After 6มรดก 6 ตุลา

After 6 มรดก 6 ตุลา (‘the legacy of 6th Oct.’), a new play by Natthapat Mardech, will be staged at T.Nam Charoen Playhouse in Bangkok later this month. Performances will take place on 11th, 12th, and 13th September.

The play is set in 1980, four years after the 6th October 1976 coup, a time when military rule had become the new normal. The drama’s four characters are lawyers who meet to discuss how to eradicate the legacy of the coup.

After 6 is Natthapat’s second play about the events of 1976. Last year, he directed Rashomon 6 ตุลา (‘Rashomon 6th Oct.’), which was also set four years after the coup.

Tickets for After 6 cost ฿112, a reference to the lèse-majesté law, which is article 112 of the Thai criminal code. Last year, advance tickets for Prapassorn Konmuang’s play The Ordinary (คนธรรมดา) also cost ฿112, for the same symbolic reason.

Chiang Mai International Fantastic Film Festival 2026The Look of Dreams

The Chiang Mai International Fantastic Film Festival 2026 runs from 20th to 27th September at the Central Chiang Mai Airport branch of Major Cineplex, and its theme is The Look of Dreams. (Last year’s festival was held on the exact same dates in 2025.)

Highlights of CIFAN this year include Hauntology: Apichatpong’s Philosophical Ghosts, a programme of short films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. There will also be a screening of Apichatpong’s Mekong Hotel (แม่โขงโฮเต็ล), which was first shown as the opening film of the 10th World Film Festival of Bangkok (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์โลกแห่งกรุงเทพฯ ครั้งที่ 10).

Hauntology features five short films: Ghost of Asia, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (จดหมายถงลงบญม), Phantoms of Nabua (ผีนาบัว), Ashes, and Blue (ตะวันดับ). (Last year’s What the Doc! film festival also featured a selection of Apichatpong’s short films, including A Letter to Uncle Boonmee and Ashes.)

Ghost of Asia was previously shown at Metaphors, Indy Spirit Project and Apichatpong on Video Works. A Letter to Uncle Boonmee was screened at Siam Paragon and the Thai Film Archive in 2010, and at the 7th World Film Festival of Bangkok (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์โลกแห่งกรุงเทพฯ ครั้งที่ 7) in 2009. Phantoms of Nabua was shown at the 26th Thai Short Film and Video Festival (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์สั้น ครั้งที่ 26), and at The Serenity of Madness. Ashes was also shown at The Serenity of Madness. Blue was shown at Ghost:2561.

A City Full of Hawks: On the Waterfront Seventy Years Later — Still the Great American Contender

Stephen Rebello wrote a thirty-page feature on the making of Psycho for Cinefantastique (vol. 16, no. 4–5), which he expanded into Alfred Hithcock and the Making of Psycho, a book that set a benchmark for behind-the-scenes film monographs. There aren’t too many books about the making of films that actually become films themselves, but Rebello’s Psycho book was the basis for the biopic Hitchcock.

Rebello’s book A City Full of Hawks: On the Waterfront Seventy Years Later — Still the Great American Contender, published last year, covers the making of Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront. As he says in his preface, the film is a five-star classic and Marlon Brando’s naturalistic performance in particular is one of the greatest in the history of cinema: “I hope to immerse you in every phase of the creation of one of the greatest, most important, and enduring movies ever made, featuring a towering central performance of such magnitude and genius that its impact and influence are still being felt today.”

Kazan directed Brando on stage and screen in A Streetcar Named Desire, but his reputation was tarnished in 1952 when he named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee, betraying former colleagues by identifying them as communists. On the Waterfront — in which Brando’s character Terry Malloy testifies to a crime commission — can be interpreted as Kazan’s defence of his HUAC testimony, and in the book’s final sentence Rebello concludes that Kazan’s betrayal was inexcusable.

Kazan’s autobiography A Life includes his account of shooting On the Waterfront and Richard Koszarski’s recent Keep ’em in the East features a brief production history of the film, but A City Full of Hawks is the first full-length book on the making of On the Waterfront. Its title and subtitle are both taken from lines spoken by Malloy: “You know this city’s full of hawks?” and, of course, his legendary monologue, “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody.”

On the Waterfront was shown at the Thai Film Archive earlier this year a part of their Blue Collar season. The film was released in a comprehensive blu-ray edition by the Criterion Collection.

