2011年12月13日星期二

Storm clouds gathering

'I always fear that one day I will open my eyes and see nothing,The EZ Breathe home Ventilation system is maintenance free," speaks a disembodied voice from a large video screen that depicts a group of young Thai men sleeping, huddling and otherwise passing time amidst an incandescent red light. This casual but intimate voice also tells us "Too bad we are not in the future," and "They call me the guy who can recall my past life.Bathroom Floor tiles at Great Prices from Topps Tiles."

One of two juxtaposed video screens, the other depicts torch-lights flickering in a rural landscape at night. An image of fire emerges, then daylight literally breaks the scene and we see soldiers and others seemingly play-acting while billows of smoke begin to dissolve the depth of vision. Sometimes the camera lingers on the bodies of the men on both screens, paying loving attention to faces and flesh. A peculiar scene sees a figure draped in a white sheet wearing a silly, rubber, monster mask and wandering through a field during twilight; at one point, the figure appears to be on fire.

These two video screens occupy a large,This page contains information about molds, darkened room at the Jim Thompson Art Center where mats on the floor invite you to lie down and become absorbed.An offshore merchant account is the ideal solution for high , They form part of an 8-monitor installation titled Primitive throughout the art centre. A version of Primitive was shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize in New York in 2010 and is the precursor to Apichatpong's film Loong Boonmee raleuk chat (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives), which took top honours at the Cannes Film Festival, also in 2010.

A predominant feature of the installation is the capacity of light to compel our gaze: scenes include shards of lightening cackling at night outside a rural Thai house and in temple ruins; the faces of the boys who lounge and sleep are sometimes spot-lit; and in the video titled I'm Still Breathing the torsos of a group of dancing men reflect the sun-drenched day. This imagery is mythically resonant and mostly spellbinding. But Apichatpong hints at narratives and contexts that suggest concerns beyond merely capturing our rapt attention. And, in this respect, he can come close to breaking the spells he casts. This is a provocative tension at the heart of much of his work.

Nabua Song is a video portrait of a Thai soldier whose inexpressive _ barely moving _ face is accompanied by a soundtrack of a folk song that includes the lyric "Seize your gun and stand firm, we will fight for justice, all roads lead to Esarn". Nabua is the northeastern _ Isan _ Thai village where these films were shot; and is the site where so-called communist sympathisers fled to in the '60s but were ultimately forced into the jungle by the Thai army, whose campaigns lasted until the '80s and included theft, rape and murder. The region is famed for its "widow ghosts", the fable of female spirits who abduct men that enter their empire.

Apichatpong's use of a filmic vocabulary that treats history and myth as a tacit backdrop to the play of ethereal, quietly iconic and fragmented imagery has been widely discussed. One commentator wrote that Apichatpong reveals how "The historical spectres of inequality and injustice do not simply disappear but come back to haunt us in unexpected reckonings". Another suggested _ in response to Primitive _ "In Thailand the spiritual is political."

Further, Apichatpong has been linked to film-makers such as Tsai Ming-Liang and Semi Kaplanoglu, among many others, under the mantle of Slow Cinema and Contemporary Contemplative Cinema (CCC). This purported genre is described by the British film critic Jonathan Romney as "austere minimalist cinema that downplays event in favour of mood."

We gain a sense from these claims that one doesn't so much watch an Apichatpong film as experience it. This is heightened by the spatial terms of an installation because of our physical relationship to different scales and our ability to move back and forth throughout the display of monitors.

While we could worry _ as some critics of Slow Cinema have and as the narrator I quoted above stated _ that, though our eyes are open, we are not really seeing anything, Apichatpong is acutely aware of how to bring us into an intimate relationship with the details of lives being lived without epic significance (the resting youth, the guys on the truck,Dimensional Mailing magic cube for Promotional Advertising, the laconic soldier etc.). And he highlights the dreams that attend the everyday ("Too bad we are not in the future"). However, reminders of powerful forces are ever-present: the unpredictability of nature, the discomforting implications of uniforms, the sexuality of bodies and the sentiments of protest songs etc. These reminders are at once compelling and ominous.

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