Cinematic Forms and the Assembly of Cities

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… Noah Viernes1 (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

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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, ในสังคมปจจุบัน) at Chulalongkorn University, photographed, filmed or otherwise produced” November 15, 2007, Bangkok, Thailand (Crouch and Malm 2003: 259). 3

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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.”

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invisible,” he is suggesting that there are form. The Thai language oeuvre of all sorts of artistic forms in the city literature and film works with the (among other places), but that some are materiality of urban imagery by asking unfairly (i.e., unequally) favored among how some images parallel other images others in order to represent what “spaces (giving rise to analogies among films and and times” should be. What can be everyday life or, below, between a scene experienced is directly analogous to at a site in Bangkok and an image invoked aesthetic forms of “spaces and times,” in a short story or film. These questions among which film and literature figure may, at first sight, seem trivial; for prominently. Rancière’s three other instance, in the relations between what a closely aligned books to address the pedestrian or highrise resident sees versus particularities of aesthetic forms are aptly the tracking landscape view of a passenger entitled The Flesh of Words (2004), Film as framed by the window of an elevated Fables (2006), and the cinematic The train. But the relation the analogy invokes Future of the Image (2007). compliments one’s knowledge of a generalized city with an added specificity The analogies that follow take the form of of place. Here again, Rancière’s work the city and align it with the form of both (2004: 12) wants to foreground these types literature and cinema, an analogy that of relations in order to visualize a kind of exemplifies “the place and the stakes of assemblage; i.e., “the distribution of the politics as a form of experience.” In this sensible”: sense, selected short stories by Siriworn Kaewkan, Parinya Phiphathphorn, and I call the distribution of the Wanich Charungkichornanth, treated in sensible the system of self-evident depth below, mirror the forms of facts of sense perception that cinematic presentation in Apichatpong simultaneously discloses the exis- Weerasethakul with regard to their tence of something in common formulaic and aesthetic approaches to the and the delimitations that define landscape of Bangkok. Each of these the respective parts and positions works, focalized through the form of the within it. city, re-center Rancière’s notion of the (Rancière 2004: 12) political, which he calls the “redistribution of the sensible,” a ground for what This distribution of the sensible can be can be experienced and talked about: a located in the landscape of the city visibility conventionally resigned to the because its visibility changes according to domain of film. where a subject is positioned within it. Common views are orchestrated by In the sense that film projects images, it common points of seeing. The visual does so through a sequencing or juxta- documentation of films, then, exists position, or extended frames that invite alongside the textual commentaries of reflection. A camera, in this way, thinks. literature as a starting point, as everyday Montage, one cinematic technique, works epistemologies, toward addressing the through the parallel juxtaposition of following question: what is an urban images (Rohdie 2006). If one looks at the subjectivity; i.e., how does an urban relation between montage and literature, subject navigate the space of the city one finds that both undertake a similar through a transitional consciousness

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embodied by its changing surroundings? social texts that compliment their This article’s attempt to answer this encounter with “art” forms. Seeing is question looks not simply at the interiority inflected by sounds, smells, and other of particular films; i.e., its narrative-laden sensory flows. In this intertextual-aesthetic content, but moreover at its assembly and sense, Marco Polo, the urban navigator of form that aligns a variety of films and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1974), images with a surrounding material and reflects on his manner of “looking” at the literary landscape context. The subject is city, “dismantling the city piece by constituted through vision, as vision piece…reconstruct(ing) it in other ways,” constitutes the landscape that positions the which is a cinematic means of encounter- subject. This “visual subjectivity” allows ing space—where the possibilities of for a redistributive notion of ‘aesthetics’ encounter are never truly exhausted. Cities that realigns a view of the urban landscape are not merely mapped or built, he through the literature and film that suggests, but are simultaneously thought formulaically guide this view. and imagined. Siriworn builds on this cinematic rendering of space. The Specificity of place protagonist in “A Navigator on the Deck of the Baiyoke Tower,” rips areas of a Kublai Khan had noticed that map of the world in order to reconfigure Marco Polo’s cities resembled one the cartographic relations between East another, as if the passage from one and West and the possible horizon of to another involved not a journey thought, but all this takes place from a but a change of elements. Now, raised view of the city. The city is not from each city Marco Polo simply global and generalized, but described to him, the Great constituted by a geopolitical image that Khan’s mind set out on its own, renders its own specific relations. and after dismantling the city piece by piece, he reconstructed it If the inquiries about ‘form’ and inter-art in other ways, substituting analogies draw a relationship between components, shifting them, inver- literature and the cinema, how does ting them. Bangkok project this analogy as a (Calvino 1974: 43) ‘distinct’ place with its own singularity constituted by a pluralism of social forces? The urban politics of film form is, in the Numerous problems begin to emerge with vein conceptualized in Rancière, an this dilemma of global difference. If cities aesthetic which often crosses between the are thought and imagined, and cities are spheres of art, literature, photography, and “globally” networked, and if a kind of music for direction. A movement to the postmodernity thrives off imitation city can be interpreted as a natural through the construction of similarity, how progression, since it is the predominant does one articulate the specificity of an site for the subject’s unavoidable encoun- urban landscape? Toward this specificity, ter with more than one of these spheres at film manages to project an archive of the same time. At the threshold of images (which contain a subset of aesthetic spaces, the urban subject is then combined sequences) that can be read and forced to think through a plentitude of reassembled with varied results. Rancière signs, screens, soundtracks, noises, and (2007: 46) suggests that literature too

