Cinema is an animistic apparatus, to borrow May Adadol Ingawanij’s formulation,1and animism hinges around acts of place-making. In the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, memory returns as a place to which one is constantly attempting to recover relation. This recovery, however, is not an act of reproduction but rather becomes a space for negotiation and invention. Cinema becomes the place where our relationship to multiple worlds becomes palpable, in all their friction and violence, and sound can be heard across worlds. 

The last time we saw each other, at least in person, Apichatpong (P’Joei) had just opened the first half of two-chapter exhibition entitled A Minor History in Bangkok. The Scala Cinema had already been torn down when we spoke. The last standing single screen cinema in the city, which for about half a century occupied prime real estate in the Siam area of the Pathumwan district, was to be replaced by a building that the architect had candidly admitted was planned for obsolescence. Built at the height of the American presence, during the 

American War in Vietnam, the Scala Cinema with its thousand-seater single-screen hall was a significant soci space in the history of cinema in Thailand. When we heard, a few years ago, that the cinema had been slated for demolition, the news galvanised support from cultural and political communities in the city. We had initially thought that perhaps some small victory had been won when it was temporarily preserved. I remembered that moment during the premiere of the anthology film Ten Years Thailand (2018), when, to an audience packed with artists, journalists, opposition members of parliament, and the old guard of the so-called Red Shirt political faction, the curator Gridthiya Gaweewong quipped, “If they bomb [the] Scala tonight, the resistance movement in Thailand would be set back decades.” It was in front of the Scala that some of the biggest pro-democracy protests of the last few years took place, where hundreds of thousands of people braved police violence for months. They were calling for the resignation of the military government that had taken over the country in a coup in 2014, and for a reformation of the institution of the monarchy, which rules the country and wields some of the strongest lèse-majesté laws anywhere in the world. But more fundamentally, at stake was a contestation of memory: one that had for generations been framed and built to justify the continued rule of the elites of the country. 

It’s hard to say that any one event triggered the protests, but the disappearance of the dissident activist-in-exile Wanchalerm Satsakit brought simmering tensions to a head. Charged with lèse-majesté, Satsakit had fled firs Laos and then to Cambodia, where he was kidnapped and presumably murdered, though his body was never recovered. His girlfriend recalled the sound of his final words, spoken to her, as he was being taken: I can breathe. Around the same time, the bodies of other activists-in-exile were found along the banks of the Mekong River, their bellies filled with cement. There was an urgency, then, to rebel against the infrastructures of forc forgetting2that had tightened their grip on the production of history, dictating who was allowed to remember what, and what could remain to be remembered. 

A Minor History revolved around footage from another abandoned cinema theatre, this one in Isaan, the northeast region of Thailand. In many ways, the show was about cinema, architecture, and memory: you enter a dark room where three screens float around you—a long vertical one, and two which form a diptych, sometim mirroring each other. The tall vertical screen behind you scrolls through videos of a figure in shadow, moonlig hitting a river and a rotating sculpture of a bird made of fluorescent lights from a mola3festival. Behind the screens is a large painted cloth also used in molaam performances depicting an empty throne room. As your eyes adjust as they do in a cinema theatre, you’re immediately jarred by a loud unexpected sound—somewhere between a bang and a thud—a rifle firing, or a body hitting the floor? We see the inside of the ruins of a  in Khon Kaen, populated only by pigeons, who cake the walls in guano and scatter after each loud sound. You hear the sound of a conversation—a date—Mr. Somchai has taken Ms. Ratri for a walk along the river, and she made sandwiches. He tells her that at the bend in the river is where they found a dying Naga—its stomach fill with human remains. It was poisoned by eating bodies stuffed with concrete and thrown into the Mekon staring at the sky and thrashing as it died. I asked P’Joei if he had read the work of the anthropologist Jakkrit Sangkhamanee, who contends that the Nagas represented the monarchy’s triumph in controlling water and irrigation—a sign of its cosmological supremacy. Sanghkhamnee references hydraulic engineering textbooks from early modern Thailand where they teach you how to deal with Nagas when building dams.4 P’Joei and I talked about the river, and how it had changed, how the dams built by the Chinese state upriver choked its waves almost to a standstill. The screen turns black, with text scrolling by. Someone is relating a dream on a hot summer night where she watches her lover get repeatedly hit over the head with a rock, each blow robbing him of more and more of his memory. Each blow is punctuated by the otherwordly bang. The words stream past, almost screaming, silently and urgently. The dreamer wakes up wanting to kill her father who sleeps next to her. The use of disembodied voices, never given corporeal form, makes us feel as if we are listening to a radio play from a different dimension on a melancholic sultry afternoo 

This project is a continuation of P’Joei’s interest in popular forms of culture and fiction and their deploymen as well as their place in Thai society towards the manufacturing of a strained normality. Often twisting and playing with this mode, he produces jarring juxtapositions that open us up to a layered feeling of unreality that is actually more cosmologically true. Take the diptych structure of Tropical Malady (2004), for instance: the fir part of the film seems to be a banal, if sweet, love story between two men: a soldier and a worker in an ice facto in Isaan. Both within its use of the teledrama-esque storytelling, of shy furtive glances, romantic motorbike rides, first dates, and its punctuation by love songs on the radio, beaming in from a source everywhere and nowhere  once, P’Joei twists together many scales of experiences, while making us keenly aware of the frictions between them. The radio becomes a key character in the second half of the film—we never know if it’s the same story to again, but from a different perspective, a continuation, or if we’ve indeed fallen between worlds. Now the soldi is sent into the forest, gun and radio in hand, to stalk and kill the beast that’s been terrorizing the surrounding villages. The beast—a weretiger, whose human form is of the soldier’s lover—in turn stalks the soldier, fascinated by the strange sound-receiving and -emitting object on his shoulder. As the hunt continues, a monkey-ghost warns the soldier that he is in fact the one being hunted—but it's already too late. 

