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Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a native of Khon Kaen in Northeast Thailand, a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, and twice a Cannes prize winner. This unusual trajectory defines his auteur identity, and has led one US critic to dub his distinct film style “village surreal”, an epithet which marks him out from Bangkok contemporaries of Thai cinema. When his second feature Sut saneha/Blissfully Yours (2002) won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2002 Cannes film festival, Apichatpong began to gain international recognition as a young filmmaker of significance. Within Thailand this recognition remained limited to a minority of the cinephile audience. However, the prestigious Jury prize from Cannes two years later for his follow-up film Sat pralat/ Tropical Malady (2004) has begun to introduce the director’s name if not his films to a wider public. Local media interest has emphasized the accolade, a Thai success on the world stage, over and above the particular merits of the films themselves. When Tropical Malady was briefly released in only three cinemas in Bangkok, the tabloid-style Thailanguage Khao Sod praised it for having “crossed the water to win a prize at Cannes to the delight of all Thais”.2 Elsewhere in the media, a well-known columnist for the middlebrow Manager Online (internet edition newspaper) expressed admiration for the young filmmaker despite confessing that she could not meet the challenge of the film’s form, a characteristically paradoxical sensibility that Apichatpong appears to provoke.3 In this respect, he has the unusual distinction of being a national figure whose creative efforts are nonetheless considered irrelevant to Thai public life. As the leading figure of an emergent mode of alternative Thai filmmaking sustained primarily by transnational cinephilia, Apichatpong’s cinema provides a sharp contrast to the bourgeois heritage cinema exemplified by Suriyothai (dir. Chatrichalerm Yukhol 2001), a warrior-queen biopic made at the behest of Queen Sirikit, the functioning of which as a prestigious cultural commodity in Thailand is premised upon the hyperbolic conviction of its own international significance. Despite whatever claim to international “artistic” importance the film’s producers make, this fantasy of world-class glory (figured in this case in the form of the premature expectation of Oscars triumph in hagiographic media discourse on the film) is conjured up by the film’s promoters for domestic mass consumption, and sustains itself in the absence of substantial acclaim and 5 Blissfully Whose? Jungle Pleasures, Ultra-modernist Cinema and the Cosmopolitan Thai Auteur May Adadol Ingawanij and Richard Lowell MacDonald1 120 May Adadol Ingawanij and Richard Lowell MacDonald interest from international distributors, critics and audiences (May Adadol 2007a, chap. 6). In contrast, Apichatpong’s whole oeuvre and identity as a filmmaker is premised on the self-conscious marginality of his practice within Thailand, and its appreciation by institutions of transnational art and avant-garde cinephilia in North America and, to a lesser extent, Europe. From the outside looking in, Apichatpong is Thailand’s most significant filmmaker (Clarke 2004). This paper explores Apichatpong’s trajectory as an alternative filmmaker as a mode of cosmopolitanism exercised through education. This identity of the cosmopolitan cultural producer opposes itself to what might be called the cosmopolitanism of the masses lived through consumption. In eclectically drawing on the North American and European traditions of avant-garde and art cinema (as well as increasingly on the popular tradition of Thai cinema), Apichatpong’s mode of cultural practice constitutes a kind of contact zone (Pratt 1992) with the West which is particularly dependent on transnational cinephilia for its visibility and perpetuation. Drawing on Raymond Williams and Perry Anderson’s writings on the conjuncture of modernism in the West, we characterize this contact zone as an encounter between the dissident Thai bourgeois cultural producer and transnational ultra-modern enclaves committed to preserving the ideals of avantgarde and art cinema (Williams 1989, P. Anderson 1984). Our interest lies in exploring how this encounter structures the attempt to articulate an alternative sphere of cultural production in Thailand, which desires to assert its autonomy from the domestic mass market. We end by speculating that the success with which Apichatpong negotiates this encounter may have a decisively neutralising effect on how his transgressive cinema, and self-fashioning, have been received in Thailand. Khon Kaen-Chicago-Cannes In many interviews, Apichatpong’s self-presentation involves a narrative in which his potential as a filmmaker began to be realized at the point of his liberation from the cultural influences and condescension of...

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