Dispositif, ghost, and prosopopoeia : audible materiality of memories in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s recent feature films since 2010 (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Mekong Hotel, Cemetery of Splendor, and Memoria) through Michel Chion’s sensuous and interdisciplinary approach to sound and image. Prioritizing sound to image, it looks at how such alchemy could trigger the interplay between sound and image and shape various perceptions. Inheriting the sonic practice of amplifying the ambient sounds to create undulating rhythms and sensory immersion, Apichatpong’s films deprivilege the anthropocentrism of human voices to the ambient sounds, thus opening up a liminal space of permeable thresholds where past and present, living and dead, human and the anthropomorphic, the natural and the spectral could go across the boundaries and coexist in harmony. Through his audiovisual aesthetics regarding how temporality registers auditory impression and how sound shapes visual perception, Apichatpong’s films facilitate various memories and the agency of voice through the rhetoric of prosopopoeia and ventriloquism, representing an audible and visible materiality of how it sounds to remember. Following his creative trajectories, this dissertation also argues that Apichatpong has developed his ontology of sound that the intermedial, from the animistic jungle to characters as the sonic flesh of cinema, is gradually dispelled and subverting the audiovisual perceptions that the visual becomes the shadow cast by the truth of sound.