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surfaces as cinematic in a “linking” sense, aural objects. Does writing, like cinema, through a combination of sentence- not presuppose a soundtrack, an interior images. It is the sentence from a novel, the rhythm that facilitates the manner in which character on-stage, as well as the film that its parts hang together? Further, if the express these sentences. It’s not that relationship between sound and image is sentence = sayable, or that image = presupposed in the cinema, could the visible, he continues, but the question of importation of sounds in literature collapse how the relationship between the text (that conventional distinctions between these links actions) and the image (that imparts two art forms? Music acts as an analogy presence and substance) link together. between these forms, an aural motif to Two primary events unfold through these enhance the specificity of the city, finding links: the sentence-image establishes a itself below in the redistribution of phrasal power of continuity, while particular places and times. projecting an image that contains the power of rupture. One might picture a Prabda Yoon’s cinematic short story carefully constructed poetic bomb dropped Probabilities (2000) springs to mind, in upon established category of narrative terms of how it deals with time and the representation and this is the power of merging of the elements of cinema. analogy. “The sentence-image” so far as it During each of the Friday night film hangs together with a variety of screenings held at the house of the story’s contemporary moments, instances, and protagonist, the grandmother assumes dimensions “must make its music heard” soundtrack duties by playing Mozart’s (Rancière 2007: 58) as it re-distributes Violin Concerto No. 5 and Symphony No. what can be experienced. In a literary 41 in the background regardless of what sense, the images conjured up in any movie is being screened. This simple sentence train the visual imagination and “sentence-image” of Prabda Yoon conveys produce sensible affect. Something about a its music in several ways: in its description situation, an assembly of elements, of musical taste outside of a national- resonates more than simple character cultural register (a tendency of the monologues that fit into a larger narrative. “Orientalist” project), as a conceptual If representations of the majorities stifle means to activate the memory of the the stories of the others, and if protagonist, as a foregrounding of the representation is a mode of generalizing, cinematic elements of soundtrack that the specificity of the city calls for a more guide images and, most importantly for affective and resilient sentence-image: this analysis, as the surfacing of the “where language is nothing more than contemporary tendency to think and write intensities…a kind of ‘minor music’” in the language of cinema. (Deleuze 1986: 26). “The sentence-image” says Rancière “must make its music Beyond the dimension of writing lies the heard” (Rancière 2007: 58). additional layer of everyday experience, i.e., as a mode of reading the city. It is appropriate that Rancière’s concept- Following the above treatment of tion of the sentence-image should Rancière’s work, each of these readings of undertake musical qualities as its primary the city privilege the ground of what can metaphor. The city, after all, contains be experienced as a visibility, as an images that can be linked through these aesthetic assembly of parts. The parts of

