International Film Festival 2011

Chulalongkorn University's International Film Festival 2011 opened today. This year's highlight is the controversial Greek family drama Dogtooth (previously screened at the 2009 Bangkok International Film Festival), which is scheduled for 5th September.

The Festival runs until 9th September. As in previous years (2008, 2008-2009, 2010), all screenings are free.

Journey Of The Buddha

Journey Of The Buddha, the inaugural exhibition of Bangkok's VR Museum, is a collection of Buddha statuettes (collected by Vichai Raksriaksorn) dating from the 9th century onwards. The icons originate from throughout South-East Asia, though primarily from Thailand's Sukhothai and Ayutthaya periods. The majority of the collection is displayed in darkened corridors with atmospheric red uplighting and ambient music. In contrast, an impressive panorama of more recent Buddha images is positioned around one side of the VR's modernist glass dome.

The most frequent Buddha styles and postures are all represented in the VR collection, with the exception of the emaciated Buddha, a striking example of which can be seen at Wat Umong in Chiang Mai. Thailand's most celebrated Buddha images include the golden Buddha at Wat Traimit and the emerald Buddha at Wat Phra Kaew, both in Bangkok, though the country's most majestic Buddha statues are in the ancient city of Sukhothai. (Buddha has been portrayed less respectfully in popular culture, appearing as a malevolent alien in Gantz.)

The Book Of Skulls

The Book Of Skulls, by Faye Dowling, is a visual survey of the human skull as a design icon, with examples of skull imagery from art, fashion, and graphic design. Damien Hirst's For The Love Of God, a platinum skull decorated with 8,000 diamonds, is the ultimate symbol of artistic commodification and fetishisation, and one of the most expensive works by a living artist, though the terms of its sale remain mysterious.

Gabriel Orozco's Black Kites, a chessboard pattern drawn onto a skull, is not included in Dowling's book, though it's an even more direct example of vanitas or memento mori iconography. It also evokes the Dia de los Muertos and Santa Muerte traditions of Orozco's native Mexico.

Kulo

Kulo, a controversial exhibition accused of blasphemy and subjected to vandalism, has been closed prematurely. The exhibition opened on 17th July at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines in Manila, and was originally scheduled to run until 21st August.

Kulo was a group exhibition featuring works by thirty-two artists, though Poleteismo, an installation by Mideo Cruz, was singled out for criticism. Cruz's installation includes crucifixes and icons of Jesus decorated with wooden dildos and a used condom. President Aquino claimed that Cruz's work is offensive to Christians, which over-rides freedom of expression: "there is no freedom that is absolute". Cruz is now facing blasphemy charges.

Poleteismo has been shown in Manila several times before: at the Vargas Museum in 2002, at the Kulay-Diwa gallery in 2005, and at Ateneo de Manila University in 2007. It was profiled on the Telecingko television programme in 2005, and featured in a video directed by Sigfried Barros-Sanchez in 2007.

Another Art Book

Another Art Book is a portfolio of artworks commissioned by Another Magazine over the past decade. (The title is similar to Stefan Sagmeister's Another Self-Indulgent Design Monograph.)

Highlights include Ucnt (an irreverent anagram by Jake and Dinos Chapman) and Urine Shroud (a Rorschach blot by Tim Noble and Sue Webster, punning on the Turin Shroud and influenced by Andres Serrano's Piss Christ). The centrepiece, however, is The Stations Of The Cross, David Bailey's glossy photographs of Damien Hirst's passion-of-Christ tableaux, featuring skulls, a cow's head, and lots of blood.

The Tree Of Life

The Tree Of Life, directed by Terrence Malick, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year. Malick avoids publicity, works intensely, and emerges every few years with another masterpiece (like Stanley Kubrick, though even more so). His first two films, Badlands and Days Of Heaven, are undisputed classics, with gorgeous magic-hour cinematography. The Tree Of Life looks as stunning as his previous works, though its non-linear, almost abstract narrative is surprisingly experimental.

The film begins with a mother and father's grief at the death of one of their three sons. How he died is never explained; he would be at the right age to fight in the Vietnam war, though Malick's brother committed suicide and the film may therefore be semi-autobiographical. Later scenes of the sons growing up together in Texas in the 1950s may also be autobiographical, as Malick was also raised in Texas.

Like the art film Powers Of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, The Tree Of Life's perspective is both macroscopic and cosmological. Malick shows us the origins of galaxies, stars, and planets, the development of microbial organisms, the evolution of marine creatures, and the reign of the dinosaurs. These sequences are extraordinary and breath-taking, especially on a large cinema screen. They resemble the interplanetary scenes from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the analogue visual effects for both films were developed by Douglas Trumbull.

The dinosaur sequence (influenced, as are so many other CGI dinosaurs, by Jurassic Park) is arguably a prequel to 2001's 'Dawn of Man' segment; whereas Kubrick used pre-historic apes to illustrate our capacity for violence, Malick's dinosaurs represent nascent compassion, as one dinosaur spares the life of another. The hallucinatory dreamscapes of 2001 - and, less profoundly, Gaspar Noe's Enter The Void and Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain - may be The Tree Of Life's only parallels in commercial cinema; few other films are as ambitious (or audacious).

