11. Manussak
Dokmai
Manussak Dokmai
is one of the best essayistic filmmakers in Thailand. Many of his films present
his social or political ideas and are the hybrid between documentary, fiction,
and experimental films. His most famous film is Don't Forget Me (2003,
10 min)(6), which combines the footage from the massacre on October 6, 1976, at
Thammasat University, with the narration from a documentary about Mlabri
people. The combination result is as haunting as Night and Fog (Alain
Resnais, 1955). Other great essayistic films of his include Dialogue
(2001, 7 min), Way of Thingking 1: Laotian Soldiers Would Like to Change
Thai People's Ideas (2002, 8 min), Dream Watch for Anyone Who Is
Believed to Violate Good Morality (2007, 14 min), and Sport News: Those
Bastards Are Leaving and Will Be Replaced by Evil Spirits (2008, 3 min).
Manussak is an
ultra-low budget filmmaker. He used to live with only 13 baht (0.42 US dollar)
a day and suffered a lot from hunger at that time. He made Dialogue, Gay
Megadance (2001, 6 min), The Devil Rules Metropolis (2001, 13 min),
and Moment of Distraction (2001, 8 min) with the budget of 80 baht (2.60
US dollars) each and with a camera borrowed from someone. The ultra-low budget
of his films mean his films don't have big production, but come in such a
simple style that most filmmakers don't do. For example, Gay Megadance
(2001) consists of a static shot of a man looking at the camera, then he bows
down out of the frame, revealing a poster of a bare-chested Brue Lee behind him,
and then he raises his head, and we see some white stain on his mouth. Dialogue
(2001) consists of a static shot of two people talking, though we don't see the
faces of these two. The Truth about Mr. Dome Sukvong: Episode -- Invisible
Threat (2005, 13 min) simply interviews Dome Sukvong, the director of Thai
Film Archive. There are nothing to see in this film except Dome's face while he
is talking. But what makes this film special is the love and respect Manussak
has for Dome. This love is in the air of the film. Dome appears again in one of
the best scenes of Manussak's films. It is the scene near the end of Dream
Watch for Anyone Who Is Believed to Violate Good Morality, in which we see
Dome waking up at his table, and we hear him talking about his strange dream
about Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat. It is hard to describe why this scene is
special. Let's just say there's something unexplainably touching in this scene.
บทความนี้เขียนขึ้นในช่วงต้นปี 2012
12. Michael Shaowanasai (born 1964)
Michael is a multidisciplinary
artist who has made many films dealing with gay issues, such as KKK
(1996, 6 min), in which he performs a rent boy; EXOTIC 101 (1997, 7
min), in which he teaches the audience how to be a male go-go dancer; and in the trilogy comprising The
Adventure of Iron Pussy, Episode I (1997, 8 min), The Adventure of Iron
Pussy II: Bunzai Chaiyo (1999, 22 min), and
The Adventure of Iron Pussy III: To Be or Not to Be (2000, 30
min). In this trilogy, he plays a man who can transform into a superhero after
he has put on some makeup and dressed himself up as a woman. The superhero's
main mission is to save the male go-go dancers in a red light district in
Bangkok. He reprises this role again in the musical feature film The
Adventure of Iron Pussy (co-directed with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2003,
85 min), but the character's mission is changed and the character's gender
becomes even more ambiguous.
Most of Michael's films are very
hilarious, daring, outrageous, provocative, and concerned with some social or
cultural issues. His masterpiece is Observation of the Monument (2008, 5
min), in which he performs a monument of a high-class lady where people go to
pay respect. The film is extremely thought-provoking. He also performs a
woman's role in Playgirl (2005), Long Night Short Film (2008, 8
min), and Le Cirque de l'homme (2008, 18 min), and it shows that his
talent as an actor is as enormous as his talent as a director. In Playgirl,
he plays two female celebrities, one tries to evade from paparazzi, the other
enjoys being followed by them. This film poses some interesting questions about
our gossip-obsessed culture. In Long Night Short Film, he performs a
lonely woman who resorts to masturbation, while in Le Cirque de l'homme,
he shows us the cycle of life--being born, getting old, getting sick, and
dying--in his particularly queer style. For example, he shows the state of
getting old by wearing a dress which looks like a Mondrian painting and walking
in a market. His dress looks out of place and may emphasize that the time
that the character was fit in has been
passed.
