August 28, 2022
Apichatpong Weerasethakul – Memoria (2021)
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Dear Apichatpong Weerasethakul,
I saw your film Memoria. Thank you for the film and the experience of watching it. Your film was so exceptional that I felt compelled to share some of the feelings it evoked in me.
When I walked out of the theatre after the screening of Memoria, it was a beautiful day in May. I watched your film alone, even though there were also others in the audience. After the screening, on the street outside the theatre, each viewer went their separate ways.
I felt a strange sense of despair and powerlessness after your film. The characters were unable to escape their anxious state. They couldn’t get out of the film. And I couldn’t get into it. I wasn’t given a role.
Was your film meant to be closed off?
Perhaps the sense of hopelessness stemmed from the unique style of cinematic narration. Why are there no close-ups in Memoria? There are no faces shown in medium close-up or close-up. The tightest shot in your film seems to be a medium shot. You’ve limited the visual expression of the film strongly in this way.
You surely know Charles Chaplin’s famous quote: “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”
Did you want to follow Chaplin’s idea and keep me at a distance from the characters so that their sorrow and distress wouldn’t come too close? Perhaps you aimed to maintain a lighter impression that way. Did you think close-ups would make their sorrow too visible?
I felt sad about the complete absence of close-ups.
When visual expression is sparse, the soundtrack becomes overemphasized. Sound gains an added sense of meaning. However, the disturbing bang that the main character hears in her mind, I can’t see any other meaning beyond its oppressive impact. The bang is harder to interpret than speech. If the protagonist had heard voices in her head, she would have been sent to a psychiatrist. And then the story would have taken a very different turn. Perhaps that, too, could have become a sad story.
The dialogue in your film isn’t the kind that fosters understanding between people. Instead, it’s withered and obscure. Dialogue is stuck. Conversation doesn’t flow. The dialogue is incomplete, vague, misleading.
So it’s no wonder that the main character seems to become sad. Or would “powerless” be a better word?
It’s hard to say when I can’t see the faces more closely. The protagonist remains a mystery to me. The other characters remain mysterious as well. Mystery is fascinating, but at the same time it’s frightening, because it can feel dangerous. When close-ups are missing, I’m deprived of the most effective means of unlocking the mystery of a character in a film. I nearly have to give up.
But giving up in the face of an unresolved mystery would also mean giving up on the exploration of others, and of ourselves, that gives life its meaning and interest. Our quest for exploration is to solve the mystery of being human and the mystery of life itself. That goal creates the forces that sustain life. We need those forces constantly. Every day. We move forward in this journey by communicating and interacting with one another through speech, looks, gestures, glances, actions, writing, and using various means of creative expression.
If we don’t understand others and don’t feel understood by them, or even by ourselves, the mystery of the human being will not be revealed. A mystery that remains only a mystery leads to loneliness and a loss of life’s meaning. When one loses hope of reaching understanding, the feeling of powerlessness echoes in the mind like a stale bang. That sound lacks space. It is entirely sealed within its own airtight isolation.
We must talk in order to understand and to be understood. We must stretch the boundaries of speech and language. We must express ourselves through gestures and facial expressions. We must keep speaking even when we hit a wall. Let us continue along the path cleared by Ludwig Wittgenstein: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must not stop speaking. Creative expression that sustains life should not be silenced. If speech cannot carry us forward in understanding, we must strive through using creativity in all its forms. Interactions that promote understanding should not be cut off lightly, because blocking understanding entirely can make interaction destructive to life.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must make a film!
In your film, there is very little physical contact between people. No handshakes. No hugs. Intimacy seems to be light-years away, even though your film evokes some hints or faint hopes of it between characters. The alienation from touch is so extreme that near the end of the film when one person touches another’s hand, it only causes anxiety for both of them. Some strange, telepathic transfer and sharing of memories takes place. In that moment, I see only suffering on the protagonist’s face. And even that doesn’t require a close-up. A medium shot is enough.
The characters’ sight lines are also ambiguous. Since there are no close-ups, I can’t tell if the characters are looking at one another. When you have abandoned that traditional cinematic tool – using the sight line to draw the viewer in the film – I feel staying further away from the characters, further away from understanding. Without the intensity of eyeline closer to the camera, it’s harder to feel empathy. Your characters look away so much. They look past me. They don’t realize that a look a little closer to me, and thus also to others in the audience, could spark some understanding within us. Instead, I am left only to guess.
During some of the long, static takes, I remain acutely aware of sitting in a movie theatre. My attention drifts, and I begin to think of other things besides the things on the screen. My thoughts wander to everyday matters in my own life, work matters, financing matters, relationship matters, well-being matters, not-well-being matters. During those long takes, I don’t find myself delving into the film’s themes or meaning of the things.
Was that your intention too?
The beautiful landscape shots in your film have a certain bleakness and grayness. Dark clouds in the sky. Strangely, the continuity of wide shots creates a claustrophobic feeling, even though one would expect the opposite. The wide shots emphasize my separation from the film. The landscape shots don’t help with that. The dark clouds in the sky offer no comfort.
And yet, I understand that your film is about the importance of individuality and communication. All those feelings I described about the distance I experienced in the movie theatre highlight the very problem created by that distance. I understand that by keeping me far from the characters, you are actually expressing how important it is to get closer.
Still, while watching the film, I never manage to get closer.
If you would even briefly take me closer, that might open a path out of the sealed space I inhabit in the theatre – and perhaps also a path out of the sealed space in which your characters are. Each of them is even in their own sealed space. Just a few close-ups of faces would be accents, deviations, breaks from the pattern. They would offer the possibility of escaping that prison of separation, from which it is so hard to break free. It’s hard for each of us. We need escape routes from the all-encompassing sense of powerlessness into which all increasingly sink. Sink deep into themselves.
You have to go close in order to see a person’s uniqueness. You have to go close so that the specialness of every human being is highlighted. When we go close to the face, to the look, we see the eyes. We see expressions. We see the mouth. We see whether someone is smiling or whether someone is serious. We see whether someone is crying. That’s how we see what someone is feeling.
In film it’s much easier to come close to a stranger than it is in real life. That is something quite wonderful in film.
Maybe you wanted to turn the aesthetics of wide shots into tragedy. Did you want to flip Chaplin’s statement around? Did you want to show that life in long-shot is tragic, not comic? But since your film lacks close-ups, I can’t see whether life in close-up is comic. I can imagine it wouldn’t have been particularly comic in your film. However, Chaplin knew that close-up contains both tragedy and comedy, both sorrow and joy. At the end of City Lights, the close-up of Chaplin’s face expresses not sorrow but the joy of life. Togetherness and understanding are possible. For Chaplin too, life in close-up can be joyful. Even tears can be tears of joy.
With your film, you told me that a viewer’s distance from a film is just as harmful as people’s distance from one another in real life. I felt lonely while watching your film, even though there were other people in the movie theatre. Loneliness is distressing even when experienced in a movie theatre. In real life, outside the theatre, I already knew it was distressing. Each viewer goes their separate ways.
You too probably know how miserable loneliness is. Yes, loneliness is destructive for a human being.
Apichatpong, thank you for your film, which inspired these reflections.
I would have one more request. If you plan to continue using the aesthetics of wide shots, could you please, among those wide shots, include at least a few close-ups of the characters’ faces? In those few close-ups, the characters would look at each other for a while, and a barely noticeable smile would pass across their faces. Then perhaps, while watching your new film, I too could get a role in it, when those fleeting close-ups, with their hints of a smile, could open a path out of loneliness.
Human’s regards,
Sam Kris
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