البـــــوابـــة
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Phantoms
of Nabua/A Letter to Uncle Boonmee
Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a great
sensualist, a director who revels in the sensory and emotional qualities
of a particular moment in time and the setting in which it takes place.
His feature films are collections of these moments, strung together in
such a way as to create a cumulative effect, a slow building-up of
emotion and visual beauty. Phantoms of Nabua is a
ten-minute short film that documents one such moment, and it's typically
evocative and breathtaking. It is divided, roughly, into three
segments, with little clear separation between them; rather, they flow
into one another, each new section introducing a new wrinkle into the
film's treatment of light and darkness. In the film's opening minutes, a
village is struck by lightning multiple times, the white-hot strikes
looking like fireworks being set off; it's ambiguous whether the streaks
of white light are descending from above or spiking up out of the
ground. It's frighteningly beautiful, the bright white lines
illuminating the dark night, the strikes chaining together and sending
out feelers to join with other streaks of lightning. On the soundtrack,
the pops and electric sizzles of the lightning even sound like
fireworks, making this a natural spectacle, a natural light show.
In
the second section of the film, these opening images are projected onto
a screen set up in the middle of a field where children are playing
soccer at night with a flaming ball. The composition is complex,
creating this layering where the images of the children playing are
being pasted over the images of lightning. The shadowy silhouettes of
the players are set off against the flickering light of the screen, the
lightning flashes going off behind them, illuminating their bodies,
projecting halos around the players. And the flaming ball rolls back and
forth across the field, soaring through the air like a comet with a
tail of fire flickering behind it, making whooshing noises with each
graceful arc across the darkness.
The interplay of light and
dark is gorgeous, as Weerashethakul frequently returns to dark emptiness
before reigniting the night with the fireball's glow. He edits the
scene into alternating stretches of light and darkness, juxtaposing a
near-featureless dark area against a sudden burst of light as the
fireball comes flying across the frame. On the soundtrack, the
children's laughter and chatter is omnipresent, bringing energy and
vibrancy to the isolation of the night. There's this glowing hive of
activity and life at the center of the dark void, this small area of red
glow, illuminated by the fireball and the sporadic flashes of the
lightning on the cinema screen.
In the final segment of the film,
the screen catches fire and is burned away, and slowly the game comes
to a halt, all the children gathering around to watch the screen burn
away, the flashing light of the projector showing through from the other
side, the flames eventually shredding the screen until only its bare
frame remains, like an empty goal. The metaphor is obvious but layered:
the light is both destructive and redemptive, a source of creativity, a
document of reality and a potentially abrasive, damaging force. The
light both illuminates and eliminates. In the film's final minutes,
Weerasethakul cuts in closer to the light of the projector, watching it
head-on as, without a screen to project onto, the projector's flashes
become abstract, disconnected from reality, occasionally producing wisps
of imagery on the smoke wafting in front of the lens. It's darkly
beautiful, this image of cinema removed from the tangible world of
images: it is cinema projecting into the void, with any hope of
communication or understanding removed, a lonely signal going out into
the dark night.
There is a searching, hesitant quality to
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's A Letter to Uncle Boonmee.
It is a film in search of a subject, in search of itself. In the opening
minutes, a voiceover repeats the titular epistle twice. The note is
from Weerasethakul's own perspective, talking about a relative and the
film he wants to make about this man, his Uncle Boonmee, who has
apparently been reincarnated in various modern forms. It is a film very
much about nostalgia and history, about the past, about the search for
links between modernity and the past; this is a near-constant theme in
Weerasethakul's work. The voiceover recounts how Weerasethakul wants to
make a film about his relative, and how he's been seeking out houses
that look like his uncle's residence. Implicit here is the distance
between fiction and reality, especially as mediated by the passage of
time. As Weerasethakul's camera roves across the interiors of various
rural homes, his voiceover laments how his script describes one kind of
house, while in the real village of Nabua there are other kinds of
houses, and his ancestor likely lived in still another kind.
In
one shot after another, Weerasethakul's camera repeats the same stately
movement, a graceful arced tracking shot from left to right, tracing
various empty interiors, looking over the objects and mementos that may
be signs of someone's present life or artifacts of the past. There are
photos and documents on the walls, and beautiful views of the jungle out
the windows. There are also soldiers, digging in the yard, the rhythmic
thunk of their hoes a repetitive and insistent beat on the soundtrack,
later joined by the whirring buzz of a fan as one soldier lies on the
wooden floor of a house, staring off into space. The voiceover describes
how, in the past, there was some kind of military incident here,
soldiers who chased away the town's residents as part of some long-ago
war.
There's a profound ambiguity in the way the film creates a
relationship between the images and the narration: are the soldiers
depicted here meant to be the soldiers who forced the townspeople out of
their homes in the past, or are they present-day soldiers whose
appearance here only evokes the past? Another possibility exists as
well, implicit in the metafictional framing device of the narrated
letter; the soldiers are actors in the film Weerasethakul is making,
since A Letter to Uncle Boonmee is explicitly a preparatory
document for his latest feature, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His
Past Lives. In much the same way as Jean-Luc Godard would, in the
early 80s, prepare video essays that contained the seeds of the feature
films to follow, this short seems like an essay abstract for the
forthcoming feature, suggesting themes and images that, one suspects,
will be further developed in the longer work.
None of which suggests that A Letter to
Uncle Boonmee is incomplete in itself, of course. It is, like
Weerasethakul's features, elliptical and suggestive more than it is
definitive, but that's the essential nature of his cinema, which seldom
narrows its scope to a single meaning or a single narrative. His cinema
is open-ended in all the best ways. Here, the slippage between past and
present, between fictional artifice and the reality of the film-making
process — Weerasethakul even mentions in the narration that he got
British funding to make the film, bringing external economic realities
into the picture, another gesture that seems to have been derived from
Godard — resonates in interesting ways with the themes of memory and
nostalgia. The pictures of ancestors, the rural homes that could
represent any time in the last few decades or more, the soldiers who
look much like soldiers do in any era. Everything here adds up to a
powerful sense of timelessness. Time is suspended by Weerasethakul's
weightless camera as it drifts through these mostly empty scenes,
ruminating on absence — the absence of the past in relation to the
present, the absence of Nabua's villagers, forced away from their homes,
the absence of the titular uncle, long dead and sought in resurrected
form in other people the filmmaker might meet.
Contributing to
this sense of timelessness is the sumptuousness of the images.
Weerasethakul's imagery encourages deep contemplation, encourages
patience and quiet. As his camera drifts along, there is no rush, no
urgency or narrative momentum, only the languid examination of wooden
floors and walls, faded and aged photographs, the lush greenery seen
outside, the pink haze of a mosquito net erected around a bed, the smoke
billowing out of a furnace of some kind. Towards the end of the film,
Weerasethakul's camera peers up at the tree branches swaying in the
breeze, and above them the clouds drifting lazily by through a pale blue
sky, shot from the perspective of someone lying on the ground. As this
gaze drifts along, a cloud of insects hovers just below the tree canopy,
buzzing in swarms, this shifting mass of dust motes dancing black
against the blue of the sky. In this eerily quiet place, Weerasethakul
summons the ghosts of history and ancestral memory to drift, silently
and invisibly, through the splendor of the present.
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