Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Cinema of the Brain and Sonification of the World

When asked in interviews following the premiere of Memoria why he chose to leave Thailand, Weerasethakul often recalled the tribute retrospective at the 2017 Cartagena International Film Festival (FICCI). Watching a highlight reel of clips from his earlier films felt like attending his own funeral, he said , making his departure from Thailand better understood less as a break than as a passage[1].It is a characteristically Weerasethakul-ian response: death is not an end but a threshold to another form of life. Although he has insisted that his interest lies not in religion but in the memories carried across reincarnation, over the past two decades he has nonetheless become a cinematic icon of the another world.

 

In a 2022 New York Times column, Hilton Als retrospectively wrote that Weerasethakul’s first feature, Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), “rebooted the idea of world cinema” for international film festivals. [2] Although Als was careful to note that this was due in part to the international film world’s limited familiarity with Thai cinema, such a condition does not diminish the film’s exceptional quality. Blending field interviews with staged fiction, Mysterious Object at Noon modulates its narrative rhythm through the chain-like storytelling of its interview subjects. In doing so, it moves beyond the self-stylization of local politics and offers the world a more complex image of everyday Thailand. Though often perplexing, the fractured narratives and forests teeming with sentient beings in Weerasethakul’s later films have also become sites onto which viewers project their own imaginations and interpretations.

 

Looking back on the enthusiasm surrounding Weerasethakul, we find that it stems in part from the global democratization and the waves of postcolonial thought. The search for boundaries, the longing for alternative narratives, and the desire to uncover what has been concealed all find a space for projection in Weerasethakul’s ghosts and forests. Film itself, as a luminous machine for producing phantoms, can in this context be understood as a medium of visibility—one that is always open to contestation and critique. On this point, Weerasethakul himself offered a distinctly political interpretation of cinematic light in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). In the film, Boonmee, lying on his deathbed, dreams of a futuristic city in which people from the past are made to disappear. The authorities shine a powerful light that projects a person’s image onto a screen; when the image vanishes, the person vanishes with it.

 

However, if we were to call Weerasethakul a political filmmaker on these grounds, it might be more precise to say that it is his attention to memory that allows his work to intersect with the political. His own account of this is relatively modest. He suggests that “It's probably because I've been creating more art, which requires research and travel, so my work has turned into a collective memory of the Isaan region.” [3] The convergence of memories in his work is also related to the fact that film production is a collaborative practice. For instance, Weerasethakul has described Jenjira, his long-term collaborator and actress, as a “treasury vault” of memories of Laos passed down from her grandfather’s generation. It is hardly necessary to mention how Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is structured around Boonmee’s journey in search of memories from his previous lives. The story goes that the film was inspired by a booklet Weerasethakul happened to receive from a monk, in which memories of past lives of people—human and animal alike—were recorded. Boonmee’s reincarnations are all located in areas close to Weerasethakul’s hometown in northeastern Thailand, which naturally made Boonmee the subject of Weerasethakul‘s own inquiry. To a certain extent, the film begins with Weerasethakul’s curiosity about this peculiar form of memory. Yet its political dimension emerges more clearly through Nabua, a village he encountered while searching for Boonmee.

 

Nabua is not directly connected to Boonmee; rather, it emerges as a detour in Weerasethakul’s search for him. Sixty years ago, it was a border region where the Thai government suppressed communist insurgents. In contrast to Boonmee’s vivid memories, the younger generation in Nabua seemed largely unaware of this history of repression. Many of them ironically went on to become soldiers. It was precisely this stark contrast in historical memory that led Weerasethakul to stay in Nabua, investigating its past while documenting its present. To justify his prolonged stay, Weerasethakul used the film’s production plan as a pretext. In private, he documented his interactions with local youths: building a spaceship together as a speculative vision of the future, shooting a music video for a band, and recording the sensations and rhythms of everyday village life. These materials eventually came together as Primitive (2009), his multi-channel video installation. Reflecting on the project, Weerasethakul described Primitive as a work that “is about re-imagining this little terrain of Thailand called Nabua, a place where memories and ideologies are extinct. […] It is the manifestation of someone who has created various fictional scenarios in order to implant a memory into a place.” [4]

