Pulp Fiction

Neighbourhood, the Bangkok community mall that began regular outdoor film screenings last month, will show Pulp Fiction tomorrow. Quentin Tarantino’s classic was previously shown at House Samyan and Bangkok Screening Room in 2019, and at Cinema Winehouse in 2018 and 2015.

Sondhi v. Prachatai

Thailand’s Criminal Court yesterday dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed by media mogul Sondhi Limthongkul against the online news organisation Prachatai. Sondhi had filed the case in August, claiming that Prachatai misrepresented his opinion by falsely implying that he supported another coup.

In a Facebook post on 31st July, Sondhi speculated on the future of Thai politics, listing thirteen potential scenarios. The last of these was the possibility of another coup, which he described as “ไร้ความชอบธรรม” (‘illegitimate’). Later that day, the Prachatai website reported Sondhi’s comments about the chances of a coup, though its headline omitted the word ‘illegitimate’.

The Criminal Court noted that the first sentence of Prachatai’s article quoted his reference to an ‘illegitimate coup’, and that the article also went on to reproduce Sondhi’s list of thirteen scenarios in full, thus mitigating any potential misunderstanding caused by the headline. (Dateline Bangkok raised the same points a few days after Sondhi sued Prachatai.)

Cannibal Holocaust (4k blu-ray)

Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust was remastered in 4k for the first time by 88 Films in the UK last year, and their new transfer was released on UHD blu-ray and standard blu-ray discs. The film’s opening titles were digitally recreated for the 4k version, using a slightly different typeface [pictured left] compared to the original version [right]. The new titles include several typos: Franco Palaggi and Franco Di Nunzio’s first names both mistakenly appear as “FRANKO”, and ‘authenticity’ is misspelt as “autheticity”. (A full stop is also missing.)

As a UK release, the 4k version has been censored by the BBFC, though only one sequence — the killing of a coati — has been cut. As if to offset the typos and censorship, the 88 Films discs also include an excellent new audio commentary by horror expert Kim Newman and writer Barry Forshaw. The US blu-ray, from Grindhouse Releasing, is uncensored, though for purists the only truly complete version is the Dutch Ultrabit DVD edition: in this print, the documentary sequence The Last Road to Hell is a few seconds longer.

The film is notoriously shocking, and remains one of the most famous titles caught up in the ‘video nasties’ moral panic in the UK during the early 1980s. Its genuine cruelty to animals is, of course, indefensible, but it’s also notable as the first ‘found footage’ horror film, directly influencing The Blair Witch Project and indirectly inspiring the wave of Blair Witch imitations that followed.

Cannibal Holocaust is undeniably an exploitation movie — from a cycle of cannibal-themed Italian horror films that began with Man from Deep River (Il paese del sesso selvaggio) — though it transcends that reputation with its critique of the mondo documentary subgenre. As discussed in Killing for Culture, mondo films mutated from the relatively mild Mondo Cane to violent ‘shockumentaries’, a trend that Cannibal Holocaust both condemns and exploits.

Surprisingly, the film has been available uncut on DVD in Thailand for more than twenty years, prior to the introduction of the rating system. (As noted in Thai Cinema Uncensored, Thai film censors are concerned far more with politics and religion than with violence.) It was shown at Jam in Bangkok in 2015, and a screening at Thammasat University was planned in 2020, though this was cancelled due to the coronavirus lockdown.

Cannibal Holocaust is not the only film whose title sequence has been mangled on blu-ray. All standard blu-ray releases of Ingmar Bergman’s classic The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet) feature a Swedish title screen with a missing word: “SJUNDE INSEGLET”. (The definite article “DET” has been omitted; 4k UHD blu-ray releases are unaffected.)

The Disturbing Movie Iceberg

In 2021, a Reddit user known as Nice Guy Phil posted an infographic titled The Disturbing Movie Iceberg, an eight-tiered hierarchy of violent and offensive films. The metaphor in the title suggested that the films in tier one were ‘the tip of the iceberg’, while those in tier eight were the most disturbing films imaginable.

The chart generated a great deal of interest online, though most people who saw it were unaware of most of the films listed. In fact, it’s not advisable to seek out many of the films in the chart, and the only recommended films are those in tiers three and four. (The other tiers are either too mild to be considered truly disturbing, or too extreme to be considered narrative films.)

Tier one consists of mainstream horror movies that are entirely conventional and uncontroversial. Tier two features titles that are slightly more violent than those in tier one, including mainstream horror films that have been dismissed as ‘torture porn’.

Tiers three and four are the core of the list, and most viewers should confine themselves to these tiers. The exploitation films in tier three, such as Cannibal Holocaust, are not mainstream titles, though they have all been theatrically released. Tier four features fake snuff films released on video, including the Guinea Pig (ギニーピッグ) series.

