Agenda

EN

“I realized that through cinema I could express something that I cannot possibly through other means. Tropical Malady is a channel to present my attachment to untouched landscapes and mysteries. It is a memoir of love and darkness.”

“Like in my previous film, I shot Tropical Malady in the jungles of northeastern Thailand. The jungle is used as one of the main characters. I wanted to revisit the same place and see it differently. When I am in the jungle, I see the vast arena of life. It’s a very different life with different rules. I don’t think I’ll ever truly understand the animal world. But I borrow their landscapes to present the film’s ‘malady’ and suffocating world that is somehow not human either.”

“I believe we all have this malady. We become attached to certain things, especially to the beauty of our own species. I presented similar ideas in Blissfully Yours. But this time it seems like this attachment has escalated to the point of being a malady. We are at one point in life suffocated by beautiful memories of our loved ones. The lovers in Tropical Malady become suffocated by their love because it is so right, so natural.”

“When we close our eyes, of course we see darkness. But if we stare at this darkness long enough, we will see something. The image comes from within, from the mind.  This is what I wanted to apply to Tropical Malady – a mind from one world adjusting to another world. The soldier can see images from the other side and also sees himself. He is on the border.”

“I’m fascinated by mystery. It has to do with my childhood. I grew up in a hospital housing compound (my parents are both doctors). Those strange buildings where body parts are kept in jars were a playground for us kids. Nights were quiet and there was always talk of ghost stories. I am fascinated by the simplicity of folk tales and legends. Many legends are so simple they are like concepts. Tropical Malady is a folk tale: encountering things, minimal dramatic moments usually saved for the end. This approach is so nostalgic for me.”

Series of statements by Apichatpong Weerasethakul from the press kit of Tropical Malady

“My works in film and video are personal, and have very few links with what’s going on. The current filmmaking atmosphere tends to get very complicated for me. I like to do simple sketches. I shot how I felt each day, some as short clips, some long, building the emotional structure along the way. On Blissfully Yours I was more focused. Tropical Malady, to me, was more temperamental. Since I made Tropical Malady during my ‘dark’ period – I was at pain with some losses – the film is like my sorrow box. Some of the scenes, including the style and the structure, contain personal references. It may appear scattered to some, but it was the way I saw my memories at that particular time. The experience of making this film was very naïve and direct. When we shot in the jungle, I was more aware of how the movie was going. Somehow I felt like I was back in the past making a silent film where there was no man on earth.”

Apichatpong Weerasethakul1

“The films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul occupy a space between what is known and unknown, what can be seen and what can be felt or experienced. His films are impressionistic, primarily sensory – meanings, context and social references are secondary. You must give yourself over to them, succumb to them entirely. There is a line from Tropical Malady that might as well serve as instruction to all who come to view Apichatpong’s work: as when the monkey warns the soldier of the tiger’s power ‘Slay it, if you wish to free it from its world... or be devoured, if you wish to enter it.’”

Chris Barwick2

“Tropical Malady begins with a quotation: ‘All of us are by nature wild beasts. Our duty as human beings is to become like trainers who keep their animals in check, and even teach them to perform tasks alien to their bestiality.’ The quote comes from a short story, Tiger-Poet, also known as The Moon Over the Mountain (published 1942, the year of the author's death) by Japanese writer Ton (Atsushi) Nakajima. Set in China and based on a Tang Dynasty Chinese story, Tiger-Poet is, in broad outline, one of the templates for Apichatpong's film. A scholar named Li Chêng decides to devote his life to poetry. He gives up his civil service job for poetry but falls into poverty. Consumed by bitterness he is forced to re-enter the civil service. Posted to the south of China, he is overtaken by madness during the journey and disappears. As it transpires, he has turned into a tiger, notorious in the area for eating humans. An old friend, Yüan Ts'an encounters him in his tiger form and they converse, Li Chêng hidden behind thick foliage. A voice had summoned him, he recounts, “and an irresistible impulse caused me to obey.””

David Toop3

“When I was younger, I was attracted to Thai adventure stories [by Noi Inthanon, a pen name of Marlai Choophinit] that were always set in the jungle, with various dangerous animals. These stories were influenced by the Western infatuation with the Amazon, which romanticized the jungle and all of its dangers from a colonial viewpoint. This Thai writer [Noi Inthanon] used the Amazon as a bridge to different cultures, but at the same time you come to realize the brutality of these invasions. I grew up with those stories and then you start to compare them with what happened all around the world and also in the country [in Thailand] to indigenous people. The jungle is very rich in memory and that’s why I can picture it like home in my films.”

