New Thai Cinema and the Poetics of Resistance

Abstract

Throughout its history, Thai cinema has been entangled with institutions of state power. Through invasive systems of censorship and discursive regulation, the state not only regulates public expressions but also sculpts particular forms of national identity, silencing other forms of remembrance and identification. Against these pressures, independent filmmakers in Thailand creatively negotiate the boundaries of state censorship through silences, narrative discontinuities and elliptical plot structures to simultaneously evade state censorship and renegotiate national systems of memorialisation under military rule. This paper investigates how the Thammasat University Massacre is remediated through Anocha Suwichakornpong’s 2016 film Dao khanong (By the Time It Gets Dark), and finds that the film intentionally evades direct representation of the massacre to instead disarticulate national memory cultures and reimagine unconsolidated futures disentangled from institutions of authoritarian power.

Keywords:

• Duncan Caillard, Suwichakornpong, Anocha, By The Time It Gets Dark (film), Thailand, Thammasat University Massacre, censorship, resistance, experimental filmmaking, lese-majeste, Thai cinema

Notes

1 Thongchai Winichakul, Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976, Massacre in Bangkok, Hawaii University Press, Honolulu, 2020, p 18 (added emphasis)

2 Benedict Anderson interprets this distance as an allegory for the decline of the Thai monarchy, drawing a visual connection between actor Paramej Noiam and the late Thai King. See Benedict Anderson, Exploration and Irony in Studies of Siam Over Forty Years, Cornell University Press, New York, 2014, p 162.

3 Sudarat Musikawong, ‘Working Practices in Thai Independent Film Production and Distribution’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol 8, no 2, 2007, pp 248–261

4 Benedict Anderson, ‘The Strange Story of a Strange Beast: Receptions in Thailand of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Sat pralaat’, in Adadol Ingawanij and Benjamin McKay, eds, Glimpses of Freedom: Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia, Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, Ithaca, New York, 2012, p 159

5 Thak Chaloemtiarana, Thailand: The Politics of Despotic Paternalism, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 2007, p 94, cited in Noah Keone Viernes, ‘Restricted Vision: Censorship and Cinematic Resistance in Thailand’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol 52, no 4, 2022, pp 634–657

6 Viernes, ‘Restricted Vision’, op cit, p 637

7 Ibid, p 635

8 In this case, ‘poetics’ refers to the process of understanding finished works of work through the process of their construction, analysing the creative principles upon which creative decisions were made and how these principles produce particular forms and effects. As a method of textual analysis, historical poetics centralises acts of creative agency situated within specific empirical social, cultural and institutional contexts, and investigates how creative actors negotiate these competing tensions to produce particular (experiential or political) effects. See David Bordwell, ‘Historical Poetics of Cinema’, in R Barton Palmer, ed, The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches, AMS Press, New York, 1989, pp 369–398.

9 The #MilkTeaAlliance is a transnational antiauthoritarian protest movement connecting users from Thailand, Taiwan and Hong Kong. For further discussion of the Milk Tea Alliance, see Adam K Dedman and Autumn Lai, ‘Digitally Dismantling Asian Authoritarianism: Activist Reflections from the #MilkTeaAlliance’, Contention, vol 9, no 1, 2021, 445–466.

10 Brent L Pickett, ‘Foucault and the Politics of Resistance’, Polity, vol 28, no 4, 1996, pp 445–466; Viernes, ‘Restricted Vision’, op cit, p 635

11 See May Adadol Ingawanij, ‘Hyperbolic Heritage: Bourgeois Spectatorship and Contemporary Thai Cinema’, dissertation, Insititute of Contemporary Arts, University of London, London, 2006; May Adadol Ingawanij, ‘Nang Nak: Thai Bourgeois Heritage Cinema’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol 8, no 2, 2007, pp 180–193. For discussion of the reception of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films among Thai bourgeois audiences, see Anderson, ‘The Strange Story of a Strange Beast’, in Ingawanij and McKay, eds, Glimpses of Freedom, op cit, pp 149–163.

