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Itinerant Cinema
David Teh

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1. Montri Umavijani,
Sunthorn Phu: An
Anthology, Office of the
National Culture
Commission, Bangkok,
1990, p 68
2. Walter Benjamin, ‘The
Storyteller: Observations
on the Works of Nikolai
Leskov’, in Illuminations,
Harry Zohn, trans,
Fontana, London, 1992,
p 86 (emphasis added)
3. Lively discussions take
place on web-boards and
social networking sites.
Some more considered
writing appears on blogs
such as Filmsick, http://
filmsick.exteen.com/ and
Twilight Virus, http://
twilightvirus.blogspot.
com/; and in Sonthaya
Subyen, ed, Unknown
Forces: The Illuminated Art
of Apichatpong
Weerasethakul, Filmvirus/
Open Books, Bangkok,
2007 (all in Thai). Several
articles and interviews from
the Thai film magazine
Bioscope are available in
English translation on the
excellent webzine Criticine:
http://www.criticine.com/.
Third Text, Vol. 25, Issue 5, September, 2011, 595– 609
Itinerant Cinema
The Social Surrealism of
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
David Teh
Oh, how inconstant and changing are things!
So men and women forsake their old ways.
Most people are, therefore, of many minds;
Those of one mind are hard to find.
Sunthorn Phu, Nirat Phukhao Thong, c1830s1
. . . the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today
‘having counsel’ is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is
because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence,
we have no counsel either for ourselves or for others. After all, counsel is
less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation
of a story which is just unfolding.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, 19362
INTRODUCTION
Commentary on the work of Thai artist and film-maker Apichatpong
Weerasethakul has thus far come mostly from cinephile precincts
rather than the contemporary artworld. At best, it affords a survey of
his filmography in terms of Western art cinema aesthetics, and sometimes
of a ‘New Asian Cinema’; at worst, it descends into mystification and
exoticism. In any case it is not the sort of cinema discourse attentive to
the increasingly vaporous boundary between art and film, a boundary
constantly brought into question by Apichatpong’s steady stream of
video and installation projects, which have received precious little critical
consideration. Compounding this, the most lively writing in Thai,
which is non-academic, circulates almost exclusively within cinephile
circles.3 And like most of his Thai artworld peers, Apichatpong has con-
ducted most of his gallery activity outside Thailand. Despite his exper-
imental leanings, and constant appearance in galleries and biennales,
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online # Third Text (2011)
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2011.608973
 596
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4. A recent edited volume
exemplifies the impasse:
historical (let alone art
historical)
contextualisation is scant in
James Quandt, ed,
Apichatpong
Weerasethakul, Synema/
Austrian Film Museum,
Vienna, 2009.
5. Primitive (2009) was a
cross-media project
exhibited online and in
installation form at the
Musée d’Art Moderne de la
Ville (Paris), FACT,
Liverpool and Haus der
Kunst, Munich.
engagements from the realm of contemporary art have done little to
deepen what has thus far been a strikingly ahistorical contemplation of
his work.4
I will therefore be breaking with precedent in offering two critical tra-
jectories largely missing from the existing literature: first, an attempt to
ascertain the sociopolitical positions demonstrated, or implied, by Api-
chatpong’s practice, and the stakes of its conversation with Thailand’s
political present. This is salutary for an artist whose work has so much
to say about its milieu, about the latter’s history, and about the media
in which these are rendered. The second goal is art historical: Apichat-
pong’s extraordinary success as a film-maker (and an avant-garde one
at that) ironically threatens to sideline him both from Thai art history
and from wider currents in the popular media that are a constant
preoccupation of his work. With his latest project, Primitive – which
demonstrates that, despite thirteen years of discernible development,
the social parameters of his practice have not much changed – one
feels these critical lacunae more acutely.5 They obscure what is perhaps
his most valuable contribution to Thai public culture: an attentive appro-
priation of old media forms, repurposed not for the sake of nostalgia but
for their richly multivalent channelling of social reality and collective
memory.
So rather than survey Apichatpong’s oeuvre, I will focus on the first of
his five feature-length productions to date, Mysterious Object at Noon/
Dogfahr nai meu marn (2000; hereafter simply Dogfahr), and offer
some overdue context through three historical frames. The first is
ethno-historical, and considers Apichatpong’s provincial origins and
ambivalent position in Thailand’s national and political culture. The
second explores a putative aesthetic channel for this ambivalence in the
art historical legacy of Surrealism. The third frame is psycho-geographic
– what I will call the poetics of itinerancy through which Dogfahr appears
as a kind of thematic ‘keyframe’ for his oeuvre as a whole. While less
obvious in his features than in his shorter experimental works, this
itinerancy will prove no less suggestive for interpreting them, since it is
immanent to the very movement of narrative, to the mode of storytelling
Apichatpong employs. Finally, I will explore precedents for this in Thai
literary and cultural history, and locate parallels in the work of his
contemporaries.
In each of these frames, Apichatpong will sit only uneasily, but this tri-
angulation will nevertheless locate the cultural resources he taps and give
us some sociohistorical purchase on his work. My ambitions are thus
modest, suggestive rather than conclusive. I hope simply to open a
series of historical and thematic doors through which a more nuanced
understanding may proceed. For the attempts advanced thus far lead to
dead ends, either into the spiral of abstraction, or worse, to a spiritual
and cultural exoticism which, however much they lubricate a breathless
appreciation of his oeuvre, have shed little light on what it might say
about the place that so palpably informs it. Certainly, the abiding alterity
of Apichatpong’s oeuvre – with respect to its own cultural milieu as much
as to Western modes of explication – cannot be ignored; and nor am I
immune to its seductions. But I will try to tackle the problem of otherness
head-on, in the hope that it will not become, as it so often has, interpret-
ation’s confounding destination.

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6. Three artists of comparable
international stature would
be Rirkrit Tiravanija,
Navin Rawanchaikul and
Surasi Kusolwong.
7. Interview with the artist, 14
February 2010, hereafter
simply ‘interview’.
8. Apichatpong says the idea
of adapting this technique
to film was deliberate and
immediate (interview).
9. While his characterisation
of Dogfahr is sound,
Quandt overstates
Apichatpong’s reservations
about documentary,
asserting that he ‘quite
utterly [rejects] the very
notion’. The artist’s
statements on the matter
are more qualified. He
rejects documentary’s
claim to truth, but clearly
not its aesthetic. Whatever
his reservations, Dogfahr
was both proposed and
marketed as ‘a
documentary’, and won
second prize at the
Yamagata International
Documentary Film Festival
(2001). James Quandt,
‘Resistant to Bliss:
Describing Apichatpong’,
in Quandt, op cit, p 35.