Apichatpong Weerasethakul4

“Malady repeats, as has been mentioned, some aspects of Mysterious Object at Noon, and also returns to images, characters, objects, and locales from Blissfully Yours – ‘I wanted to revisit the same place and see it differently,’ Joe says – as well as its two-part structure, its hospital sequence, its central romance tinged by disquiet, and its attenuation of time in the jungle. [...] More generally, in its invoking many elements of traditional Thai culture, from Noi Inthanon’s adventure stories to the popular ghost/monster movies suggested by the film’s original Thai title, Sud Pralad (‘Strange Creature’), to the primitive paintings of Malady’s second half, which recreate the ancient way of narration on a temple wall because sacred space was the last to be demolished, Tropical Malady commemorates, like Mysterious Object, national forms of storytelling, a past or vanishing civilization.

Perhaps, then, the illness of the English title is not malaria, unrequited love, or amour fou, but the malady of remembering: ‘We are at one point in life suffocated by beautiful memories of our loved ones,’ Apichatpong states, ‘The lovers in Tropical Malady become suffocated by their love because it is so right, so natural.’”

James Quandt5

• 1Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in an interview reprinted in the booklet accompanying the Second Run’s 2008 DVD release of Tropical Malady. Reprinted in Apichatpong Weerasethakul, ed., James Quandt. (Vienna: FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, 2009), 225-226.
• 2Chris Barwick, “About Apichatpong,” from the booklet of Second Run’s 2008 DVD release of Tropical Malady.
• 3David Toop, “Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The Unknown Sound,” Sabzian, April 2022.
• 4Bjorn Gabriels, “Longing for Change. The Shifting Shapes of Apichatpong Weerasethakul,” Sabzian, June 2016.
• 5James Quandt, “Tropical Malady,” in Apichatpong Weerasethakul, ed., James Quandt. (Vienna: FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, 2009), 80.

EN

“We propose to produce an interactive film which takes us on a voyage into the vaults of the internet; a voyage from the margins to the interstellar heart of black culture. The series will boldly chart a new interface, strike up connections and dialogues between diverse black interstellar parties who have too much in common, and yet for the most part remain unaware of each other’s existence – from Sun Ra, to Nichelle Nichols, to A Guy Called Gerald, to Samuel Delaney and beyond. Disparate names, places, events inform the stories we want to tell, the locations we want to trace. To aid us on this journey we have chosen a mythical figure from the African Diaspora – s/he’s a trickster/hustler/Stagolee in a new incarnation – the data thief.

Our data thief is a time-surfing roughneck, a shapeshifter, part human part cyborg, a gold-toothed, gold-chained recording angel from tomorrow. S/he’s on a mission. Transported self to 1995 via the internet, s/he’s on a cultural pillage; a future grave robber whose booty is ideas destined for a high-brow cerebral mind-park called Babel 17.”

John Akomfrah & Edward George1

“The film elaborates on a comment made earlier by Akomfrah that Britain ‘feared it had produced a surplus mutant population that had no roots. no connectedness, to home, elsewhere or here’. The mutant is traced to the ‘limit situation’ of slavery’s African body as labour/machine, re-figured as popular culture’s anxious image of the alien, robot or cyborg. Blacks, as Eshun points out, ‘lived the estrangement that sci-fi writers talk about’: alien abduction, spaceships, genetic transformation. For Eshun, black subjects enacted the man-machine interface in order ‘to explore the mutations that have already happened to them’. As the film repeatedly states: ‘The line between social reality and science fiction is an optical illusion’. We could not have a dearer demonstration of the philosophical conundrum of the human as historical being – that the past is not something that has happened to us, but is what afflicts us as a haunting from the future.”

Jean Fisher2

• 1John Akomfrah & Edward George, guiding script for The Last Angel of History, as published on Chimurenga.
• 2Jean Fisher, “In living memory... Archive and testimony in the films of the Black Audio Film Collective”, The ghosts of songs. The film art of the Black Audio Film Collective (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007) 28.

EN

“My goal was to make a continental film, one that crosses boundaries. To make Hyènes even more continental, we borrowed elephants from the Masai of Kenya, hyenas from Uganda, and people from Senegal. And to make it global, we borrowed somebody from Japan, and carnival scenes from the annual Carnival of Humanity of the French Communist Party in Paris. All of these are intended to open the horizons, to make the film universal. The film depicts a human drama. My task was to identify the enemy of humankind: money, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.”

Djibril Diop Mambéty1

“This film, which evokes the terrible and disastrous revenge of a humiliated woman, is adapted from Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play, The Visit of the Old Lady. The hyena, a recurring motif in Mambéty’s art, is his favorite animal. Decorating his ring, it symbolizes cowardly and fearful man, who also clings to life as best he can.”

Montaine Dumont2

“But even as he used film as a platform for political communication, Mambéty deftly refrained from explicitly didactic art. The moral dilemma that pervades Hyenas is, for instance, accented by a blurring of the lines between victims and oppressors. Secure in her island-citadel, Linguère Ramatou anticipates the onset of “the reign of the hyenas,” confident in her resources (greater than those of “the World Bank”) and in their capacity to eventually sway the townsfolk. In evoking an institution whose policies, like those of the IMF, would come to engulf African nations in pervasive economic turmoil and catastrophic social crises under the guise of financial assistance, Mambéty puts a grim spin on the changes that begin to slowly transfigure the social and spatial realities of Colobane.”

Njeri Githire3

“Durrenmatt’s The Visit was completed in 1956, and the English drama critic Kenneth Tynan wrote in 1960 about the play: The plot by now must be well known; a flamboyant, much-married millionairess returns to the Middle-European town where she was born and offers the inhabitants a free gift of a billion marks if they will consent to murder the man who, many years ago, seduced and jilted her … Eventually, and chillingly, her chosen victim is slaughtered, but I quarrel with those who see the play merely as a satire on greed. It is really a satire on bourgeois democracy. The citizens … vote to decide whether the hero shall live or die, and he agrees to abide by their decision. Swayed by the dangled promise of prosperity, they pronounce him guilty. The verdict is at once monstrously unjust and entirely democratic. When the curtain falls, the question that Herr Dürrenmatt intends to leave in our minds is this: at what point does economic necessity turn democracy into a hoax?”

In the way democracy was captured by Keynesian-era capitalism in The Visit, the egalitarian ethos of communal life is captured by neoliberalism in Hyènes. But the capture of the former is far more devastating than the capture of the latter. Democracy is still a relatively new institution, so one can understand its vulnerability and even forgive it. The mechanism that supports the egalitarian ethos (communal killing), on the other hand, can be argued to be the mechanism by which human morality was spawned and shaped. It is much, much older than democracy, and much more about the animal origins of our humanity.”

Charles Mudede4

“The hyena is an animal of Africa. Singularly wild. It practically almost never kills. First cousin to the vulture. It knows how to sniff out illness in others. And then is capable of following, for a whole season, a sick lion. From a distance. Across the Sahel. To feast one evening on its corpse. Peacefully.” 

Djibril Diop Mambéty5

• 1N. Frank Ukadike, “The Hyena’s Last Laugh: A Conversation with Djibril Diop Mambéty,” Transition 78 (1999): 136–53
• 2Montaine Dumont, “Djibril Diop Mambéty - The Poet of African Cinema”, Daily Art, February 2022.
• 3Njeri Githire, “Reign of the Hyenas: The Dark Satire of Djibril Diop Mambéty”, Walker, September 2019.
• 4Charles Mudede, “Neoliberalism and the New Afro-Pessimism: Djibril Diop Mambéty's Hyènes, e-flux, November 2015.
• 5Njeri Githire, “Reign of the Hyenas: The Dark Satire of Djibril Diop Mambéty”, Walker, September 2019.

EN

“The journey forms part of our culture, and it is linked with mysticism; for us what is really important is not the goal we wish to attain, but the path we must travel to reach it.”

Abbas Kiarostami1

Abbas Kiarostami: I can’t bear narrative cinema. I leave the theater. The more it engages in storytelling and the better it does it, the greater my resistance to it. The only way to envision a new cinema is to have more regard for the spectator’s role. It’s necessary to envision an unfinished and incomplete cinema so that the spectator can intervene and fill the void, the lacks. Instead of making a film with a solid, impeccable structure, one should weaken the latter – yet keep in mind that one mustn’t drive the audience away! The solution may lie precisely in stimulating the viewers so that their presence is active and constructive. My belief is more in a form of art that seeks to create differences, a divergence among people, rather than a convergence with everyone in agreement. This way, there’s a diversity in the thinking and the reactions. Each one constructs his or her own film, whether one fits in with my film, or defends it, or opposes oneself to it. The members of the audience add some things so that they can defend their own viewpoint, and their undertaking is part of the evidence of the film. Engaging in war against great powers has to be done with a certain weakness, a lacking.

Jean-Luc Nancy: About the void: I remember a completely grey screen in a shot in Hiroshima mon amour. I was nineteen and already a little used to this – not that I remember how this came about – but I did understand that this was an image. At the same moment, next to me in the theater, an old woman cried out: ‘There’s a power failure!’ They’re two ways of looking: one of them understands that it’s a hole in the film, the other one doesn’t.

These holes, these moments of ‘failure’ are what makes for the construction. That’s my dream. I don’t expect things to change. I know about force of habit.

Still, there are signs that things are changing, by simply seeing how successful your films are. I realize that it’s not the same audience that goes to watch Life and Nothing More... and any old disaster movie, like Independence Day. But your films are being watched by many, and this success does show proof of something – since this audience had been saying for twenty years that cinema finished when neorealism ended. Godard has talked a lot about the death of cinema, he even overdid it. Since then, other cinemas – Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean – have made something else.

Jean-Luc Nancy in conversation with Abbas Kiarostami2

• 1Alberto Elena, The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami (London: Saqi & Iran Heritage Foundation, 2005), 75.
• 2Jean-Luc Nancy, Abbas Kiarostami: L’Évidence du film / The Evidence of Film  (Brussels: Yves Gevaert, 2001), 88.

EN

“De cinema van Jan Vromman is een uitnodiging tot samenzijn. In Als reuzen sterven komt zijn familie bij elkaar. Vanuit het heden en het verleden brengt hij ze samen, in gezelschap van de toeschouwer. Vromman is de gemoedelijke vaandeldrager die ons rondleidt door een Belgische geschiedenis. Aandoenlijk, want volks, ontroerend want schijnbaar onbeduidend. Maar het carnaval is altijd een experiment in gemeenschapsvorming geweest. De armen vieren een potlatch, de vrouwen worden mannenrokkenjagers en de onderdanen nemen de overhand – ook al is het maar voor één dag. De opschudding van het sociaal weefsel creëert ademruimte, zorgt dat de donsdeken van de gemeenschap weer volume heeft. In de archiefbeelden zien we hoe individuen op straat samentroepen met maskers en vaandels om hun gemeenschappelijk verhaal leven in te blazen. In een stoet kon men de macht van een massa ervaren. En leerde men om die macht in te zetten voor folklore, maar ook voor verzet. Klimaatspijbelaars en vakbondsvoormannen zijn schatplichtig aan de Dulle Griet en het Ros Beiaard.

De film toont hoe feestelijk maar fragiel een gemeenschap is. Na een stoet gaat iedereen naar zijn eigen huis en sluit zijn eigen deur achter zich dicht. Wie weet wanneer zij weer samen zullen komen? Wanneer de slingers en bloemen zijn verwelkt, razen er weer auto’s voorbij. Jan Vromman zegt; ‘de straat is de moeder van de democratie’. Het begint allemaal met samen wandelen op een weg. Dan ontstaat magie als vanzelf.”

Nina de Vroome

EN

“Bicycle Thieves is truly one of my favorite films. I could watch it over and over again, and in truth, I have. It’s a complicated and eloquent story in spite of its simple plot. The first time I saw Bicycle Thieves was in a class on neorealism, and I was immediately struck by how seamless and real it was, as if a camera were fortunate enough to be present in capturing an actual event. Bicycle Thieves gives meaning to the common man. And, as is often the case in life, reality here doesn’t have a happy resolution. It was the same where I grew up: life was basically a continuous struggle. You endure, as William Faulkner points out. The people from the housing projects near where I used to live had a lot in common with those in Bicycle Thieves. In trying to find answers to what I experienced, I read a lot of Depression-era literature and studied the works of the photojournalists who focused on families struggling to make ends meet – slave narratives and books like Richard Wright’s Native Son and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which share the sensibility that produced neorealism. To tell a story without imposing your values is very challenging.”

Charles Burnett1

“It was in this long overdue first viewing of Bicycle Thieves that I first recognized the often discussed link between Italian films of this era and contemporary Iranian films of today, and how such structural and thematic similarities in these films meld so seamlessly across what would appear to be such differing cultural divides. In watching Bicycle Thieves, for example, I noticed the sensitivity towards a child’s viewpoint, mirrored in many current Iranian films from Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon and The Mirror to Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? to Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven. The setting of the film in the streets of Rome, was labyrinthine and chaotic, much like many depictions of Tehran today, making the connection between postwar Italy and contemporary Iran today more apparent than I had ever before realized.”