Michael plays a straight man, too.
In Eastern Wind (1997, 9 min), he plays an Asian artist who becomes
internationally famous because he has followed the rules to become famous, such
as speaking a language that westerners don't understand, and having a curator
as a wife. Though Michael performs in most of his films, there may be several
films in which he only directs, such as Shopping (2001), which shows
three women walking back and forth in a market, smiling and observing the
market. One of them wears a neck brace. Both Shopping and Playgirl
are commissioned to be shown at certain high-class shopping centers in Bangkok.
What is interesting is that both films seem to subtly criticize and parody the
customers of those shopping centers, which are the target audience of the
videos.
บทความนี้เขียนขึ้นในช่วงต้นปี 2012
13. Napat Treepalawisetkun (born 1990)
What
makes Napat famous since he was a high school student is the John Waters'
spirit in his films and Nene, a ferocious actor who appears in many of his
films and becomes his Divine. Napat made some crazy, bloody, cult films in the
early phase of his filmmaking, including A Series of Salinee Event
(2007, 14 min), Lamyong (2007, 6 min), His Blood Is Not Red!
(2008, 5 min), Vogue (2008, 10 min), Rabid in Habitat
(co-directed with Bongkodpass Pinsawaat, 2009, 15 min), and I Will Rape You
With This Scissors (2008, 13 min), which is made to satirize the censorship
of Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006). These cult
films of Napat inspire other young
filmmakers to make cult films, too. However, there is also a calmer side
of Napat, which first revealed itself in The Dress (2008, 3 min), a
minimalistic horror film. After making some cult films, he began making films
which are more contemplative and explore the deeper side of his characters,
including Seduction Lullaby (2009, 23 min), which is influenced by
Michael Hanake. He always experiments with the boundaries and the styles of his
films. The constant change and the ongoing development of his filmmaking styles
are ones of the most notable things about Napat. His styles have kept on
evolving since 2007, and it can be said that he has his own particular
filmmaking style now.
Almost
all of Napat's films deal with the relationship between mother and daughter,
which in a way reflects his intense feelings for his own family, especially in
his later films in which his mother, Supatra Treepalawisetkun, is the main
actress. Napat once said that family is the answer to every question, because
everybody forms his own identity out of his own family, and the films he made
are the products of the family environment which he has been living in all his
life. Many characters in Napat's films ask some questions about family or are
adversely affected by family conditions. These characters include the mother
who hates chicken skin in I Will Rape You With This Scissors, a boy who
is so mentally ill that his mother, love and sex cannot heal him in Seduction
Lullaby, the mother who tries to feed lotus flowers to her paraplegic son
and tries to teach him stick and sword fighting in It's Hard to Say How I
Love You, Captain Hook (2009, 10 min), and the mother who was killed during
the political massacre in May 2010 and comes back to haunt her two daughters in
We Will Forget It Again (2010, 9 min).
His
latest film is The Womb in Aquarium (2010, 23 min), which is a part of a
big project called Bua: A Fantasy Journey of
Absurd Woman in Surrealist World to the End of the Humanity, which he has been planning for a few years. The
Womb in Aquarium shows that Napat has now crossed into a new area. The fact
that this is a sci-fi film allows Napat to create a new concept of family. This
film takes place in a post-apocalyptic world. People in this film must ask for
permission from the government if they want to "breed". The film focuses
on three sisters, one of which wants to have a child, which means she wants to
have "a relationship between mother and child". But this desire leads
to the horrifying ending. Napat is now making his thesis film, and it is likely
that it will be a part of the Bua project, too.
14. Nawapol
Thamrongrattanarit (born 1984)
One of
the most interesting things about Nawapol is the fact that he can work both for
arthouse films and for mainstream film industry. He has been making independent
films for eight years, and he has also written a few scripts for Thai
mainstream film studios such as GTH, including the scripts for Bangkok
Traffic Love Story (Adisorn Trisirikasem, 2009) and Top Secret
(Songyos Sugmakanan, 2011). Nawapol can work very well for both worlds. He
understands the market conditions when he works for the studios, but he uses
the most of his creative power when he works independently.
While
Nawapol straddles the worlds of independent and mainstream films, his
independent films straddle the worlds of fiction and documentary. He first
gained wide recognition with See (2006, 9 min), which consists of a long
take portraying an old main cooking. A text appears on the screen later, saying
that this old man is Nawapol's father. He made this film as an indirect way to
reconcile with his own father.
