A refracting rumination on cinema and storytelling
Mysterious Object at Noon — Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2000)
Under the weather, this week’s newsletter is a little shorter than usual. Not because Weerasethakul isn’t worth it (far from that). Cloudy, foggy brain, it was difficult to pull the words together. But it was impossible to hit pause on this whole thing. Brevity can be good, sometimes.
— What does participatory cinema look like? Its technologies are complicated, nuanced, expensive. Its social machinery is hierarchical, a nested complex of specialisms and expertise. Instruction flows from the director, who motivates its movement. It is precision.
— Cornelius Cardew was an English composer. His scratch orchestra (founded in 1969) involved any number of potential performers. Knowledge or proficiency with an instrument wasn’t necessary, nor even desirable. Its existence had been anticipated by a piece written by Cardew between 1963 and 1967. This work, Treatise—arguably his masterwork—departed entirely from the norms and conventions of Western musical notation. It is more like a diagram void of meaning and content, a surface of potentially total interpretation. The orchestra, be they professionals or not, were free to interpret the notation as they saw fit. What emerges isn’t necessarily incoherence. Each of the participant-performers intuit their interventions based on the notes and bodies and gestures of those around them. It can lurch into cacophony just as easily as it can coast toward silence.
— For his first feature, Apichatpong Weerasethakul achieved something similar to Cardew’s Treatise. Mysterious Object at Noon departs from the territory of fiction and documentary, inhabiting the ambivalent space between them. Its fabula — its story — emerged from the loose, interpretive conditions set by Weerasethakul, but it was not determined by them. Travelling across the Thai countryside, the filmmaker and his crew invited strangers to continue a story told by the strangers who’d preceded them. Where their story ends, the new fabulist picks it up. Weerasethakul offers no invisible hand. A smiling old woman drinking a glass of beer, a group of folk singers, a classroom of school children. Each group or individual takes the story wherever it takes them. Here, there is something akin to the surrealist conception of the exquisite corpse - exploded radially through the homes and landscapes of Thailand’s countryside.
— Between these moments of hesitant articulation, Weerasethakul stages elements of the story being told. There is a boy in a wheelchair. There is his teacher. There is the ‘mysterious object’ that rolls from her skirt and turns into a boy, who subsequently turns himself into a vengeful doppelganger of the teacher. The borders of the story are ambiguous. It’s not always entirely clear whose story is being told. After all, the film opens with patiently documentarian stylings: a van driving from street to street, selling seafood. In the back, a woman shares her story of parental abandonment and grief. This has no obvious bearing on the story that will ‘become’.
— In this restoration of the film, an even grain speckles the high-contrast black and white of W’s original. There is the patient framing that will become his trademark, favouring fixed, durational shots over roving camerawork. There is all the time in the world. Myth, after all, exists out of time. The extraordinary penetrates the everyday. The camera simply waits for it.
— Peripherally, we cannot but be reminded that this is a film. Boom mics drop into shot. Crew members wander across the frame and adjust lighting, or offer loose instructions to the camera’s subjects. The filminess of the film is always hovering at its edges, refracting yet further the constructedness of ‘plot’. The real and the unreal (the imaginary) have equal footing under the glare of the camera’s lens. Film exists both as the miraculous and the intended.
— But as much as Mysterious Object at Noon is an evocation of film’s potential for plurality and openness, it also bootstraps the secrecy of what cinema is: not a single shot, the movement of a performer or subject, but an entity that comes to exist in dark rooms and editing suites. Necessarily, it is a form of detachment or excavation that lifts life from the surface of lived experience and hides them away, whereupon it becomes film. It is a form of transformation, never quite aligning with real life. This is why I demur from calling it — as some have done — a “truly collective vision”. By necessity, as a film, it cannot be. Weerasethakul is aware of the extractive nature of what film is. I’m not speaking of its political economy, but of how film enters the space of the sublime. This is no criticism. By the same measure, the inner lives of the subjects are withheld from us - their personhood or existence. Rather, these things are projected and enfolded through the deeply human(e) act of telling a good yarn. Stories are sublimations.
— At times, Weerasethakul wanders away from life. He sets up his camera to gaze poetically at a hilly, mist-shrouded landscape. Time, and duration, are asserted. History is experienced in its largeness, its scale.
— Really, this is the giddy sublime of film itself. Of being rooted in a context but also unmoored — disarmingly — from it. What is known intimately by the people telling their stories (real or not), is withheld from us. Their lives are as mysterious as the “mysterious object” itself. Weerasethakul inserts us — our eyes — into adjacent situations for which we have no meaningful understanding. Two men - is this ‘real’, or part of the dramatisation - greet each other with surly indifference in a shop. A radio broadcast seems to echo back from decades before (it speaks of the withdrawal of American troops from the Pacific theatre, WWII), and then they embrace. Time is out of joint. It is an unruly and confounding moment in a film that, despite its painterly patience, is filled with similarly jarring moments and confrontations. It is yet another moment of disoriented corrugation. Something simmers, here, beneath the surface of what - at first - seems like a simple story. Nothing is simple.
— Doubt is central, essential, to this filmic rewiring. In that first scene, after the woman’s tearful and heartfelt confession, Weerasethakul speaks from off screen. “Do you have any other stories you’d like to tell us - it can be real or fiction”. Bursts of folk music are intercut with the fishmonger’s voice speaking over a speaker. We’re trying to find our feet, but slip and falter. Where is this going? Where are we going?
— All the elements of Weerasethakul are here, of what will become fuller and more fleshy (and still more strange) in later works. Reveries, disassociation, the jarring interleaving of narrative. It is an ambient structure both difficult to follow and closely, calmly perceived. Something like this is difficult to pull off. It doesn’t signal its intentions or structure. You are left to focus and intuit, much like Cardew’s performers. Really, you have to attune yourself to the film in order to begin to crack it open. The participation is yours, too.
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