film, eyeballs, brain

In his lovely essay over at Lilok Pelikula, Richard Bolisay writes about the spectrality of the camera, or rather, the camera as the ghostly presence in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s haunted film, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee. It’s a film set in a village in Northeastern Thailand and the site of the torture and massacre of farmers by the military in 1968 – as the narrator(s) reads: “Soldiers once occupied this village. They killed and tortured the villagers until everyone fled into the jungle.”

Bolisay writes:

ascribing its movement to a phantom’s seems fit; how it glides, roves, and circumvents; sometimes even floats from the ground. What it sees is different from what it captures, for Apichatpong has able to personify the camera with non-human qualities—something less human in layman’s terms—and share exuberant glimpses of the house in Nabua through its mobility.

In contrast to this ethereality, however, I see/view instead the camera foregrounded as material object, the smoothness of its glide through the houses’ interiors enabled by machines and human operators. We see, after all, a hand adjusting the lens halfway through the film. We are reminded that the camera is physically moving – more important, being physically moved – within rooms and peeking through windows, drinking in the deep green, and is wholly dependent on people (those who have not disappeared, who are still here) to fix the images onto celluloid, as an imperative to remember.

We treat the camera as witness, and therefore the film as material testament, as certificate of presence: the camera never lies; seeing is believing. Our sense of seeing is fully engaged. The camera’s eye becomes our ocular appendage; like detectives, we investigate and examine what is, in effect, the scene of the crime. But we look for traces, not clues, for there are no solutions to this puzzle, to these disappearances.

So, too, is our sense of hearing heightened: we hear the increasing rush of pre-monsoon wind through the trees, the sound of digging, an ominous mechanical humming which turns out to be an electric fan on the floor. In this fashion the camera and its microphone establishes itself as an objective presence in the film.

But like Weerasethakul’s Exquisite Corpse film Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), A Letter to Uncle Boonmee exposes its scaffolding to the viewer, and lays open the process of its creation: the provenance of funding for the film, for instance, or, most important, the inexactitude of both topos and logos. The narration is tentative and unstable, whether recited or rehearsed, undercutting its own words and the very film itself: this house isn’t the house, or even looks like the house; it’s the wrong place (“endless fields and trees” instead of a “longan farm surrounded by mountains”), it involves the wrong son (it might be a nephew), the wrong relative (“Boonmee or Boonma”). “You screwed up our dialect,” someone says. The film insistently interrogates itself, or rather, provides openings for the viewer to doubt its veracity, its fidelity to representation.

When the mysterious object appears – a distant cousin, perhaps, of a similar vessel in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (2006) – our visual tie with the camera is immediately ruptured. We’ve been betrayed. We can no longer trust our eyes. (As if a perverse acknowledgment of the audience’s incredulity, the camera slowly swings back to catch another glimpse – you can almost hear the director laughing – and then we see a sketch for the construction of the mysterious object on the wall a minute later.) And when the ape-like creature – like Roger Patterson’s famous Sasquatch footage from 1967 – crosses the green thicket of jungle before our eyes, is it a hallucination? Will we remember this as truth?

We trap light and sound, into boxes of metal, before they vanish forever; we do this to forestall our own extinction, before we, too, disappear. When trauma is forgotten, when things vanish from our eyes, when all that remains of people are photographs wrinkled by humidity, are they any less real? Do they pass into the realm of legend, of extraterrestrials, of mythical creatures of the forest, of massacres denied, of letters never sent?

Popularity: 20%

Possibly related posts:

1. Nimrod Antal, “Predators” (2010).
2. Phillip Noyce, “Salt” (2010).
3. Sylvester Stallone, “The Expendables” (2010).