RIP TONY RAYNS

 

น่าดูที่สุด เห็นเขาบอกว่าหนังของ Claudia von Alemann สามารถปะทะกับ Chantal Akerman และ Marguerite Duras ได้เลย

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เห็นแสงเงาในรูปนี้แล้วนึกถึง paintings ยุคเก่า เราเลยถาม Gemini แล้ว Gemini ก็ตอบว่า

 

The photographic style in this image—characterized by a high contrast between a brightly lit subject and a dark, obscured background—closely mirrors a technique known as chiaroscuro (Italian for "light-dark") and its more dramatic evolution, tenebrism.

The master painter most famous for using light and shadow exactly like this is Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio).

Here are a few iconic painters renowned for this specific technique:

• Caravaggio: He revolutionized Baroque art by plunging his backgrounds into near-total darkness and using a single, intense, directed light source (often called "cellar light") to sharply illuminate his subjects. This created an intense, theatrical, and highly realistic effect, much like the dramatic spotlight on the muscles and face in this photo.
• Rembrandt van Rijn: While Rembrandt used a softer, warmer variation of chiaroscuro, he is legendary for using focused light to draw attention to faces and hands out of deep, atmospheric shadows.
• Georges de La Tour: A French Baroque painter heavily inspired by Caravaggio, he used extreme contrasts, often using a single candle as the light source to illuminate figures against pitch-black backgrounds.

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RIP TONY RAYNS (1948-2026)

 

เราไม่เคยรู้จักเขาเป็นการส่วนตัวนะ แต่เราเคยอ่านงานวิจารณ์หนังของเขาใน หนังสือ TIME OUT FILM GUIDE เมื่อราว 20 กว่าปีก่อน และก็ได้รับประโยชน์จากสิ่งต่าง ๆ ที่เขาเขียน ซึ่งแน่นอนว่าเราก็เห็นด้วยกับเขาในบางครั้ง และเราก็ไม่เห็นด้วยกับเขาในหลาย ๆ ครั้ง เพราะหนังที่เขาด่าหลาย ๆ เรื่องเป็นหนังที่เราชื่นชอบอย่างสุดขีด แต่นั่นก็เป็นเรื่องปกติ เพราะความเห็นของแต่ละคนย่อมไม่เหมือนกันอยู่แล้ว

 

ตัวอย่างงานเขียนของ Tony Rayns ใน TIME OUT FILM GUIDE

(เราไม่ได้เห็นด้วยกับความเห็นของเขาที่มีต่อหนังบางเรื่องนะ เราแค่ copy มาให้เห็นเฉย ๆ ว่าเขาเคยเขียนถึงหนังเรื่องอะไรว่าอย่างไรบ้าง)

 

1. ...AND THE MOON DANCES (1995, Garin Nugroho, Indonesia)

 

A young man and woman, both from troubled backgrounds, come to Surakarta to study under Waluyo, a master of traditional Javanese arts. The boy, Ilalang, wants to write music but seems trapped in memories of childhood traumas; the girl, Bulan (= Moon), is simply trying to find herself. The suppressed violence which haunts their lives - which, the film implies, may be endemic in Indonesian society - surfaces when their master dies in an accidental fire. Nugroho's exquisite film doesn't tell a story so much as it explores ambiguities of mood, texture, light and meaning. There's nothing folksy or 'Third World' about this daringly modernist film which uses a rich sound design to point up submerged emotional truths.

 

2. BLISSFULLY YOURS (2002, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)

 

Apichatpong's 'emotional disaster movie' opens wittily with the longest pre-credits scene ever: a leisurely introduction to the three main characters and the binds that tie them. Min (Oo) is a Burmese illegal immigrant, a strapping lad with a nagging skin problem, in need of a fake ID. His Thai girlfriend Roong (Kanokporn), a factory worker, has hired Orn and her husband to help get it. Orn wants to have another child before she's too old, but her husband isn't keen. The credits show up some 45 minutes in, as Min guides Roong to a secluded spot near the Thai-Burmese border where they'll eat, laze, bathe and eventually make love. By chance Orn has chosen a spot nearby for illicit sex with her lover... There's more here than meets the eye: the shattered Thai economy and the Burmese military junta are only just offscreen, and unvoiced fears simmer in the sweltering heat. But the film takes its tone from the uncomplicated Min, whose diary notes and sketches are sometimes superimposed over the images. A languid celebration of the pleasures of the moment, which climaxes with an image of startling sexual candour.

