junta: “In Thailand and many other places, there are no documents, there is only propaganda…. My work is…not documentation. It’s not even historical record. It’s more about my personal reaction to a particular situation or place.”³ Though his work is rarely seen in Thailand’s censored cinematic ecosystem, Weerasethakul remains a vital voice for his home country, both in his public critique of injustice and his sublime oeuvre.

Theodore Lau, Mellon-Marron Consortium Fellow, 2022