Cinematic Forms and the Assembly of Cities
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CINEMATIC FORMS AND Landscape and the literary THE ASSEMBLY OF CITIES: The more we were bound to the BANGKOK INSCRIBED room, the more empty we became. And so we went out… 1 Noah Viernes (Kaewkan 2006: 34) There is an anxiety about the city that Abstract looms in several recent scenes from Thai- language literature and film. The above This article suggests that an aesthetics of passage taken from Siriworn Kaewkan’s contemporary urban life builds new short story, “Our Resemblances,” narrates avenues for treating the politics of a day in the life of one urban subject who visibility. Several reasons instigate this leaves his apartment of “emptiness” to new approach. First, art forms illustrate experience the material of the city. But as and train a specific way of “seeing,” a the subject leaves his room to travel across camera consciousness, that correlates the landscape of Bangkok, the depthless with changes in the built landscape. A urban signs and signifiers ultimately specific configuration, in other words, exacerbate this emptiness. In the story’s presents a relationship (an analogy) final line, an analogy is drawn between the between the contemporary predominance subject’s emptiness and a frustrated sense of urban images and urban subjects that of vision: “The more we try to open our elude preexisting categories. These eyes, the more blurry everything becomes” aesthetic departures can be illustrated by (Kaewkan 2006: 47). The dilemma of literary and cinematic “sentence-images” blurred vision inquires into how seeing is within the project that Jacques Rancière constrained by the landscape of the city, (2004; 2006; 2007) calls the “redistribution and what possibilities the forms of film of the sensible.” This paper's attempt to and literature offer for addressing an urban locate this redistribution according to the subject alienated by a disinclination appearance of “the urban” in the toward seeing. It is an understatement to literature of Prabda Yoon, Wanich say that academics do not turn to literature Charungkichanant, Siriworn Kaewkan, to understand the global city in all its Parinya Phiphathphorn, and two films by irregularities of appearance. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, explains how Bangkok’s aesthetic landscape is The materiality of landscape is not only an produced by its material “visible” form. immediate surrounding, and this is particular to a postmodern world: of media explosions, distances that are technologi- cally compressed, and perpetual image- making that commodities lifestyles. As suggested in a recent conference program in Bangkok, postmodernism is like the 1 Ph.D. student in the Department of Political city: both take the form of nostalgia for a Science and Lecturer in the Department of rooted tradition, the schizophrenia of our Political Science and the School of Pacific and dissipating material surroundings that Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at acquire new meanings more rapidly than Manoa Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:54:09PM via free access MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities, Special Issue No.15, 2008 our ability to comprehend them, the the urban landscape in order to show how rootlessness that positions the subject “at new urban subjects relate to different sea” in an ocean of imitations, and the kinds of development. Recent literary hyperreal of so many places built upon works (that more often than not mimic simulated foundations (think simulacra).2 newer film forms) look for openings and It is no longer intriguing that one may go fissures in what might be considered banal to the zoo or even ice-skating on the and localized activities, knowing the upper-most levels of Bangkok shopping possibility of re-arrangement and malls, or spend the majority of one’s day contingent organization of life, as with the inside a corporate tower that looks like an assembly of so-called “fictional” texts, elephant, or that the “freedom” once vary in accord with a variety of possible yearned for in nature (e.g, with the scenes. Inside the frame of urban Romantics, or Transcendentalists) is now landscapes, literary texts provide a situated signified by spaces inundated in concrete, context which corresponds with a “point exchange value, and vertical living). The of view” directed through the avenues of zoo on the rooftop of Pata Mall, the the city’s built form.4 To attend to a Elephant Tower on Phahon Yothin Road, critique of “landscape” through its texts, and the Sub-Zero ice skating rink at the according to the literary and landscape Esplanade shopping complex, in these scholar John Dixon Hunt, is to illuminate terms, are “real” places along the “the very physical places where the landscape of Bangkok. These characters, events and actions of literature contemporary dimensions of appearance as well as life are represented as taking can be equated with a sense of “seeing”; place” (Hunt 2003: 123). This is why, I where even a highrise housing campaign suggest below, that Thai language cinema in Bangkok is able to appropriate the and contemporary literary