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the city are not unlike the parts of film, Dog undertakes a Greek notion of the containing soundtracks in as much as they chorus as the organic fabric of the city, contain fragments of technological while the song Ta Sawang ‘Bright Eyes’ advances embodied by the urban inspires the character Peur from Final condition. With these fragments in mind, Score (2006). In the latter case, the lyrics films and literary works nod toward the ทองฟาแสนจะกวางใหญ หนทาง ยังคงยาวไกล streets of Bangkok, to the everyday, and to (‘The sky is the limit, but the path is long’) its composite “layers” that foreground the run parallel to the intensity of the analogies of the city: in travels between impending college entrance exams, but music, text, dialogue, and image. How also to his contemporary status within an many screens does one pass in a day? urban chorus. Final Score is weaved Could one not pass through a montage of together through landscape shots of the billboards, while sharing SMS photos and city, movement through the city, and an hyper-real video captures (not unlike those amazing diversity of songs. The city’s used in recent films like Soraya distribution of experience, through an Nakasuwan’s Final Score (2006), or in implicit fluctuation of sensibility (of the Chukiat Sakveerakul’s reality-show- rhythms of music, depression, celebration, mimicking 13 Beloved (2006), where the and even weight loss), underscores a rules of new technologies dictate the certain anxiety left for the arts of cinema actions of the characters)? Again, beneath and literature to address. the images lies a soundtrack, where even those who can usurp the soundtrack It is precisely these anxieties, caught freedoms of an iPod playlist can still be within the movement and assembly of the held victim by the amplification of Siam city, that drive the unproblematic whole Square’s networked speakers, each con- into the eventuality of rupture, critique, straining the possibilities of an experience fragmentation, and eventually, the move- of place. A distribution of place is an ment of forms against representation. It is assembly of parts that hang together, of this convergence of meta-levels (i.e., of fragments that find their manifestations visible forms in a particular work), of not in representations of a coherent whole language and an ‘everyday reality,’ that but in its opposite: as a sequence of critics like Patricia Waugh (Cobley 2001) fragments. No city can be the same. In this explain through an “increased social and light, a Rancièrian approachs to sensibility cultural self-consciousness” (Rancière connect the everyday life encounter with 2007: 173). But Rancière wants to say a the city as more than simply a succession difference is always ‘there,’ beyond the of images that combine time and space. delimitation of times and spaces, and that Instead, the configuration of elements this departure from narrative conspires to perpetuate a variety of moods. representation (away from a particular Seeking to understand these moods and distribution of parts) is what is conveyed their connection to the city, a kind of by the ‘aesthetic.’ The politics of reading, requires close attention to how aesthetics is thus, in this case, what the phenomena of its form is amplified literature and film can do to “confront the (i.e., externalized). The increasing role of established order of identification and Modern Dog songs in recent Thai films classification” (Rancière 2004: 89). The underscores the point. For example, the departure of a realignment of fragments song Korn in Wisit Sasanatieng’s Citizen that redistributes the sensible is largely

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responsible for a new specificity of the to the situations projected in the camera city. dimensions of visibility.

Camera-consciousness and the Balász’s treatment of a camera-conscious- configuration of the city ness inflected by urban space helps to clarify the relationship between Rancière’s The sentence-image epistemology that sentence-image and the material of the gives rise to the projection of the city city. The building of tracks, rails, deviates from the attempt to clarify the pathways, sidewalks, and other routes meaning of a particular narrative. The through urban space entails quick camera- sentence image would rather illuminate, like movement through a variety of visual i.e., render visible, the composition (i.e., shots as different times and spaces the parts or “the aesthetic”) of the city. converge and as frames run through a This projection of “sight” is made possible variety of sequences and successions. The through a mode of thinking oriented by a parts hang together. Phrases and images passive camera. Below, I refer to the become linked. Montage, “the joining alignment of landscape, movement, and together of different elements of film in a subject as productive of a camera- variety of ways, between shots, within consciousness. How the camera thinks is them, between sequences, within them”, is how the subject relates to, and is conscious the keyword here since the numerous of, its surroundings (Branigan 2006). possibilities of presentation lend to “the possibility of the reworking of reality in The life of the camera was always related images, a possibility of transformation, of to the development of the urban landscape, creating new realities and new thoughts, according to film theorists like Béla rather than accepting existing ones” Balász (2004). Balász uses the camera of (Rohdie 2006: 15, 59). In any image the silent film as his starting point for this capturing the vertical layers of Bangkok’s argument since the camera could capture Victory Monument to invoke one example what the subject might have missed. It is among many others, there are multiple the camera, he suggests, that is endowed fields of view rendering several ways of with the power to teach the viewer “to see “seeing” such that a camera consciousness the intricate visual details of life” (Balász can be interpreted in terms of three camera 2004: 315). Facial close-ups, with the dimensions. technological advances of modernity that packed people closer together, were urban At the highest point of modern Bangkok events in an everyday context. The camera transportation (and this highpoint refers to close-ups that Balász compared to the class, technological, and visibility sight of two rush hour subway riders is an dimensions), the Skytrain produces analogy raised with regard to how urban tracking long shots of the city, and in this infrastructure positions the subject’s field case, a center guided by its actual track. of view in the city. Balász suggested that Inside the Skytrain, simultaneous close-up both the industrialization of cities that to medium shots are common, a montage facilitated constrained close-up contact of passengers who are visible to each through trains, subways, buses, and other other. To the rightward position of the ephemeral and transitory spaces, gave rise foreground, pedestrians encircle the Victory Monument as they walk along the