What the Doc! 2

What the Doc! 2 — The International Documentary Film Festival Thailand (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์ สารคดีนานาชาติ แห่งประเทศไทย) — will take place in Bangkok from 3rd to 13th September, a year after the first What the Doc! festival. Screenings will be held at Century Sukhumvit, and at the new Doc Club and Friends cinema that’s due to open this month at Cloud 11. (After the closure of Doc Club and Pub in 2024, the venue has relocated to Cloud 11 under the new name Doc Club and Friends.) The festival will include Thunska Pansittivorakul’s new film Are We Monsters? (อสูร) at Century on 9th September, followed by a Q&A with Thunska.

What the Doc! 2 will also include the premiere of Buariyate Eamkamol’s Images of Fire (ร่องรอยไฟ), a self-reflexive short film in which he revisits the circumstances surrounding the killing of protesters by military snipers in April and May 2010. Buariyate’s film will be screened at Century on 7th September (followed by a Q&A with the director), and at Doc Club and Friends on 12th September.

The Dutch artist Armando coined the phrase ‘guilty landscapes’ to describe spaces that bore silent witness to past violence. Buariyate and other Thai directors have returned to these politically and emotionally charged locations as part of a reckoning with the unresolved trauma of 2010.

Images of Fire is Buariyate’s fourth film that touches on the 2010 violence, after A Fire 9 Kilometers Away, Isekai (อิเซไก), and Red Is the Orangest Colour. (Thai Cinema Uncensored discusses the representation of the April–May 2010 events by Thai filmmakers in more detail.)

What the Doc! 2’s poster also refers to the 2010 military crackdown: it features a portrait of one of those who died on 10th April 2010 (Maew), painted by Tawan Wattuya. The painting is from Tawan’s Red Faces series, shown at the Khon Kaen Manifesto (ขอนแก่น แมนิเฟสโต้) and Amnesia exhibitions in 2019.

The New York Times

A college basketball player has been awarded $9.25 million in damages against The New York Times, after winning a defamation case against the newspaper on 20th August. Kai Spears had filed the libel suit after the NYT wrongly alleged that he was a passenger in a car linked to a fatal shooting.

In the article — headlined “On Eve of Tournament, Fourth Alabama Player Is Placed at Shooting” and published on 16th March 2023 (p. B7) — Billy Witz wrote that the occupants of a car at the crime scene included “Kai Spears, a freshman walk-on whose presence at the scene had not previously been reported.” This is the first libel case the NYT has lost in more than fifty years.

Spider-Man:Brand New Day (ScreenX)

ScreenX was developed in South Korea in 2013, as a new type of immersive cinema format. The ScreenX system uses multiple projectors to fill the viewer’s peripheral vision by projecting images onto the walls on the left and right sides of the screen during some scenes. The technology was first demonstrated in Kim Jee-woon’s short film The X (더 엑스).

Since then, numerous South Korean and Hollywood films have been shown in the ScreenX format, though the ScreenX versions have all been created in-house by ScreenX themselves, using B-roll or CGI outpainting to produce the extra footage required for the peripheral images. The film studios were not involved in this retrofitting process.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the new film by Destin Daniel Cretton, marks the first time that ScreenX footage has been captured during a regular film shoot, integrating ScreenX into the production process from the start in an attempt to relaunch the format. (The closest equivalent is perhaps Christopher Nolan’s use of an IMAX 70mm camera for selected scenes in The Dark Knight, and Cretton has similarly used ScreenX cameras for only selected sequences.)

“紫禁城中静悄悄...”(‘all is quiet in the Forbidden City...’)

Chinese comic actor Guo Degang is under investigation after he altered the lyrics of a song he performed as part of the opera 濟公活佛 (‘Ji Gong, living Buddha’) at the Zhongnan Theatre in Wuhan on 24th July. Guo sang 弹起我心爱的土琵琶 (‘playing my beloved pipa’) and changed the original lyric “微山湖上静悄悄” (‘all is quiet on Weishan Lake’) to “紫禁城中静悄悄” (‘all is quiet in the Forbidden City’). Mocking patriotic symbols can lead to prosecution in China: in 2023, a talent agency was fined the equivalent of $2 million for a comedian’s joke about a military slogan.

The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan’s epic The Odyssey is the first film to be shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film. With The Dark Knight in 2008, Nolan became the first Hollywood director to shoot selected action scenes in the format, and he has done so ever since, with The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet, and Oppenheimer.

