CLICK HERE to watch Phantoms of Nabua.

No one speaks of the quotidian in a more fluently surreal language than Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I always like the way he describes his films. In this new short film, specially commissioned for AnimateProjects as part of his new installation ‘Primitive‘, he speaks of it as a portrait of home and projects a vision of a place that is both destructive and tender, painting a tableaux that vividly sticks to one’s imagination.

Nabua today is a sleepy village in the north-east of Thailand, close to the Laotian border. It was one of the places the Thai army occupied from the 60s to the early 80s in order to curb those who were accused of being communists. Nabua was the scene of fierce oppression, fighting and violence.

In his artist’s statement, Apichatpong talks about light, the fluorescent light in particular, as having an amazingly comforting and homely quality. Many of course have interpreted the atmospheric quality of the fluorescent as clinical, particularly in reference to the second part of his last feature length film, Syndromes and the Century. But he offers a different understanding, ‘Perhaps for an economic reason, most of the houses in Asia are illuminated by fluorescent lights. Even though these lights make the skin look pale, even dead, for me they relate to home, to being home.’

I grew up in houses with fluorescent fixtures too and remember how my parents used to say, it’s brighter and easier to study under fluorescent light. I grew up hating its brutal intensity, the kind of starkness it makes a space look, stripping off any romantic notion of glow and warmth. But it was also through Syndromes that i first began appreciating the artificial quality of the fluorescent, especially its honesty.

I like to think of Phantoms of Nabua in the great Southeast Asian tradition of wayang shadow-play, managing a precarious tension that balances light and darkness, manifesting as forces of good and evil, calm and rage, hope and despair, in the weaving of a narrative that is at once both accessibly heartfelt and intellectually engaging.

Like all Apichatpong’s films, it is also highly reflexive. The burning down of a projection screen tied to a football (soccer) goal post reveals the flickering beams of a running projector. The film then ends with a close up shot of the projector’s flashing light. Imagine watching it in a theatre, this final scene must’ve seem like a mirror reflecting on the very nature of projection itself, the throbbing light that draws us into another world, another story, another dream.

The premise is simple enough:

‘The film’s setting is a rear projection of Nabua (from the Primitive installation) and a recreation of a fluorescent light pole back in my hometown. I used this setting as a playground for the teens who emerged from the dark with a football raging with fire. They took turns kicking the ball that left illuminated trails on the grass. Finally they burned the screen which revealed behind it a ghostly white beam of a projector… Phantoms of Nabua is a portrait of home. The film portrays a communication of lights, the lights that exude, on the one hand, the comfort of home and, on the other, of destruction.’ (Artist Statement)

CLICK HERE to watch Phantoms of Nabua. (I highly recommend viewing the High Quality version in full screen)

(SS)