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raised sidewalk. Their vision takes the awaited at the next four-way form of long-shots also guided toward intersection. viewing the monument. While the (Charungkichananth 1991: 36) previous two levels suggest the raised level of vision in proportion to the This traffic condition lasts for approxi- construction of the city, the lowest level, mately 30 minutes, according to the comprised by buses and automobiles, unnamed male narrator. During those 30 gridlocked within the confines of urban minutes the reader learns of his exhaustion development’s organized chaos, remains and physical weakening due to crowds at street-level. Depending on the direction scrambling toward the bus entrance, and or confinement of the street-level position, the smell of sweat within a bus growing a subject’s camera consciousness deviates increasingly hot. Like many works of between panning, tracking, and worms-eye literature that project the relationship view shots. The landscape directs vision. between alienation of the subject and the Contemporary urban travel can be ruthless grip of modernity (as in Jean Paul construed as a montage of camera shots Sartre’s Nausea or Albert Camus’ The where windows, walkways, and elevated Stranger), the mounting nausea of the train tracks constitute the frame and the narrator exacerbates the tension of the very possibility of sight. story using the bus as a laboratory for measuring the visible world. An hour The travel from one level of “seeing” to passes. The narrator moves further back to another is itself contained within a literary the rear of the bus. The exterior tracking and cinematic archive. The roundabout shot of the traffic circle in the above that looks a lot like the traffic of the passage is followed by a further Victory Monument’s surrounding circle is entrenchment into this world he calls Hell: projected in Wanich Charungkichananth’s the bus remains a constrained space of The Capital (1991) where a sidewalk vision. A move to the depths of this world, worms-eye view leads into a bus interior, i.e., to the back of the bus (with windows an encounter with those who share the fogged from humidity caused by the narrator’s mode of “seeing.” From the bus outside rain), turns the frame of narration window, this is how the narrator sees: to the interior close-up:

Edging into the intersection’s Ugh…I groaned in my heart that roundabout, the bus jerked the bus would move a bit but to no forward at random. Bumper to avail. There were 7 people sitting bumper, and continuously bottle- next to me in the rear of the bus. I necking, an assortment of cars observed each of their eyes crowded together as they entered thinking that there couldn’t be the traffic circle. Cars and taxis anyone feeling any different than overlapped each other, both stuck, me. confused, and unwilling to allow (Charungkichananth 1991: 41) space to the other. Disordered, I hung on to the rails as the bus “Observing each of their eyes,” the above struggled to pass through the passage suggests the narrator’s identifica- roundabout. Leaving behind the tion with the other bus passengers sitting chaos, another sticky situation along the back row of the bus. This

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empathic moment of affinity is made The reader recognizes the place of the possible by a close-up oriented song, a diversion through urban space to consciousness of interior surroundings, the migration routes of the poverty since observation is facilitated by stricken northeast that brings workers to proximity. The story progresses with the city: the Isan region of Thailand. As descriptions of other passengers sitting the young Isan man continues to sing, the along the back row, peering through the narrator smiles so the spontaneous singer window frame to observe the would notice the narrator’s endorsing technological fall-out of a broken-down gaze. The relationship becomes one car, then cutting back to the interior where between the elements of text, image, and his observation reveals faces devoid of soundtrack rather than a dialogic union emotion: “The people in the bus where I between characters. The scene becomes was appeared as faces devoid of feeling” more than an empathic moment, but one of (Charungkichananth 1991: 43). vision ignited by sound. The cinematic story of The Capital is the story, following Vision comports with a notion of equality Rancière, where a redistribution of the brought into space through the aesthetic sensible is made possible by a reassembly arrangement of parts within the scene of of urban parts tied to the landscape of the the short story. Because the subjects of the city. bus “see” similarly, they are affected in common moment. But it is the soundtrack If Wanich’s story demonstrates several of the story that allows this moment of modes of a subject-oriented camera equality, among those without a voice, to consciousness from the street-level of the be rendered visible. The moment of bus, other contemporary stories project the tension reaches its boiling point, where the increasing verticality of vision. The clichés of genre tend toward more distance of the image parallels the distance conventional turns. As a departure from between appearances and realities in the filmic genre, The Capital projects a contemporary fiction. In Parinya cinematic technique in musical Phiphathphorn’s “The Next Station Is…” soundtrack, since there is nothing worse (Phiphathphorn 2002) the writer prefaces a for the narrator than the alienating story told through the Skytrain’s condition of the bus, gridlocked and movement through the city with a collectively devoid of communication. Up comparison of Bangkok to New York to this point, the story is a story of vision City, London, Paris, and other cities, “in progressing through the images of the the way I’ve seen them in movies” narrator in place of any dialogue between (Phiphathphorn 2002: 82). Bangkok is an characters. Like the film underpinned by a appearance, which will be narrated, for the soundtrack, The Capital manages to make most part, from the elevated level of the its music heard through a sentence-image. Skytrain’s interior. The story starts from The sounds of country music suddenly Mo Chit, a place once known as a emerge from an anonymous passenger as transitional link between Bangkok and the the narrator is sincerely moved by a luk outer Thai provinces, but now a base of thung voice that morphs an anonymity of technological advancement and the entry characters into kindred souls. point for passengers with cell phones, notebook computers, and the latest fashions. The fashion of appearance