Other filmmakers have also used IMAX 70mm cameras for selected sequences, following Nolan’s lead, but the technology was always considered too noisy for dialogue scenes. IMAX created a large sound-proof blimp for The Odyssey, making it possible to use the large-format camera for the entire film.

IMAX in Thailand

Thailand’s first IMAX 70mm cinema, at Major Cineplex Ratchayothin in Bangkok, opened in 1998. The slightly larger Krungsri IMAX screen at Bangkok’s Siam Paragon opened in 2006, and both venues showed The Dark Knight in IMAX 70mm. (Ratchayothin and Paragon are the only Thai cinemas with true IMAX-format 1.43:1 screens.)

Ratchayothin converted to digital laser projection in 2010, though the Paragon cinema screened The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, and Dunkirk in IMAX 70mm. But Paragon’s 70mm projector repeatedly broke down during screenings of Tenet in 2020, and it has now been replaced with a digital laser projector.

The Ratchayothin and Paragon laser systems each use a single projector — the IMAX CoLa format — meaning that they are only capable of projecting a 1.9:1 aspect ratio image (almost identical to the 1.85:1 ratio of regular cinema screens). To fill the entire 1.43:1 IMAX screen, 70mm or dual-laser GT projectors are required.

Also, CoLa produces a 4k image, which is now the same resolution as many conventional cinemas. Dual-laser IMAX GT also has a 4k resolution, significantly less than the unsurpassed image quality of IMAX 70mm.

Thailand’s other IMAX venues use either the CoLa system or the similar XT single-laser format (which is also 4k), and have smaller 1.9:1 screens. This IMAX-lite setup is known informally as ‘LieMAX’, as it differs so much from the original 1.43:1 IMAX format.

On the Mark:A History of Punctuation from Ancient Egypt to the Emoticon

If you only read one book on punctuation, it should be On the Mark: A History of Punctuation from Ancient Egypt to the Emoticon by Florence Hazrat, which was published earlier this month. Previous books have covered the history of punctuation in Western literature (Pause and Effect by M.B. Parkes), and the history of English punctuation (Making a Point by David Crystal), though On the Mark is the history of the subject with the widest scope. (“The first global history of punctuation”, according to its publisher.)

Hazrat discusses the ancient origins of punctuation and its development not only in English but also in other European languages and even in Arabic. She cites some fascinating examples, including an early use of emoticons in the Polish newspaper Kurjer Warszawski (‘Warsaw courier’) that slightly predates a more famous example from Punch magazine. (The Polish emoticons were published on 5th March 1881, and those in Punch appeared twenty-five days later.) The book also includes an excellent bibliographic essay.

Sala LecturePorn

Artist Oat Montien began his presentation at the Sala Saneha cinema yesterday with a content advisory: anyone offended by images of frontal nudity should retreat to the venue’s bar. But given that his lecture was titled Porn, which was emblazoned like a banner headline on the event poster, everyone knew what to expect.

The trigger warning was tongue-in-cheek — and some of the film clips he played were literally tongue-in-cheek. Oat showed explicit extracts from The Devil (El Sartorio, one of the first hardcore films), Flower (a short film from 2017 by Matt Lambert), and James Bidgood’s underground film Pink Narcissus from 1971.

Oat’s lecture covered the history of porn in film and photography, from the early ‘stag reels’ of the 1900s to the ‘beefcake’ pin-ups of the 1950s and the ‘porno chic’ era of the 1970s. He explained how porn alternates between realism and fantasy, public and private, permissible and forbidden.

Pink Narcissus was the cornerstone of the lecture, and Oat highlighted its long-lasting stylistic influence. The film’s kitsch theatricality and dreamy opulence established a queer aesthetic that still exists today, not least in Oat’s own short films, such as Mochit and his ‘desert trilogy’ of Untie, Oasis (โอเอซิส), and Ravine.

The event was the first in the Sala Lecture series. The Bangkok arthouse cinema opened in March this year, and shows classic films (including Barry Lyndon) alongside selected new releases such as Morte Cucina (ครัวสาว).

Hard Core and Screening Sex, by Linda Williams, are the definitive academic studies of cinematic sex, and Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art is an essential survey of transgressive films. Thai Cinema Uncensored examines the history of sex in Thai film.