 

3. BUTTERFLY AND FLOWERS (1985, Euthana Mukdasanit, Thailand)

 

An exceptionally beautiful movie set among Thailand's Muslim minority in villages near the Malaysian border, and centering on a bright teenage kid forced to drop out of school and support his family by turning small-time smuggler. Impossible to convey its qualities without falling back on turn-off words like 'charm' and 'sensitivity', but the fact is that it succeeds in evoking the trials, terrors and excitements of childhood with an immediacy that's both sweet and tough. There's an eye-opening blend of universal and local elements: trouble with punks at a rock concert, daredevil feats on the roof of a moving train. And it offers the joy of seeing a director in full control of his medium.

 

4. COME, COME, COME UPWARD (1989, Im Kwon-taek, South Korea)

 

A female companion-piece to Im's classic MANDALA, this too rests on a contrast between sacred and profane approaches to Buddhist enlightenment. Sun-Nyo (Kang, superb) runs away from her broken home and her crush on a teacher to become a nun, expecting to pray and meditate. But the convent sends her out into the world, where she mixes with the poor and desperate and forms one sexual attachment after another with rough working-class men. Im compares her self-abasement with the more orthodox asceticism of another young nun, whose retreat from worldly things results in a brutal rape. The drama is rooted in a clear sense of social and psychological realities but lifted above mere social realism by Gu Joong-Mu's sensationally beautiful cinematography, mostly in shades of blue and grey.

 

5. THE DUMB DIE FAST, THE SMART DIE SLOW (1991, Manop Udomdej, Thailand)

 

The hard-boiled thriller, Thai-style - obviously indebted to The Postman Always Rings Twice and other models, but irreducibly Thai in its plotting and characterisations. The kindly owner of a gas station with a no-good wife takes on a hitchhiker as a handyman, unaware that he's on the run. The wife learns the newcomer's secret, and tries to blackmail him into robbing her husband. Manop started out as an 'underground' political film-maker, which doubtless explains the hints of social comment here. Mostly, though, he has fun in the plot's moral quicksand. Very entertaining, and very novel to see these conventions through Thai eyes.

 

6. INVISIBLE WAVES (2005, Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Thailand)

 

Reuniting the LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE team, this is essentially a tale of bad karma coming home to roost. A Japanese chef in Macau (Asano) murders his lover on the orders of his boss, the woman’s unfaithful husband, and is sent off to Phuket to lie low. Many misadventures later, he realises that the boss actually wants him killed -- and moves through guilt towards a serene acceptance of his fate. Shot in murky grunge-vision and resolutely minimising the impact of its sparky supporting cast, this non-thriller announces at the outset that narrative will count for less than mood, but then goes on to tie itself up in irrelevant storytelling knots with a series of elisions, ambiguities and delayed revelations. Part redeemed by its moments of black comedy, but a real disappointment.

 

7. KARL MAY (1974, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, West Germany, 180min)

 

The second film in Syberberg’s trilogy forming, with LUDWIG – REQUIEM FOR A VIRGIN KING and HITLER, A FILM FROM GERMANY, a unique analysis of the dominant forces in German history and culture. Like a German Riger Haggard, May was an ‘imperialist’ novelist with a strong romantic idealism (best remembered for his American ‘noble savage’ character, Winnetou), and part of Syberberg’s aim is to celebrate the fragile beauty of his fantasies. But the film is structured as a kind of biography, and the long central scene of a courtroom battle marks the collapse of May’s dreams as he gets more and more deeply embroiled in the realities of Prussian jurisprudence. The matter-of-fact historical framework acquires an added resonance from the fact that all the main parts are played by prominent figures from the Nazi cinema for the ‘30s. The mesh of fact, fiction, realism and expressionism is complex and fascinating. And the film’s ‘plastic’ qualities are at least as sumptuous as those in LUDWIG.