works provide slogan “I Am Issara”3 (I am Free) to an important contribution to our equate the “freedom” of upward class understanding of how the landscape of the mobility with a new fad in upper-level urban city is constructed by a vision of it. living. In each of these modes of seeing, which are thoroughly embodied by the This approach of juxtaposing the cultural urban landscape, the signified is increase- mediums of literature and cinema with the ingly removed from the signifier. “affect” of landscape is not a new approach, but a way in which new This urban structuring of cultural forms “aesthetic” analogies might bypass old means that a cinematic capturing of the “disciplinary” categories. The analogy everyday is increasingly related to a place- underpinned through appropriation of the based dimension of vision. This article term “aesthetic” refers to the existence of projects this dynamic by assembling film forms that call existing categories into and literature in relationship to “seeing” question. If Aristotle’s Politics or Poetics invoke two conventional categories for 2 Conference on Postmodern Thought and Contemporary Social Change 4 (แนวคิดหลังสมัยใหม กับความเปลี่ยนแปลง “[T]he power of representing landscape is the power of the text, whether written, ในสังคมปจจุบัน) at Chulalongkorn University, photographed, filmed or otherwise produced” November 15, 2007, Bangkok, Thailand (Crouch and Malm 2003: 259). 3 <http://www.charnissara.co.th/> 14 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:54:09PM via free access Cinematic Forms and the Assembly of Cities two disciplines, then aesthetics can be Noon (2001). And beyond these filmic construed, as the manner in which the scenes, the landscape navigator resonates existence of those categories is called into similarly in urban Thai literature. question. In this sense, the French Political Rendering new epistemological high Theorist Jacques Rancière uses the term ground to the short story’s use of montage, “aesthetics” in opposition to represent- Siriworn Kaewkan inscribes a “navigator” ation, since the conventional visibility of from the top of a skyscaper, who the latter reinforces the dominant engrosses the city with a camera-like distribution of political visibility (i.e., birds-eye view and formulaically begins to through the existing categorical groupings: list things in order to navigate the urban censuses, genres, canons, geopolitical landscape as a microcosm of the globe.5 In labels, or the reductionist claims of “what each of these examples, elaborated more belongs to what”). This “crossing” of extensively below, form is content in the fields has helped to multiply the attempt to project, through the aesthetic applications of literature and the cinematic assemblage, the political and economic image. hardships of a city affected by global narratives. This relationship between the It therefore seems appropriate that the cinema and the literary work, through the work of Rancière, and particularly his urban landscape’s orientation of “seeing”, interrogation of conventional poetic and is simultaneously a convergence between political categories, surfaces alongside politics and aesthetics that informs the recent debates in comparative literature projection and visibility of the city in a and film studies where distinctions variety of forms. Toward discussing these between film and literary texts are aesthetico-political analogies, Rancière, in problematized by “analogies.” Literature his landmark work The Politics of is like film because of a historical lineage Aesthetics (2004), begins with the of illustration (Elliot 2003), and, following analogy: conversely, film is like literature because certain film movements incorporated a If the reader is fond of analogy, meta-cinematic mode of “reading” that aesthetics can be understood in a had originated earlier in the meta-text of Kantian sense…as the system of a the French New Novel (Kline 1992). In priori forms determining what the analogy of the meta-cinema/text (or presents itself to experience. It is what one could call literary cinema or the delimitation of spaces and cinematic literature), it is the form that has times, of the visible and invisible, become content, an increased attentiveness of speech and noise, that to an assembly of a scene. This assembly simultaneously determines the is political to the extent that it provides the place and the stakes of politics as ground of possibility for what can be a form of experience. experienced—e.g., in an opening estab- (Rancière 2004: 13) lishing shot of Bangkok’s seemingly infallible skyline in Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s When Rancière refers to the “delimitation 6ixty 9ine (1999), or through an of spaces and times, of the visible and experiment in Surrealist form that begins in its navigation of the city in Apichatpong 5 Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Kaewkan, Siriworn. 2004. “About a Navigator on the Deck of the Baiyoke Tower.” 15 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:54:09PM via free access MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities, Special Issue No.15, 2008 invisible,” he is suggesting that there are form.