ศิลปะนานาพันธุ์ ศิลปะประชาธิปไตย

The group exhibition ศิลปะนานาพันธุ์ ศิลปะประชาธิปไตย (‘art for democracy’) opened on 28th September at Angoon’s Garden in Bangkok. Most of the paintings in the show are displayed outside, with some hanging next to a small pond. The exhibition (a less provocative equivalent of the political art show Uncensored) runs for exactly one month.

Each artwork is a response to the Thai military’s political influence over the decades. For example, Jirapatt Aungsumalee’s painting ประตูแดง (‘red gate’) depicts the outlines of two men hanged from a red gate in 1976, the extrajudicial killings that precipitated the 6th October 1976 massacre. A painting by Ekalux Julsukont also refers to 6th October: a man ready to strike a corpse with a chair, a figure from Neal Ulevich’s iconic photograph of the massacre.

The exhibition includes a single sculpture, Pin Sasao’s ถังแดง​: ความตายของบิลลี่ (‘red barrel: the death of Billy’), which uses a mannequin and barbecue to represent the murder of human rights activist Porlajee Rakchongcharoen. (Porlajee, nicknamed Billy, was stuffed into an oil drum, in an echo of the ‘red barrel’ killings of Thailand’s anti-Communist purge. In 2014, Teerawat Mulvilai’s solo dance performance Satapana evoked the anti-Communist killings, as the artist interacted with red oil drums on stage.)

The short film The Two Brothers (สองพี่น้อง) and the Anatomy of Silence (กายวิภาคของความเงียบ) exhibition were also inspired by the ‘red gate’ hangings; the gate itself will be shown at an exhibition marking the anniversary of 6th October this weekend. The man with the chair has been painted by numerous artists, including Headache Stencil and Tawan Wattuya.

Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood, according to the poster) is the ninth film by Quentin Tarantino. It’s also, apparently, his penultimate work. (Tarantino’s previous films are Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill I and II, Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained, and The Hateful Eight.)

The title is both a tribute to Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una volta il West) and a signal that this version of 1960s Hollywood is ultimately a fairy tale. Inglourious Basterds began with the caption “Once upon a time... in Nazi-occupied France”, and the new film features a similar form of revisionist history: the Manson Family murder of Sharon Tate is rewritten with a happy ending. The film is also unashamedly nostalgic, recreating the Hollywood of Tarantino’s childhood.

All of Tarantino’s films have superb soundtracks, and Once Upon a Time... is no exception. In this case, the music is all from the period, a great early example being the lip trill from Billy Stewart’s Summertime matched to a sputtering car engine. (It’s a reversal of the moment when the music slows as the car runs out of gas in The Graduate.) In fact, the best scenes all feature Brad Pitt driving around LA listening to his car radio.

Stone

Stone is the latest in a series of coffee-table books on building materials, edited by William Hall and published by Phaidon. Like its predecessors Concrete, Brick, and Wood, Stone features stunning full-page photographs of more than 150 buildings, each with a paragraph-length caption.

“Many of the world’s most significant, revered, influential and memorable structures are built with stone,” Hall notes in his preface. Stone is the oldest and most durable of building materials, and the book includes such architectural masterworks as the pyramids of Giza, the Parthenon, and the Taj Mahal. Various forms of stone are represented, including basalt, limestone, marble, and sandstone.

“...a long and disturbing pattern of behaviour by the British tabloid media”

Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, are suing The Mail on Sunday for breach of copyright, after the newspaper printed extracts from a letter she wrote to her father, Thomas. In a statement released yesterday, Harry said: “This particular legal action hinges on one incident in a long and disturbing pattern of behaviour by British tabloid media.”

The Mail on Sunday published the letter on 10th February, in a four-page article written by Caroline Graham. Thomas Markle — who supplied it to the newspaper — has legal ownership of the letter as its recipient, though copyright is retained solely by his daughter, as its writer. Thus, the newspaper was not legally entitled to reproduce it.

The Queen sued another UK tabloid, The Sun, for breach of copyright in 1992, after it published a transcript of her Christmas broadcast two days early. More recently, Prince William and his wife Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, sued the French magazine Closer for invasion of privacy.