Joanne Kouyoumjian2

• 1Charles Burnett, “Bicycle Thieves: Ode to the Common Man”, Criterion, February 2007.
• 2Joanne Kouyoumjian, “Bicycle Thieves”, Reverse Shot, September 2005.

EN

“Mystery is good, confusion is bad. And there’s a big difference between the two.”

David Lynch

“The scene in the nightclub in Mulholland Drive works as a synedoche for Lynch’s entire filmic project. It shows that accumulation fails because the object is lost and that our enjoyment of the object depends on its absence. In this scene, an emcee comes onto the nightclub stage to introduce the singer Rebekah Del Rio (playing herself). Rather than describing the upcoming act, the emcee ennounces that, in a sense, it will not take place. He says, ‘No hay banda - and yet we hear a band’. He adds, « Il n’y pas d’orchestre » and ‘It is all on tape.’ After these pronouncements of the object’s absence, Rebekah Del Rio comes on stage and begins to sing Roy Orbison’s song ‘Crying’ in Spanish. The object’s absence becomes apparent right away. Not only is Del Rio covering the song of another artist, but she is doing so in another language. Orbison’s song is an absent object, and yet it provokes demonstrable enjoyment in both Betty and Rita. We see them moved to tears, and Lynch creates a scene full of passion for the spectator as well. In Club Silencio, enjoyment corresponds with absence rather than with accumulation.”

Todd McGowan1

“When presented with texts that consistently resist our attempts to fix their final meaning, what becomes apparent is our desire to make sense of them. That these three films [Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire] have a long history of ‘explanatory’ critical commentaries of the psychoanalytical and ‘sense making’ sort clearly attests to this. It seems that we resort to these sense-making strategies to assuage our uneasiness at being confronted by discontinuous, indeterminate texts. We do not like contradictory readings to co-exist, but logic cannot be forced to prevail here. It does not all fit together neatly. [...] However, what is most interesting is the desire of both spectator and critic to cling to this binary fantasy/reality reading of the film in an attempt to make sense of it, long after it has become logically untenable and signalled as such by the film. We want epistemic mastery at any price.”

Simon Lovat2

“As we know, Lynch had the bizarre habit of dissecting animals in order to piece them back together again afterwards, to put them in bottles, to stretch the skin and organs on planks and then name them ‘mouse kit’ or ‘cat kit’. This suggests that, for him, a dismantled cat no longer has the Platonic form of that animal, but none the less remains a cat kit. At the same time, it is what he discovers in the parts that impassions him: details and, as he says, textures which are normally invisible unless one plays at erasing their names.

It was in an entirely different context, in the living hell of Philadelphia (hut this also applies to his animal kits), that Lynch exclaimed: ‘Very often, when you only see a part, it’s even worse than seeing the whole. The whole may have a logic, hut out of its context, the fragment takes on a tremendous value of abstraction. It can become an obsession.’ Whether willingly or not, an artist is always trying to create a unity. Even slightly ambitious creations speak to us of the One, if only by its opposite, disparity. Lynch’s works invite us to do this in their own way, by actively and boldly reflecting on the relationship between the part and the whole, especially when the parts question the unity of a work at different levels, in the action, the dramatic line and even in the technique [...] and in their special attention to disproportion. Even as he seeks to recreate a unity, Lynch seems to aim for the part as such to subsist, the part which is incommensurable with the whole (that is, which operates on another level), the part which stands out from the whole and thereby completes it. [...]

Creation, for Lynch, thus consists of building kits which do not exist in nature but which derive their parts from it, and which, ideally, would obey the law of the incommensurability of the part and the whole, whereby the part confers a specific, authentic weight to the whole and at the same time runs the risk of breaking free from it. ‘I like to have one little thing in a scene which on its own would be nothing, but in the context and the balance of things around it, pops out and just gleams, and it makes everything else work.’”

Michel Chion3

• 1Todd McGowan, “Enjoyment and Accumulation on Mulholland Drive”, The Comparatist 39, 2015.
• 2Simon Lovat, “Asking the Wrong Questions: Reiteration and Doubling in David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire”, Bright Lights, February 2018.
• 3Michel Chion, David Lynch (London: BFI Publishing, 1995).