The titles in the remaining tiers are not commercial feature films, and should be avoided by most viewers. Tier five features Japanese porn videos, and tier six consists of mondo videos. The final two tiers contain extreme online material: fetish porn in tier seven, and death clips in tier eight.

(A compilation of footage from the 7th October Hamas attack on Israel, untitled though known colloquially as the ‘video of horrors’, would surely find a place in tier eight, though it has not been released to the public. The video, variations of which are between forty-four and forty-seven minutes long, was edited by Mattan Harel-Fisch and includes uncensored footage of the deaths of many Israelis on that day. It has been shown to journalists, politicians, and diplomats at various private screenings.)

Short Film Marathon 27

The 27th Thai Short Film and Video Festival (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์สั้น ครั้งที่ 27) runs from 16th December until Christmas Eve at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya. As a prelude, all of the films submitted will be screened in alphabetical order in this year’s online Short Film Marathon (หนังสั้นมาราธอน), between 31st October and 6th December.

The Thai Short Film and Video Festival, founded in 1997, is Thailand’s longest-running film event. Whereas other festivals have come and gone, the Thai Short Film and Video Festival goes from strength to strength: 400 films were submitted last year, and this year the total has increased to 600, though only a fraction will be selected for the main event.

Highlights this year include A Love Letter to My Sister by video journalist Napasin Samkaewcham, a deeply moving documentary about the volatile relationship between his parents. It will have its first public screening on 11th November.

Also, the feature-length version of Supamok Silarak’s documentary Red Poetry (ความกวีสีแดง) — a profile of performance artist Vitthaya Klangnil, who has been convicted of lèse-majesté — will be shown on 16th November. (It has previously been shown only at under-the-radar screenings in Chiang Mai.)

Three standouts from the Wildtype 2023 event — Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s ANG48 (เอเอ็นจี48), Vichart Somkaew’s Cremation Ceremony (ประวัติย่อของบางสิ่งที่หายไป), and Koraphat Cheeradit’s Yesterday Is Another Day — are also included, showing on 2nd, 4th, and 19th November, respectively. (Cremation Ceremony and Yesterday Is Another Day were previously screened at this year’s Chiang Mai Film Festival (เทศกาลหนังแห่งเมืองเชียงใหม่), and Yesterday Is Another Day has also been shown at Silpakorn University.)

Chatchawal Thongjun’s From Forest to City (อรัญนคร), one of the best Thai short films of the year, will be shown on 6th December. Koraphat Cheeradit’s experimental, transgressive film ...Tomorrow I Fuck with Yesterday Now! (ฉันแต่งงานกับปัจจุบัน ช่วยตัวเองด้วยเมื่อวาน และมีเพศสัมพันธ์กับวันพรุ่งนี้) is screening on 19th November.

กลุ่มอิสระล้อการเมือง 14 ตุลา (‘political parody of 14th Oct.’), Warat Bureephakdee’s satirical commentary on the aftermath of the 14th October 1973 massacre, is screening on 21st November. Warat’s collage film reappropriates footage from the documentary อนุทินวีรชน 14 ตุลาคม (‘diary of 14th October heroes’), and he takes a skeptical view of the claims of democratic freedom that were made after the event. The film ends with the caption “ถนอม WILL RETURN” (‘Thanom will return’), in the style of the James Bond series, though in this case the ominous reference is to military dictator Thanom Kittikachorn. Thanom was sent into exile after the massacre, though he did indeed return to Thailand in 1976, and this precipitated the 6th October 1976 coup.

On 30th November, Teeraphan Ngowjeenanan’s แฟ้มรวมภาพทักษิณกลับไทย (‘dossier of pictures of Thaksin’s return to Thailand’) documents another politician’s return from exile. Thaksin Shinawatra returned to Thailand earlier this year, and the film is a compilation of live TV coverage of his arrival at the airport and his performative prostration in front of a portrait of Rama X. The events are replayed more than twenty times, each from a different TV broadcast, accompanied by commentary from each channel’s news anchors. The film ends with a montage of TikTok videos from Thaksin supporters at the airport.

Kawinnate Konklong’s Unfortunately (แค่วันที่โชคร้าย) dramatises the ideological gap between generations, as a royalist father files a lèse-majesté charge against his daughter’s girlfriend, Bam, after she attends a protest calling for reform of the monarchy. The man tells his daughter: “I used the law to protect the King from defamation. Unfortunately, the person was Bam.” His dialogue evokes a comment from former prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, who dismissed dozens of civilian casualties: “unfortunately, some people died”. The film will be shown on 23rd November, and although its plot is fictional, it echoes journalist Michael Peel’s book The Fabulists. Peel interviewed a man who filed lèse-majesté charges against young activists, and consequently “had fallen out with his son over his alleged disrespect for the monarchy.”