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saturates the story as the reader arrives at Having entered the Third month the hip area of Phrom Phong where a the aged Srimin sat that way from woman, noticing a man reading a book by daybreak until 9 o’clock, smoking Earnest Hemingway, asks him if he’s a one cigarette after another, in his writer—an assumption she arrives at via favorite chair, on the deck of the appearances. The visual layering of the Baiyoke tower, in the middle of scene is carried further when the narrator Bangkok, sipping on black coffee, describes the same “Thai” woman by her staring at the illumination of “appearance,” as one who might be sunlight, sinking into silence, confused as a foreigner. The man who’s waiting for the arrival of reading Hemingway doesn’t actually like daybreak. Hemingway’s books, but envies his (Kaewkan 2004: 55) lifestyle. His reading is dictated by appearance and the anticipation and Siriworn manages to instill the story with normality of one consuming an image. But sequences, like lists and successions of appearances never equate with their images, but also with a sense that seeing is referent, which is adequately conveyed proportional with a positioning, a setting when the woman departs leaving her male that enunciates the possibilities of vision. acquaintance with a name card reading This mode of seeing is trumped by an “Moon Hamingway.” The American imagination that in turn relocates the writer had a nice last name, she thought. horizon or the possibilities for vision. Srimin, the sole character of the story, is This relationship between appearance and an old man who seems to draw many of the imagination facilitates a relationship the morning’s thoughts from idealized between the reader and the mapping of the voyagers of the past, places of discovery, city within unstable global and and a variety of cartographic relationships cartographies. When the cartographic between East and West. Further into the relations of the city seem fixed, as in the story, this relationship between East and categorizing of places through maps, the West becomes increasingly problematic, succession of film-like sequences written especially as it appears on the global map. in contemporary Thai literature insinuate Srimin, sitting at the top of a skyscraper in new distributions of the sensible. Siriworn the center of Bangkok, must embody the Kaewkan’s A Navigator on the Deck of the navigator he aspires to be, but, lacking in Baiyoke Tower (2004), like “The Next actual sight due to old age, his imagination Station Is…,” presents the sentence-image is projected through a series of fragments. with an incomparable set of differences in Navigators: Vasca de Gama, Marco Polo, “seeing” that has unfolded since The Captain James Cook. His immediate Capital. This mode of seeing, apart from a surroundings: “the prayer call of the title that suggests a ship and an ocean (the Muslim community and the sound of the Thai word for “navigator” conjoins the Cuckoo’s song came floating through the words “knowledgeable-traveler-ship”), air.” The horizons of East and West: begins on the top of the tallest skyscraper Viking, Magellan, New Horizon, The in Bangkok. Its opening shot projects the Bible, The Indian Ocean, Malacca, following scene: Constantinople. Also the time dimension of these fragments: “It’s set.” He thought, “I’ll begin my preparations. The East. The

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humble Mekong. The Mekong river. The through the character of Srimin that these building fronts blinking: 1…2…3…4….” appearances must be renegotiated through The climactic moment arrives as he rips the active reimagination of a horizon. This the confusing world map along old borders is possible, not only through the to proclaim new horizons: character’s position, but through the author’s arrangement of figures and Then he suddenly jumped up from intensities that re-map the landscape. And his chair, clashing with the coffee what we find is that if Wanich’s The table, lifting his hands to embrace Capital set the frame in motion, through the sky, raising his head to the sun an ethical encounter facilitated by a at dusk while shouting: cinematic mode of seeing, more recent literary works have undertaken such “The East! The East!” frames as a relation among parts that hang together, as opposed to people as parts that Then silence and stillness ensued. either belong to the same group or that happen to be in the same place. Then he lit another cigarette. More obvious examples in contemporary Then he grabbed a world map and Thai literature run rampant. Win lifted it once more as though his Lyovarin’s The Lover (1999) takes eyes could see without difficulty. montage as its formal technique, each phrase (an image) separated by a forward Then he ripped the world map, slash (/) to signify the need to renegotiate separating Europe and America meaning at each turn. In Anusorn along the Atlantic Ocean bringing Tipyanon’s London and the Secret in the the parts along the Bering Strait into Kiss, the narrator presents his memoir of alignment. 9/11 by referencing Danis Tanovic’s contribution to the short film collection The illusion emerging from the map 11'09''01 (2002), a film that focuses, like was significant, the aged Srimin Anuson’s memoir, on proximity to the thought, but its conjecture was event rather than a moment along a villainous. historical trajectory. And, perhaps a sure- (Kaewkan 2004: 63) fire classic, Parithat Hutangkoon’s เพลิงรัก

