Memoria

Lottery West Films/Perth Festival
UWA Somerville

By Wolfgang von Flugelhorn

 

When I was ten I went to India with my parents. One of the places we visited was a national park that was a sanctuary for tigers and leopards. The afternoon we arrived there was a sighting of a tiger that had killed a tethered goat. We were bundled onto the back of an elephant and set off slowly and quietly into the jungle. 

 

After about twenty minutes the mahout silently stopped the elephant and indicated for us to look to our left. It took a moment for my eyes to distinguish the tiger lying beside the remains of the goat and looking at us about twenty feet away. 

 

Later that night (unbeknownst to my parents) I went for a walk along a road. I remember the mixture of fear, excitement and a sense of supernatural kinship with the creatures I imagined in the trees around me. 

 

The films of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul remind me of that experience. It’s not just because they’re set in the jungle, or that they involve strange encounters and journeys into the unknown. It’s also because they explore time, memory and repetition. Even structurally his films involve doubling. Watching them is like experiencing déjà vu.

 

The first one I saw was Blissfully Yours at the Melbourne Film Festival in 2003, followed by Tropical Malady at MIFF in 2004 and Syndromes and a Century in 2006. They’re rarely shown outside of festivals, and really need to be seen on the big screen; so you can imagine my excitement at the prospect of seeing his new film Memoria as part of Perth Festival at Somerville outdoor auditorium; especially as it’s only being screened at one cinema at a time around the world (except in the UK where for some reason it was released on multiple screens) and isn’t being released online or on DVD (at least for now). 

 

It’s also the first Weerasethakul film that isn’t shot in the rural north-eastern province of Thailand where he grew up; and the first that features an international cast, headed by Tilda Swinton. I felt some trepidation about all this, fearing that the filmmaker’s style might be compromised. I was also uncertain about an outdoor screening, given the level of concentration his films require, and their meticulous use of sound. 

 

In the event the experience exceeded my expectations. Memoria represents a further advance into the unknown – not least because of its setting and the sense of collaboration between director and star – on the part of a fearlessly avant-garde filmmaker. As for seeing it outdoors: while there were undoubtedly compromises, the screening was also enhanced by its surroundings. The jungle vistas and brooding skies of the final scenes blended into the dark outlines of the pines at Somerville stirring in the breeze beyond the edges of the screen. Leaving the auditorium, I felt like I hadn’t left the film.

 

Memoria is set in Colombia and concerns a recently widowed expatriate orchid-farmer living in Medellín named Jessica (Swinton) who travels to Bogotá to visit her sister Karen (Agnes Brekke). The latter has been hospitalised with a mysterious respiratory illness that seems to involve randomly falling asleep. While in Bogotá Jessica is suddenly afflicted with a mysterious complaint of her own, in the form of loud booming sounds that she alone hears. 

 

The film follows a series of encounters between her and a variety of ‘specialists’, including the medical team looking after her sister; a winsome young sound engineer named Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego) who attempts to recreate Jessica’s ‘sound’ electronically, based on her verbal descriptions; and a doctor (Constanza Gutiérrez) who refuses her request for Xanax and suggests she try Catholicism instead. Two subplots (also featuring specialists) involve the purchase of industrial equipment for the refrigeration of orchids, and a friendship with an anthropologist (Jean Balibar) studying ancient human bones uncovered during the construction of a subterranean tunnel in the Andes, including a female skull that appears to have been ritually perforated. 

 

The final act of the film involves an encounter with a different kind of specialist: an older man also named Hernán (Elkin Díaz), the younger Hernán having mysteriously disappeared, his university colleagues apparently unaware of his ever having existed. The older Hernán lives beside a stream in the Andes where he spends his time scaling fish. He also suffers from an even more mysterious ailment which entails being haunted by traumatic sound-memories that reverberate in objects around him and are transmitted to him by touch. 

Weerasethakul’s films often deal with afflictions and specialists, medical or otherwise, as well as questions of identity. The main character in Blissfully Yours suffers from a skin disease as well as from being an illegal Burmese immigrant; feigning muteness to conceal his poor Thai, he is refused a medical certificate because he lacks ID. The title of Tropical Malady (the Thai title ‘Satpralat’ literally means ‘monster’) refers to a shamanistic tiger-man whose gift is a kind of affliction, and perhaps also to the ‘affliction’ of love between him and a male soldier who is unwittingly hunting him. Syndromes and a Century is a love story involving two doctors (based on the Weerasethakul’s parents) played by the same actors in two different hospitals and time periods. More recently Cemetery of Splendour is set in a clinic where soldiers suffering from a mysterious sleeping sickness are treated by a medium who uses psychic powers to help their loved ones commune with them. 

