Apichatpong Weerasethakul and the cinema of dreams

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is one of the most cited filmmakers in contemporary cinema. He appears in film studies syllabi, in cinephile threads, in Instagram captions.

In Italy he has become a name to drop, a signature that signals critical sophistication. The problem is that citing him and having truly watched his films are two very different things.

This is an attempt to talk about the second.

Who is Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Born in Bangkok on 16 July 1970, Apichatpong grew up in Khon Kaen, a city in northeastern Thailand’s Isaan region. His parents were both doctors.

He studied architecture at Khon Kaen University, then earned an MFA in filmmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997. In 1999 he founded the independent production company Kick the Machine, through which he has made his entire filmography outside the Thai commercial film industry.

His international festival career traces a near-unprecedented arc: Un Certain Regard Prize at Cannes 2002 for Blissfully Yours, Jury Prize at Cannes 2004 for Tropical Malady, Palme d’Or at Cannes 2010 for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Jury Prize at Cannes 2021 for Memoria. Syndromes and a Century (2006) was the first Thai film ever selected in competition at the Venice Film Festival.

His video installations are in the permanent collections of Tate Modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

The method: time, spirits, bodily memory

Apichatpong’s cinema does not tell stories in any conventional sense.

It does not build narrative arcs, does not resolve tensions, does not offer the audience the gratification of closed meaning. What it does instead is create perceptual conditions: the film as a field of experience in which time slows until it becomes physical, in which the distinction between past and present loosens, in which the dead return as naturally as rain.

The supernatural in his films is never spectacle. It is taken for granted, as it is in the Theravada Buddhist cosmology and rural Thai animism from which the director draws.

Spirits exist. The dead remember. The body carries lives it does not recall having lived. These are not metaphors. They are premises.

Tropical Malady (2004): what it feels like to watch it

Tropical Malady

Tropical Malady

Tropical Malady

Tropical Malady is a film in two halves that do not explain each other.

The first is a love story between two men, a soldier and a country boy, told with an almost documentary tenderness.

The second is a Buddhist fable set in the jungle, where the soldier pursues a creature that may be his lover transformed into a spirit-tiger.

There is no explicit connection between the two parts. The film does not ask you to understand. It asks you to stay.

And staying through the second half of Tropical Malady, in the near-wordless darkness of the jungle, lit only by moonlight filtered through leaves, is a physical experience. Not anxious, not narrative. Physical.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Uncle Boonmee is the Palme d’Or film. A man dying of kidney failure spends his last days surrounded by his loved ones and his dead: his deceased wife returns to sit at the table with him, his vanished son reappears as a forest spirit with glowing red eyes. Nobody is frightened. Nobody is surprised. The dead simply return because the moment is right.

The film contains one of the strangest and most hypnotic sequences in contemporary cinema: a princess makes love with a catfish in a pond. It is not a dream. It is a story told in flashback.

It has no explanation. It needs none.

Uncle Boonmee does not leave the kind of emotional residue that a classical drama leaves.

It leaves something more like a landscape traversed: you do not remember it as a plot but as an atmosphere, a light, a feeling of having slept somewhere you do not know.

Memoria (2021):  the most accessible film, and the most radical

Memoria

Memoria

Memoria

Memoria is the first film shot outside Thailand, in Colombia, with Tilda Swinton as its protagonist.

A Scottish botanist working in Bogotá periodically hears an enormous, inexplicable sound, like a rock falling in the dark. Nobody around her hears it. Perhaps it is a trauma. Perhaps it is the earth remembering.

Memoria won the Jury Prize at Cannes 2021. In the United States it was distributed in a unique format: one cinema at a time, for a few weeks each, with no digital copy available. The film could only be seen in person.

This was not a marketing choice. It was an aesthetic statement: the film exists in shared experience, not in individual consumption.

The problem of Italian and Western reception

In Italy, Apichatpong is barely distributed. Uncle Boonmee had a limited release in 2011. Memoria screened in a handful of cinemas for a few days. Cemetery of Splendour (2015) is practically invisible outside of festivals. Syndromes and a Century received no Italian distribution at all.

And yet the name circulates. It is cited in the right contexts, associated with the right words: slow cinema, spirituality, Palme d’Or. The problem is that citing Apichatpong without having watched him is a performance of critical posture. His name is used to signal an openness that one has not actually done the work to develop.

His cinema is not difficult in the sense of obscure or hermetic. It is difficult in the sense that it requires a different kind of attention. It requires stopping waiting for something to happen and starting to be present to what is already happening.

For those accustomed to cinema as narration, this is a real leap.

The CZMOS angle

Citing Weerasethakul without having watched him is critical posture.

We prefer the real discomfort: sitting in a cinema for ninety-two minutes without a plot holding your hand, without a resolution to reassure you, with the growing feeling that the film is doing something to you, not for you.

Thailand produces a cinema that Europe rewards and does not watch. Apichatpong is the most glaring case. It is not only a distribution problem. It is a problem of perceptual habit.

And habits, unlike titles in syllabi, only change by watching.