Subversive Saturday: Ashes (2012)
Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Country: Thailand
Genre: Short
Watch It: Here
Editor’s note: The following review is a continuation of Matthew Blevins’ Subversive Saturdays series.
Western middle-class thinking is permeated with an arrogance and certainty of an objective linear truth. We want to reduce every decision in to something clearly defined with black and white implications as we carry out what we falsely believe to be a linear progression through our relatively short lives where there are clearly defined cause and effect relationships between what was and what will come to be. It is through these arrogant reductions that we attach moral implications to actions, because there is one clearly defined path and anyone that strays from that path will reap the negative consequences of their betrayal of the uniform narrative of humanity. Perhaps this reductive and reactionary thinking is at the heart of our cultural affinity toward conventional narrative structure. By falsely applying reductive cause and effect relationships to every choice and decision, we try to sloppily wedge our existence in to a three-act structure that it clearly doesn’t fit in to. Meanwhile financial institutions collapse and society continues to evolve through the accidental consequences of our own myopic thinking. It doesn’t matter how many times we are proven wrong by the unintended consequences of our actions, we still hold on to this limited linear thinking that clearly doesn’t accurately describe the way that a life actually unfolds.
The recent conversion to digital filmmaking and subsequent (possibly temporary) death of celluloid is one such example of the reductive nature of “narrative” thinking. Our environments are paired down to recognizable elements as we unconsciously train our senses to ignore extraneous information that is unrelated to our linear assessment of the world. Digital filmmaking pairs down the unquantifiable elements that make film beautiful in to clearly defined sets of ones and zeros, pluses and minuses, truths and untruths, as though an image or idea can be succinctly encapsulated in to something that can be easily identified and commoditized. This is why rebellious revelers of poetic truth like Apichatpong Weerasethakul are so important in retaining the appropriate amount of metaphysical mysticism in our thoughts and dreams. With his rebellion against the pervasiveness of digital filmmaking and support of poetic realism that can only be captured in an analogue format as it is wide open to the nuances that exist in the natural world (I appreciate the irony of a statement like this coming from someone that experiences most film through digital means of conveyance, but I’m not allowing my own hypocrisy detract from the sentiment). His support of the LomoKino camera and collaborative efforts with MUBI are an act of rebellion against the polemic reductions of digital film. Artistic vision should not be quantified and reduced to a series of recognizable elements. It should speak the language of our dreams and revel in the unidentifiable. One should not be alienated by their inability to condense the experience in to clumsy words or even concise thoughts as it the mystery of the intangible that ultimately defines art.
His support of the LomoKino camera and collaborative efforts with MUBI are an act of rebellion against the polemic reductions of digital film.
In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new experimental short, Ashes, Joe (reductive nickname, ironic considering the focus of this article, but names are inherently reductive) rebels against the restricting confines of objective narrative through the use of an analogue medium, alienating framerates, and lack of a clearly defined narrative that flows with obtuse and inarguable linearity from past to present. Instead he speaks an artistic language of poetic truths, and in this language he captures the way that thoughts manifest themselves as nebulous and inseparable components in the human mind uncorrupted by its own tendency to serialize images and thought to present clear cause and effect relationships. Rather than trying to reduce thoughts in to something easily digested, he evokes more accurate truths that are far easier to feel but nearly impossible to quantify.
He begins his film with looming darkness and the sounds of insects droning in the background, carrying out existences that are indifferent to the concerns of humankind. A man walks his dog through the living landscapes of the third world, the rooster crows signaling the break of dawn, and then we are instantly transported to magic hour light that bathes the brown landscapes in ethereal beauty. His use of non-objective framerates both alienate the viewer and illustrate film for the progression of isolated images that it is really is. Night creeps in with its hushed orchestra of nocturnal fauna, and we drift in to sleep that will erase the day that was to replace it with the day that is to come. Ironically, I have just described a linear progression of time, but the annihilation of time is an entirely different animal than the annihilation of narrative. One can still attack a system of thought while operating just within the borders of its restricting confines.
The literal signs of civil unrest line the concrete constructs of modern civilization, beautifully encapsulating the artist’s tenuous relationship with the rest of humanity.
Joe then takes his camera to the city, filling the frames with the silent chaos of hallowed grounds that have been manipulated by man from every vantage that the eye is capable of perceiving. The literal signs of civil unrest line the concrete constructs of modern civilization, beautifully encapsulating the artist’s tenuous relationship with the rest of humanity. The artist is simultaneously attracted and repelled by the rest of civilization. It is the artist’s calling to exist within a civilization and take the punishments that are constantly doled out by people that are falsely comforted by their objective thinking. Despite this alienation, the mysterious driving forces behind these comforting falsities live within every human that has ever dreamed. They may disregard the gift of dreams as extraneous nonsense that distracts from their objective existence, but the capacity for abstract thought exists in every mind that allows itself to listen carefully.
We are then assaulted by a myriad of greens that are as diverse as the perceivable color spectrum. Despite this diversity, we reduce the information in to the easily definable categories of “green” or “plants” or “leaves” or any other simple categorization that deprives us of the unfettered diversity and beauty of the progression of images on display.
We are then assaulted by a myriad of greens that are as diverse as the perceivable color spectrum. Despite this diversity, we reduce the information in to the easily definable categories of “green” or “plants” or “leaves” or any other simple categorization that deprives us of the unfettered diversity and beauty of the progression of images on display. The mechanical sounds of film sprockets being forcefully pulled through a projector are introduced in to the soundtrack as a droning metronome, permanently beholden to the restricting confines of objective linear time. The sound reminds us that despite the power of film as an art that holds the capacity to destroy our ideas about conventional narrative and time progression, it is still a finite form of expression that inevitably has a beginning, middle, and ending. One must load the first frame in to the projector so the succession of frames can carry the film to its conclusion. Perhaps that is at the heart of our affinity toward conventional narrative structure. If the physical medium has a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end then so to should the content of the artistic expression contained within that medium. Or perhaps poetic truths are painful reminders of the hypocritical transient constructs of civilization and the necessary evils that we must endure as a result of the majority rule of objective thought.
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http://twitter.com/NextProjection Christopher Misch
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