The universe of Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Phenomenology beyond the human and the world
Abstract
From Mysterious Object at Noon (Dokfa nai meuman, 2000) to Cemetery of Splendor (Rak ti Khon Kaen, 2015), Apichatpong Weerasethakul makes movies as if he is intuiting a tone or a mood. He dilates the present in a succession of events and simultaneous sensations, placing his characters, and us spectators, in a state of perplexity before the world. He transforms the most common objects and landscapes in ineffable and enigmatic images, in spectral regions where everything is transitory, transient, and mutant, where all beings exist in the same ontological status. Phenomenology helps us explore this cinema, to answer the demands that these movies seem to impose. However, to fully attend to Apichatpong’s mysteries, we have to go even further in the decentralization of humanity - we have to step into nonhuman territories. Phenomenology needs help when we go beyond the question of human and world. Our purpose is to propose a dialogue between Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred North Whitehead. To think with them and Apichatpong is to affirm a different starting point from classical film theory, and in the end, to explore its ontological bet.
