QUESTIONS FOR Week 13★June 30th Presentation Session

My warming up questions:

What do you think of Uncle Boonmee? Have you done research about the red-eyed ‘ghosts’? Have you experienced Apichatpong’s art projects, and especially the video installations etc.? Kim’s interview is a great read for you to rethink Uncle Boonmee, probably. 

Required Readings

Ingawanij, May Adadol; Macdonald, Richard Lowell. (2010). “Blissfully Whose? Jungle Pleasures, Ultra-Modernist Cinema and the Cosmopolitan Thai Auteur.” In The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Traces of the Colonial in Thailand, edited by Rachel. Harrison and Peter. A. Jackson, 119–34. The University of Hong Kong press.
[link to download its bibliography; sorry for not including this earlier]
for Perry Anderson's 'ultra-modern', check out page 104-5 from THIS BOOK 

1.     I recall participating Apichatpong’s talk session with Yomota Inuhiko last November at Tokyo, when a too-much talkative Yomota reminded the enthusiastic ‘Joe’ (Apichatpong’s nickname) lovers that, ‘it is very dangerous to be appreciated/celebrated without being really understood’ (at least, nobody could tell the differences of Isan dialects and the entangled regional geopolitics if not one of the ‘insiders’; also, some of the most celebrated works in Thai ‘social realist new wave cinema’ were set in Isan). I concur with Yomota, and would also live to invite you to think of Apichatpong’s ‘dilemma’, if any, as a ‘cosmopolitan Thai auteur’.

Could you use one-line to summarize May Adadol and Lowell (A&L)’s argument?

2.     Why do you think A&L’s framings in general (re Williams, and Perry Anderson/no Benedict)? [read: what we could learn from such lines of arguments]

What do you think of the discussions regarding the ‘educational pilgrimage’ in relation to Apitchapong’s filmmaking trajectory moving from Khon Khai (Isan is a very unique area in Thailand) to Chicago and back to Thailand?

Which cinematic traditions, according to them, have inspired A’s film practice? Do you agree with their analysis of the ‘viewing experience’ (122-3), and why (not)?

What do you think of their positioning of A within the ‘new generation’? Any other Thai filmmakers coming to your mind?

3.     How to grasp the ‘deep’ cosmopolitanism in the context of A’s positioning and filmmaking? (p124-5)

Why would both authors suggest that ‘the modernist rebellion of this conjuncture constituted an assault on the prevailing institutions of art and the encroachment of the market on culture (and as such differed from the historical avant-garde’s project of transforming Life through Art)’? [we studied derive and the Situationist—part of the historical avant-garde]

4. Commenting on the ‘shock of recognition’ (126), both authors talk about the transnational connoisseurship’s ‘reluctance to surrender the particularity of place’ (127). What is their critique of an ‘enclave of transnational cinephilia’? How would this relate to the ‘powerful neutralizing effect’ they are talking about later on (133)? What is your understanding of A’s films as being the ‘genuine contact zone, an interface with the West’?

O’Haha, Angela. (2012, reprinted in 2015)“Mysterious Object of Desire: The Haunted Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul”. In Gates, Philippa & Funnell, Lisa. (eds.) Transnational Asian Identities in Pan-Pacific Cinemas: The Reel Asian Exchange. New York & London: Routledge: 177-190

1.     What is OA’s critique of transnational cinema, and how, in this chapter, has she maneuvered to draw attention to ‘the highly nuanced and subtle politics’ within the films of A by framing them as a ‘cinema of shadows’?

2.     How does OA’s discussion (of A’s ‘transnationality’) dialogue with A&L’s when theorizing Joe’s oeuvre as cultural products ‘involving partnerships between two or more nations or whose circulation depends on international distribution and exhibition’? Any critique of her take?

3.     Whether O’Hara’s analysis of ‘paramodern’ dialogues with A&L’s take on ‘ultra-modernist cinema’? If (not) so, how (come)?

4.     How to make the linkage between A&L’s critique of an enclave of transnational cinéphilia and O’Hara’s argument that ‘the desire so fervent…in fact, that desire alone warrants unraveling’ and ‘while their subtexts and hidden references go unheeded or even unnoticed, the open textuality allows for any imagined reading’? Any indication for your survey of Asian arthouse/international auteurs as a whole? Or Joe is a unique case?

How would these relate to Yomota’s ‘untimely’ warning?

5.     From which perspectives has O’Hara discussed Joe’s films as ‘hybrid cinema’? How does Laura Marks’ ‘intercultural cinema’ (briefly summarized by O) link up to the themes of absence and haunting, as well as the efforts of creating ‘new expressions of Thai identity and belonging’?

6.     Any further  ideas on ‘medium’?