Français (2009, 30 min) is another film
which employs some documentary techniques. It is about a blind university
student who has to take an exam on the next day, but the university hasn't
given her the Braille textbooks as planned. The camera follows the heroine and
observes her like in a documentary, including the scene in which she walks with
difficulty and the scenes in her dormitory. What is special about this film
includes its nonjudgmental and objective attitudes towards disabled persons,
and the film seems to ask the audience some questions without giving the
answers.
Nawapol's
combination between fiction and documentary reaches its peak in I Believe
That Over 1 Million People Hate Maythawee (2010, 30
min). The film is about Maythawee, a good-looking high
school student who becomes the object of her friends' hatred in Facebook. The camera in this film closely follows
Maythawee, and many scenes are done by a hand-held camera, resulting in a film
which looks creepily real. Nawapol promoted this made-for-TV film by using
interactive methods. He created a Facebook account of Maythawee, and a Facebook
fan page of " I Believe That Over 1 Million People Hate Maythawee",
which made some viewers believe that the film was a documentary and Maythawee
really existed. The film became a phenomenon because of this clever publicity.
Another
notable thing about Nawapol's films is the deadpan humor and the static camera,
which may remind the viewers of films by Roy Andersson and Tsai Ming-liang. His
first deadpan comedy is Yuriem est le mari d'un étrangère
(2006, 30 mins), which is a satire on traditions of
art films, including the slowness, the unnatural dialogue, and the
unpredictable behaviors of the characters. After Yuriem est le mari d'un
étrangère, other Thai directors also make some satires on art films, for
example, Still (Palakorn Kleungfak, 2009, min) and M.A.M.A.
(Katon Thammavijitdej, Chonlasit Upanigkit, Jarupat Lor-Isaratrakul, 2010, 18
min).
Another
good example of Nawapol's contemplative deadpan comedy is Penguin (2007, 40 mins), which is about a young
couple who wander around a public park in Bangkok at night to find some
penguins. The more they walk, the farther they are from their destination. The
film's absurd quality may remind the viewers of the play Waiting for Godot
or the search for sheep in the novel A Wild Sheep Chase by
Haruki Murakami.
Nawapol
made Mr.Mee Wanna Go to Egypt (2009, 20 min) for Action On Smoking and
Health Foundation Thailand. Though he had to make this film to serve the
campaign objective, his style is still evident in it. The film is about two
filmmakers who lack the fund to make a short film for anti-smoking campaign, so
they try to raise the fund by making a cigarette commercial. The ending of this
film is very memorable. It ends with the scene in which the two filmmakers are
in the editing room, while the sound of the commercial, saying, "Let's smoke,"
is repeated for about 30 times.
Nawapol
earned R.D. Pestonji Award in the 14th Thai Short Film and Video Festival with Cherie
Is Korean-Thai (2010, 19 min).
The film is about an actress who is going to play a maid in a TV series, so she
tries to research for her role by interviewing two female construction workers
and recording their manners and activities in video. The film is full of
sarcastic humor, and presents a scathing view on how people exploit one
another.
Though
Nawapol said that he was not very interested in politics, his films can capture
the recent important political moments in Thailand or can respond to them very
quickly. On the night of the coup d'état on September 19, 2006, Nawapol chatted
with friends via MSN, and all of them were puzzled about what was happening.
Then, Nawapol captured these written conversations on his computer screen and
turned them into the film Bangkok Tanks (2006, 5 min), which has since
become one of the important records of that historical moment.
The
Mother Wanna Go to Carrefour (2010, 5 min) is another film in the same vein. After the massacre
in Bangkok on May 19, 2010, Nawapol's mother wanted to go to buy some food at
the supermarket on the next day. This documentary conveys very well the
atmosphere in Bangkok after the curfew, and becomes one of the first Thai films
in the post 5/19 era.