There is something different in “looking” ลานแคน ‘Flames of Love, Grounds of and “encountering” space between street- Regret’ (2002), fools the reader along with level, the interior of a bus, or the elevated the narrator, into digesting an illusion as area of the landscape, Bangkok’s Skytrain the real as our captors (a film crew) stage or the city’s tallest skyscraper. The more the hold-up of a shopping mall in order to “multiple” our field of view is, the more capture a more real depiction of distress. camera-like our perception becomes. But The story assumes the cinematic technique as Parinya Phiphathphorn’s story of misc-en-scene as its modus operandi demonstrates, a field of view still can be rather than conventional narrative saturated with images removed from their techniques. And finally, the example most material foundations, i.e., as mere often incited in response to this article’s appearances. Siriworn seems to suggest aesthetic claim, Chart Korbjitti’s short

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novel Time (1993) demands attention to a any delimited geography: a desire. The film’s vocabulary of shots in order to films treated below suggest a understand the narrator’s visual mode of configuration of this ontology in accord rethinking human relationships in the with spatial designs, temporal rhythms, context of older art forms. and images that break with a demographic text.6 This assemblage, an aesthetic way of Films, like their presentational reading the contemporary as an urban counterparts in literature, cannot avert the phenomenon, moves the film viewer into material foundations that comprise the an engagement with the images that construction and composition of the city. construct a desire of the city. This urban The camera consciousness of a film enters desire, embedded into the landscape, the camera consciousness of a subject accounts for the way the city is which initiates a point of recognition with experienced in the two films treated one’s material surroundings. The below. encounter with the city, the horizon of the contemporary, is recognition perpetually In this urban-navigational sense the first re-oriented. If literature becomes feature film of Apichatpong Weerasetha- increasingly cinematic with a kul entitled Mysterious Object at Noon development-led shot orientation, the (2000) constructs the city as an “object” cinema as treated below becomes fragmented through transient points of increasingly literary in order to find view which change based on the multiple different ways of “seeing” the landscape. fields and levels that affect these views. Shot between 1997 and 1999, Mysterious The city as mysterious object Object takes its title from a more melodramatic feature shot decades earlier, The city seen through the lens of a camera only this film is one of departures and consciousness appears unlike a map that genre transgression, a mixing of fixes objects into a particular time and intertextual elements of the national place as a particular distribution of the landscape. But its journey, a formulaic sensible. The camera breaks things into experimentation with the Surrealist pieces, rendering the unity of a whole into technique of Exquisite Corpse, begins in a mysterious object perpetually fragmented and into new horizons of 6 The event, the encounter, and the possibilities thought. Attending to this horizon of of experience become controversial as they thought, a distribution of sensible exit “national” forms of representation. Hence, experience within the larger spatialized the issue of censorship, nationalism and the artist’s role in shaping national “graphics” urban object, the city is projected, which is constitute a political problematic. But to to say “distributed,” through the camera— clarify this issue of “demographic” as a even in the provinces in the consciousness political question, one need only look at its of a rural food vendor or in an urban etymological character: landscape photograph that projects the development of a new provincial city. The δεμος = demos = people / γραφος = graphos = city is born not simply out of the physical write construction of tangible materials like skyscrapers, but through an ontology of Michael J. Shapiro (2004), in this vein, writes everyday life that is more pervasive than “[t]he nation-state is scripted” (49).

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Bangkok at street-level and ends in the But the form of the film is itself a treatise more peripheral areas of the Thai on how the forms of the city figure into provinces. His next two features Blissfully multiple ways the subject is embodied by Yours (2002) and Tropical Malady (2004) it. The opening credits, for instance, read avoid Bangkok altogether in order to “conceived by Apichatpong Weerasetha- confront what some might describe as kul,” rather than “directed by Apichatpong landscapes unique to the outer Thai Weerasethakul” since cities, according to province. His latest feature Syndromes and the objective camera, escape any single A Century (2007) returns to Bangkok in its point of view, i.e., any one representation final half in order to deal with what few willed by the director. The opening frame film critics seem to notice: the of Mysterious Objects is a departure from development of the construction of a the closed story form or representation and landscape and a camera consciousness that towards the aesthetic redistribution of the encloses and manipulates contemporary sensible underscored above. This human life. redistribution is made possible by the disorder of the city and the distribution of Apichatpong’s films are about “seeing,” multiple points of views facilitated by it. and often attempt to convey what is The form of the city, the mysterious beyond vision through affectations and the object, is reoriented via the possibilities of subtle movement of a camera, the the camera’s cinematic world. heightened soundtracking of non-human surroundings, or the accentuation of How does the city amount to a world and simple moments in time that most how does this world work? Apichatpong’s exemplars of urban studies might take for production company, Kick the Machine, granted. In Mysterious Objects, “seeing” tells us that the stories that comprise unfolds in a manner which suggests that different narratives within this film are the images are already pre-configured into the “Villagers of Thailand.”7 Each person who mind of the narrator so that when each attempts to tell some fictional stories of a person attempts to tell the primary story of character named Dokfahr is “in another a character named Dogfahr, subtracted of city” narrating the relationship between a any narrative criteria, the images change boy and his teacher. The story departs according to the experiences of each from several elements of representation, storyteller. Even as the story departs from the distribution of the sensible object of the city, the projected images can not the city, in order to address the assembly escape the urban development that gives of that object. Plot, characters, language, rise to media shows, Kentucky Fried and spectacle construct the object, Chicken, the import of Manga comics into Apichatpong demonstrates, but it is desire Thailand, the prevalence of melodrama, that holds this particular distribution of the centrality of military announcements, objects in place. the cultural hierarchy that enables foreigners to prosper in Thailand, and so The film begins to address this on. A message about the city resonates: objectification of the city with a departure comics, fast food chains, military rule, and from Plot. The opening intertitle “Once the foreign wielding of power operate most prevalently in the city. 7