 

The two works of film and video art created while in Nabua perhaps demonstrate a turning point in Weerasethakul’s creative career. When discussing Primitive, he said “I try to think of the developing process and production the same thing. Production is more responsive to change. It's greatly influenced by art—the readiness to improvise.” [5] This kind of organic development on site offers a different creative logic from script-driven filmmaking. This reminds me of the abandoned murals in Tsai Ming-liang’s film Stray Dogs (2013)—another example of when cinema and contemporary art coincide. The murals originate from Kao Jun-Honn's The Ruin Image Crystal Project (2007), a project about life attempting to repair itself by drifting toward the margins of modernity, where it unexpectedly encounters forgotten histories. Tsai said when talking about the murals that “I was simply looking for a ruin, but then I came across this mural inside it. I don't know who painted it, but it changed my whole approach. Originally, I thought the film would have a much stronger narrative, but once the mural was there, I realized I didn't need to do anything else”. [6]

 

In 2016, Chien-hung Huang described the entire film Uncle Boonmee as an act of “entering.” [7] According to him, this notion of “entering” means opening up a space that tilts toward an unreal elsewhere, while presenting it on screen as a real environment. A similar logic can also be found in Stray Dogs, where Kao’s murals are based on archival photographs of the site. When standing before these murals, Tsai’s characters effectively enter a temporal corridor of the ruins. Likewise, when characters in Weerasethakul’s films step from their contemporary lives into the jungle, they are entering a jungle version of this temporal corridor. In Uncle Boonmee, Boonmee can see ghosts, enter a futuristic city, and return to a previous life as a princess, where he(she) has intercourse with a catfish—a sequence inspired by a film Weerasethakul saw in his childhood.

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Subsequently, if we turn to Mekong Hotel (2021) and Cemetery of Splendour (2015), we find that they are no longer concerned with “entering” but rather with “being within.” The experimental film Mekong Hotel is—according to its official framing—a rehearsal for another film. The story began when Jenjira Pongpas was involved in a car accident and her daughter came to visit, a circumstance that reminded Weerasethakul of an earlier script about a mother-and-daughter reincarnation story. The entire film was shot in a hotel on the banks of the Mekong River. Weerasethakul was able to decide when to pause shooting during production, moments that also became occasions for rest and reflection after a long period of intensive work. Across the river lies the border with Laos, at the time, Thailand was experiencing severe flooding, and Weerasethakul had just reunited with a high school friend. He incorporates these fragments of experience into the film through a loosely structured narrative accompanied by classical guitar music. The film does not move toward a fixed destination; rather, it unfolds like a discursive reverie set in an extended afternoon. At times, Jenjira becomes a flesh-eating ghost; at other times, she returns to reality and shares her memories of Laos with the crew. Everything unfolds in a stream-of-consciousness mode.

 

This placid tension continues in the later Cemetery of Splendour. Although it is often regarded as Weerasethakul’s most politically charged film, its visual language is less radical than in his earlier works: post-production editing is minimal, and bust shots and close-ups are rare. Instead, the ambient sounds of the forest acquire a strong sense of presence, and they often carry over from one scene to the next. This approach subtly departs from conventional sound design in cinema, where ambient sound typically functions as an extension of the visual field and shifts in accordance with narrative focus. In Cemetery of Splendour, however, Weerasethakul releases sound from its visual source, allowing it to form an encompassing, indistinct sonic field, thereby rendering politics (and history) as something akin to an acoustic ripple.

Let us frame it this way: immersed in the sounds of the forest and the roar of machinery, Cemetery of Splendour gradually unfolds a living Thailand. In the film, a village clinic shelters a group of drowsy soldiers. In their dreams, they have been summoned to a battlefield by the ancient king who once ruled this land. Unlike the striking monkey ghost and spirit figures in Uncle Boonmee, Weerasethakul no longer relies on special effects to evoke different temporalities. Instead, he reveals them through ordinary conversations and everyday exchanges. Cemetery of Splendour extends the sense of ease found in Mekong Hotel by allowing different forms of life and different temporalities to coexist and interact within a shared world. When the goddesses from the Laotian shrine come to explain to Jenjira why the soldiers are asleep, the scene resembles nothing more than three ordinary women engaged in casual conversation. Later, as Jenjira and Keng walk through the forest, the audience realizes through their conversation that Keng is, at that very moment, inhabiting an ancient royal palace.