597
MYSTERIOUS OBJECT: OPIATE OF THE CRITICS
Born to medico parents in the north-eastern city of Khon Kaen, Apichat-
pong studied architecture at the local university before venturing to
America, and pushing his way into the film-making MA programme of
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While in some ways exemplary
of a Thai bourgeois thrust into global post-industrial patterns of training,
work and exchange, Apichatpong is unusually ambitious. And he is dis-
tinguished amongst his peers – internationally established Thai artists
working in aesthetically progressive modes – in that upon returning to
Thailand after studies abroad, his practice quickly became firmly
rooted there, both practically and thematically, to a degree that his
peers’ practices have not.6 Why so? His work is decidedly unparochial
in its address, and has found no great popular appeal there, lauded
from the outset more in Rotterdam and Cannes than in Bangkok. Part
of the explanation is his access to local raw materials – not simply to
low-cost production but, more importantly, to a low-key but sustained
dialogue with a place and a people. Thailand in the late 1990s, an incom-
plete modernity flinching from regional financial crisis, seemed to him a
‘gold mine’ of interesting stories for one newly armed with avant-garde
art and film inspirations – he cites Abbas Kiarostami in particular, but
also Tsai Ming Liang, Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp.7 If there is
no obvious aesthetic to bind this canon, there is some epistemological
kinship: all four have thrived when the boundary between truth and
fiction, between reality and art, became indistinct, a strategy Apichatpong
adopted wholesale for his experimental ‘documentary’, Dogfahr.
Indeed, Dogfahr is a good starting point for a study situated at the
threshold between art and film. His first feature-length offering, it reflects
his training, close to this threshold, at the Art Institute. The project
emerged from his work for his MA thesis. Of all his films, the conception
and execution of Dogfahr most resembles an art project, with a grant from
the Hubert Bals Fund (administered by the International Film Festival
Rotterdam) facilitating completion of a project already under way. It is
his most outwardly experimental feature, and carries an overt avant-
garde inspiration: the Surrealist parlour game cadavre exquis (or ‘exquisite
corpse’), artefacts of which the artist saw in an exhibition at the Art
Institute.8 Building on this model, the film is a heuristic road-movie cum
documentary, splicing an improvised, multi-authored story with candid
scenes of everyday life and interviews with ordinary folk, starting out
from the suburbs of Bangkok, then traversing Thailand from north to south.
Apichatpong is hailed in film circles as a formal innovator, and cer-
tainly his works are structured in unconventional ways. But something
that crashes through the conventions of narrative cinema when viewed
from the vantage of video or media art may seem rather less adventurous.
While the film’s ludic structure defies generic classification, it is nonethe-
less a resolutely narrative piece. There is nothing very abstract or exper-
imental about the cinematography; sound and image are sewn more or
less conventionally – if cleverly – together. As has been noted, aestheti-
cally it conforms more to documentary than fictional traditions.9 Shot
mostly on sixteen-millimetre black-and-white stock, it is composed of
long takes (this too is considered daring in the cinema), but runs for
 598
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Mysterious Object at Noon (Dogfahr nai meu marn), 2000, 35 mm blown up from 16 mm, 1.85:1, Dolby SR, black and
white image, courtesy Kick The Machine Films

eighty-five minutes. Shots are discrete and mostly static, and the montage
largely preserves this; when the camera does move, for instance on a train
or pick-up truck, the frame shifts accordingly.
It is therefore surprising that cinephile treatments have emphasised the
work’s formal daring and stumbled at interpreting its content. This has not
precluded a certain exoticism, or the misleading effects of aestheticisation.
While these at least tend to cordon it off from more pedestrian readings
of national cinema, in the absence of a legible auteurial message, the
work goes uncontextualised, disengaged from the place and time, and
the culture, that inform it. In the recent volume dedicated to Apichatpong’s
oeuvre, editor James Quandt’s treatment of Dogfahr is nimble and
detailed, but does not pretend to go much beyond description; Tony
Rayns’s summary is no less adroit, but opens Dogfahr laterally, mapping
connections to the artist’s other works.10 In the wide constellation of
possible artistic influences offered by these authors, not one is Thai. Both
prefer to riff on what is ineffable about his style, rather than venture any
historical context, a shortcoming typical of the commentary to date.
Apichatpong’s films muster their energies from amidst a bustling verna-
10. Ibid, pp 31 –42 and 132 – cular culture, a milieu that does little if anything to shape the vocabulary
142, respectively. For a
more searching treatment, with which art film is customarily framed. They might thus fairly claim a
see Matthew P Ferrari, certain aesthetic sovereignty, or even destabilise prevailing assumptions
‘Mysterious Objects of the medium engages elsewhere. This arbitrage is undeniably in play, both
Knowledge’, MA thesis,
College of Fine Arts, Ohio in Apichatpong’s work and in its eager reception by Western experts,
University, 2006. however they may resist deciphering it. But if the work indeed demands to
 599
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Mysterious Object at Noon (Dogfahr nai meu marn), 2000, 35 mm blown up from 16 mm, 1.85:1, Dolby SR, black and
white image, courtesy Kick The Machine Films

11. John Clark, Modern Asian be read as ‘autonomous’ – as a primarily aesthetic rather than discursive
Art, Craftsman/G + B
Arts, Sydney, 1998,
statement – then we would need other explanations as to why Apichatpong’s
pp 84 –85 images are so abidingly anchored in their social reality, so fully freighted
12. Corrado Feroci (1892– with the people of contemporary Thailand, including the non-professional
1962), known to the Thais actors usually at their centre. This challenge becomes even more critical in
as Silpa Bhirasri, founder Primitive, in which a specific social history is engaged more directly than
of the first academic art
school in 1933, which in previous work. But before this is characterised as a political turn, more
became Silpakorn thought must be given to the sociopolitical stakes of the earlier work, and
University in 1941. to the local dynamics obtaining between art and society.
13. Field Marshal Plaek The idea of aesthetic autonomy is conspicuously not local. Thai mod-
Phibulsongkram (1897–
1964), military leader and
ernism has seldom aspired to be autotelic.11 If Apichatpong has, it is a
Prime Minister (1938– habit he picked up abroad – he would not have acquired it at architecture
1944 and 1948 –1957). school in Khon Kaen. The doctrine of ars gratia artis holds little currency
Thongchai may be right to
recuperate Plaek’s
in a country where visual art emerged relatively recently from sacred
republican credentials, contexts, and almost directly into the embrace of the national ideology
versus the monarchic machine. The classical slogan bestowed upon this apparatus by its pro-
revival narrative that has
highlighted his fascist
genitor – an expatriate Italian named Corrado Feroci – was ars longa
tendencies. But the vita brevis.12 This marks a polite fusion between the Buddhist notion of
aesthetic leaning of the the impermanence of the physical self and a Western Classicist notion
public art he patronised,
still conspicuous in Thai of art’s longevity that is unmistakably conservative, and which, in the
cities today, speaks for hands of the modernist state that patronised this fusion from the late
itself. Thongchai 1930s on (under military strongman Field Marshal Phibun), inspired
Winichakul, ‘Toppling
Democracy’, Journal of outcrops of pseudo-fascist junk that embarrassed even Feroci.13
Contemporary Asia, vol In fact, a better fit might be the Futurist slogan, Fiat ars, pereat mundus
38, no 1, February 2008, which, like the Thai dictator Luang Phibun Songkhram (1932 – 1973),
 600
11 –37. See also Apinan
Poshyananda, Modern Art
in Thailand, Oxford
University Press,
Singapore, 1992, p 46.
