Langenbach

Filmic Vagrancy: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Subtitling Apichatpong Weerasethakuls Thirdworld

The short black and white film, Thirdwor ld, by Apic hatpong Weeasethakul, was composed in 1997 partly of vagrant 1 out-takes from his feature film, Dogfahr Nai Meu Marn (Dogfar in the Devils Hand , re-titled for the foreign market as Mysterious Object At Noon) 2 . The soundtrack of Thirdworld begins with an extradiegetic male voice (recorded at another time and plac e): X: It was like wondering whether it was a boy or a girl. laid over a short opening shot of a sound-man holding a shot-gun microphone as the camera pans right to reveal a girl (or is it a boy?) washing her feet with water bowled out of a village cistern. Thus begins an ambiguously diegetic/extradiegetic narration of dream sequences by the voic e of an unseen presumably male character, laid over beautifully composed idiomatic interior and exterior scenes of a Thai island village, shot in a quas i-film noir style. The voice relates dream sequences to another male, interspersed with the second persons periodic uh....hmmmm.... and a few questions about the dreams. The topmost audiotrack of male voices activates a densely packed pile of sampled ambient sounds. Both voices are delivered at low, intimate volume, and the two speak ers seem to be acquainted, yet not intimately enough for the listener to know the other s dreamsif those are his dreams. The intimacy could be an illus ion. Hovering between documentary and fiction, the dream narratives seem almost too perfect perhaps scripted or improvised by the filmmaker himself (who is credited as a member of the cast). Exploiting the audiences perpetually deterred/deferred desire for the real, the fiction of dream narratives, within the fiction of the film itself, draws us into the very milieu that it constructs around us in reel time. Verisimilitude is subverted in the manner that pseudo-surveillanc e videos of reality tv game shows, such as Big Brother, destabilise their own truth-value. But

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Filmic Vagrancy: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

this film (or should we call it a game) unlike those games is no one-trick pony.

The conversation track seems to lack resonance, giving the impression of a recording in a wooden enclosure the intimate, erotically charged space of a bedroom, just before or after sleep, with a microphone resting or held between the two men. At one point in the sequence a pair of feet appear against a curtained wall or window, with foley rustling sounds of the sort made by bed linen, clothing or other textiles, and the moving of bodies ly ing near a microphone. Further down the pile of audio tracks appear the now clich sounds of a rural third world village around dawn, complete with cock crowing and the startup of kerosene generators. Two such generators are shown in a short montage designed to realistically anchor image to sound. But soon the generator sound subliminally morphs into the deeper, liquid, rumbling sounds of an in-board boat engine, bringing the filmmaker s 3 associative intelligence This audio morph brings the cognizant viewer into awareness of the director-editor s assoc iative intelligence in the work. The boat engine auditorially/authoritatively continues through the last seven minutes of the sixteen minute film, providing context to a series of views of the sea and sky obliquely framed by high-contrast rectilinear house shapes.

Much of the writing about Apichatpongs films suffers from the romanticisation of their romantic and mythic content, avoiding the exquisite organisation of material or concrete means by which the film is constructed, and the effect of those means on audience reception. In my efforts to avoid romanticisation and to emphasise its radical constructivist aspects, this description of Apichatpongs film resorts to implanting material metaphors, such as the image of audio sedimentation (the pile or layering of audio tracks) to describe the editing process, and other techniques the filmmaker uses to engineer or disrupt the audiences sense of continuity and cognitiv e

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Filmic Vagrancy: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

immersion. The force of Apichatpongs methodology is seen in the writer s need to incessantly oscillate between such spatialisations of narrative structure, kinaesthetic patterning, tactics and cognitive effects. Deploy ing Vertovs tactic of creating a film that reveals its means, Weerasethakul thereby produces both a film and a performance of filmmaking, and alienates immersive reception in a classic ally Brechtian manner. The film problematises the critics tendency to reduce the film experience to a handful of mythologising analogues now ubiquitous in the literature surrounding Apichatpongs films, such as these few of hundreds: the realm of the inexpressible, euphoric, magical, fleeting, elus ive, abandonment of rationalism.

