A Letter To Uncle Boonme
Film
Comment Vol.45 No.5, New York, 2009
(Opening
excerpt only currently published online)
The advent of phonology – of recorded sound as medium and practice – is a unique moment in technological history. For just as the 20th C augured a peak of industrialised process and mechanical actuality, so the recording of the human voice channelled the spirit realm into the new machine age. Most reports of the introduction of audio devices like the telephone, phonograph and radio mention audiences perceiving the disembodied voice as a spirit – a vox sans corpus. The effect persists even today. Audiences conjure the recorded voice as an ethereal being irrespective of its mortality.
A multi-platform installation by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Primitives (2009), investigates spirits rooted in the Northern Thai township of Nambua which borders Laos. Via photographs, single screen projections with headphone playback, and two discrete shorts, the project collectively documents and stages issues of cultural identity. The greater strength in one of the shorts, A Letter To Uncle Boonme, lies in how issues of regionalised spirituality are audiovisually rendered as cinematic effect.