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upon a time…” signals the most two young students use sign language to conventional means of opening a story. signal the phrase “she sang and danced But as an intertitle, followed by the black beautifully” in which the character of and white shot of the city from a moving Dogfahr takes the form of beauty contests vehicle, time has been destabilized and the transmitted on evening television. In development of the city turns both Mysterious Object at Noon the camera mysterious and monstrous. An urban follows the imagination which, in many street vendor, the viewers first encounter cases, is tied to some aspects of the urban with anyone resembling a character in this spectacle. Spectacle requires vision, a film, tells her story of being sold into mode of seeing, but thought imagines prostitution, but is then asked to begin something beyond mere representation. another story that may be either “true of fictional.” Only a few minutes into the Engaging the urban spectacle means film, the audience is invited to pursue not projecting the relations of vision. When a simply what brings one to the city, but the group of men are filmed watching a Muay ways in which the city will inform their Thai match, the fighters, the actual narration of a story. spectacle, remain absent from the frame. Instead, the camera captures the act of The characters of the film are pulled from seeing on the part of the audience. This the yoke of representation because of the might be one of the most explicit spontaneous manner in which these “real” sequences of the film as a montage of people actively engage the story in groups surrounding the Muay Thai ring are innovative ways. “So I was residing in this captured in a succession of images. Here floating object…” one elderly woman again one notes the assemblage more than begins as she attempts to explain a representative play of expectations. A Dokfahr’s disappearance. This character distribution of the sensible, of what can be belongs to a succession of scenes that experienced through a particular likely occur outside of the city, but a delimitation of times and spaces, is called repetitive return to urban scenes of into question by a “seeing” and thinking “exterior characters” (of producers, that makes the city possible. A desire for editors, those who discuss ideas for the the spectacle of the city, Apichatpong film we are watching), prefigures a suggests, is more interesting than the difficulty in escaping the city. A desire spectacle itself. positions the city, however distant one deviates from it. The projection of urban desire has become increasingly prevalent in recent Thai films. If the city cannot be escaped, it is because The relationship between the construction a mode of thinking, the camera of the city and the desire of the city consciousness of the urban subject, exists becomes one way of understanding even in the imagination of the rural Apichatpong’s Syndromes and A Century vendor. In this way, the camera’s (2006). It shares two primary correlations documentation of life in the provinces with Mysterious Objects at Noon that are engages a rural food vendor’s image of the significant to this analysis. First, the Thai city. “If it’s in Bangkok, you will get paid landscape is built into the process of more than this. A Pain-reliever company “looking” that visualizes the relation of will sponsor you.” In a proceeding scene, desire to the city. Secondly, the final half