The plot of Memoria is more elaborate than the preceding films, but the style is even less plot-driven and even more austere. Action and dialogue are minimal; Swinton refers in an interview to Jessica being less a ‘character’ than ‘a predicament’. Like its precursors, the film is shot in long, motionless takes with no intercutting, and colours are mostly reduced to muted tropical greens and greys; cinematography is by Weerasethakul’s regular collaborator Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who also worked with Luca Guadagnino on Call Me By Your Name. Within each shot, movement is also minimal, and often limited to slight shifts in position by a human body, faint stirrings of vegetation, drifting clouds or distant flocks of birds. Lighting is entirely natural or practical, and the sound design (by Akitcharlerm Kalayanamitr, another regular collaborator) is similarly diegetic and minimalist, although in the closing scenes it becomes more densely layered before finally resolving into total silence. There’s an extraordinary visual ‘effect’ towards the end, but this occurs so slowly and quietly (and is so otherworldly) that initially one disbelieves one’s own eyes (much like the revelation of a tiger lying along the branch of a tree at the end of Tropical Malady).

Some of the most mesmerizing shots however take place in the built (internal and external) environments of Bogotá (Weerasethakul began his professional training as an architect) and involve Jennifer’s body slowly moving, positioning or adjusting itself in relation to things in space: circling a stray dog across a city square in a strange half-crouch; reaching over to insert her finger into a hole in an ancient skull; leaning forward to peer at a photo in an art gallery and then freezing when the lights suddenly go out. It’s like a minimalist dance performance, and unlike anything I’ve seen on film, though it reminded me of Swinton’s work in Jim Jarmusch’s languid vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive (another film in which she embodies a character suffering from a kind of half-life).

In one of these scenes, Jennifer is crossing a road when an explosion that sounds like a car backfiring goes off, and a man in the crowd breaks and runs like a panic-stricken dog as if a traumatic memory has been triggered; she slows to a halt and stares after him while everyone else keeps walking. This foreshadows a dialogue scene in which Jennifer’s sister and brother-in-law remind her that someone she has asked after is dead; a parallel scene establishes the disappearance and erasure of the first, younger Hernán. 

The motif of heightened or selective perceptions and memories culminates in the encounter with the second, older Hernán, and the sounds that are transmitted to him through touch. To demonstrate, he picks up a stone by the stream and hears voices that appear to be traces of a mysterious act of violence that took place there. Hernán finds relief from this syndrome only in a form of sleep with his eyes open that resembles another kind of living death. In one of the most minimal shots in the film, we (and Jennifer) watch him lie down in the gently swaying grass and enter this state for what seems an eternity.

The image recalls the erotic scenes that take place in the grass by a stream in Blissfully Yours (and beyond them a pictorial lineage stretching back from Manet to Giorgione and Titian). However over the years Weerasethakul has shifted focus from eros and love to trauma and loss as forms of heightened sensibility. The title Memoria refers not simply to memory but more precisely to memorials, and the film itself can be seen as a kind of commemoration or monument. As a widow, Jennifer seems to be processing grief throughout the film, and this seems to put her in touch with a level of political and military trauma that lurks in the landscape and psyche of Colombia (and perhaps Weerasethakul’s Thailand). 

As the filmmaker remarked in typically minimalist fashion in a Q&A screened after the film: ‘She is a cinema.’ Another way of putting this might be to say that both Jennifer and Swinton are like a combined camera/projector/screen and sound recording/playback apparatus, or even a kind of medium (in both senses of the word). Character and actor could also be seen as doppelgängers or doubles of the filmmaker himself; watching the film feels like watching an improvised collaborative dance between them taking place in real time.

Weerasethakul has been lumped into the category of ‘slow cinema’ alongside such diverse filmmakers as Antonioni, Kubrick, Tarkovsky or Tsai Ming-Liang, but each of these uses ‘slowness’ to convey different things: Antonioni, bourgeois existential emptiness; Kubrick, inhuman structures and processes; Tarkovsky, mystical contemplation; Tsai, social alienation. Weerasethakul’s ‘slowness’ conveys something of all of these, but also a creaturely way of seeing, listening, feeling and being, a plenitude of sensation that borders on hallucination, considering the latter not only in terms of its content but also as a form of perception. (For those of a philosophical bent, I’ve written about this with reference to my own paraphenomenological researches – in India and elsewhere – in my book Unzeitlich Sein [Not Being On Time], translated by Humphrey Bower, unpublished).

Memoria won’t reward those who seek action, narrative or drama in films; but those who seek tigers in the forests of the night, or hands and eyes that frame their fearful symmetry, won’t be disappointed. 

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Memoria screened from Jan 24 to 31 at UWA Somerville as part of Perth Festival/Lotterywest Films and will be released in cinemas around Australia from April 7.

 

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Wolfgang von Flugelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Flugelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. He is editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flugelhorn where he holds a chair in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.