A Film Canon

With Tropical Malady, Achipatpong introduces the peculiar conception of memory that will haunt his subsequent output. At first glance, the film presents as two, semi-independent films - in the first, a soldier (Banlop Lomnoi) and his lover (Sakda Kaewbuadee) amble around Bangokok and its outskirts; in the second, a different soldier (Lomnoi) journeys into the jungle, to hunt down a creature (Kaewbuadee) that's been terrorizing his local outpost. It's with the second film that the strange ambience of the first starts to make sense, as Apichatpong builds the hunt around a Thai legend that tells of a shaman trapped inside a tiger's body, and their fusion into a third soul, "neither animal nor human". Although Apichatpong provides various visual cues as to the universe of this shaman-tiger, which range from a series of still, painted images to a ghostly, superimposed spectrum of organisms, it's most pervasively defined as "a creature whose life exists only by memories of others"; that is, as a creature whose shamanic power is to tap into what the body remembers, rather than what the mind remembers. It's this bodily, reflexive, unconscious memory that Apichatpong seems keen to visualize, which he does by reinventing one of the most enduring cinephilic subjects, thereby aligning reflexive with cinematic memory - the spectacle of foilage, of wind blowing through trees, which forms the third-soul's "song of happiness", and fuses sound and image into a tactile, third kind of silence. It's this silence, this foliaged, mnemonic relationship between hunter and prey, that feeds back and informs the relationship between the two men in the first film - appropriately, by asking us to reflexively remember their relationship, just as their relationship seems more concerned with reflexively remembering each other, as if homosexuality were simply a heightened attention to bodily memory. In this way, the second film is less an extension than a reincarnation of the first - and, as such, it doesn't merely present homosexuality as an exquisite attention to the reincarnated possibilities and deep memories of every organic surface, but as the locus of a new kind of cinematic image - a ghost-image, a reinvention of silent cinema - that recalls the cosmos as a footprint does a hand, or a striation a jungle.