In the Distant Hills
man and beast gather
to celebrate their ancient desires
embedded in the roots of every tree
man and beast gather
to celebrate their ancient desires
embedded in the roots of every tree
Dedicated to "Memories of the Jungle", Weerasethakul's 2005 short was released as something of a companion piece to Syndromes and a Century , his feature film of the same year.
What happens in the film, as it stands, is fairly easy to describe. A film crew works in the jungle to shoot a film that may be called "Bloody Red Night" (this is mentioned in the credits, never onscreen) by Pimpaka Towira, an interesting filmmaker in her own right. This film, so far as we can see, involves a couple stumbling through the jungle, looking for a legendary tree that attracts lovers, and may grow above a buried treasure. At night, the same film crew works on what looks to be a music video, where a woman in a white dress dances (poorly) and sings a pop song about meeting a special person, just like her mother and her father.
The scenes of the film crew pass by at a remove; like any film set, there mostly seems to be a lot of waiting around. What we see of "Bloody Red Night" suggests that it's a melodrama, perhaps not a particularly great one. The scenes of dancing in the night time are shot at an even further remove, usually in one or two distant masters, lit only by ambient light and the giant lights of the film crew, usually clearly visible as framed. By the end of the film we realize we have started to see through the lens of the digital camera, as the crew films secondary landscape shots, talking amiably off screen about Brad Pitt being single, and whether "Keanu" looks Chinese.
The narrative of this film, while being very clear -- even Weerasethakul's most oblique film, Mysterious Object at Noon uses a simple folk tale as the basis for its increasingly strange variations -- is so flat, so seemingly removed of conflict, any reading of the film based on the narrative alone is going to regard the work as more or less inscrutable, as the film maker's work often is. We would argue that this is not the case at all.
It would seem very simple, in fact, to use the central juxtapositions -- between the film crew laboring in the daylight, the couple acting out melodrama in front of the camera, and the acting as the embodiment of the sentiments expressed in the pop song we hear several times on the soundtrack -- as the basis for the discussion. One could also argue that these juxtapositions are rendered further into the distance by the visual style of the film, which consistently positions the human figures as small, nearly insignificant objects in the frame, and a structure which places a long series of landscape shots at the very end of the picture.
Within the basic structure of the film, we could also point to several moments to which our attention is directed very specifically by editing choices. The moment, for example, where we see, through the live camera feed (almost black and white, with poorer reproductive quality than the rest of the film, and a box showing aspect ratio clearly visible within the frame), that the main couple of "Bloody Red Night" are initiating sex, the camera slowly panning away from the act, settling on the plants of the jungle beside them, just before cutting to several landscape shots, devoid of human figures. Or the only time that the pop song from the night time dance scenes plays over daylight footage, where a truck drives across a road, blowing great clouds of smoke behind it, which drifts across the jungle and the empty film sets, until we settle on a man in a green hoodie dancing alone on an otherwise deserted roadway. Both of these sequences set up a dialogue that can be easily attributed as the main "argument" of the entire film -- the first, for example, could suggest that any shot of nature is a cut away for some other base form of desire, a re-contextualization that could easily spread to every other shot in the film, including the landscapes with which it ends; the latter could suggest a melancholy impermanence of all things, the smoke that drifts through the frame and the landscape roughly equivalent to the human figures who are gone just as soon.
Either of these "readings" sampled above are valid, in their way, but they also have the effect of reducing a film to a convenient description, while the actual effect of watching the film seems almost irreducible.
Rather, we would suggest a different form of critical analysis for this project.
Who ever wishes to critically discuss this film themselves ought to take a trip to the jungles of Thailand, recruit Pimpaka Towira (or a surrogate, preferably chosen by Towira herself) to shoot a narrative about two lovers searching for a legendary tree, record a music video at night for the same pop song, and use this footage to edit together a forty minute short film -- allowing that all editing choices and variations on the basic form will be at the discretion of the critic/director. Projected side by side, these films will, through similarity and difference, constitute something of a dialectical argument, not altogether unlike those already at work in "Worldly Desires" itself.