บทความนี้เขียนขึ้นในช่วงต้นปี 2012
15. Nontawat Numbenchapol (born 1983)
Nontawat Numbenchapol grew up in Bangkok. He is one of Thaiindie filmmakers. He
graduated from Department of Visual Communication Design, Faculty of Fine and
Applied Art, Rangsit University. His thesis is a feature documentary film about
skateboard called Wierdrosopher World (2005, 88 min). Nontawat co-directed this
film with Rthit Punnikul and Preduce Skateboard in an association of GTH and
Thaiindie. After that, he worked as a still photographer for some shorts and feature
films including Uncle Boonmee who can Recall his Past Lives (2010) by
Apichatpong Weerasethakul. He was also a cinematographer for online TV program
about Thai contemporary art, www.artscenetv dot net, produced by Top
Changtrakul, an artist. His own short films include Bangkok Noise (2006, 7
min). This film observes the world around the filmmaker. It starts from his
room to the world outside and comes back to the room again. At the end of the
film, he finds out that there is no silence in this noisy city, Bangkok. War of
Fluorescence (2006, 8 min) is a fighting between the filmmaker and tussock
moths which are attracted to fluorescence light. Volatilize (2007, 15 min) is
about love cycle of two couples. Actors and actresses in this short film are very
famous, such as Teeradanai Suwanahorm (Joke), Manausswee Krittanukun (Liew),
Arak Amornsupaasiri (Pae), and Ratchawin Wongviriya (Koy).
Gaze and Hear (2010, 10 min), which is his masterpiece, is about a newly
invented folklore. This film tells a story about a king, a queen, the Earth
Goddess, a mole rat king, etc., but the story is told by the voiceover, while
what you see is some beautiful and colorful graphic images or some geometric
patterns which are not directly connected to the story. The viewers must
imagine "the pictures of the characters" by themselves. Moreover,
near the end of the film, the viewers must also imagine "the story",
too, because the voiceover is interrupted for a few minutes. That means the
story that we are told is missing a part. During these few minutes, the viewers
must imagine both the story and the pictures of the story by themselves, while
they are also enraptured by the graphic images and the powerful electronic
music in the film at the same time. Apart from being one of the most
interesting Thai experimental films ever made, Gaze and Hear may carry some
political meanings, too.
Nontawat also made Empire of Mind (2009, 90 min), which is a documentary about
his family. His current project is supported by ANA (Art Network Asia), and the
project is about the Thailand-Cambodia border conflict. He also made a video
installation called Aurora, which was installed at Film on the Rocks Festival,
Yao Noi Island, Phuket, in early 2012. According to his interview at
Dazeddigital dot com, Aurora is partly inspired by the death of his grandmother
and the massacre in Bangkok on May 19, 2010(7).
บทความนี้เขียนขึ้นในช่วงต้นปี 2012
16. Panu Aree (born 1973)
Panu Aree is one of the foremost
documentary filmmakers in Thailand. He made Once Upon a Time (2000),
which is about the memory concerning an old amusement park in Bangkok, after he
had been inspired by Thirdworld (Apichatpong Weerasethakul,1997)(8),
which makes him realize how powerful a film can be when the sound and the image
do not fully correspond to each other. In Once Upon a Time, we hear
voiceovers of many people recounting the times they used to spend at that
amusement park, but we don't see the faces of those people. What we see is some
8mm film clips of Panu's family, their home movies, recording the time they
spent in that park many years ago. The film is half-documentary,
half-experimental, and this technique of combining interviewing sound with
other images is employed again in Magic Water (2001), his masterpiece,
and in O.B.L. (co-directed with Kong Rithdee and Kaweenipon Ketprasit,
2011, 23 min)(9). In Magic Water, we hear voices from a conversation
about black magic, but we never see the faces of the speakers. We only see
images of skyscrapers in Bangkok at night, which are shot through a window of a
moving car. The contrast between the voice of ancient beliefs and the images of
the modern high-tech world we live in is striking, and lends the film its
strange power. In O.B.L., which is about the opinions of some Thai
Muslims towards Osama Bin Laden, the most impressive scene in the film is the
long scene in which we hear the voices of the interviewees, but we see the
images of a canal which runs through a Muslim community.