12 Peter A Jackson, ‘Autonomy and Subordination in Thai History: The Case for Semicolonial Analysis’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol 8, no 3, 2007, pp 329–348

13 Scot Barmé, ‘Early Thai Cinema and Filmmaking: 1897–1922’, Film History, vol 11, no 3, 1999, pp 311–312

14 Ibid, p 313

15 Viernes, ‘Restricted Vision’, op cit, p 638

16 Peter A Jackson, ‘The Thai Regime of Images’, Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, vol 19, no 2, 2004, p 181

17 David Streckfuss, ‘Freedom and Silencing Under the Neo-absolutist Monarchy Regime in Thailand, 2006–2011’, in Pavin Chachavalpongpun, ed, ‘Good Coup’ Gone Bad: Thailand’s Political Developments since Thaksin’s Downfall, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 2014, p 113

18 Surapone Virulrak, ‘Media Laws and Regulations in Thailand’, conference paper, Asian Mass Communication Research and Information Centre, Singapore, 7–8 January, 1986

19 Film and Video Act B.E. 2551 (2008), Section 23, Vipatboon Klaosoontorn, trans, Office of the Council of State of Thailand's Law for ASEAN project, Thailand, 2008

20 Lawrence Barker, ‘Past Refractions: Anocha Suwichakornpong’s By the Time It Gets Dark’, Metro 194, 2017, p 390

21 Tyrell Haberkorn, Tyrell, ‘Dictatorship as Occupation in Thailand’, Journal of Legal Pluralism & Unofficial Law, vol 49, no 3, 2017, p 339

22 Philippa Lovatt, ‘Independent Cinema’, in Mary Ainslie and Katarzyna Ancuta, eds, Thai Cinema: The Complete Guide, I B Tauris, London and New York, 2018, p 216

23 Thongchai Winichakul, ‘Remembering/Silencing the Traumatic Past’, in Charles F Keyes and Shigeharu Tanabe, eds, Cultural Crisis and Social Memory: Modernity and Identity in Thailand and Laos, Routledge, London and New York, 2002, pp 242–253

24 Ibid, p 236

25 Ibid, p 265 (emphasis added)

26 Kennan Ferguson, ‘Silence: A Politics’, Contemporary Political Theory, vol 2, 2003, p 62

27 John Cage, ‘The Future of Music: Credo’, in Richard Kostelanetz, ed, John Cage, Praeger Publishers, New York, 1958, p 54

28 John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Connecticut, 1973, p 8

29 Ferguson, ‘Silence: A Politics’, op cit, p 52

30 Ibid, p 54

31 Winichakul, Moments of Silence, op cit, p 9

32 Ibid, p 243

33 Ibid

34 Ibid, p 243

35 Ibid, p 30

36 Ibid, p 16

37 Jason Guerrasio, ‘Anocha Suwichakornpong, Graceland’, Filmmaker Magazine, nd, 2007

38 For further discussion of the Structuralist film movement, see David Company, Photography and Cinema, Reaktion, London, 2008, p 37; A L Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video: From the Canonical Avant-Garde to Contemporary British Practice, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, United Kingdom, 2011, pp 79–81.

39 Winichakul, Moments of Silence, op cit, p 30

40 For further discussion of magic realism in By the Time It Gets Dark, see Felicity Gee, Magic Realism, World Cinema and the Avant-Garde, Routledge, New York, 2021, pp 187–192.

41 Cited in Łukasz Mańkows, ‘Interview: Anocha Suwichakornpong’, Alt/Kino, https://www.altkino.com/writing/interview-anocha-suwichakornpong, accessed 14 October 2022

42 Sean Cubitt, ‘Temporalities of the Glitch: Déja Vu’, in Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron and Arild Fetveit, eds, Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2017, p 299

43 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002, pp 10–11

44 For further discussion of the intersection of patriarchy and neo-absolutism in Thailand, see Streckfuss, ‘Freedom and Silencing Under the Neo-absolutist Monarchy Regime in Thailand’, op cit.

45 Viernes, ‘Restricted Vision’, op cit, p 642