28 December 2020

The Role of the Scroll

The Role of the Scroll
The Role of the Scroll, by Thomas Forrest Kelly, is the first book to provide a history of scrolls as a medium for documenting and displaying text and images. As its subtitle (An Illustrated Introduction to Scrolls in the Middle Ages) suggests, the book is concerned mainly with medieval scrolls, though ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman scrolls are covered in the introduction.

Like most studies of medieval documents (such as surveys of illuminated manuscripts), the book’s focus is on European production, though the introduction has brief coverage of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Ethiopian, and Middle Eastern scrolls. However, the ‘Qingming Scroll’ (清明上河圖), perhaps China’s most famous painted scroll, is not discussed, and there are no illustrations of Middle Eastern or Japanese scrolls. (For a more detailed history of Japanese scrolls, see Dietrich Seckel’s book Emakimono.)

Scrolls are typically regarded as an ancient medium, superceded by the bound book, though Kelly argues that digital scrolling (browsing social media newsfeeds, for example) represents the return of the scroll: “We are now in the new age of the scroll. All you have to do is look at your computer screen, tablet, or e-reader, and just scroll down.” In addition to legal, devotional, and ceremonial scrolls, he also discusses the use of scrolls in literature and performance, though at under 200 pages this is not a comprehensive account.

An expanded history, with more coverage of Asian and Middle Eastern scrolls, will hopefully follow this introductory book. It could conceivably feature fold-out reproductions of famous scrolls, and should include a bibliography. (Kelly’s bibliography is currently available only online.) It could also discuss modern artistic uses of scrolls, such as moving panoramas, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road manuscript, and Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll performance.

The Wizard of Oz


The Wizard of Oz

The Technicolor musical The Wizard of Oz wasn’t originally considered a Christmas film, though for generations of British children it’s become an annual festive TV tradition. Its first UK television broadcast was on Christmas Day in 1975, and it’s been shown during the Christmas holiday almost every year since. It’s fitting, then, that Bangkok Screening Room will be showing The Wizard of Oz just after New Year, on 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 13th, 16th, and 17th January 2021.

The film has been shown at Bangkok Screening Room before, last year (as part of the Judy Garland Focus season) and in 2018. It also played during this year’s World Class Cinema (ทึ่ง! หนังโลก) season at the Scala, and at Cinema Winehouse in 2018. There was a sing-along screening at the Bangkok Community Theatre in 2013, and later that year it was shown as part of Jam Café’s Dark Side of the Rainbow double bill accompanied by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album.

18 December 2020

The Cost

The Cost: Trump, China, and American Revival, by Maria Bartiromo and James Freeman, was published a week before the US election. After reading a dozen books on the Trump presidency (the others being Rage, Fear, Fire and Fury, Inside Trump’s White House, The United States of Trump, A Very Stable Genius, Trump’s Enemies, The Trump White House, Too Much and Never Enough, The Room Where It Happened, and Team of Five), I sincerely hope that this is the last Trump book I’ll ever read.

Bartiromo, like most of her fellow Fox News anchors, asks the softest of softball questions whenever she interviews Trump on television. In the most egregious instance, on 29th November she conducted the first post-election TV interview with Trump, encouraging him to rehash a stream of conspiracy theories and lies about election fraud. Bartiromo and Freeman also interviewed Trump for their book; he refers to former House Speaker Paul Ryan as “a f______ disaster”, and says that he was on the verge of telling China: “Go f___ yourself”. [The authors censored the f-words.]

Unsurprisingly, Bartiromo and Freeman stick closely to the discredited Trumpian narrative, arguing that Trump was the victim of a deep-state conspiracy: “the abuse of federal investigative power against him is the greatest scandal of his era.” They also claim that the mainstream media is “unable or unwilling to report on Donald Trump objectively,” which is ironic given the biased, hagiographic nature of their own book.

12 December 2020

24th Short Film and Video Festival

24th Short Film and Video Festival
24th Short Film Marathon
24th Short Film and Video Festival
Give Us a Little More Time
Prelude of the Moving Zoo
The 24th Short Film and Video Festival (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์สั้นครั้งที่ 24) opens at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya on 14th December. More than 300 films were submitted, and screened alphabetically in a Short Film Marathon (หนังสั้นมาราธอน) from 3rd November to 10th December. Around 10% of those submissions were selected for the Short Film and Video Festival itself.

Highlights include Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s Give Us a Little More Time (ขอเวลาอีกไม่นาน), which premiered at the CityCity Gallery in Bangkok and was shown at the Marathon on 10th November. This rapid-fire video montage remixes and distills six years of mainstream press coverage of the military government, and was created from a six-volume collection of more than 1,000 newspaper collages. Its sarcastic title is a line from a propaganda song released by the junta, Returning Happiness to the Thai Kingdom (คืนความสุขให้ประเทศไทย).

Chulayarnnon’s film is screening in a programme titled These Kids Don’t Know Thai History (เด็กรุ่นใหม่ไม่รู้ประวัติศาสตร์), an ironic reference to a criticism unfairly directed towards young Thais with anti-establishment attitudes. The programme also includes Sorayos Prapapan’s Prelude of the Moving Zoo, which was shown at the Marathon on 13th November and was also screened yesterday at N22 in Bangkok. It documents the closure of Dusit Zoo in 2018, and begins subversively with a cylinder recording of the royal anthem, accompanied by footage of penguins seemingly standing to attention.

