Issue 36
Vanishing Points

Memory, photographic images and memories in the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul

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  • Milagros Expósito Barea
Milagros Expósito Barea
Universidad de Sevilla
Bio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.63700/1059

Published 2023-07-31

Keywords

  • Apichatpong Weerasethakul,
  • Cinema,
  • Memory,
  • Memories,
  • Photography

How to Cite

Expósito Barea, M. (2023). Memory, photographic images and memories in the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. L’Atalante. Journal of Film Studies, (36), 235–250. https://doi.org/10.63700/1059

Copyright (c) 2023 L'Atalante. Journal of film studies

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The filmography of the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is characterised by a constant quest to represent and interpret memory and memories, which constitute the main leitmotif of his films. A case in point is Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), in which a man is able to remember all his previous incarnations. In all of his films we can find various forms of memory, ranging from autobiographical or individual memory, for which he uses his own recollections in a manner comparable to Bachelard’s “psychogeography” (O’Keane, 2021b: 121), to communicative and cultural memory as proposed by Assmann (2008), or Landsberg’s “prosthetic memory” (2004). This article analyses some of the films by this director in which he combines cinema’s ability to represent an image as an internal subjectivised experience and the notion of cinema as memory.

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