After the dinosaurs are obliterated by a meteorite, paving the way for human evolution, Malick returns to the three sons growing up in Texas. Scenes from their childhoods, remembered by one of the sons as an adult, present an idyllic existence punctuated by occasional moments of unsettling incongruity (a man suffering a seizure; a burning house) and magical-realist fantasy (the mother levitating, and laying in a glass coffin like Sleeping Beauty). These scenes are presented impressionistically, like snapshots from a photograph album, out of sequence and often without dialogue, leaving many events unexplained.

There is an unavoidably religious element to the film: it opens with a quotation from the Book of Job, and concludes with a family reunion on a heavenly beach. A purely abstract light pattern seen at the start and end of the film may thus represent a divine presence. I was put off by the religiosity, and the pretentious whispered voice-over, though more importantly I was captivated by the scope of the narrative.

You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger

You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger is another of Woody Allen's late-period London films (after Match Point, Scoop, and Cassandra's Dream). Again, the main characters are writers and artists; more unusually, they all seem to be alcoholics.

Anthony Hopkins is excellent in an unflattering role, his character's mid-life crisis resulting in acute humiliation. Naomi Watts plays the unsympathetic lead female character, shouting "I need my own gallery!" at her husband and "You imbecile! I need that money!" at her mother; as in Sex & The City II, the 'problems' being dealt with are so upper-middle-class. The various plot strands are leading up to some potentially awkward moments, though Allen leaves them unresolved and instead finishes on a happy ending.

The Terrorists

Thunska Pansittivorakul’s The Terrorists (ผู้ก่อการร้าย) is his most political film to date, a direct and personal response to last year’s massacre in Bangkok. With his previous political work, This Area Is Under Quarantine (บริเวณนี้อยู่ภายใต้การกักกัน), Thunska waited four years before criticising Thaksin Shinawatra for the Tak Bai incident, though The Terrorists is an immediate, courageous, and necessary condemnation of the government. (This month, Abhisit Vejjajiva conceded defeat to Thaksin’s sister, Yingluck, though The Terrorists was made long before the election.)

The Terrorists begins with scenes of Thai fishermen; later, it features footage shot at an aquarium. The symbolic value of these sequences is revealed when a Thai monk is quoted equating killing Communists with catching fish. This strategy was also employed in Rwanda, where Tutsis were compared to cockroaches; it represents a dehumanisation of political opponents, in order to justify the massacre of civilians. The film’s title itself refers to a similar propaganda tactic, Abhisit and Suthep Thaugsuban’s demonisation of red-shirt protesters as terrorists in order to turn public opinion against them.

Documentary footage of the protests, providing yet more evidence that the Thai army shot and killed unarmed pro-democracy protesters, is also included. Despite the existence of such evidence, no one in the army has yet been held accountable for the massacre; the film ends with a pertinent rhetorical question: “who do you think has the power to order the soldiers?” Footage of the 1976 Thammasat University massacre is also included, demonstrating that history will keep repeating itself if we don’t prevent it.

Thunska’s trademark sexual content is also present: after the opening credits, a bound man is stripped naked and abused; later, in an echo of Thunska’s short film Middle-Earth (มัชฌิมโลก), a nude man is filmed while sleeping. Most provocatively, Thunska also combines explicit sex with political violence: footage of a man masturbating is accompanied by captions describing the Thammasat massacre.

The Terrorists was screened at the Dialogic exhibition yesterday, alongside Thunska’s short film KI SS. He has also directed the semi-autobiographical documentary Reincarnate (จุติ), and his early short films were screened at a retrospective in 2008 (Inside Out, Outside In).

Dialogic

The group exhibition Dialogic at BACC encourages visitors to interact with its exhibits: there is a large recreation area, a media zone, a hut to sit in, even (after Tracey Emin) a bed to sleep in. The exhibits are (tangential and indirect) responses to fundamental activities such as eating, excreting, and dying; the atmosphere is informal and laid-back.

The exhibition includes KI SS, a short film by Thunska Pansittivorakul in which footage of two men kissing is followed by the text of Snow White, ending with a photograph of Bangkok's Democracy Monument. Thunska's previous films include the politically and/or sexually provocative Reincarnate and This Area Is Under Quarantine; his new film The Terrorists was screened at Dialogic today, followed by a long Q&A session, as part of the Morbid Symptom film season. (After today, Morbid Symptom resumes on 6th August, and finishes on 17th September; the season is presented by Filmvirus.)

KI SS is accompanied by a collage of images of the 2010 massacre and other state-sanctioned violence, including the 1976 Thammasat massacre (which also inspired Manit Sriwanichpoom's Horror In Pink and Flashback '76), Holocaust victims, numerous other corpses, and even a severed head. Fortunately, these images are uncensored, though BACC did censor similar photographs from last year's Rupture exhibition.

Dialogic runs from 21st July to 25th September. Various books by Sulak Sivaraksa, including his banned ค่อนศตวรรษ ประชาธิปไตยไทย, are available to buy from a stall within the exhibition.

The Information

In The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, James Gleick (author of Faster) documents the history of mediated communication and calculation, from the first alphabets to contemporary social networks, and their associated technologies. He also explains how the information we exchange is stored, processed, and organised, from Charles Babbage's mechanical 'difference engine' to the modern computer.

Gleick writes in an accessible and anecdotal style, though he doesn't dumb down the science. The book's scope is extremely wide-ranging; personally, I was most fascinated by the chapters on communications technologies (telegraphy and telephony, also covered in A Social History Of The Media), lexicography (documented by Jonathon Green in Chasing The Sun), and memetics (pioneered by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene).