The Cinema of the Porous World

A film by Apichatpong (mercifully known as "Joe") does not obey the rules of Western narrative, and it is not trying to. Tropical Malady splits in two — a tender gay romance and then a wordless jungle myth of a soldier and a shape-shifting shaman-tiger — and refuses to explain how they connect, because in the worldview of the film they do not need connecting; they are the same reality seen twice. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives lets the ghost of a dead wife and the red-eyed monkey-spirit form of a lost son appear at a dying man's table with complete naturalness, the supernatural folded into the everyday without horror or wonder, simply as how the world is. The boundaries are porous: life flows into death, human into animal, this life into the last, and the films move at the unhurried pace of someone who has all the time in the world because time itself is not a line.

His formal home is slow cinema and the time-image — the long take, the held duration, the camera that waits — but he inflects it with something distinctly his own, a Thai and Buddhist sense of temporality in which reincarnation, karma, and the cycle of being make linear time an illusion. Where European slow cinema often holds duration to confront alienation or the everyday, Apichatpong holds it to dissolve the self into a larger, cyclical, animate cosmos. The patience is the same; the metaphysics is different. He shares Tarkovsky's faith that the held shot can reach the spiritual, but his spirituality is not the agonized Christian search of Stalker — it is a serene, animist, Buddhist acceptance, the camera waiting not for a revelation but for the natural surfacing of the other world that is always already here.

This makes him a profound expansion of what the time-image can do. Deleuze's seer was severed from action, left only to perceive; Apichatpong's characters are severed from the Western certainties about what is even real, left to perceive a world far stranger and more continuous than the rational frame allows. The porousness is the content and the slow form is its precondition: only by holding the shot long enough, by refusing the cut that would impose a boundary, can the film let the dead walk in, the past life surface, the tiger and the soldier become one. The slowness is not an obstacle to the magic; it is the door through which the magic enters.

His significance is the demonstration that the most advanced contemporary art cinema can be built from the oldest non-Western ways of seeing — that the time-image and slow cinema, traditions of European modernism, can be opened onto an animist, Buddhist, cyclical cosmos and made to hold things Western narrative cannot. Apichatpong took the patient camera of slow cinema and pointed it at a porous world where the living and the dead and the human and the animal flow into one another, and found that the held shot, given enough time, can film the boundaries dissolving. He is the dreamer of contemporary cinema, and his dream is older than cinema itself.

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The line: Tropical Malady → Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives → Cemetery of Splendour

This line crosses:

• Too Much Time — Apichatpong is a central figure of slow cinema, but he opens its held duration onto an animist, Buddhist cosmos the European tradition never reached.
• What Comes After the Time-Image? — his porous world is one of the strongest cases for the time-image's living afterlife, the held shot dissolving the boundaries of the real.

Read through: writing on Apichatpong and "contemplative cinema" · critical work on Buddhist temporality and the time-image.

A note on the argument: Apichatpong's porous-boundary worlds, his slow-cinema form, and his Buddhist/animist sensibility are documented. The framing of him as opening the time-image onto a non-Western, cyclical cosmos — the slowness as the door through which the other world enters — is this essay's reading.