Table Of ContentNocturnal Fabulations
Ecology, Vitality and Opacity in the
Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Immediations
Series Editor: SenseLab
“Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic
thought has done its best, the wonder remains”
– A.N. Whitehead
The aim of the Immediations book series is to prolong the wonder sustaining
philosophic thought into transdisciplinary encounters. Its premise is that concepts
are for the enacting: they must be experienced. Thought is lived, else it expires.
It is most intensely lived at the crossroads of practices, and in the in-between of
individuals and their singular endeavors: enlivened in the weave of a relational
fabric. Co-composition.
“The smile spreads over the face, as the face fits itself onto the smile”
– A. N. Whitehead
Which practices enter into co-composition will be left an open question, to be
answered by the Series authors. Art practice, aesthetic theory, political theory,
movement practice, media theory, maker culture, science studies, architecture,
philosophy … the range is free. We invite you to roam it.
Nocturnal Fabulations
Ecology, Vitality and Opacity in the
Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Érik Bordeleau, Toni Pape, Ronald Rose-Antoinette
and Adam Szymanski
With an introduction by Erin Manning
OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS
London 2017
First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2017
Copyright © 2017 Érik Bordeleau, Erin Manning, Toni Pape,
Ronald Rose-Antoinette and Adam Szymanski
This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution
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Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read
more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
All images (except figure 3) courtesy of Kick the Machine
Cover Illustration © 2017 Kick the Machine
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Print ISBN 978-1-78542-040-5
PDF ISBN 978-1-78542-041-2
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Contents
Introduction 7
Erin Manning
1. The Vitality of Fabulation: Improvisation and Clichés in
Mysterious Object at Noon and The Adventure of Iron Pussy 20
Toni Pape
2. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and the
Ecosophic Aesthetics of Peace 48
Adam Szymanski
3. Percolating the Elusive: Into Apichatpong’s Dreamscape 80
Érik Bordeleau
4. Of That Which Gives Life, Again 117
Ronald Rose-Antoinette
Erin Manning
Introduction
Intercessors are essential. Creation is all about
intercessors. Without them, there is no work.
Gilles Deleuze (1995: 125, translation modified)
When the Immediations book series at Open Humanities Press
was launched, it was done with Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the
intercessor1 in mind. We were looking for a way to give voice to
a kind of collaboration that would work from within the weave
of research and writing, a collaboration that would give texture
to a voice (or a multiplicity of voice) toward a conversation to
come. A conversation to come is one that invents interlocutors,
one that refuses to know in advance where the encounter will
lead. Deleuze calls this a minoritarian discourse: “We must catch
someone fabulating, catch them ‘in the act’ of fabulating. Then a
minoritarian discourse, with two or many speakers, takes shape…
To catch fabulation in the act is to seize the movement of the
constitution of a people. A people never preexists (translation
modified)” (Deleuze 1995: 125–6).
Nocturnal Fabulations: Ecology, Vitality and Opacity in the Cinema
of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, an eight-handed, four-bodied book
by Érik Bordeleau, Ronald Rose-Antoinette, Toni Pape and Adam
Szymanski, is an essay in intercessing. This is not a book that is
simply “about” the work of the cinematographer Apichatpong
8 Erin Manning
Weerasethakul, though it does engage his work in detail. It is a
book that deeply questions what else might be at stake in setting
up the conditions for collaboration across two genres – cinema
and writing. It is a book that asks what else this uneasy interstice
of image-thought can look like when it moves onto the page.
This thinking-with can be understood as an engagement with
how the films of Apichatpong themselves propose collective
ecologies of thought and how these ecologies foreground new
ways of seeing the image as a movement of thought. This gesture
of thinking with and across image and text, of being moved by
a work that intercesses two discrete but intertwined perceptual
processes, developing vocabulary not to “explain” the work but
to reactivate it by other means, proposes a wholly different ethos
of engagement. Refusing to position itself outside Apichatpong’s
work in an effort to situate it once and for all within a genre,
or within a historical period, or order it using a theoretical
method, what Nocturnal Fabulations proposes instead is a direct
engagement with the forces of thought that move through
the work and make it work. It is an attempt, in writing, to see
where else these forces can lead. Apichatpong Weerasethakul is
a perfect match for such a project: there is always a sense, in
watching his films, that he is a participant in a process that has
yet to quite unfold, and that his work is, before all else, dedicated
to a people (and a conversation) yet to come.
Apichatpong describes his work as “open cinema”, and often
seems at odds with questions interviewers pose, uneasy with
their probing into plot sequence and intentionality: “Sometimes
you don’t need to understand everything to appreciate a certain
beauty,” he tells one interviewer. “And I think the film operates
in the same way. It’s like tapping into someone’s mind. The
thinking pattern is quite random, jumping here and there like a
monkey” (Rose 2010). In another interview: “I believe that cinema
has its own life,” and then, when the interviewer prods a bit
more: “Yeah, but the more I explain, the more the movie loses