Other documentaries of Panu are not
as experimental as Once Upon a Time and Magic Water, but they are
still very good documentaries. He made Destiny (2000, 18 min), which is
about the lives of his friends, and Parallel (2002, 13 min), which is
about the life of a janitress. He has made four great documentaries about Thai
Muslims, including In Between (2006, 43 min), which is about the lives
and opinions of four Thai Muslim men; The Convert (co-directed with Kong
Rithdee and Kaweenipon Ketprasit, 2008, 83 min), which deals with a Buddhist
woman who is converted into Islam after her husband; Baby Arabia
(co-directed with Kong Rithdee and Kaweenipon Ketprasit, 2010, 80 min), which
is about one of the oldest Thai-Muslim bands specializing in Arab-Malay music;
and O.B.L.. These four films helps a lot in eradicating any prejudice
the viewers might have towards the Muslim minorities in Thailand. These
documentaries show us many aspects in their lives, the discriminations they
have suffered from, and how each one of them is different from one another and
should not be under any kinds of generalization. What is also praiseworthy is
that the filmmakers don't try to narrow the topics of their documentaries into
the religious topics only. In The Convert, we find out that the
converted woman does not have as much trouble with the religious conversion as
with the economic problems. Panu may not make experimental films like before,
but he still makes films which are truly humanistic.
บทความนี้เขียนขึ้นในช่วงต้นปี 2012
17. Phaisit
Phanphruksachat (born 1969)
Many
people know Phaisit as one of the most important soundmen in Thai independent
film industry. He worked with many great directors, including Kongdej
Jaturanrasmee, Sivaroj Kongsakul, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. His
conversation with Apichatpong while they were traveling together on an island is
presented in the film Thirdworld (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 1998, 17
min).
Apart
from working together with Apichatpong in many films, Phaisit also makes his
own films (or videos, as he prefers to call them like that), and his styles and
methods are very interesting. Many scenes in Phaisit's films originate from
scenes in our daily lives. He captures some images from the real world, and
then juxtaposes these images in the film without embellishment. Many images in
his films come from casual video recording, secretly recorded footage in long
shot, or a swift pan of the camera in front of something. There are also some
images which Phaisit deliberately shot
according to the plan, but many of these images are images of empty,
dilapidated buildings, junkyards, pools of black water, food markets, dirty
stains, and any unpleasant images which we may see them every day but haven't
paid attention to them. All of these images gain new meanings in Phaisit's
films, and he doesn't even need to narrate a coherent story to support these
meanings. He doesn't have to create an
expensive set or scene in his films. What he does is telling one or two actors
to walk into some real places and respond to the situations. This is because
the main thing in Phaisit's films is the imagination of the viewers. In
Phaisit's films, ordinary images in our lives become images in a story narrated
by our own imagination, using the title of each film as a clue.
Phaisit
made The Cruelty and the Soy-Sauce Man (2000, 97
min) by following his best friend and videotaping him like making an
informal home video. Some scenes in the film are staged, but most of the scenes
are real. These scenes may seem meaningless at first, but after a while, these
scenes unintentionally become like jigsaws in the beautiful picture of life of
the main character.
Phaisit's
masterpiece is Sat Wibak Nak Loke (Burden of the Beast or Tough
Creature Who Burdens the Earth) (2004), which tells the story of a man
(Pleo Sirisuwan) who tries to escape from a satellite network and security
cameras which try to detect his whereabouts. He must hide in some empty trains
which can protect him from the satellite signals in the sky. This man is a
filmmaker or used to be one. He may be cheated three months ago or maybe not.
There is an alien who interviews him about his situation, or maybe he is crazy
and dreaming it all up by himself. After that, he tries to escape from the
satellite signals by going upcountry and tries to find his mother.
Phaisit can also make a period film with his
shoestring budget. It's called Manus Chanyong's One Night at Talaenggaeng
Road (2008, 38 min). The film is adapted from a short story written by
Manus Chanyong, and it is about a soldier in Thailand 450 years ago who walked
along a road in Ayudhya, drinking and thinking about his ex-lover. The soldier
thought this might be his last night on earth, because the next day he had to
follow his master to assassinate the king. The film tells this story via
voiceover, while the images in the film is the images of the road in Ayudhya in
present time. The viewers have to visualize the soldier and other characters by
themselves. This effective but cheap method in Phaisit's film stands in
contrast to such expensive films as The Legend of Suriyothai
(Chatrichalerm Yukol, 2001, 185 min), which partly tells the same story.