14. Jit Phumisak, alias Somchai
Preechacharoen (1930–
1966). See Apinan, op cit,
p 160. This reproach had a
strong basis in literary
criticism. As president of
the Association of
Literature, Phibun himself
bolstered the primacy of the
classical chan metre – a
sophisticated verse form
associated with elite
learning – thus privileging
the written over the spoken,
and prestige over
popularity. See Manas
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Chitakasem, ‘Poetic
Conventions and Modern
Thai Poetry’, in Manas
Chitakasem and Andrew
Turton, eds, Thai
Constructions of
Knowledge, School of
Oriental and African
Studies, London, 1991, pp
43 –46.
15. May Adadol Ingawanij,
‘Transistor and
Temporality: The Rural as
Modern Thai Cinema’s
Pastoral’, in Catherine
Fowler and Gillian
Helfield, eds, Representing
the Rural: Space, Place and
Identity in Films about the
Land, Wayne State
University Press, Detroit,
2006, pp 80 –97
16. The northern city of Chiang
Mai, where Apichatpong
now lives, has long been a
major node of this activity.
The Chiang Mai Social
Installation, for example,
was a key breeding ground
for experimental art in the
early 1990s. Chiang Mai
also hosts the famed eco-
Buddhist art initiative The
Land Foundation.
Apichatpong’s practice is
only tangential to this
scene, but by no means
alien to it. Mindful of
Thailand’s privileged place
on a certain artworld
circuit, Quandt rejects the
association with ‘relational
aesthetics’, as championed
by Nicholas Bourriaud and
exemplified by the likes of
Dominique Gonzalez-
Foerster and Philippe
valorised martial technology. (But a year or so before Phibun’s rise to
power, Walter Benjamin had suggested that the consummation of l’art
pour l’art came in the form of Fascism.) Still more pertinent is the idea of
‘Art for Life’ (sinlapa phua chiwit), a motto loosely analogous with ars
gratia artis, inasmuch as it staked out a position for the artist at some
remove from – if not in opposition to – the didactic aesthetic of the
state. When coined, however, as the title of an influential 1955 text by
the radical Marxist writer, Jit Phumisak, it was a frontal attack on art
for art’s sake, then in the ascendancy in state-sponsored culture, for its
neglect of social issues.14 Art for Life later flourished with the social exper-
iments that followed the overthrow of dictatorship in 1973, but evapor-
ated with the massacre of student protestors in 1976. It inspired visual
art, literature and music, but unevenly: in film, where a thriving low-
brow tradition had long been scorned by well-to-do Thais, one scholar
has suggested that Art for Life was not a coherent platform for socially con-
scious film-making so much as a bourgeois rallying cry for higher artistic
standards.15 Either way, and however diffuse its legacy, this idea is still
visible – and is sometimes explicitly invoked – in contemporary art
circles and suggests one historical backdrop for Apichatpong’s practice,
if not a readymade artistic genealogy into which he may be plugged.16
ISAAN: CENTURIES AT THE MARGINS
In our search for background, it is hard to look past Thailand’s recent
national-political flux, brought on by the rise, fall and now threatened
return of divisive, populist former Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.
Despite Apichatpong’s avoidance of the political drama, this temptation
grew when his fifth feature, Sang Sattawat (2006), fell foul of the capri-
cious national censorship board in 2007.17 But the full amplitude of his
work, and its significance, become clearer with one foot at the margin
of national polity, and a vantage on a much longer power cycle (some-
thing we might also say of the political impasse).
It is with some ambivalence that I specify Isaan – Thailand’s north-
east – for in highlighting this regional history I risk inviting a regionalist
interpretation of his work. From the outset, I want to dispel such a con-
clusion: Apichatpong is certainly more a Thai film-maker than an Isaan
one. Nevertheless, the resonance of his work, and its challenges, are
better understood alongside the historical experience of this region that,
though preponderant in the national imaginary thanks to decades of
labour migration and its irrepressible popular cultures, has yet been
long under-represented in national historiography and politics.
The reasons for this neglect take us back many centuries and stem
from Isaan’s incoherent political geography. Relatively infertile and spar-
sely populated before the eighteenth century, its towns were buffeted
between three spheres of influence: Khmer to the east; Lao kingdoms to
the north (with whom it has close ethno-linguistic ties); and the central
Siamese lowland powers, shifting south from Sukhothai (thirteenth to fif-
teenth centuries), through Ayutthaya (fifteenth to eighteenth centuries),
to Thonburi and Bangkok (1768 to the present). While this Siamese
sphere has prevailed now for more than two centuries, the north-east
was not effectively ruled by Bangkok, nor were its borders established,

Parreno. Apichatpong did
in fact collaborate with the
latter, at The Land
Foundation in 2003,
though Quandt seems to be
unaware of this. See Johnny
Ray Huston,
‘Weerasethakul Talks
Hospitals, Aerobics, and a
Boy from Mars, SF360, 9
April 2007. http://www.
sf360.org/?pageid=7793
17. For a nuanced account of
the controversy, see
Benedict Anderson, ‘The
Strange Story of a Strange
Beast’, in May Adadol
Ingawanij and Benjamin
McKay, eds, Cinema in
Southeast Asia Today,
South East Asia Program,
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Cornell University, Ithaca,
New York, forthcoming.
18. Chulalongkorn was the
fifth king of the present
Chakkri dynasty. See
generally Thongchai
Winichakul, Siam Mapped:
A History of the Geo-body
of a Nation, Silkworm
Books, Chiang Mai, 1995.
19. Charles F Keyes, Isan:
Regionalism in
Northeastern Thailand,
Southeast Asia Program,
Cornell University, Ithaca,
New York, 1967, p 283.
Keyes traces this rebel
archetype back as far as the
late seventeenth century.
See also Yoneo Ishii,
Sangha, State, and Society:
Thai Buddhism in History,
Peter Hawkes, trans,
University of Hawaii Press,
Honolulu, 1986,
pp 171 –185
20. This loose arrangement
applied not only to the
north-east: historian Craig
Reynolds points out that
even parts of the central
flood plain around
Bangkok were but ‘lightly
governed’ at the time.
