Foreshadows of Ghosts – The Landscapes of Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thai independent filmmaker, created an extraordinary experience, vision, dream, meditation with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.  It won the 2010 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. 

Uncle Boonmee Visits the Other Side of the Wild

The film blends the banal and sublime, death regarded from above and below, darkness taunts from underground, and then light shines through.  It is fairy tale and death march into the psyche, illustrated in caves, waterfalls, stalked by mysterious beings in a world where humans can be seduced by wild animals and even catfish.

STORY: Hindu Epic ‘Mahabharata’ in Balinese Shadow Theatre and Dance

https://youtu.be/jZzjeiTqutQ

What we do know is that every new film from Apichatpong is a reincarnation of his last, of all of his own previous films, video pieces, and installations, and of the entire past of his nation’s film-making. And that just because Uncle Boonmee may not have told us everything we might like to know this time around, we shouldn’t be at all surprised if, just because he’s dead, he’s not up and walking around—or floating through the night sky, or swinging through the jungle branches—in one of Apichatpong’s future lives, future films. — Chuck Stephens, “Film Comment”

STORY: B. Traven’s “Macario” – Magical Realist Journey on Day of the Dead

Considerations in Uncle Boonmee include blinking lights, sterile hotel rooms, and the extinction of the wild. It’s reflection of past and future existence is an experience to be cherished…or feared.

It is, after all, a film about recurrent visions and round-trip journeys: a movie not just about previous incarnations but about the possibilities of multiple and diverging paths into the future and out of the past; about parallel planes, phantom meanings, ghostly return engagements, interspecies transmogrification, and the double life of each and every Apichatpong movie—where the rarified ultramodern Thai art films of tomorrow and the hoary residues of a thousand cheapo Thai ghost movies of the not-so-distant past always seem to collide in a softly glowing neon chimera of everything cinema might possibly be. — Chuck Stephens

Updated 4 May 2021