In the first encounter between the soldier and the weretiger, the soldier loses his radio—which becom consumed by the forest. The forest absorbs the machine, which then becomes a swarm of fireflies, receiving transmitting a million different sounds—both from the radio waves, but also from the forest itself. The fir gather together, and alight on a tree, becoming a pulsating blaze of sound and light, and then finally scatter in million different directions. Freed, or bereft, of his access to the disembodied sound of civilization, the soldi pads through the forest, attempting to continue his hunt. Covered in mud and leaves, he too, becomes slowly further consumed by the forest. As he lays in wait for the final encounter, he hears the bell of t shaman-weretiger. However, it is not only he who hears it, but also the past, present, other-present, other-past, the soldier-that-hunts, the soldier-that-is-hunted, and it is in the hearing of this sound that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere that all the worlds collapse together, and he has a final, fateful encounter with t weretiger. Sound, then, always seems to travel, and in its vibrations shakes the infrastructures of the imagination that come together to present our world as we perceive it. In this shift of our frame of perception, other realities, and our access to them, become palpable. 

In the middle of the 20thcentury, the practice that Ingawanij terms “itinerant cinema”5 became a key way in which the cinematic image was introduced to the so-called hinterlands of Siam-now-Thailand. Troupes of performers—musicians, impresarios, musicians—carrying 35mm projectors and using makeshift screens would organise open-air, ticketed, presentations of films to rural and indigenous audiences as part of a project conjure through media a spectre of modernism. In staging Memoria (2021) as a cinematic experience that travels from city to city for limited periods of time, P’Joei seems to be doing this in reverse, and perhaps conjuring a spectre of immodernity. Memoria is thus not only a work of cinema, but in fact, a travelling cinematic construction, an apparatus, wherein the relation, and possibility of relation, is staged, both on and off screen.The gesture also serves the purpose of bringing people to the cinema theatre—to inhabit together this dark space—a habit of togetherness, of a sociality of cinema, where you are immersed in sound that surrounds you, washes over you, and enters your body. 

I heard that sound again that I heard in A Minor History, on that sunny afternoon in Bangkok. The BANG filled the darkened hall in Berlin where Alex took me to watch Memoria. It was immediately clear to me that t BANG was not a motif, but rather a sound that had travelled between the two worlds P’Joei had constructed. Each of these worlds was a politically and aesthetically charged portal into our own. In the film, the BA haunts Jessica, a Scottish expatriate in Colombia, who is suddenly awoken by it one night. It is a clear sound that only she can hear—and by entering the space of the cinema together, the audience can too. She begins searching for the source of the sound, attempting to find a diagnosis for what she feels could only be a medical conditio possibly invoked by stress or trauma. She begins to realise that in order to understand the sound, she must hear it outside of her head, and is introduced to a sound engineer who she is told might be the right person to help her. This is how she meets Hernan. Together, they sit together in the recording studio as he attempts to reconstruct the BANG. Drawing on existing samples of recordings that he pitches up, slows down, and modifies, after t failed attempts, Jessica is able to finally hear a sound that approximates the one in her head. In doing so, s seems to do what the fireflies in Tropical Malady do in reverse, converging, gathering—a reconstruction  thing scattered, and heard across worlds. Thus, Jessica’s attempt to recover the sound she hears is not an attempt to recover a private, or personal, memory, nor a move against a physical or psychological malaise or a resolution of trauma. Rather, it is a political gesture—our worlds are uneasily held in place, between experiences of covert and overt violence. As sound moves across worlds, it channels this disquiet, and crashes forward, upsetting fragile relations of control, and makes the many worlds upon which one walks impossible to ignore. At the same time, it does not form words, it does not reach towards form—but rather, it creates a situation of an endless opening-up towards a cosmopolitical imagination still to come.

1May Adadol Ingawanij "Animistic Apparatus," https://mayadadol.info/projects/animistic-apparatus/

2 Between 2018 and 2020, the Thai military government removed monuments commemorating the 1932 Revolution that moved Thailand from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy, often whisking them away in the dead of night. Pravit Rojanaphruk, "Monument Marking Defeat of Royalist Rebels Removed in Dead of Night," Khaosod English, 18 December 2018, 

https://www.khaosodenglish.com/politics/2018/12/28/monument-marking-defeat-of-royalist-rebels-removed-in-dead-of night.

3 Molaam is a popular form of music from the Isaan region that also bears associations with the Red Shirt working class movement in the country. 

4Jakkrit Sangkhamanee, “ชลกร: ประวัตศิาสตร์สงัคมว่าด้วยความรู้และการจัดการน้ำ สมัยใหม่ในประเทศไทย”, วารสารสังคมศาสตร์4 no. 2 (July-December2012): 93-115.

5Ingawanij, May Adadol. "Itinerant Cinematic Practices In and Around Thailand during the ColdWar." Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, vol. 2 no. 2, 2018, p.9-41. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/sen.2018.0001.

This essay is featured in eflux’s You Can’t Trust Music, edited by Xenia Benivolski.