Later in the quiet dialogue between the two men we hear phrases subtitled as: Y: Where was the town? X: Probably not abroad, maybe Thailand. It might have been some places (sic) that was a mixture of places...like my dream last night. I was walking underneath my flat in Hueykwang (Bangkok) ...the way I usually do. But it wasnt really my flat. It was like another country.

While the audioscape could fit almost any rural village in any country, or a mixture of such places, we learn from the end credits that this particular potemkin thirdworld is somewhere (or severalwheres) on Panyi Island, Thailand. But this textual assurance raises the question of why we are still suckers for truth in film credits. Once again, our incessantly deterred/deferred desire for the real is what sets us up for the fall.

But that aside, doesnt the film in effect dec lare itself to be the other country

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Filmic Vagrancy: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

that the voice indexes, and the thirdworld proclaimed by the title, floating just behind the fourthwall of the screen, in this algebra of representations that force us to find the value of x? Like Chris Marker s La jete, the film engineers our reading of documentary footage, stories, sampled sounds, an imagined future and locales, memories, desires. And it shuttles us back and forth between three structuralist mainstays of the cinematic experienc e: screen-to-dream-to-civ ic ritual (the civic ritual being the publically shared daydream at noon of the film itself). How many tiny vagrancies sites, frames, signfiers divorced from signifieds appear in these few minutes of film in which, ostensibly, nothing happens? It is difficult to say whether Thirdwor ld is more densely packed than most firstworld films, but it is certainly more tactical. And it explodes the instrumental political usage of the term, thirdworld that was perpetuated during the coldwar era.

To cite a term used by Abdul R. JanMohamed 4 , Apichatpongs own subject positioning, and that of the public addressed by his films (which, apparently, have rarely been shown in Thailand 5 ) is that of syncretic border intellectual. (u)nderstood not as the individual...but as (an) authorial subject-position that combines ... cultures in order to articulate new syncretic forms and experiences, JanMohameds category includes Wole Soyinka, who combines Greek tragedy with Yoruba mythology, Salman Rus hdie, whose English novels are articulated in Urdu syntax, or Chinua Achebe, whos e English fiction is structured by Igbo oral narrative patterns etc. (1992:97)

Quite the prankster, Apichatpong is fully aware of his syncretic vagrancy. His tool kit of already tried and true disjunctive techniques inc lude some pioneered by Russian constructivists, Hitchcock, Godard, Bunuel and the Surrealists, and the Ameropean mid-century avant-garde: dipping in and out of real-time, non-diegetic voice-over narrative, alienating sound and image, use of the Kuleshov effect,

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Filmic Vagrancy: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Brechtian alienation, etc. I find myself reminded of works by Peter Kubelka, Bruce Baillie, and especially Chr is Marker. He is also clearly responding to a lineage of fetishistic queer cinema, including films of Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, Jean Cocteau, Ken Jacobs, Gus van Sant, Wong Kar Wai and others. Not to mention the flood of commercial films from Holly wood and elsewhere. Apichatpongs relaxed chronotyping, allowing real- time random events into narrative sequences, built on a post-neorealist use of amateur cast, parallels experiments by other Asian alternative filmmakers such as Hou Hs iao-hsien, Tsai Ming- lian, or U-Wei Haji Saar i among many others. This list of correlativ e practices and antecedants could be much longer, but what would be the point? Apic hatpong borrows unabashedly from many film traditions in the process of amalgamating delic ious ly stoned works of filmic imagining.