Most
of Phaisit's films neither require him to shoot many new footage nor rely on
professional actors. Scenes in his films come from the recording of real
people, pedestrians on the streets, his friends and family. What he does is
carrying a camera around, capturing images of real things that he meets, and
then putting these images together with imagination, transforming these mundane
images into exciting events in weird stories. The clues in the titles of the
films and the careful juxtaposition of the images turn ordinary places we see
on the screen into a land of wonder. The images of children in Escape from
Popraya 2526 (2007, 9 min), the images of geese in Brothers
(co-directed with Jiraporn Jaipang, 2007, 10 min), the images of people
drinking in The Cruelty and the Soy-Sauce Man, the images of rural
houses in Burden of the Beast, the images of chopping boards in Happy
Existentialism (6 min), and the images of cloudy sky in Fake Field
(18 min) may be mundane images, but when they are juxtaposed with Phaisit's
particular images of dirty stains, buildings in ruins, and junkyards in his
films, and when they are gazed at seriously in his films, these mundane images
are transformed in the viewers' heads into a magical world hidden under the
corners, or a twilight zone under an expressway, or a secret door under the
chopping board, or a door to another dimension under the pool of black water.
The gazing in Phaisit's films transforms our ordinary world into a world of
bizarreness.
If
there's anything most resembling Phaisit's films, it is our childhood activity
in which we imagine our ordinary lives as lives full of exciting adventures.
Phaisit's films use the same method, and he also uses pure images in his films
to play with some old traditions, such as when he uses modern electronic music
to accompany the images of old traditional pork market in Happy
Existentialism, and they fit perfectly. Though Phaisit's films have the
innocent quality of a child, this innocence also comes with the sharpness of
mind.
18. Phuttiphong Aroonpheng (born
1976)
Phuttiphong graduated in Fine Arts from Silpakorn University and then studied
at the Digital Film Academy of New York. Phuttiphong’s films have been shown
both at international film festivals and art exhibitions. He made many short
films, for example, Going to the Sea (2006), Retrospection (2006), Rak por
peang (The Most Beautiful Man in the World, 2007), Stranger from the South
(2007, 20 min), Our Monument (2008, 10 min), My Image Observe Your Image If It
Is Possible to Observe It (2008), and Sukati (A Tale of Heaven, 2010). He said
in an interview that he is interested in the meaning of ‘Self’ in Buddhism, and
in Buddha's saying, “Nothing belongs to us even our own body." That
translates into a range of social topics, including the question, "What is
the reason that artists put their signatures or copyrights to their
works?"(10) The concept of ‘Self’ in Buddhism drives him to create the
project My Image Observe Your Image If It Is Possible to Observe It (2008, 6
min). In December 2007, while working on his project at the Irish Museum of
Modern Art in Dublin, Ireland, he met two video artists: Yuki Okumura (Japan)
and Yahui Wang (Taiwan). Conversations with both artists brought him to
inquire: Do artists really need their individual identities in their works? If
so, what is going to happen if I integrate their identities? He began this work
by asking permission from these two artists to duplicate their works (or
identities) as well as their styles and techniques; in so doing create a new
work. The concept of the work is not to answer the questions, but to emphasize
his questioning. A Tale of Heaven (2010, 6 min) is dedicated to his dead
father, who wanted his son to scatter his ashes in the woods, but a monk
instructed him to scatter his father’s remains at sea. By making this film,
Phuttiphong was finally able to fulfill his father’s last wish. This short film
is a part of the feature film A Suspended Moment (2010, 58 min) which is
supported by The Nippon Foundation and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.
บทความนี้เขียนขึ้นในช่วงต้นปี 2012
19. Pimpaka Towira
Pimpaka made an experimental film Under
Taboo (co-directed with Jerdsak Poolthup, Sirivan Pothai, Sasiwimon
Chuangyanyong, 1992, 9 min) under a workshop run by Christoph Yanetzko at the
Goethe Institute in Bangkok. Under Taboo is an enigmatic film which
tries to use some symbols to talk about some forbidden topics in Thailand, such
as sex. Pimpaka worked with the Goethe Institute again and made Mae Nak
(1997, 33 min), which reinterprets a Thai folklore about a female ghost who
longs for her husband. Mae Nak is an extremely enigmatic film, full of
strange, hallucinating, inexplicable scenes, and may question or explore the
status of women in Thai society. This film is worthy to be compared with the
works of Maya Deren and Andrei Tarkovsky. After the success of Mae Nak,
Pimpaka tried to work with a mainstream film company and made One Night
Husband (2003, 120 min), which is about a woman whose husband disappears on
the wedding night. The heroine tries to search for him and is aided by the wife
of her husband's brother. Instead of being a formulaic suspense-thriller film,
One Night Husband turns out to be a film which can't be easily classified. It
is a drama film, but it is not quite similar to many Thai drama films about
women's lives and suffering made in the 1970s and the 1980s. It is quite
psychological and stranger than those old Thai dramas. One of the most
impressive scenes in One Night Husband is the scene in which the two
female characters talk to each other for a long time, but we only see their
backs, not their faces.
