Monday, June 28, 2010

Art Review: Primitive by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Phantoms of Nabua
by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

BFI Southbank until July 3
Chroma Launch event July 2

It’s not every issue of Chroma that has an image by a Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker on the cover. Maybe it’s the Utopia theme, but there is a significant serendipity that brings the magazine together with Apichatpong Weerasethakul (known to his English-speaking friends and fans as Joe) the winner at this year’s Cannes Festival for his film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which has as multiple an origin as any queer utopia could wish. Chroma launches at the BFI on Friday 2nd July, the penultimate day to see Apichatpong’s Phantoms of Nabua in the Gallery (free entry). Part of a project that included a spaceship, a Monkey Ghost, reincarnation and adolescent sexuality and, as political protest, Phantoms of Nabua echoes many of the themes found in our Utopia issue.

During an on-stage conversation at the BFI (which he nearly couldn’t attend due to the closure of the British Embassy in Thailand during the red-shirt protests, and due to the Home Office’s highly restrictive artist visa rules – reminders that we live far short of utopia) shortly after his win at Cannes, Apichatpong said that he’d become interested in Boonmee as a teenager, after hearing about him from a priest in Khon Kaen where he grew up. It was when he travelled to the village of Nabua, in the Isan province in the north-east of Thailand, that Apichatpong was reminded of Boonmee, a resident of Isan. His interest in Boonmee was, literally, reincarnated through his work with the young men of Nabua, a generation raised fatherless after an infamous conflict. As Apichatpong notes, “This small village was one of the places the Thai army occupied from the 60s to the early 80s to curb the communist insurgents. The soldiers erected a base to administer the villagers' daily activities. The locals were psychologically and physically abused on the grounds of withholding information. Women were raped. Some were murdered in their homes. Consequently, the villagers, mostly farmers, fled into the jungle. Most of them didn't understand the word Communism though they were accused of being communists,” leading to the gun battle that sparked a long-running conflict. Working over several months with the young men, Apichatpong created PRIMITIVE, a video installation that fuses their relationship with their absent fathers (and with the current Thai government) with the story of Boonmee’s reincarnations.
PRIMITIVE itself has been incarnated in multiple forms: as a multi-film installation, as an online installation at Animate Projects, one of the co-producers, and as a limited-edition artist’s book created by CUJO, an artist’s book magazine series that’s part of Edizioni Zero, Milan. CUJO kindly gave Chroma permission to reproduce two images and two short texts from this black-and-red book that combines fragmentary diary entries, film scripts, excerpts from the Boonmee book and sketches of the Monkey Ghost to accompany the black-and-white (and red-and-black) photographs taken during the making of the short films in Nabua. While Apichatpong’s work has a deserved reputation for a whimsical, dreamy, often erotic, gentleness, here the political subtext of his work – or rather, the way that his political intelligence is compatible, and entwined with, his lyrical sensibility – becomes visible. Opposite a brush-and-ink drawing of what might be a volcano stands the text: “They then became victims of Field Marshal Sarit Dhanarajata’s Article 17.” Flares shoot up brilliantly white into huge night skies in some photographs. Young men in military uniform mug for the camera – are they performers, or soldiers? Isan is a poor province, and many of the young men have joined the army that fired on their fathers. According to Apichatpong, some of the young men he worked with were stationed in Bangkok during the recent protests, and faced the possibility of being ordered to shoot protestors, history repeating itself as if the hauntings that Apichatpong had staged in Nabua for PRIMITIVE were coming, perversely, to life.
Premiered at the Haus der Kunst in Munich at the end of the Berlin Film Festival last year, PRIMITIVE travelled to FACT in Liverpool, and one film – Phantoms of Nabua, a haunting late-night jungle excursion marked by flares and a fireball, a film at once teenage kicks and traumatic echo – is currently screening in the Gallery at the BFI. The young soldier-actors appear again here to viewers lounging on the floor in the dark, an unusual position for public film viewing in the Western world. There are boys kicking a fire-ball, watching a giant screen, playing a war/game under a blinding sodium light. The lines between sport and battle, between making a movie and re-opening a conflict, are deliberately blurred as the film interrogates the conventions of the Hollywood war movie (including some explosive special effects), and particularly the jungle-set Vietnam movie, to produce a very different portrait of the male psyche.
It’s impossible not to see, in the films of boys running joyfully/angrily through the streets, or playing sweetly/bored-to-aggression by the river, a queer sensibility – nowhere more than in the burning red night-vision light of desire that illuminates and shadows the young men sleeping in the balsa-wood spaceship that they built in a field as part of the project. These saturated images, reproduced stunningly in the CUJO book, glow with a particular intensity that shows an utterly original artist fusing a new kind of queer cinema: one in which the politics of desire and the desires of politics are utterly entwined. Utopias don’t come easily: like the spaceship, which never takes off but instead becomes an unofficial youth hang-out and sleepover, they have to be fashioned and they never quite function as they’re supposed to. In Apichatpong’s vision, utopia is not created through the drive towards a better future, but by return, reincarnation, reproduction. It’s hard not to be haunted by these irresistible ghosts – and, of course, by the fact that Uncle Boonmee is the only Palme d’Or-winning film ever to feature a princess having sex with a talking catfish.


Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

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Saturday, June 19, 2010

Review: Love Speaks Its Name

Love Speaks Its Name
Gay and Lesbian Love Poems
Edited by J. D. McClatchy

Published by Everyman’s Library

Reviewed by Paul Kane


Just under 150 poems are contained in this compact volume, arranged in various sections which follow the process of falling in and out of love: Longing, Looking, Loving, Ecstasy, Anxiety and Aftermath. In life, the last two are optional and not really to be recommended, but if everyone and in particular poets skipped them, our literature would be much the poorer. 'Domestic as a plate' (a simile taken from Millay's poem ‘Grown-up’) does not really cut it.

Among the poets represented here are the famous and the indisputably great - Sappho, Shakespeare, Whitman, Lorca, Auden, Elisabeth Bishop - yet there are poets to be discovered in these pages too. One such is Naomi Replansky, whose poem 'The Oasis' traces a renewal or a reawakening of love. Here's the last verse:

I thought the desert ended, and I felt
The fountains leap.
Then gratitude could answer gratitude
Till sleep entwined with sleep.
Despair once cried: No passion’s left inside!
It lied. It lied.

There are a number of Cavafy's sensual and elegiac poems: all about beautiful sexy young men who will yet grow old and die. A single theme, virtually, but he riffs on it superbly. ‘The Badgaged Shoulder' is an astounding poem, especially when read in the light of the tragedies wrought by AIDS. That last line – ‘the blood of love against my lips’ - induces a very definite frisson.

It was a welcome experience to encounter Housman's verse once more. On one level he is an unpretentious and uncomplicated poet and there is nothing fancy about his verse forms at all. But the direct way in which he communicates emotion is extraordinary: heart to heart. Every poem of Frank O’Hara’s is wonderful and there are four here. Once heard, his voice is irresistible Finally, the editor has made the commendable decision to include a quartet of song lyrics - such as Noel Coward’s ‘Mad About the Boy’ - along with the regular poems.

This is a fine anthology, although there are some notable absentees: John Ashbery, Genet and Jeremy Reed, the translator of Genet's poems, being three.


Paul Kane lives and works in Manchester, England. He welcomes responses to his reviews and you can reach him at ludic@europe.com.

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Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Theatre Review: The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest
By Oscar Wilde
Directed by Chris Honer

Library Theatre, Manchester: Saturday 5 June - Saturday 3 July 2010

Review by Paul Kane

Russell Dixon (Lady Bracknell), Photo by Gerry Murray


With this strangely delightful production the Library Theatre, for the moment at any rate, loses its home. It will leave the current venue, where it has been performing plays for over half a century, once the current run of The Importance of Being Earnest comes to an end.

Little, precious little, is taken seriously in Wilde’s great play; it can hardly keep a straight, or indeed an earnest face. Despite this jollity – and it almost goes without saying that it is a supremely entertaining play – there is an unflinchingly subversive reach on show here. Everything is mocked, all is fair game: Wilde’s wit shoots down all the conventions and core values of his age. And in doing so he makes us smile.

The masterstroke of this production is to cast Russell Dixon as Lady Bracknell: he is superb, a queerly arch gatekeeper. To have a man in the role of this senior, authoritative ma’am – and for it be unremarked upon by Algernon and the rest - casts a most peculiar light on proceedings

You knew where you were with Lady Bracknell, or at least you thought you did. She was the most strait-laced of Wilde’s creations. She was the one who pulled all the other characters into line, and into happy marriages. Now that we discover that she is a genderqueer matron, her moral compass seems decidedly dodgy. Or off kilter somewhat. Something is happening, but you don’t quite know what it is.

It is fun, though.

The doors have not closed quite yet, but it is clear that the Library Theatre has saved the best till last.

The Importance of Being Earnest is showing at the Library Theatre until 3 July. Don’t miss it.

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