‘[P]olitical realities in 1900
forced the central
government to out-source
government to local leaders
of all stripes.’ Craig J
Reynolds, ‘Review of
Peerasak’, New Mandala,
12 March, 2010, http://
asiapacific.anu.edu.au/
newmandala/2010/03/12/
review-of-peerasak/. See
also James C Scott, The Art
601
until the end of the nineteenth century, when, in the face of French and
British encroachments, the reformist King Chulalongkorn set about
consolidating a national footprint with colonial strategies of his own,
laying modern infrastructure (electricity and railways) and putting
down rebellions in each corner of his realm.18 Once mapped, Isaan
covered roughly a third of the new nation, and accounted for roughly a
third of its population, proportions unchanged today.
Isaan was never a competitor for prestige. It was always marginal, a
buffer zone – and thus frequent battleground – between its stronger
neighbours, a role maintained throughout the colonial era. Much of its
population arrived by way of forced resettlement, especially following
Siamese victories over the Lao. While acculturation (eg the imposition
of Thai language over Lao) had a lot to do with Isaan’s assimilation
into Siam, culture also lay at the heart of sporadic attempts to resist it.
Strikingly, the artist figures in almost every account of organised resist-
ance. In a sketched history of Isaan revolt, cultural expression is
perhaps the chief continuity. The region’s first ‘modern’ uprisings –
modern inasmuch as they opposed a nation-state – were led in 1902 by
phumibun (or ‘men of merit’), charismatic leaders who claimed to be
endowed with magical powers. Their primary medium was song: accord-
ing to anthropologist Charles Keyes, ‘troubadour singing was probably
the major way whereby the phumibun message was spread from village
to village’.19 These irruptions had multiple causes. Central, by all
accounts, was resentment of Bangkok’s administrative reforms, especially
of taxation and labour, which slashed the prestige and income of the
provincial nobility, some of whom donned the phumibun mantle. Some
scholars emphasise the wound inflicted on Lao cultural identity, although
by 1902 this resentment cannot have been too pronounced beyond the
local elites – it would be another twenty years before the first Siamese
school curriculum was implemented, in Ubon Ratchathani.20 Certainly,
economic factors weighed heavily; not least, a precarious, weather-
sensitive agricultural economy. Into this tinderbox fell regular sparks of
insurrection, often Messianic in form, but always short-lived.21
During the Cold War, the Americans established bases in the region for
their air assaults on Indochina. This period left its marks, yet, despite pro-
viding some basic infrastructure, did little to improve Isaan’s lot.22 In
1967, Keyes traced the development of a regional consciousness from pre-
modern times; what was remarkable was that it had not taken more radical
forms, given the region’s stubborn economic and political disadvantage,
and the government’s tendency to ignore ‘legitimate regional grie-
vances’.23 The explanation was the effective merger (now increasingly
frayed) of symbolic imaginaries: the extent to which regional conscious-
ness was made compatible with national, monarchic belonging. Unsurpris-
ingly, though, from the 1960s, the north-east did host a significant
Communist insurgency, a cause bolstered, if also complicated, by the
influx of students fleeing the 1976 massacre in Bangkok. The state’s
counter-insurgency was protracted and brutal – Primitive probes one mar-
ginal community’s past at the frontline of this national political violence –
but after 1975, with the Americans defeated, Communist sympathies
ebbed and all but dissolved with a government amnesty declared in 1982.
It would be a mistake to slot Apichatpong into this regional-rebel gen-
ealogy. But we might at least sketch the contours of this marginal identity
 602
of Not Being Governed: An
Anarchist History of
Upland Southeast Asia,
Yale University Press, New
Haven and London, 2009,
pp 20 –21.
21. Charles F Keyes,
‘Millennialism, Theravada
Buddhism, and Thai
Society’, Journal of Asian
Studies, February 1977, vol
36, issue 2, p 283. Ishii (op
cit, pp 182 and ff)
highlights the millenarian
foundations in old,
apocryphal byways of
Buddhist doctrine, noting
that at these moments of
crisis Theravada thought
seems to play an
untypically disintegrative
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role in the development of
national community.
22. From the 1960s to the
1980s, income disparity
between Isaan people and
their lowland compatriots
grew drastically. Despite
an economic boom in the
1980s, the World Bank
found more Isaan people
below the poverty line at
the close of that decade
than at its beginning. See
Peter Rogers, Northeast
Thailand: From Prehistoric
to Modern Times, DK
Bookhouse, Bangkok,
1996, pp 220 –223.
23. Keyes, Isan: Regionalism in
Northeastern Thailand,
op cit, p 55
24. Karen Newman, ‘A Man
Who Can Recall His Past
Lives: Installations by
Apichatpong
Weerasethakul’, in
Quandt, op cit, pp
143 –152
25. Exemplary of the ironic-
critical trend are Vasan
Sitthiket, Manit
Sriwanichpoom and Sutee
Kunavichayanont.
that colours his ambivalent purchase on Thailand’s national history, and
of the political tradition proper to it in which art (especially song and
storytelling) has been so preponderant. Apichatpong has consistently situ-
ated his protagonists and stories – from Dogfahr to Primitive, through
other work made in Isaan such as Haunted Houses (2001) – within pre-
cisely this knot of national and regional imaginaries. His subjects tend not
to represent one or the other position, but usually both, an imbrication of
identities that short-circuits attribution to a singular ethnicity or political
stance. In this nation of mixed and murky ethnic origins, its conflicts as
acute now as ever, this strategic ambivalence is crucial: it ensures that
the memories of individuals and communities come largely unmediated
by the monolithic patriotism that typically frames public experience.
Nevertheless, this question of a dual cultural imaginary is inescapably
political. Again, the north-east is exemplary, its open, carnivalesque folk
traditions offering an antithesis to the closed, hierarchical and ceremo-
nious forms of official Siamese culture. Isaan’s animism and religious syn-
cretism, and its matriarchal social structure, were gradually overcoded by
a mono-logical Siamese-Buddhist patriarchy, and less gradually after the
reforms of the fifth reign (1868– 1910). So Buddhism, while integral to
Isaan life, has become so somewhat against the grain of an animist sub-
strate. (Elsewhere, it has met tougher resistance, as in the Muslim
majority southern provinces ceded to Siam by the British in 1909.) The
eager recourse to Buddhism by Apichatpong’s Western interpreters
tends to ignore this regional complexity.24 While Buddhist symbols
appear frequently in his work – as in everyday life – he avoids the
sacral zones of religious life, instead framing the clergy (sangha) in
profane and quotidian contexts. In fact, he eschews all the obvious
markers of ‘Thai’ cultural heritage, in step with emerging art practices
since 1998 which have broadly sought to insulate contemporary art
from both the neo-traditionalism of the 1980s, and the ironic critiques
of nationalism that began to prevail in the ’90s. Tellingly, the urban bour-
geois consumer – aspiring patron of the former, anti-hero of the latter –
is nowhere to be seen.25 Apichatpong passes over not just this bourgeois
subject, but also its bourgeois politics.