 

Weerasethakul uses an organic analogy to describe this superposition of temporalities when he remarks that “sometimes the street is one scene while what is in your head is another scene or story.” [8] I am reminded of the notebook that Jenjira flips through in the film, in which one sentence reads: “The visions we see are caused by chemical reactions in our brain.” If we understand film as a sensory record of human experience in the world, the stream of consciousness running through Mekong Hotel becomes easier to grasp. Perhaps, through the reductive apparatus of cinema, Weerasethakul seeks to compare the brain to a film installation in reverse—or even to imagine cinema itself as a simulation of the human brain. Seen in this light, Weerasethakul’s solo exhibition at SCAI in Japan, which sought to recreate the eyeless ghosts chasing beams of light from the horror films of his childhood, can also be understood as a meditation on the brain’s instinctive fascination with light after the disappearance of visual images.

Memoria (2021) is another film about the brain. Shot in Colombia, it follows a woman trying to uncover the source of a loud boom in her head. The film was inspired by exploding head syndrome, a condition from which Weerasethakul himself has suffered, characterized by loud auditory hallucinations during sleep. As the point of departure for the narrative, this sound has no identifiable source and can therefore be the carrier of any narrative, depending on the historical memories attached to a particular place. As Weerasethakul explains, “Memoria, for me, was an exploration of the intersection between personal and collective memory […] I hope that it sparks our connection to the world around us.” [9] Accordingly, the mysterious boom in Colombia may originate from a personal neurological condition, the explosion of a tire, a gunshot from an armed conflict, or even a spacecraft in an ancient rainforest. In the second half of the film, Jessica, the protagonist, meets Hernán, a man who remembers everything—a figure reminiscent of an even more powerful Uncle Boonmee. He never leaves the town because the burden of his memory would overwhelm his mind. More remarkably, he can pick up a pebble from the ground and recognize its ancient history—the story of when it was still part of a gargantuan rock.

Although Memoria, too, points toward an alternative temporality through reality itself, it is no longer populated by ghosts. Or rather, from Hernán’s perspective, the present is the ghost of the past. This ghostly exchange, mediated through sound, transforms clearly defined politics and ideology into lingering aftereffects of world history. As Remy Jerry observes, “[in Memoria], it’s more about an internal or hidden memory in all of us that’s vibrating but that we don’t hear or register.” [10] Interestingly, in Weerasethakul’s films, ghosts can also embody love. As in Uncle Boonmee, Boonmee’s deceased wife and his monkey ghost son return to his deathbed to express their care. 

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[1] Hilton Als,‘The Metaphysical World of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’ s Movies’, The New Yorker,2022.

[2]  ‘Apichatpong Weerasethakul in Conversation with Giovanni Marchini Camia’, The Metrograph <https://metrograph.com/apichatpongweerasethakul/>[accessed 2 March 2024].

[3] Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Gridthiya Gaweewong, Apichatpong Weerasethakul Sourcebook: The Serenity of Madness (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2020)

[4]  Artist’s website https://www.kickthemachine.com/page80/page22/page13/page62/index.html

[5]   Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Gridthiya Gaweewong, Apichatpong Weerasethakul Sourcebook: The Serenity of Madness (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2020)

[6] Tsai Ming-liang, 《郊遊》電影概念書 [Stray Dogs: Film Concept Book] (Taipei: Rye Field Publishing, 2014)

[7]  Chien-Hung Huang, ‘《化身为靈，進入記憶》 [Becoming Spirit, Entering Memory]’, lecture at Para Site, Hong Kong, 2016.

[8] https://cinephilia.net/75799/。

[9] Interview conducted by the author, 7 February 2024.

[10]  Remy Jerry, ‘Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Past, Present, and Future’, OCULA, 2021.