The Right to Rule: Thirteen Years, Five Prime Ministers and the Implosion of the Tories

The Right to Rule: Thirteen Years, Five Prime Ministers and the Implosion of the Tories, by Ben Riley-Smith, sets out to explain how the Conservatives have held on to power in the UK since 2010. One reason is simply that the party has an inbuilt sense of entitlement: “The story that emerges is one of a party built to rule. Time and again, the same message was echoed by interviewees: what must be understood is that the Conservatives are not an ‘ideological party’ but a ‘power party’.”

A complete political history of the past thirteen years would be impossible to cover in a single volume, so the book instead focuses on “ten critical moments or parts of the story, the pivotal points that explain the wider whole.” These include David Cameron’s decision to hold the Brexit referendum, Theresa May’s ill-fated 2017 election, Boris Johnson’s resignation (Riley-Smith subscribes to the ‘three Ps’ theory cited in The Fall of Boris Johnson), and the brief Liz Truss premiership.

Riley-Smith interviewed more than 100 sources for the book, including three of the last five prime ministers (Cameron, Johnson, and Truss). He spoke to twenty of Johnson’s cabinet ministers, and obtained the first drafts of Johnson’s resignation speech and Truss’s party conference speech. He also quotes previously unpublished material from his Daily Telegraph interview with Sunak — “people are fed up with politicians talking about things and not actually doing them” — and extracts from a tranche of internal party memos from the 2017 election campaign.

Surprisingly, The Right to Rule has not been widely reviewed, except by the Telegraph, of which Riley-Smith is the political editor. But it deserves wider coverage, particularly for its revealing insights into Conservative party procedures: it explains the process by which letters of no confidence are submitted to the chairman of the 1922 Committee, and it includes the first published photograph of a cabinet reshuffle whiteboard.

รำลึก 19 ปี ตากใบ(‘remembering 19 years of Tak Bai’)

Today marks the nineteenth anniversary of the tragedy that took place at Tak Bai on 25th October 2004. More than 1,000 people protested outside Tak Bai’s Provincial Police Station, and police responded with water cannon, tear gas, and live ammunition, killing seven people. The surviving demonstrators were crammed into trucks and taken to Ingkhayuttha Borihan Fort military camp, though seventy-eight people died of suffocation during the five-hour journey.

The security forces have never been held accountable for the deaths, and the government prohibited the broadcasting of video footage of the incident. In defiance of the ban, Same Sky (ฟ้าเดียวกัน) magazine distributed a Tak Bai VCD — ความจริงที่ตากใบ (‘the truth at Tak Bai’) — with its October–December 2004 issue (vol. 2, no. 4). The footage is also included in Teerawat Rujenatham’s short film Tak Bai, and in two documentaries: Thunska Pansittivorakul’s This Area Is Under Quarantine (บริเวณนี้อยู่ภายใต้การกักกัน) and Prempapat Plittapolkranpim’s 18 Years. (Thai Cinema Uncensored discusses the representation of Tak Bai by Thai filmmakers.)

รำลึก 19 ปี ตากใบ (‘remembering 19 years of Tak Bai’), an exhibition at Patani Artspace, opens today to commemorate the anniversary, and closes on 16th December. The Heard the Unheard (สดับเสียงเงียบ) exhibition at Silpakorn and Thammasat universities earlier this year also commemorated the nineteenth anniversary. Tak Bai photographs were shown at the Deep South (ลึกลงไป ใต้ชายแดน) exhibition last year in Bangkok. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Photophobia series incorporates press photographs of the incident, as does the interactive installation Black Air by Pimpaka Towira, Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, Koichi Shimizu, and Jakrawal Nilthamrong.

Jehabdulloh Jehsorhoh’s Violence in Tak Bai (ความรุนแรงที่ตากใบ) features white tombstones marking the graves of each victim, and his book The Patani Art of Struggle (سني ڤتاني چاراو او سها) shows three versions of the installation in situ. It was first installed, just a few days after the massacre, at Prince of Songkla University in Pattani, and the grave markers were accompanied by rifles wrapped in white cloth. In 2017, it was recreated at Patani Artspace and then mounted on a plinth containing Pattani soil at the Patani Semasa (ปาตานี ร่วมสมัย) exhibition.

Two other installations — Jakkhai Siributr’s 78 and Zakariya Amataya’s Report from a Partitioned Village (รายงานจากหมู่บ้านที่ถูกปิดล้อม) — both include lists of the Tak Bai victims’ names. Photophobia, 78, and Violence in Tak Bai were all included in the Patani Semasa exhibition in Chiang Mai. (The exhibition catalogue gives Violence in Tak Bai a milder alternative title, Remember at Tak Bai.)