SOCIAL SURREALISM: POLITICS
AND LUDIC ETHNOGRAPHY
Specifying the ethnographic horizon of Apichatpong’s work is therefore
no simple matter. If he privileges a geopolitically and economically mar-
ginal class, a position he only partially shares, what might his work have
to say about them? Surely, the ludic and fictional dimensions of Dogfahr
complicate the terms on which it might be said to record their reality. Yet
it was documentary enough to win a prestigious documentary prize in
Japan; and its focus on the nation’s margins suggests an ethnographic
scope, whatever the disputes attending this term. So what kind of
recording does it enact? What are we to make of the artist’s adoption
of documentary’s aesthetic, without its epistemological claims?
In The Return of the Real, Hal Foster fired a shot across the bow of art
with ethnographic pretensions. Political art of the 1990s had traded a
protagonist defined in terms of economic relations for one defined in

26. Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as
Ethnographer’, in The
Return of the Real, MIT
Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1996,
pp 171 –203. ‘Just as the
proletkult author
according to Benjamin
sought to stand in the
reality of the proletariat,
only in part to sit in the
place of the patron, so the
ethnographic artist may
collaborate with a sited
community, only to have
his work redirected to
other ends. Often artist and
community are linked
through an identitarian
reduction of both, the
apparent authenticity of
the one invoked to
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guarantee that of the
other’; p 198.
27. Quandt, op cit, p 35. In a
recent discussion about
Dogfahr’s marginal
subjects, it was suggested
that the documentary
agenda lay in presenting
counter-images to the
national tourism
authority’s ‘Amazing
Thailand’ campaign, in full
swing at that time. The
artist expressly refutes this,
countering that the sense of
discovery during his dérive
made him feel he was a
tourist himself (interview).
I will suggest below that
this sense of journeying is
essential to his practice.
28. See James Clifford, The
Predicament of Culture:
Twentieth Century
Ethnography, Literature
and Art, Harvard
University Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts
and London, 1988. On
anthropological film, see
David MacDougall, ‘Visual
Anthropology and the
Ways of Knowing. . .’, in
Transcultural Cinema,
Princeton University Press,
Princeton, 1998,
pp 61 –91.
29. Catherine Russell,
‘Surrealist Ethnography:
Las Hurdes and the
Documentary
Unconscious’, in Alexandra
Juhasz and Jesse Lerner,
eds, F is for Phony: Fake
Documentary and Truth’s
Undoing, University of
603
terms of cultural identity. Foster identified here the same dangers of ideo-
logical ‘patronage’ flagged by Benjamin in his 1934 lecture, ‘The Author
as Producer’. There is a difference, warns Foster, between standing in and
standing for an identity group, and in the latter case ‘the artist is primiti-
vised, indeed anthropologised, in turn’.26 Apichatpong, we have seen,
stands in just such an ‘impossible place’ (Benjamin) between the commu-
nity he is inevitably ‘representing’ – itself schizophrenically national and
provincial – and his mostly foreign audience. But rather than affirming or
denying an identity with his subjects, he takes pains to complicate any
conflation, for instance, by soliciting from them fictions (Dogfahr) or
role-play (Haunted Houses; Primitive). The non-professional locals
become active agents, performing and improvising in their own idioms,
their own spaces. Whatever record results from this deliberate prolifer-
ation of voices and authors is collective and subject to chance and play.
Yet at the same time, the work retains a certain ‘notational quality’, as
Apichatpong strives to maintain an emotional distance when shooting,
to remain an observer.27
The purposes of art and of ethnography, typically understood, may lie
far apart, yet they have had in recent years little choice but to confront
one another. Contemporary art has avidly pursued ethno-political sub-
jects, absorbed and critiqued ethnographic means of presentation.
Anthropology, for its part, has expanded its media, as its field of interest
has dilated to encompass everyday life and ‘experiential knowledge’.28
Viewed historically, one vanishing-point on the horizon, where art and
ethnography converge, is Surrealism. Catherine Russell gives an
account of their meeting in her reading of Luis Buñuel’s scandalous ‘docu-
mentary’ Las Hurdes (1932).29 She takes up James Clifford’s characteris-
ation of Surrealism in the late 1920s as a laboratory for ‘overcoming the
universalising tendencies of anthropological humanism’.30 If Buñuel suc-
ceeded, it was by stealth, camouflaging his attack in what would other-
wise be taken as humanist modes: documentary film and the emerging
anthropology. Russell credits him with a cunning, inverted primitivism.
The great ‘transgression’ of Las Hurdes lay in his ‘inhumane refusal to
even try to close the gap’ between the viewer and the accursed Hurda-
nos.31 The latter appear not as ethnographic other – another people
from another time, in Johannes Fabian’s oft-cited formulation – but as
the inverse: the other within interwar Europe’s tattered patchwork of
incomplete modernisation; remnants of a feudal society, tragically con-
temporary; the ugly ‘big toe’ of European civility to borrow, as Russell
does, a metaphor from Bataille. To Buñuel, documentary film must
have seemed ‘drastically ill-equipped to grasp the reality’ of this hetero-
geneity. His Surrealist ethnography is thus ‘an antihumanist. . . critique
of the colonialist tenets of anthropological cinema’.32
Might not this patchwork be comparable to the economically hetero-
geneous space of today’s post-authoritarian Southeast Asia?33 While
there is no direct link to be made with Las Hurdes, Buñuel’s gesture is
yet suggestive of a certain line of flight, a way of side-stepping the epis-
temological assumptions weighing on the moving image, and the purport-
edly humanist ends to which it might be put. Apichatpong does not court
scandal. But he does cloak his fictional, mixed reality in a documentary
aesthetic; and he does exercise a certain reserve, a reluctance to engage
the scale of liberal-humanist values which has frustrated attempts to
 604
Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 2006
30. Clifford, op cit, pp 25 –28;
Russell, op cit, p 99
31. Ibid, p 105. See also James
F Lastra, ‘Why is this
Absurd Picture Here?
Ethnology/Heterology/
Buñuel’, in Ivone
Margulies, ed, Rites of
Realism: Essays on
Corporeal Cinema, Duke
University Press, Durham,
North Carolina and
London, 2003, pp 194 –
195.