After making One Night Husband
and Tune In (2005, 20 min), which is made to commemorate the anniversary
of the tsunami in December 2004, Pimpaka seems to change her focus and has made
some great films about social or political issues. Her films are still very
interesting, though they are not as strange, enigmatic, surrealistic, or
experimental as before. It is as if she has gradually moved from the realm of
Tarkovsky/Michelangelo Antonioni (spiritual, enigmatic, psychological) to the
realm of Ken Loach/Bertrand Tarvernier (political, humanistic, heartfelt). She
made some social problem short films, such as Taxi the Hero (2005),
which deals with the prejudice Bangkokians might have towards people from the
south of Thailand; The Sea Voyage (2007), which is about the Moken
people in the south of Thailand; and My Father (2010, 22 min), which is
about the tragic life of a political protester. One of the most impressive
scenes in My Father, is the one in which we gaze at the back of the main
character for one and a half minute as he walks towards his destination.
Pimpaka also made a feature
documentary called The Truth Be Told: The Cases Against Supinya Klangnarong
(2007, 105 min), which deals with a famous female activist who fought against
Thaksin Shinawatra, who was the prime minister of Thailand at that time. It is
one of very few Thai political feature documentaries, but it suffers a little
bit from the fact that Supinya seems to control herself too well in front of
the camera, and doesn't reveal much about her feelings and emotions she might
have deep down inside. Nevertheless, the film is still very interesting as it
has captured one of the most important political moments in Thailand's
history--the military coup on September 19, 2006, after which Thailand will
never be the same.
After Mae Nak, Pimpaka made a
masterpiece again with Terribly Happy (2010, 30 min), which deals with a
Thai soldier working in a religious-conflict zone in the south of Thailand.
When he returns home in the northeastern part of Thailand, he finds out that
his sweetheart has been married to a rich foreigner. The film is very touching,
and is an antidote to some nationalistic films such as White Buffalo
(Shinores Khamwandee, 2011), which also deals with the marriages between
northeastern Thai women and foreign men. In Terribly Happy, everyone has
a reason of his/her own. Everybody hurts, and no one is to blame.
Though the recent social problem
films of Pimpaka might look very different from her old experimental films, one
thing that is constantly found in her films is some exquisite camera movements.
These camera movements abound in Mae Nak and One Night Husband. Sangrangsee
(2011, 2 min), which can be considered the prequel to Terribly Happy,
and My Father have some interesting panning shots. There are also some
breathtaking shots at the end of The Truth Be Told and at the beginning
of Terribly Happy, when the view from the camera gracefully moves from
inside a room to outside the window.
บทความนี้เขียนขึ้นในช่วงต้นปี 2012
20.Pramote Sangsorn (born 1974)
Pramote is an ex-teen heartthrob and ex-singer. He became famous as a filmmaker with Fish Don't Fly (2000, 18 min) and Tsu (2005, 24 min), which is made to commemorate the anniversary of the tsunami in December 2004. In Tsu, we watch a lame boy walking very slowly and calmly along a beach, trying to pitch some flags on the beach for more than 20 minutes. Though Tsu and some of his films are extremely slow, it is hard to say that slowness is the main characteristics of Pramote's films, because many Thai independent or experimental filmmakers make extremely slow films, too. However, it might be possible to say that many films by Pramote tackle some serious issues, for example, Fish Don't Fly deal with sexual violence and incest. Observation of the Monk (2008) presents a scene in which a monk is holding a bowl containing white liquid, which is interpreted by some viewers as semen. Bharramanuh (2008) is a powerful experimental film about power and oppression. The Island of Utopias (2010, 20 min) may be his most controversial film, partly because viewers don't know what this film is trying to say. The film first tells us a story about an old man and an empty building, but it ends unexplainably with the image of His Majesty the King and a monument of the Princess Mother. As for now, Pramote is making a feature film called Tam Raseesalai, which is about a man in northeastern Thailand who believes that his dead eldest son is reincarnated as a water lizard.
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