Primitive Installation
FILM
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Primitive
2009
Duration:
The various videos made at Nabua, like my feature films, are impressions of light and memory. There are natural illuminations from the sun and from fire. The lights seep through the doors and windows and burn the rice fields. There are artificial ones like fluorescent tubes and LED lights like dots of recollections. And there are simulated bolts of lightning that destroy the peaceful landscape and unearth the spirits. As in the book A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Primitive is about reincarnation and transformation. It’s a celebration of destructive force in nature and in us that burns in order to be reborn and mutate.
Primitive
Duration 29'34"
2 synchronised screens
A few weeks after the spaceship has been built, the teens have adopted it as a place to drink and sleep. Weerasethakul documents this integration and makes a fictional narrative with them. The film progresses from evening into night, presenting various kinds of lights. The fiction merges with candid portraits of the teens playing with fireworks and military flares.
Nabua
Duration 9'11"
A documentation of Nabua altered into a field of lightning. The film, in the manner of an old sci-fi or horror movie, shows a set of mini-explosions creating a synchronised series of bolts of lightning like a downpour of bullets from the sky. The flashes of light reveal the surroundings, then the ground with smoke, dust, and silence.
Making of the Spaceship
Duration 28'13"
The working men, the animals and the rain orchestrated this video portraying a month long spaceship-making process.
A Dedicated Machine
Duration 1'00"
Nabua’s spaceship as an ideally manufactured vessel slowly lifts off from the ground and flutters in the air for a moment. Then it moves back down to the earth. This loop portrays a never-really-taking-off spaceship.
An Evening Shoot
Duration 4'10"
A group of teens gather at a house near the rice field for the shooting of an unknown movie. Wearing army costumes, they practice with their gun, one by one, and point it at a young man, walking in the distance, who reincarnates miraculously after being shot.
I'm Still Breathing
Duration 11'00"
Music video
A Thai band, Modern Dog, was invited to Nabua for the making of a music video for one of their songs, I’m Still Breathing. The teens are together in the village street and start to run, some of them kicking the smoking balls and throwing them into the moving crowd. The video is a celebration of exaltation and the release of tension, echoing Thailand’s political atmosphere.
Nabua Song
Duration 4'12"
Music video
Petch, one of the young men of Nabua, composed and plays this song about his village written to commemorate the first shoot-out between the army and the farmer communists 43 years before. The song is combined with an image of Kamgiang, Petch’s friend, whose grandfather was killed by the soldiers in the field not far from his home.