A Film Canon

A beautiful, haunting tribute to his parents, Apichatpong's Syndromes And A Century is divided into two episodes, each devoted to the operations of a hospital, some forty years apart - one rural, couched in green, one urban, couched in white. For a film set exclusively in hospitals, however, there's very little interest in narrativising the relationships between doctors and patients, let alone in the spectacle of illness or death. Most encounters are wonderfully elliptical, and simply form part of a wider interest in the texture of the two spaces, which Apichatpong elaborates with an almost unbearably exquisite, crystalline sensitivity, culminating with the powderisation of a room, the texturisation of atmosphere. In any case, the pathos of illness and death seems slightly redundant in the face of Apichatpong's abiding interest in reincarnation - which here, as in Tropical Malady, is less a religious than a cinematic category, less preoccupied with abiding religious memory than with abiding cinematic memory. However, whereas Tropical Malady explored that connection through an analogy between cinematic and animal memory, Syndromes is more preoccupied with the way in which medicine draws out a kind of reflexive, unconscious memory - particularly clear in the interview which opens each episode, in which a new doctor's recall is put to the test with a series of increasingly irrelevant questions, culminating with his reflexive exposition of an acronym. As the episodes gradually diverge, Apichatpong suggests something that the eye can remember independently of the brain, or the body can remember outside conscious thought, just as the doctors, for all their conscious, 'modern' focus on the individual patient, are still driven by a subliminal memory of every previous patient, colleague and body, and a tactile calibration of those memories against something like the film's own aesthetic, or its surrogate, the hospital architecture. It's as if Apichatpong finally wants to remember his parents by way of a space that remembers and disperses them - a fusion of cinematic and hospital infrastructure, film and healing, into a celluloid monastery. Despite the censorship of key moments by the Thai government, it's a wonderful instance of how to remember without remembering in a censorious mileu - the most dreamy, ambient segment juxtaposes a statue of the Buddha with Rama IX - as well as an astonishing surrogate for the chakra that one of the more unconventional doctors performs, a reincarnation in which we're invited to walk through a forest, dip our hands in a waterfall, soak the stream up into our head, and then allow it to crystallise, vaporising and removing those 'inconsequential thoughts' that occlude memory.