 

8. LOVE WILL TEAR US APART (1999, Yu Lik-wai, Hong Kong)

 

Ace cinematographer Yu (XIAO WU, ORDINARY HEROES) has come up with the kind of debut feature that vindicates shoestring indie film-making. He focuses on the new underclass of recent immigrants to Hong Kong from Mainland China – the ‘hicks’ stuck in the sex industry or crappy menial jobs – but looks beyond sociology. Ah Ying (Wong Ning, a recent graduate from drama college in Beijing) gives up karaoke bar work in China to try her luck in Hong Kong. Trapped in prostitution and shoplifting, she heads for a crack-up. Her path crosses those of porn tape vendor Ah Jian (Leung Ka-fai, from L’AMANT, also the co-producer), ex-dancer and fantasist Ah Yan (Lu Liping from  THE BLUE KITE) and elevator repairman Ah Chun (first-timer Rolf Chow). Yu’s real subject is the masochistic resignation that keeps these people locked in their personal hells; he approches it with inexpected wit and good humour.

 

9. PUEN-PAENG (1983, Cherd Songsri, Thailand)

 

Quite unlike the mainstream of Thai movies (but a little too similar to the same director’s masterly THE SCAR), this is an elegiac rural melodrama about two contrasted sisters in love with the same cowherd. It’s set in the ‘30s, and lovingly detailed period touches strike an optimum balance between nostalgic escapism and serious reconstruction of traditions that are already almost extinct. At its heart are magical images of life in a Thai village: a brazen girl propositioning a naked boy as he bathes in the river, a romance pursued on the backs of water buffalo.

 

10. SUZAKU (1997, Naomi Kawase, Japan)

 

Impressionistic portrait of a dying family in a dying mountain village in Nara Prefecture: a 'nothing happens' film which ratherly cleverly camouflages its own lack of grip and focus by hinting at hidden themes (incest, ghosts) and using people from the real-life village as actors. It opens in 1971: recession is already thinning the population but Kozo Tahara (Kunimura, the only professional actor) believes that a rail link will bring new prosperity and eagerly helps dig the tunnel through the mountain. Fifteen years later the railroad is a forgotten dream, the tunnel seems haunted and the Taharas are fading fast. According to Kawase, the obscure title refers to a local bird deity; she wants to see the Tahara family as if through this creature's eyes. Somebody must buy this stuff, because the film won the 1997 Caméra d'Or at Cannes.

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เสียดายเว็บไซท์ Palestine Film Institute เพราะหนังในเว็บไซท์นี้น่าดูสุดขีด แต่พอเราดูหนังเรื่องนี้แล้วพบว่าหนังมันกระตุกและสะดุดมาก ๆ เหมือนหนังมันสะดุดทุก ๆ 10 วินาทีจนเราทนดูไม่ไหว

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หนังสือ CONTEMPORARY THAI CINEMA จะออกวางแผงในเดือนม.ค. 2027 ในราคา 90 ปอนด์ (หรือ 4016 บาทตามอัตราแลกเปลี่ยนปัจจุบัน) น่าสนใจมาก ๆ มีบทความ THE CINEMA OF POJ ARNON ด้วยนะ กรี๊ดดดดดด

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ARTWORKS

 

JIN IN PARADISE HORIZON DREAM 01 (2025, Mairung Jarurattanaporn)

 

AMEN TO THE WEEKEND! (2025, Mairung Jarurattanaporn)

 

VASE CASE: POLYURETHANE LEATHER (2026, Mairung Jarurattanaporn)

 

JIN IN PARADISE HORIZON DREAM 02 (2026, Mairung Jarurattanaporn)

 

A UNIVERSE OF CHAOS: JIN TAKES A BUBBLE TEA BREAK (2026, Mairung Jarurattanaporn)

 

Poster of the exhibition MILLENNIALS FLEX by Jin HaloQ (Mairung Jarurattanaporn)