The These Kids Don’t Know Thai History programme will be shown on 21st December, and repeated on the last day of the Short Film and Video Festival, 27th December. Admission is free.

ANIMAL KINgDOM

Animal Kingdom
A House in Many Parts
Yellow Duck Against Dictatorship
Shadow and Act
Prelude of the Moving Zoo
A House in Many Parts (บ้านเเหวกศิลป์), the arts festival being held at various Bangkok venues from 1st to 16th December, continued yesterday at N22 with ANIMAL KINgDOM, a selection of short films programmed by Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa. The outdoor screening was divided into two sections: ANIMAL and KINgDOM (the lower-case ‘g’ indicates a double meaning: human kinship with animals, and the kingdom of Thailand).

The ANIMAL programme included two new films: Taiki Sakpisit’s Shadow and Act and Sorayos Prapapan’s Prelude of the Moving Zoo. Both feature sequences shot at Dusit Zoo, which was closed by royal decree in 2018. (The zoo was situated on Crown Property Bureau land, which King Rama X reclaimed.)

Prelude of the Moving Zoo, filmed on the last day of the zoo’s operation, begins subversively with a cylinder recording of the royal anthem, accompanied by footage of penguins seemingly standing to attention. Shadow and Act also includes shots filmed at another prestigious institution from a bygone age, the Chaya Jitrakorn photography studio. As in A Ripe Volcano (ภูเขาไฟพิโรธ), Taiki’s camera pans slowly and elegiacally around the studio’s fixtures and fittings, settling upon dusty portraits of Cold War dictator Phibun Songkhram and other kharatchakan (‘civil servants’).

The KINgDOM segment included Ukrit Sa-nguanhai’s The Pob’s House (บ้านผีปอบ), which was previously shown at Histoire(s) du thai cinéma, another film programme curated by Wiwat. In The Pob’s House, an elderly woman is attacked by villagers who believe her to be an evil spirit. Her granddaughter is also killed, and the child’s body is beaten in an echo of the mob violence of 6th October 1976. A little boy turns to the camera and grins, in reference to the smiling boy from Neal Ulevich’s famous 6th October photograph. The Pob’s House was made in response to another massacre, in 2010, and as Ukrit explains in a voiceover, his film is an allegory for the violence “buried in people’s minds.”

The evening ended with Yellow Duck Against Dictatorship, another new film by Sorayos, compiled from raw footage of riot police firing water cannon at protesters outside parliament on 17th November. The protesters used inflatable rubber ducks to protect themselves from jets of water laced with tear gas (as the David versus Goliath-style title suggests), and Sorayos was on the front line with the protesters, whereas most news camera crews were behind the barricades.

10 December 2020

14 ตุลาคม

Thai PBS
14 ตุลาคม: 40 ความทรงจำเดือนตุลาคม (‘14th October: forty years of memories’), a four-part Thai PBS documentary on the 40th anniversary of the 14th October 1973 massacre in Bangkok, was released on DVD in 2014. The series, broadcast in 2013, was the first substantial 14th October documentary since historian Charnvit Kasetsiri’s 14 ตุลา (‘14th Oct.’), which was released on VHS to commemorate the twentieth anniversary in 1993.

Charnvit’s hour-long documentary was later released on VCD under the English title October 14 Thai Student Uprising 1973, and repackaged with the docudrama Tongpan (ทองปาน) and the 6th October 1976 massacre documentary พ.ศ. 2519 (‘2519 B.E.’). Episodes relating to 14th October from the บันทึกเมืองไทย (‘save Thailand’) documentary series were also released on VCD in 2001.

09 December 2020

Our Daddy Always Looks Down on Us

Our Daddy Always Looks Down on Us
Our Daddy Always Looks Down on Us
Our Daddy Always Looks Down on Us
Our Daddy Always Looks Down on Us
Our Daddy Always Looks Down on Us
Jirat Prasertsup’s exhibition Our Daddy Always Looks Down on Us (คิดถึงคนบนฟ้า) opened on 5th December (Thai Father’s Day and the late King Rama IX’s birthday) at Cartel Artspace in Bangkok, and runs until 24th January 2021. Appropriating indirect royal iconography recognisable to generations of Thais (a pair of glasses; a squeezed toothpaste tube), the exhibition parodies the propaganda and myth-making associated with the Thai state.

The gallery has been fitted with a false ceiling, with one tile missing: visitors climb a stepladder to poke their heads into the loft space and peer at a large bust of a dog (Tongdaeng?). This installation constitutes almost the entire exhibition, though there are also some small line drawings near the skirting boards. (The beatific smiles in the drawings are reminiscent of Joan Cornella’s satirical cartoons.)

08 December 2020

“...turning his back on Marines”

The Mail on Sunday
Prince Harry has announced plans to sue The Mail on Sunday for libel. On 25th October, the newspaper published an article by Mark Nicol headlined “Top general accuses Harry of turning his back on Marines”. The story, printed on page 9, alleged that he had not been in contact with the Royal Marines in the past six months.

Harry launched libel proceedings on 27th November, and the article has now been deleted from The Mail on Sunday’s website and removed from other online newspaper archives. Harry and his wife Meghan are also suing the same newspaper for breach of copyright, after it printed a personal letter Meghan wrote to her father.

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