Thailand’s Movie Theatres

Thailand’s Movie Theatres: Relics, Ruins and the Romance of Escape features photographs of more than fifty vintage Thai cinemas. The book, by Philip Jablon, also includes a brief history of film exhibition in Thailand. (A Century of Thai Cinema, by Dome Sukwong, also covers Thai film exhibition, though Jablon goes into a bit more detail.)

As the book’s subtitle suggests, many of these stand-alone cinemas have been abandoned; in his preface, Kong Rithdee laments this “glorious dereliction”. Notoriously, Siam Theatre was destroyed by arsonists in 2010, a great cultural loss (as it was the first venue to draw crowds to Siam Square in downtown Bangkok), and — to add insult to injury — its demolition gave developers an ideal opportunity to build yet another shopping mall (Siam Square One). Fortunately, the Scala cinema, which Jablon calls “Bangkok’s last movie palace”, is still open for business. Others have been repurposed, such as the Prince Theatre, which was converted into an impressive movie-themed hotel.

Thailand’s Movie Theatres also examines the social history of film exhibition, profiling poster artists such as Somboonsuk Niyomsiri (Piak Poster) and voice dubbers like Sirichai Duangphatra. It includes a fascinating account of Sirichai’s dubbing of a Hollywood thriller in 1973: “He had a penchant, moreover, for using his role as dubber to address the day’s top political scandals, both at the national and local level. And corrupt politicians were his number one target. With Serpico, making political satire for Sirichai was like shooting fish in a barrel; it turned out to be his voice-over magnum opus.”

Sonthaya Subyen and Morimart Raden-Ahmad’s Once Upon a Celluloid Planet (สวรรค์ 35 มม.: เสน่ห์วิกหนังเมืองสยาม) is another tribute to Thailand’s stand-alone cinemas, with multiple interior photographs of each venue. Once Upon a Celluloid Planet was published five years before Thailand’s Movie Theatres, though the two projects were developed in parallel.

Bangkok Screening Room

To celebrate Halloween, Bangkok Screening Room will be showing a season of horror films this October and November. Highlights include Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Psycho, Nonzee Nimibutr’s Thai classic Nang Nak (นางนาก), and William Friedkin’s horror blockbuster The Exorcist.

Psycho will be screened on 29th, 30th, and 31st October; and 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 7th, 9th, and 10th November. Nang Nak is showing on 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, and 15th October. There will be a single screening of The Exorcist, on 11th October.

Transmissions of Unwanted Pasts

In Prabda Yoon’s short film Transmissions of Unwanted Pasts (วงโคจรของความทรงจำ), a satellite malfunctions and begins transmitting images that seem inexplicable until Pang, a young engineer, discovers that they represent “many important historical events in Thailand.” The mysterious images are never shown, though Pang lists the dates that they refer to: “2014, 2010, 2008, 1992, 1976, 1973, 1932...”

Of course, those are precisely the years that Thailand’s military would like us all to forget: the 2014 coup, the 2010 red-shirt crackdown, the 2008 police violence against yellow-shirt protesters, ‘Black May’ 1992, the 6th October 1976 and 14th October 1973 massacres, and the 1932 abolition of absolute monarchy. Pang excitedly suggests that historians could use the satellite data to study these events: “They might discover many new things, things that they were previously unaware of, or things that were never documented.” But her boss has other ideas, and three soldiers destroy all the material she’s gathered.

The science-fiction dystopia of Transmissions of Unwanted Pasts is, like the portmanteau film Ten Years Thailand and Thunska Pansittivorakul’s Supernatural (เหนือธรรมชาติ), also a comment on present-day Thailand. Like the soldiers erasing satellite images of ‘unwanted pasts’, Thailand’s successive military governments have sought to suppress discussion of these events. Bhandit Rittakol’s The Moonhunter (14 ตุลา สงครามประชาชน) describes the 1973 massacre as an event “that many would like to erase from history”.