Vagrant Subtitles I want to focus for a few minutes on a different, but related technical phenomenon, produced by the film dubbing and subtitling industry in Thailand, especially as it affects films three younger electronic siblings: VHS+VCD+DVD. Running parallel to the translation of media formats from film to electronic media, we find dubbing and subtitle translations in Thai pirated tapes and discs that are a function of the economy of mass industrialisation and the distribution of global commodities in Thailand. As detailed by May Adadoi Ingawanijm in her paper Laughter, tears and voice performance in the space of Thai film history, 6 it is an industry that extends back to the silent film era during which live performances by versionists, who improvised the speech of the main characters, regularly accompanied film screenings. According to her, the versionists produc ed live Thai versions of the primarily Hindi films from the end of the war until well into the late 1970s. In a recent conversation, the Thai performance artist Chumpon Apis uk, who is around two decades older than Apichatpong, recalled the obvious

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Filmic Vagrancy: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

mistranslations of the versionists in his early exposure to film.

It is in this phenomenon of mistrans lation that the tires of globalism meet the tarmac of vernacular culture. Some of the unintentional and unstrategic pirate mistranslations of film subtitles from English, Hindi, Cantonese or other languages into Thai 7 subtitles leave diverse audiences to construct vagrant coherencies that the director or script-writers never imagined. Hermeneutics become heuristics. Because during the 1990s translations were often done directly off the audio track, rather than from a script (and still on some new releas e shot-in- movietheatre discs put out today), in a mistranslated video coherent interpretation is continuously anchored to the ad hoc act of (mis)hearing, (mis)pronunciation, and (mis)understanding. The subtitling is obvious ly improvised, rather than produced in a reflective act of reading and research. In these cases a films textuality mutates into a kind of performative dyslexia. And due to the national distribution system, it generates an enduring national dyslexia that lives on through the DVDs played and replayed in millions of homes on VHS/VCD/DVD decks and tvs.

While subtitle denotation is certainly a function of both difference and deferral (differance ) in an industrialized information economy, depending on the educational level of the audience, it can also be terminal. The average Thai family two decades ago was not likely to pause the film to run for a translation, but may now look for a translation on the home computer. Connotation on the other hand was and remains anything but terminal, with every film taking on something of the algebra of a whodunit. Yet, the unrecognised mis-subtitle has the power of a performative declaration, such as in a documentary voiceover. The already inherent structural autocracy of the linear film medium the prison-house of 24 frames per second is transmogrified into a walled city under the dictatorship of the mis-heard and mis-translated VHS/VCD/DVD. But in the case of show-your-

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Filmic Vagrancy: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

means-Weerasethakuls films, it is as if the people of Troy built their own Trojan Horse, filled it with Greeks and then inv ited it in.

If my presumptions are correct, Apichatpongs films are a paradoxical rebellion/acquiescence to syncretic vagrancy, that manifests through his extension of the semantic disjunctions mistitling into the haptic environment of image, sound, frame, movement and mise en scene. He exploits the ubiquitous Thai tradition of mistranslations inherited from the versionists and mass media that are already part and parcel of daily life. Mistranslation is so ubiquitous that the prefix mis- seems inadequate to properly characterize this social convention, particularly as it is developed by Weerasethakul. Perhaps the prefix pata- could be of use here, as in Alfred Jarrys pataphysics: the scienc e of imaginary solutions. These patatranslations the production of imaginary equivalencies across languages already conventionalized by the versionists, and continued into the dubbing and subtitling industry (in the 1980s on VHS tapes, in the 1990s on VCDs, and finally now on DVDs), would have been a staple since Apic hatpong, (b.1970) was a teenager in the northeastern village of Khon Kaen 8 .

I am suggesting that Apichatpong is the inher itor of this phenomenon, but that he has intentionally developed it into an analogic al practice 9 , exploiting a broad spectrum cultural and linguistic vagrancies that include, but are not limited to disjunctive semantics. The crucial point is that, by showing his means/memes its means, Apichatpongs film opens new imaginary countries and thirdwor(l)ds through its patatranslatability.