32. See Russell, p 107.
33. One influential account of
this patchwork
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characterises it as ‘post-
developmentalist’. Aihwa
Ong, ‘Graduated
Sovereignty’, in
Neoliberalism as
Exception: Mutations in
Citizenship and
Sovereignty, Duke
University Press, Durham,
North Carolina and
London, 2006
34. Foster, op cit, p 173
35. Apinan, op cit, p 164
36. Ingawanij, op cit. The
monarchy, meanwhile, has
had more success
articulating a place for the
farmer in its cinematic
utopia. See David Teh,
‘The Art of Interruption:
Notes on the 5th Bangkok
Experimental Film
Festival’, Theory, Culture
& Society, vol 25, no 7–8,
pp 309 –320 (2008)
37. Apinan, op cit, pp 141 – 142
38. Georges Bataille, ‘The
Moral Meaning of
Sociology’, in The Absence
of Myth: Writings on
Surrealism, Michael
Richardson, trans, Verso,
London and New York,
1994, p 105
read in his work a cosmopolitan politics. Perhaps his uncanny realism, in
scrambling the codes of humanist representation, even provides (fictional)
cover for the outing of a certain unconscious repressed, the ethnic other-
ness embedded within Thailand’s national imaginary.
For Western critics, Surrealism belongs to a well-known, even mytholo-
gised, avant-garde genealogy, one in which cultural resistance and political
resistance have been posited as one another’s sites.34 Does this obtain
in Thailand’s case? While I have shown that it might once have at the per-
iphery, the conjunction is less clearly made out in the national culture
centred on Bangkok’s institutions, where doctrines like Art for Life never
held much more than marginal ground. The heyday of a self-consciously
political art was short-lived: perhaps announced by the formation of the
Artists’ Front of Thailand (in 1974) around a left-leaning splinter of
Silpakorn faculty, it too was shattered by the massacre in 1976.35 In
film, the obvious test case is Tong Pan (1975), produced by the progressive
‘Isaan Group’ of intellectuals gathered in the capital. Made literally in the
name of a north-eastern rural constituency, this film exemplified, however
reflexively, the difficulties of bridging the social divide. The film’s narrative
doubles the impasse, with the progressive students failing to integrate
the eponymous rice farmer into their experimental polity. Could cinema,
or art, have been expected to do any better? It seems unlikely given the
farmer’s lot in visual culture since the 1970s.36 In any case, today’s contem-
porary artists – especially those who matured, like Apichatpong, after
1997 – relate to this oppositional generation of the 1970s with distance,
diffidence and a lack of detailed knowledge.
While the artist’s inspiration for Dogfahr is clear, any broader Surrealist
filiation will require careful study, keeping in view these broken ideological
chains, and certainly looking beyond the horizon of national cinema. Art
history provides one avenue: in his Modern Art in Thailand, Apinan
Poshyananda provides an overview of Surrealism’s impact on Thai mod-
ernism. Appropriation of Western styles tended towards liberal adaptation,
often without much attention, he stresses, to their theoretical underpin-
nings. Surrealist aesthetics found many outlets, from the 1960s on,
merging freely with local renderings of tradition, myth, magic and the
supernatural.37 Again, Apichatpong fits into this lineage only uneasily:
he makes plenty of room for chance, but no commitment to psychic auto-
matism. Like his forebears, his adaptation bears nothing of the unequivocal
claim to moral or aesthetic ‘exemption’ found in Breton’s 1924 manifesto.
Indeed, on the contrary, his handling of social taboos deliberately defuses
their shock value, dousing them instead with the quotidian familiarity, and
slightly awkward intimacy, that are his trademarks.
For all the dreaminess of his films, the unconscious that Apichatpong
taps – or that taps him – is as much collective as it is individual. This
could suggest an affinity with the less strident politics found at the
margins of the movement. His approach is perhaps better described as
post-Surrealist, like that drift after 1930 towards a new sociology, that
‘vague orientation’ described by Georges Bataille, born of ‘detachment
from a society that was disintegrating because of individualism’.38
At stake would be (as it was for Michel Leiris or Roger Caillois) not a
neglected unconscious, so much as a neglected relation between the
unconscious and social reality, an attempt to relocate the figure of the
unconscious, to re-anchor it, in collective experience. No doubt the

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39. Translation from Montri,
op cit, p 67
40. Craig J Reynolds, Seditious
Histories: Contesting Thai
and Southeast Asian Pasts,
University of Washington
Press, Seattle and London,
2006
605
individualism Thailand faces is of a different order, arguably less effective
in dissolving traditional bonds. Yet it was a cardinal value of modernism
well into the 1980s and, as password for a certain bourgeois anxiety, has
been a preoccupation of contemporary art since.
FROM NIRAT TO ROAD MOVIE:
HOMESICKNESS AS SPATIAL AND CULTURAL LOGIC
At Bang Torani, grief increases.
Utter desolation makes me weep.
Oh, the solid earth extends in all directions,
Two hundred and forty thousand miles in all;
When in misery, even my wee body
Cannot find a spot of ground to rest.
All brittle with thorns and bitter thoughts.
Wandering alone like a nestless bird.
Sunthorn Phu, Nirat Phukhao Thong, 182839
So far I have suggested that Apichatpong’s take on Thailand’s history and
culture is deliberately inscrutable and equivocal: while he has obvious
sympathies for marginal communities, his stance is irreducible to any
clear ethnic, regional or national position. I have also proposed that in
certain strands of Surrealism – in particular where it chafed against a
nascent anthropology’s schemas of visual representation – lies some pre-
cedent for this non-committal position, where a certain representational
directness shrugs off the liberal assumptions ordinarily ascribed to
realism. Now I will examine the spatial logic that accompanies this
unfixed perspective: a logic of itinerancy that suffuses Thai narrative
arts generally, and Apichatpong’s especially. Coming to grips with the
pivotal role of distance in Thai aesthetics will require a brief excursion
into literary history wherein three historical processes intersect: the
geo-spatial overcoding as premodern cultures are absorbed by the
nation-state; the emergence of a modern authorship that inevitably
informs the role of the contemporary auteur; and the new mobility of
information occasioned by the arrival of reproducible media.
Literature was the first art to confront reproduction. Its historians
have made much of the emergence in the late nineteenth century of the
first ‘commoner’ intellectuals who, harnessing the new technology of
print, managed to loosen the royal monopoly on historiography.40
Pivotal though this was, it was no revolution; most had been beneficiaries
of court patronage, and the growth of their new public sphere was
gradual and continually checked by sovereign power. But earlier rappro-
chements between courtly and popular culture had already occurred in
the medium of poetry, as popular (oral) verse forms were incorporated
into the (written) arts of the palace and nobility, at the eighteenth-
century court of Ayutthaya – an absorption that would not appear in
visual art for another two centuries. One form in particular stands out
for our purposes: the nirat or ‘travel poem’.