The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021

The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021, published last year, is the only book to cover the entirety of Donald Trump’s presidency in a single volume. Every day of his four-year term brought another I-can’t-believe-he-did-that moment, so it’s not surprising that The Divider is over 700 pages long.

The Divider — written by Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; and Susan Glasser of The New Yorker — argues that Trump succeeded by stoking the embers of preexisting social polarisation: “He exploited the fissures in American society to gain, wield, and hold on to power.” This divide-and-conquer strategy, which gives the book its title, culminated in the insurrection at the Capitol in 2021.

Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker began their book on Trump’s final year in office by listing a dozen of his personal failings. The Divider, on the other hand, opens by identifying arguably the most pernicious aspect of his presidency — not included in Leonnig and Rucker’s litany — namely his “sustained four-year war on the institutions and traditions of American democracy.”

Most of the major Trump books — by Leonnig, Rucker, Maggie Haberman, Bob Woodward, and Robert Costa — are structured scene-by-scene, with atmospheric accounts of selected meetings recounted by the participants. The Divider is just as well-sourced — Baker and Glasser interviewed more than 300 people, including Trump — but it focuses instead on the bigger picture, giving a uniquely comprehensive overview of Trump’s presidency.

This is the twentieth, and surely the last, Trump book reviewed on Dateline Bangkok (at least until his inevitable ghostwritten memoir is published). The others are: Betrayal, Confidence Man, Fire and Fury, Too Much and Never Enough, Fear, Rage, Peril, I Alone Can Fix It, A Very Stable Genius, Inside Trump’s White House, The United States of Trump, Trump’s Enemies, The Trump White House, The Room Where It Happened, Team of Five, American Carnage, TrumpNation, The Cost, and the audiobook The Trump Tapes.

Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones

Madonna released her dance remix album Finally Enough Love last year. An expanded version, Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones, was released a few months later as a CD triple album and a six-disc vinyl box set. The album features fifty tracks, including forty-nine of the fifty number ones Madonna has achieved on Billboard’s dance club songs chart. The title is a line from the lyrics to I Don’t Search I Find, from the Madame X album, and the text on the cover has been cut-and-pasted from Billboard’s website. Unfortunately, most of the tracks are edited versions, so this isn’t a definitive collection of Madonna remixes. (The full-length remixes are available on her back catalogue of 12" singles and maxi CDs, Justify My Love being a personal favourite.)

Of the fifty chart toppers, forty-nine were singles, the one exception being Madonna’s previous dance remix album, You Can Dance, as the entire album was counted as one entry on the dance club songs chart. 50 Number Ones features two tracks from You Can Dance — Everybody and Physical Attraction — but one of the forty-nine singles, Causing a Commotion, is missing. This is odd, because it did reach number one on the dance club songs chart, and it’s clearly a song that Madonna still likes, as she sang it a cappella during yesterday’s performance of The Celebration Tour.

The 50 Number Ones track list is: Holiday, Like a Virgin, Material Girl, Into the Groove, Open Your Heart, Everybody, Physical Attraction, Like a Prayer, Express Yourself, Keep It Together, Vogue, Justify My Love, Erotica, Deeper and Deeper, Fever, Secret, Bedtime Story, Don’t Cry for Me Argentina, Frozen, Ray of Light, Nothing Really Matters, Beautiful Stranger, American Pie, Music, Don’t Tell Me, What It Feels Like for a Girl, Impressive Instant, Die Another Day, American Life, Hollywood, Me Against the Music, Nothing Fails, Love Profusion, Hung Up, Sorry, Get Together, Jump, 4 Minutes, Give It 2 Me, Celebration, Give Me All Your Lovin’, Girl Gone Wild, Turn Up the Radio, Living for Love, Ghosttown, Bitch I’m Madonna, Medellín, I Rise, Crave, and I Don’t Search I Find.

Cunt

Feminist artist Janice Turner has published two books of her ‘cunt’ paintings: The Cunt Book in 2019, and the significantly expanded The Essential Cunt last year (which also includes an interview with the author). Turner cites Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues as the original inspiration for her quest to reclaim the c-word, and in The Essential Cunt she repeats the word in the same way that Ensler does: “Cunt, practice it cunt cunt cunt cunt love the word and love your CUNT”.

There are also other possible influences. Turner’s phrase “love your CUNT” evokes Germaine Greer’s pioneering essay Lady Love Your Cunt, and The Essential Cunt seems to paraphrase a monologue about the f-word from Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour. Madonna told her audience: “‘Fuck’ is not a bad word... If your mom and dad did not fuck, you would not be here”; Turner writes: “CUNT is not a dirty word!... If not for a CUNT, you would not be here!” Other artists who have painted the c-word include Marlene McCarty, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Alison Carmichael.