The result of this whitewashing is a cycle of nascent democratic reforms repeatedly reset by military coups, as forgotten history is destined to repeat itself. In Prabda’s previous film, Someone from Nowhere (มา ณ ที่นี้), this cycle is symbolised by a violent argument between a condo owner and an interloper. The two figures represent military and civilian governments jostling for power, though their roles are later reversed, and they have no memory of their previous confrontation.

Madame X Tour

Madonna’s Madame X Tour began last night. Her previous world tours (Who’s That Girl, Blond Ambition, The Girlie Show, Drowned World, Reinvention, Confessions, Sticky and Sweet, MDNA, and Rebel Heart) were all held in stadiums or arenas, though Madame X is a theatre tour. This makes each concert a far more intimate experience, and Madonna interacted with the audience throughout last night’s show. She has experimented with smaller-scale performances before: she debuted her Tears of a Clown cabaret show in Melbourne and Miami in 2016, and played one night at the Paris Olympia during The MDNA Tour in 2012.

The new tour includes live performances of almost the entire Madame X album (Medellín, Dark Ballet, God Control, Future, Batuka, Killers Who Are Partying, Crave, Crazy, Come Alive, I Don't Search I Find, and Extreme Occident) and a handful of classics (Human Nature, an a cappella Express Yourself, Vogue, Papa Don’t Preach, American Life, La Isla Bonita, Frozen, and Like a Prayer). There are two cover versions (Fado Pechincha and Sodade), and the encore is I Rise.

Tropical Malady: The Book

Tropical Malady: The Book, published this month, is a deluxe facsimile of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (สัตว์ประหลาด) shooting script. The full-size reproduction includes the film’s dialogue, directions, and storyboards, all annotated by the director. In addition to the lavishly reproduced screenplay, it also features an interview with Apichatpong and a booklet of English and Japanese translations. (A different copy of the script was featured in the exhibition The Serenity of Madness.)

Internationally, Tropical Malady is one of Apichatpong’s most acclaimed films, though it had only limited distribution in Thailand. When I interviewed him in 2017, he discussed its disappointing domestic theatrical release: “I think, from Tropical Malady, there’s this issue of releasing the film, and marketing, that I don’t like. And also the studio was not interested in the film, anyway, because there’s no selling point: there’s no tiger, there’s no sex, so it’s very personal.” The new book is an attempt to raise the film’s Thai profile.

As in the novel S., simulations of various documents have been inserted between the pages: a handwritten letter (from Keng, one of the film’s protagonists); a Risograph print of a fantastically lurid comic, สมิงมนต์คนอาคม (‘possessed by a tiger’); a temple booklet, พื้นเสือสมิง (‘tiger spirit tales’); a magazine serial, นารายณ์ทรงปืน (‘Narai with a gun’); and a poster. The premium edition also comes with a sticker and tote bag, both featuring the book’s calligram logo. The book is housed in a custom cardboard box with the same design.

The book was edited by Sonthaya Subyen and Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa. This superb tribute to one of Thailand’s greatest films is the last of Sonthaya’s Filmvirus publications, a long-running series that also includes Once Upon a Celluloid Planet (สวรรค์ 35 มม) and another Apichatpong Weerasethakul monograph, Unknown Forces (สัตว์วิกาล).

จำนรรจา: อย่ามาขึ้นเสียงกับผม! (‘speak: don’t raise your voice to me!’)

An exhibition of paintings by Uthis Haemamool opens at Many Cuts Art Space in Chachoengsao tomorrow and runs until 5th January 2020 (extended from the originally scheduled closing date, 27th October). จำนรรจา อย่ามาขึ้นเสียงกับผม! (‘speak: don’t raise your voice to me!’) is a collection of impressionistic portraits of leading figures from both sides of the political divide, finger-painted in acrylic on paper.

This is one of the first exhibitions of political art since the election. While most of the works are portraits, one — Nuamthong — depicts Nuamthong Praiwan crashing his taxi into a tank in a protest against the 2006 coup. The title of each work is the first name of its subject in English, such as Prayuth (Prime Minister and coup leader Prayut Chan-o-cha).