The nirat is a versified narrative. It is typical for each of its verses to
begin with a place name that sparks recollections of a lover, and whose
connotations prompt the verse’s sentiment – not exoticism or adventure,
 606
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41. Ibid, p 86. On the origins of
the nirat, see Manas, op cit;
and Nidhi Eoseewong, Pen
and Sail: Literature and
History in Early Bangkok,
Chris Baker et al, trans,
Silkworm Books, Chiang
Mai, 1984, pp 114 –146.
42. Nidhi, op cit, p 134, notes
that in earlier nirat the
actual experience of travel
is ‘not considered worthy
of description’, and it is
sometimes not even clear
where the author is going.
43. Klaus Wenk, Thai
Literature: An
Introduction, Erich W
Reinhold, trans, White
Lotus, Bangkok, 1995,
pp 35 –36. Jit described this
as a movement from
‘subjective romanticism’ to
‘naturalism’ and ‘realism’.
See Reynolds, op cit, p 88.
44. Reynolds, ‘A Seditious
Poem and its History’, in
Seditious Histories, op cit,
pp 80 –121
45. Ibid, p 87. In Thai, ‘to miss’
(kit theung) is the same
phrase as the less
sentimental ‘to think of’.
The word theung
exemplifies the Thai sense
of distancing, which is
irreducible to either the
temporal or the spatial:
meaning ‘to arrive at’ or ‘to
reach’, its span may be
temporal, spatial or
conceptual.
but usually weariness, longing and the alienation of the miserable, home-
sick traveller. Like a mnemonic map, descriptive and sometimes dated,
these poems hold considerable historiographic value for scholars inter-
ested in Thailand’s largely unwritten past.41 But the nirat is epistolary,
more subjective than objective, addressed not to a scholarly reader –
nor to some abstract posterity in the manner of a Western chronicle –
but to a distant lover. Yearning and worry are its chief emotions. Essential
to this form are itinerancy and movement; its aesthetic power rests on the
psychology of displacement, on the melancholy of separation. Distance
here is an index of loss, of longing for the people and comforts of home.
The nirat was pivotal in the transition to a modern artistic paradigm,
occasioning innovations of both form and content. While the idiom of
separation derived from Ayutthaya, early Bangkok’s emergent bourgeoi-
sie, its horizons expanded by bourgeoning trade, seems to have demanded
a more descriptive form, and the nirat was merged with a kind of long-
form documentary travelogue (phleng yao jotmaihet).42 The master inno-
vator was a colourful figure named Sunthorn Phu (1786 – 1855). A
favourite of the second Chakkri king, and reputed as a lover, traveller
and drinker, he would fall in and out of royal favour until his death in
obscurity at the ripe age of seventy. Whereas courtly literature had
been marked by formal self-consciousness and virtuosity with arcane
and foreign vocabulary, Sunthorn Phu minimised the lofty language;
while court poets had hitherto concerned themselves with the celestial,
sacred sphere and with eulogising royalty, his poems were rooted in ‘an
objective world and real life’. Klaus Wenk notes his ‘almost photographic
way of depicting things’, especially nature, ‘as they appeared’.43 It would
be a stretch to call the nirat ‘cinematic’, yet it could well be thought of as a
kind of moving image. It marked, in short, the emergence of a form of
modern realism, albeit in a romantic idiom.
Amongst the journeys the nirat chronicled were military expeditions,
early attempts to shore up Siam’s ‘geo-body’ (Thongchai), including those
to Isaan, constructed as a foreign land, dangerous and inhospitable to the
homesick Siamese scribe.44 But while it was a channel for official history,
of a state gaze scanning its subject periphery, the nirat was in important
ways not typical of colonial historiography or geography. First, before the
twentieth century these expeditions, while certainly expressive of a colo-
nial will to subdue provincial and foreign threats, aimed to consolidate
allegiance, not to occupy. This is a key distinction, for what was
foreign – the nature and culture the poet traversed – was not marked,
even implicitly, for occupation, appropriation or extinction. Difference,
the Other, belongs where it is, and it is there to stay. It is the experience
of this alterity that energises the literary form. But from line to line, this
energy is converted into images of what is left behind. It is perhaps a
peculiarity of Siamese culture that such chronicles are not catalogues so
much as projections, onto unfamiliar lands, of what was loved and
missed of home. Second, the author of the nirat was not a wanderer or
drifter. His momentum is directed, inexorable and always with a view
to return. (This distinguishes him from Isaan’s charismatic troubadours,
discussed above.) The poem comes out of that temporary state, not of
home and everyday life, but of displacement; it oscillates ‘between
homesickness and the living reality that is pressing itself against the
poet’s senses’.45

46. A full typology of the nirat
artist will require an essay of
its own. Most conspicuous is
Navin Rawanchaikul, a
Thai of Indian descent from
Chiang Mai, working
globally and based partly in
Japan. His celebrated ‘taxi
museum’ projects (1999–
2006) had an extensive,
international itinerary, as
did Fly With Me to Another
World (1999–2009). The
latter retells the 1960s
European motorcycle
odyssey of artist Inson
Wongsam, through an
itinerant programme of
installations, conferences,
comics and other
publications. Of today’s
emerging artists, two are
Downloaded by [david teh] at 04:10 05 October 2011
exemplary of the nirat
tendency. Arin Rungjang’s
collection of neon tubes
from art spaces in Thailand
and abroad (Neons from Art
Spaces, 2006) may be read
as a minimalist nirat; he is
the most literary (and
epistolary) of the younger
generation, and frequently
cites Sunthorn Phu as a
major inspiration. Pratchaya
Phinthong’s first installation
upon returning (again,
overland) from studies in
Germany (Missing Objects,
2004) documented this
journey by way of collected
objects and a written
memoir; and his ongoing
Dong-na project (with
Pattara Chanruechachai,
started in 2005) emerged
from a journey into the most
remote reaches of Isaan, to a
village that had been
omitted from official Thai
maps. Of these four artists,
only one (Arin) is from
Bangkok.
47. Visual anthropologist
Rosalind Morris notes that
transportation and
ethnographic inscription
were ‘mutually entailed’
from the moment a
premodern sense of distance
began to collapse, with the
construction of railways in
the 1890s. Rosalind C
Morris, In the Place of
Origins: Modernity and its
Mediums in Northern
Thailand, Duke University
Press, Durham, North
Carolina and London, 2000,
p 209.
607
The nirat was more than just a poetic innovation – it laid a thematic
and psycho-geographic template that still pervades Thai culture today.
And this itinerancy could do much to illuminate Thai contemporary
art, especially in the globalised market that has embraced it since the
mid-1990s.46 Travel, and the distance and longing it implies, are hard-
wired into Thailand’s narrative traditions and artistic sensibilities, and
Apichatpong’s itinerant cinema is no exception.
ITINERANT CINEMA
The kinship between cinematic and transport technologies is well known.
The camera’s gaze was perhaps from its inception a motile gaze, from the
machine’s early pioneers (including the chrono-photographers), through
its applications in science, war, industry and, of course, entertainment.
But while this motility may be universal in the cinema, the poetics it
engenders can be localised. For, like films, roads, canals and railways
are channels of information and memory too, their functions and mean-
ings determined by the cultures they traverse. Their growth and decline
leave a palimpsest of shifting vectors of wealth, force and merit. Let us
return, then, to the question of what sort of inscription an itinerant
film-making can make on Thailand’s geo-body.
Apichatpong’s oeuvre offers a veritable psycho-geography of Thai
transport. The latter is conspicuous in his features and is the subject or
setting of several shorter works, including Unknown Forces (2007), Lumi-
nous People (2007) and Mobile Men (2008). His most itinerant project,
Dogfahr, has frequently been called a road movie. Uncrossable expanses
of space and time are fundamental to his work: more than mere plot
devices, they form the very canvas of experience on which his stories are
inscribed; distance is the fabric of narrative. One of his very first films,
0116643225059 (1994) is an experimental epistle based on the student’s
phone calls from Chicago to his mother back in Khon Kaen. His most
recent short, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (2009) also has an epistolary
pretext. Indeed, given the much-savoured evocations of longing in his
films, it is remarkable that none of his interpreters has placed his work
within this specifically Thai cultural history of displacement and yearning.
This task awaits a more qualified scholar; for now, the poetics of itinerancy
serves to underscore the social and art histories introduced earlier.
First, there are obvious class and ethnic dimensions to this topogra-
phy, the domain of a mobile, but largely unskilled and under-educated
rural labour force.47 We recall here that the predominantly Lao (and
Lao-speaking) people of the Khorat plateau were first brought there to
work. Broadly speaking, it is their descendants at the forefront of all
this movement today, to and from the larger industrial centres and
tourist towns, subject to the vagaries of regional, national and global
economies. They drive a large share of Thailand’s trucks, buses, taxis
and tuk-tuks; they push carts in city streets and hotel corridors. And it
is no coincidence that they are also the ‘mobile men’ and women at the
barricades in the present political standoff. Second, mobility occupies a
special place in both the contexts, and the themes, of visual art. There
are of course exemplary migratory models in the figure of the Buddha
and in Buddhism. Itinerancy in art is strongly tied to this spiritual
 608
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Top: Unknown Forces, 2007, four channel installation, digital video, 16:9, Dolby 5.1, colour image, courtesy Kick The
Machine Films; bottom: Mobile Men, 2008, 35 mm blown up from digital video, 16:9, Dolby 5.1, colour photo:
Chaisiri Jiwarangsan, courtesy Kick The Machine Films

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48. Clark, op cit, pp 85– 86.
Ishii, op cit, shows that
religious itinerancy has
been inhibited by the
Thammayudt sect, founded
in the fourth reign and
ascendant in national
religious affairs ever since.
It perhaps resurfaces (as
farce?) in today’s domestic
cultural tourism, eg around
sites like Chalermchai
Kositpipat’s famous White
Temple (Wat Rong Khun)
in Chiang Rai; and in the
‘socially engaged’
Buddhism that informed
the practice of Montien
Boonma, laying fertile
ground for today’s
‘relational’ practices.
49. Benjamin, op cit, pp 84 –85
50. Morris, op cit, is the best
guide to this transition in
which a communicative
field was transformed –
disarticulated, as much as
reconfigured – by the
spread of new media, and
to how early modern
literature reflects it.
51. Benjamin, op cit, p 89
52. Ibid, p 95
609
tradition and geography, as exemplified by Paiboon Suwannakudt’s
peregrinations researching the mural tradition he and his followers
would revive, in temples and hotel lobbies, in the 1970s and 1980s.48
As elsewhere, the traditions onto which cinema would be grafted were
also itinerant. In most of the country, film first appeared – and lingered
until quite recently – in the mobile and temporary architecture of the
temple fair, tracing the seasonal footsteps of the puppet theatre. In Thai
culture, it seems, where there is narrative, there is distance.
In his essay on storytelling, Walter Benjamin observed two modes of the
craft: one brought knowledge from afar, the other from long ago (embo-
died by seaman and farmer respectively). But it was only with the ‘intimate
interpenetration’ of these two essential functions that storytelling finds its
‘full historical breadth’, a synthesis Benjamin attributes to the artisan
class of the Middle Ages.49 For the purposes of storytelling, then, distan-
cing has both a spatial and a temporal dimension. In Thai culture and
language, and Thai narrative arts, the two are seldom distinct. The
writing of history, and the history of writing, are about institutionalising
this distancing: space and time, place and history, to be appropriated,
must be reified and informationalised. To this imperative of a global mod-
ernity, both Siamese culture and the animist ones that preceded it have pre-
sented sustained and often ingenious resistance, even as they have
embraced other things (market economy; technology) that came along
with it.50 And it is in this history of resistance – resistance to fixity and cer-
titude – that Apichatpong’s work may finally come to rest. A history
without dates, a map without place-names, a documentary without facts,
Dogfahr dramatises this condition, prompting a reconsideration of the
epistemological status not just of film, but of narrative per se.
It is no accident that Apichatpong has been taken for a media artist,
yet he clearly works against the grain of the new, informational order
Benjamin diagnosed. He knows that ‘it is half the art of storytelling to
keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it’, that it is by
entrusting interpretation to the reader that a story ‘achieves an amplitude
that information lacks’.51 It is just such an amplitude that demands our
attention in his art. If, for us, this non-informative, ‘artisan form of com-
munication’ seems at odds with the writing of history, Benjamin, for one,
saw no such opposition. Indeed, he wondered whether historiography
might not be the ‘common ground’ of all epic forms, including storytell-
ing, ‘as white light is to the colours of the spectrum’.52 If it is, this has
wide ramifications for Thailand, where the ‘record’ is so partial in the offi-
cial sphere, so patchy in the public sphere, and so enduringly oral in the
sphere of everyday working life. A history worthy of the name can scar-
cely afford to ignore any of these channels.
As the ninth reign draws to a close, the Thai nation, wracked by long
simmering class and ethnic conflicts, lurches toward a symbolic void.
Questions about its peoples, and their histories, cannot be posed
without attention to its unthinkable future. Hence the timeliness of an
itinerant cinema, of narratives in which what happens next is largely a
matter for the nation’s under-represented others. Apichatpong’s
‘counsel’ is less an answer to these questions than ‘a proposal concerning
the continuation of a story which is just unfolding’.