If any patrons of the arts wish to take part in this project, we would be honored to accept, could set to work immediately.
What happens in the film, as it stands, is fairly easy to describe. A film crew works in the jungle to shoot a film that may be called "Bloody Red Night" (this is mentioned in the credits, never onscreen) by Pimpaka Towira, an interesting filmmaker in her own right. This film, so far as we can see, involves a couple stumbling through the jungle, looking for a legendary tree that attracts lovers, and may grow above a buried treasure. At night, the same film crew works on what looks to be a music video, where a woman in a white dress dances (poorly) and sings a pop song about meeting a special person, just like her mother and her father.
The scenes of the film crew pass by at a remove; like any film set, there mostly seems to be a lot of waiting around. What we see of "Bloody Red Night" suggests that it's a melodrama, perhaps not a particularly great one. The scenes of dancing in the night time are shot at an even further remove, usually in one or two distant masters, lit only by ambient light and the giant lights of the film crew, usually clearly visible as framed. By the end of the film we realize we have started to see through the lens of the digital camera, as the crew films secondary landscape shots, talking amiably off screen about Brad Pitt being single, and whether "Keanu" looks Chinese.
The narrative of this film, while being very clear -- even Weerasethakul's most oblique film, Mysterious Object at Noon uses a simple folk tale as the basis for its increasingly strange variations -- is so flat, so seemingly removed of conflict, any reading of the film based on the narrative alone is going to regard the work as more or less inscrutable, as the film maker's work often is. We would argue that this is not the case at all.
It would seem very simple, in fact, to use the central juxtapositions -- between the film crew laboring in the daylight, the couple acting out melodrama in front of the camera, and the acting as the embodiment of the sentiments expressed in the pop song we hear several times on the soundtrack -- as the basis for the discussion. One could also argue that these juxtapositions are rendered further into the distance by the visual style of the film, which consistently positions the human figures as small, nearly insignificant objects in the frame, and a structure which places a long series of landscape shots at the very end of the picture.
Within the basic structure of the film, we could also point to several moments to which our attention is directed very specifically by editing choices. The moment, for example, where we see, through the live camera feed (almost black and white, with poorer reproductive quality than the rest of the film, and a box showing aspect ratio clearly visible within the frame), that the main couple of "Bloody Red Night" are initiating sex, the camera slowly panning away from the act, settling on the plants of the jungle beside them, just before cutting to several landscape shots, devoid of human figures. Or the only time that the pop song from the night time dance scenes plays over daylight footage, where a truck drives across a road, blowing great clouds of smoke behind it, which drifts across the jungle and the empty film sets, until we settle on a man in a green hoodie dancing alone on an otherwise deserted roadway. Both of these sequences set up a dialogue that can be easily attributed as the main "argument" of the entire film -- the first, for example, could suggest that any shot of nature is a cut away for some other base form of desire, a re-contextualization that could easily spread to every other shot in the film, including the landscapes with which it ends; the latter could suggest a melancholy impermanence of all things, the smoke that drifts through the frame and the landscape roughly equivalent to the human figures who are gone just as soon.
Either of these "readings" sampled above are valid, in their way, but they also have the effect of reducing a film to a convenient description, while the actual effect of watching the film seems almost irreducible.
Rather, we would suggest a different form of critical analysis for this project.
Who ever wishes to critically discuss this film themselves ought to take a trip to the jungles of Thailand, recruit Pimpaka Towira (or a surrogate, preferably chosen by Towira herself) to shoot a narrative about two lovers searching for a legendary tree, record a music video at night for the same pop song, and use this footage to edit together a forty minute short film -- allowing that all editing choices and variations on the basic form will be at the discretion of the critic/director. Projected side by side, these films will, through similarity and difference, constitute something of a dialectical argument, not altogether unlike those already at work in "Worldly Desires" itself.
If any patrons of the arts wish to take part in this project, we would be honored to accept, could set to work immediately.
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