Having grown up within the already syncretic condition of Thai film culture, Apichatpong Weerasethakul eventually came full circle to restore (in the manner a film editor montages film rushes to restore a representation of sequential

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Filmic Vagrancy: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

temporality), the very real conundrums of linguistic and haptic vagrancy that he had experienced ... now for filmic and cognitiv e effect. And this artic le (like others of its ilk) functions as yet another theoretical patasubtitling of his film 1 0 . ----------------------------------------Ray Langenbach is a performance artist, documentary filmmaker, curator and writer on art, performance and cultural theory. His installations and performance art works have been presented in the United States, Europe and Asia-Pac ific.

Notes

1 Va g r a n c y c o n v e n t i o n a l l y c a n t a k e t h r e e f o r m s : b i o l o g i c a l ( i n t e r - s p e c i e s ) , h u m a n ( i n t e r - c l a s s ) , a n d c u l t u r a l v a g r a n c y. T h i s e s s a y f o c u s e s o n t h e t h i r d : the movement of cultural works and workers, such as artists, artifacts and memes, including techniques and skills, information, technologies, languages, beliefs, bureaucracies into a new range, social group or economic habitat. 2 In Dogfar, the scenes from the island village form a kind of Epilogue, introduced with an inter-title, At noon, perhaps a reference to the progenitor of all subsequent disjunctive temporal mappings: Un Chien Andalou (Andalusian Dog) by Luis Buuel and Salvador Dali. 3 Weerasethakul edits or co-edits his own films in the manner of many independent filmmakers. There is no editing credit for Thirdworld, implying that th e di re c to r d o ub l e d a s ed i to r.

4 A b d u l R . J a n M o h a m e d 1 9 9 2 , W o r l d l i n e s s - W i t h o u t - W o r l d , H o m e l e s s n e s s - A s H o m e : To w a r d A D e f i n i t i o n o f t h e S p e c u l a r B o r d e r I n t e l l e c t u a l , i n E d w a r d
S a i d : A C ri t i c a l R e a d e r, e d i t e d b y M i c h a e l S p r i n k e r, ( C a m b r i d g e , M a s s a c h u s e t t s , B l a c k w e l l ( p p 9 6 - 1 2 0 ) JanMohamed distinguishes the syncretic from the specular border intellectual in his discussion of the life and work of Edward Said. The syncretic border intellectual is defined above, while, in a nutshell, the specular border intellectual is defined as being at home nowhere. 5 According to Chuck Stephens in the Flexifilm DVD notes for Mysterious Object at Noon/Dogfahr in the Devils Hand.

6 Delivered at the Asia Research Institute (National University of Singapore) Performing Space in Asian Cinema workshop Feb 2010.
7 I am extrapolating from the mistranslations I have found in English subtitles. Often the words heard by the translator are completely different from those spoken. The translators seem to have particular difficulty strong British, European and American southern and western accents. 8 In a 2007 article, Ghosts in the Darkness, Apichatpong recalls the versionists Konjanard, Rong Kaomoonkadee and Juree Osiri and muses that due to the continued presence of their profession: It is not surprising then that Thailand didnt change to sound on film until the 1980s, decades after many o th e r co u n tri e s, w i th u s th i n ki n g al l th e w hi l e th a t l ive d ub b i n g w a s cu sto ma ry a ro u n d th e w o rl d . (Qu a n d t , Ja me s, ed i to r, 2 00 9 , A pi ch a tp o n g Weerasethakul, Wien:Synema Publikationen p.107) 9 The willful error for example the citational error or misprision in the works of British Romantic poets, as deconstructed by Harold Bloom is certainly not new to art. 1 0 I w i s h t o t h a n k G A I K C h e n g K h o o f o r i n v i t i n g a n e a r l i e r v e r s i o n o f t h i s p i e c e f o r a c o n f e r e n c e , a n d M AY A d a d o l I n g a w a n i j a n d D a v i d T E H f o r s h a r i n g resources.