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of the film signals his first return to the narrator of both “The Next Station is…” city since Mysterious Objects at Noon. and Calvino’s Invisible Cities conveys to the reader: this new city, under- Urban aesthetics/landscape construction, is built (or imagined) montage according to the changing desire of all cities. After handing him a photo album of Fifty-three minutes and thirty seconds into construction photos as proof, a montage of Syndromes and A Century, a director leads still-images depicting the revitalized subjects (you, I, and the rest of the world) Chonburi overlay the conversation to into the city. Having departed from a show us what they are looking at. Most of provincial world explored in the first half these shots appear distant, and, in any of the film, we are asked to take a hard case, devoid of human life. Toward the look at how “we” are constituted as urban end of this scene, the doctor’s attempt to subjects. An alienated character sits lean forward and kiss his girlfriend is against the backdrop of a window that interrupted by her desire to look at the frames skyscrapers through the translucent urban landscape. “Wow, you can really blur of glass. The walls are white like a see my house from here.” movie screen. The character sits peripheral to an interview between two doctors, but In another scene a montage sequence of central to what the movie projects: an urban sculptures depicting national urbanity of alienated figures organized imagery (royal figures, Buddhism, etc.) is into the city’s distribution of categories. If mixed with slow and passive shots of desire is the function into and outside of organized life in the hospital. Immobile categories, the landscape is what drives sculptures are juxtaposed here with this desire throughout the film. The uniform-clad subjects. Some walk in analogy between film and landscape single-file lines with monks following arrives at the sine qua non of urban close behind them, as if leading, while pessimism. Bleakly, we are asked whether others walk in groups of similar-colored it is possible to escape this organization of uniforms. This montage sequence is everyday life, an organization that juxtaposed with a proceeding montage alienated subjects seem to desire. where one worn-out doctor sits alone in the hospital’s basement while another sits The phrasal power of continuity that alone in a dimly lit office. In the analogy, Rancière locates in the sentence-image, the collective desire of organization is and that Apichatpong projects through a juxtaposed against the alienation of slow montage of life organized through individuals who remain on the outside. symbolic imagery, illuminates an aesthetic politics of the city. In a relevant scene a The final two scene sequences suggest an Bangkok doctor, and the film’s primary interesting juxtaposition between the male protagonist, receives a visit from his interior and exterior urban landscape of girlfriend at the hospital where he works. Bangkok. In the first sequence, the camera They kiss momentarily after which she enters the hospital basement. The camera’s expresses her desire to move to a long-take pursues a slow low-angle revitalized Chonburi where a new circular pan below ceiling ventilation industrialized city is currently under- pipes and other varieties of equipment one construction. She then expresses what the might find in any factory. There is a clear

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absence of people in this room. The the division of self through functions that viewer remembers this location since it reproduce the city in relation to a was referenced earlier in the film to landscape. In this way, a sentence-image suggest its strange utility as a space used produces an analogic duality tied to a to rehabilitate patients via a gradual re- landscape where film can inscribe what familiarization with the industrial literature can project: a similar mode of technologies of the city. It exists beneath thinking that Siriworn Kaewkan’s prose the other levels of the hospital and, as the poem “The Love of Crying at the doctor suggests earlier, is only checked on Busstop” (Siriworn Kaewkan 2005: 21) so once a week and must be considered amply expresses: secondary to the more significant “other cases” on the upper-levels. If the shot Narrate the city from the looks strangely familiar to film historians, viewpoint of the self it is due to its resemblance with the opening shot of Godard’s Contempt Narrate the self from the (1963) where a slow pan transitions to a viewpoint of the city view that trucks into a film camera’s lens. Only in Apichatpong’s film, the panning The narration of the city lies in the very camera trucks into an industrial exhaust inscription of it, and what I have suggested pipe. The analogy (though it need not be in this article is that “viewpoint” remains the intention): whereas the viewer was central to undoing any single narration. A encouraged to sense the presence of a simple narration, however, is not quite thinking camera in Godard’s film, what leads a plot to develop in the Apichatpong foregrounds the banality of contemporary literature and film treated urban construction. His industrialized here. sequence foregrounds the technologies of production and also the inferior role of Could this analysis be conducted with production in the realm of visibility, since similar results in the cities of other the development of the city builds and contemporary writers or filmmakers? constrains the vision of urban subjects. In Sure. But in some literary circles, all roads the urban sequences projected in lead to the postmodern New York of Don Mysterious Objects at Noon and in Delillo and Paul Auster, the provincial Syndromes and a Century, Apichatpong subject’s arrival in an urban Paris passed demonstrates that the cinema’s attempt to down by Stendhal, or the new globalized inscribe the city is a process of selective Asia of Haruki Murakami. There is an imaging, and that a photo-album, shot urgent need for contemporary literature to sequence, or manipulation of space relies understand film, and there is an urgent on the desire to see. need to look at the projection of cities in languages marginalized in global literary Conclusion discourse.

The similarity between cinematic modes This article’s selection of literature and of encountering urban life with the literary films treated above was premised upon inscription outlined in the first half of this their unique “aesthetic,” their means of article resonates through a politics of arranging a city that appears to a subject aesthetics: a mode of assembly, of life and that sees through the frames of urban

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forms. The development of an urban Publishing Ltd. problem, that is the centerpiece for the emergence of the political, calls for a Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The return to the reality of a fictional world Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh that usurps an aesthetic means to depict it. Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. This is why the relationship between the Minneapolis: University of Minnesota sentence-images of literature and film Press. remains a significant means of treating the perpetual development of the urban Elliot, Kamilla. 2003. Rethinking the landscape. The conjoining of text and Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: image, through either the written graphic Cambridge University Press. or the moving picture, assigns poetic diversity to its underlying construction, a Hutangkoon, Parithat. 2002. Flames of space that pluralizes our ability to see. Love, Grounds of Regret. In

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