Dear Tilda,
So we are to write something on Apichatpong
Weerasethakul.
I am sitting in my flat in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The clouds are racing across the dawn sky.
I am in long johns and a big cardigan because
my heating has broken down. I can think of no
better way of starting the day than writing
about Apichatpong. Why? Because I am not up
to speed yet. The phone hasn't started going,
the e-mails haven't started blinking, my mind is
relatively empty and unburdened.
I know that the pace and brouhaha of even
this relatively relaxed European capital city will
soon impress itself upon me - its pace and
brouhaha will become mine in half an hour or
so - but before they do, I am sitting here with
pictures of Apichatpong fIlms in my head. They
are fIlms that you know well but we have hardly
talked about them. I imagine you in L.A., where
you are today, a place so different from this
place, and wonder what images you will have in
year head when you read this or start to respond
to it. What moments will flicker onto the screen
in your mind?
As I see my first image, I realize that flicker is
the wrong word. Apichatpong's movies do the
opposite of flicker. They are not delicate like
butterflies, like Lillian Gish in D.W Griffith
movies, like Anna Karina's eye lashes in Vivre sa
vie. The first scene I remember in the first
Apichatpong movie I saw, in the Bazin cinema
in Cannes, is from Tropical Malady. A guy takes
a piss. When he's finished, his friend licks his
fingers. Everything iliey have done so far is calm
and gentle. The film even looks slightly
undercranked, as they used to say (I know it
isn't). And they are photographed with such
quietude, such lack of flicker or dither. Yet the
scene is an electric bolt. When I saw it then and
when I see it in my mind now, I think of the
scene where the guy has a shit in Wim Wenders'
Kings of the Road. It was an electric bolt
too. Both were completely new to me. I'd seen
neither before in the movies, or in life. And
there they were, up on screen, rock solid proof
that when filmmakers really look, when iliey
tear away the fIlters and fIlm something really
simple, the effect is an electrifying punctum, as
the sainted M. Barthes would say.
I left Cannes that year, in search of Apichatpong
movies, like a bullet out of a gun. The
next one I saw was Mysterious Object at Noon. Its
'exquisite corpse' structure has cast its spell on
a doc I am making in Iraq at the moment, but
the image from it that comes to mind this
morning, as the clouds race across the sky
(it's a bit brighter now, I no longer need my desk
lamp on), is a simple one near the beginning of
the film. A woman who sells tuna fish from her
van to villagers is sitting in the back of that van,
telling us the moving story of her semi-slavery
as a girl. She is on the verge of tears: the sort of
scene we've seen many times before. Then, as
she finishes, without a cut (I believe) and rather
too brutally, it seems to me, a voice - which I
presume is Apichatpong's - asks her to tell a
story. And immediately she does. The story begins
the series of improvisations that make up
the body of the film. But what I love about this
moment is the directness of the gear change
between her recounting a painful memory and
the filmmaker deciding that the film should
now lift off the ground of realism, as it were,
into fantasy and childish invention. Soon we are
in the realm of the moon, and the mysterious
object of the title. Apichatpong, if it is he, does
not come across as entirely patient in this moment.
It's as if he is straining to get on to the
metaphysical part of the story but, as I would
see as I watched more of his movies, this gear
change is one of the things that's unique to him
in contemporary cinema. The closest I can
compare it to from the past are the moments in,
say, An American in Paris, where speech suddenly
rises into song.
My next image comes from Blissfully Yours,
which was sent to me from Second Run DVD,
who constantly introduce me to great movies I
haven't seen. I'm thinking of the languor of the
picnic scene, which is slower than life. The girl
and the boy are on a cliff, overlooking a landscape.
The colours are pale because of the
brightness of the sun, the heat of the day, the
humidity in the air. Suddenly hand-Written Thai
words and draWings appear onscreen, as if the
movie has become a note-book or diary, as if
there is space between incidents, as part of the
slow beat of the film's clock, to sketch. Aren't
picnics times to draw? Apichatpong seems to
think so. The only times in my life that I've ever
watched a fly or a ladybird crawl along a blanket,
or through grass, are on picnics or, after
picnics, lying in the sun. At this moment, in this
film, I would not have been surprised if I'd seen
a ladybird crawl across the screen.
And even as I think of those sketches on that
film, I'm onto Apichatpong's Syndromes and a
Century. I've seen it only once, on DVD, after
two glasses of wine. Maybe for this reason it is
its shape more than indiVidual images that
come to my mind. I remember it like a Henry
Moore sculpture, twisting and torqUing. Perhaps
this is because, in its second half, downstairs
in the over-lit hospital, the camera drifts towards a
funnel that leads to a pipe. Is it being
sucked into that pipe? This seemed purely sculptural
to me. As I think of this scene, the movies
of David Lynch come to mind. If they are
"black Lynch," this one is "white Lynch." The
hospital is like a beast, and we are in its belly. We
expect a Lynchian roar.
It's bright now. The Edinburgh traffic noise
has increased and the day has properly begun. I
send you these few thoughts and images via
e-mail and on the movie thermals, to L.A., and
can't wait to hear your thoughts or your images.
I knowJames Quandt wanted our comments
as the introduction to his book on Apichatpong,
but given that the movies are all brokeback, that
they're diptychs that start again half way
through and the credits can come somewhere in
the middle, maybe our introductory piece could
come somewhere in the middle? Handwritten
like the sketches in Blissfttlly Yours? Or maybe
not since both our handwritings are illegible.
Over to you comrade,
Mark
Mark
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