Weerasethakul, whose ninth feature, “Memoria,” starring Tilda Swinton, opened in New York on December 26th, is about as tall as the tallest boy in grade school-around five feet six-and thin but sturdy, with large, beautiful hands. America was my home, and he was a guest here.
In Thailand, it’s considered polite to bring a gift to someone’s home. I had arranged to meet Weerasethakul outside the exhibition, and when he saw me he clapped his hands, saying excitedly, “You came!” We sat in a lounge area near the gallery, and he opened his shoulder bag and pulled out a package of freeze-dried shrimp paste. Time passing, time passed, the distance and the unknowability of the love object, the myth and the reality of politics-it was all there in “The Serenity of Madness,” as it is in Weerasethakul’s landmark feature films. I was especially taken with a video of Weerasethakul’s then partner, Teem, a beautiful young man, sleeping, and with “Fireworks,” a video made in the dead of night at a spectral temple in Thailand, in which shots of stone skeletons lit by flares, ghostlike human forms, and mythological animals are followed by images of Thai politicians and activists.
#MAYA CINEMA CHINAGMAI MOVIE#
And although what I saw in those still photographs and on video screens, large and small, was unlike Weerasethakul’s movie work-they were fragments and meant to be seen as such-I couldn’t fail to recognize his deep commitment to visualizing the uncanny. Images of boys and landscapes and fire jumped out at me, like figures in a haunted house. Entering the gallery, I meandered through an eerie, darkened space with something approaching fear. Now it was making its first American stop.Īn admirer of Weerasethakul’s films, I had also flown to Chicago to immerse myself in his world. The show, “The Serenity of Madness,” which was organized by the curator and scholar Gridthiya Gaweewong, and occupied the institute’s cavernous Sullivan Galleries, had begun a seven-city tour in Chiang Mai in 2016. In mid-September, 2017, the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul flew to Chicago to see how a world that he’d made had been remade: the School of the Art Institute of Chicago had installed the first large-scale retrospective of his non-feature-film work: short films, videos, photographs, and ephemera. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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