Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards

Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards, published earlier this year, contains storyboards and production illustrations from some of Hitchcock’s most famous films, including classics such as Vertigo. But the main attraction of Tony Lee Moral’s book is its chapter on Psycho, with a four-page spread of storyboards by Saul Bass. Although some of the Bass drawings have been reproduced elsewhere, Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards includes more than 100 of them, some of which are previously unpublished.

The Bass storyboards for the Psycho shower scene are “undoubtedly the most widely discussed sequence in the history of storyboarding,” according to Chris Pallant and Steven Price in their book Storyboarding, which includes a chapter on Hitchcock’s storyboards. Cinefantastique magazine (vol. 16, no. 4–5) printed a set of shower scene storyboards, and the same sketches appeared on the cover of Fionnuala Halligan’s book The Art of Movie Storytelling.

Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards doesn’t address the authorship controversy surrounding the shower scene. Bass claimed that he not only storyboarded the sequence, but also directed it, though this was refuted by Psycho’s cast and crew. Cinefantastique challenged the Bass claim (in an article by Stephen Rebello), though Jennifer Bass and Pat Kirkham endorsed it in their book Saul Bass.

Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room

Liz Truss is, by a country mile, the UK’s shortest-serving prime minister in history, in office for only forty-nine days. The Economist magazine (15th October 2022) calculated that the Truss premiership had “roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce”, and the Daily Star newspaper proved that an actual lettuce could stay fresh throughout her entire term of office. (Harry Cole and James Healey wrote an excellent Truss biography, Out of the Blue.)

Truss has written a new memoir, Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room (subtitled Leading the Revolution Against Globalism, Socialism, and the Liberal Establishment in the US). But it’s not a conventional account of her premiership: “I do not see it as simply a chance to tell the detailed inside story of my time in government and justify every decision I made while I was there.” (Similarly, Theresa May wrote that her book was “not an attempt to justify certain decisions I made in office or to provide a detailed retelling of historical events.”)

Instead, Truss expresses her grievances about everything from the trivial (why would nobody help her book a haircut?) to the critical (why did economic institutions oppose her reckless fiscal policies?). Apparently, nothing was her fault: even though she asked Jeremy Hunt to become Chancellor before informing her close friend Kwasi Kwarteng that he was being sacked, she blames a leaker for revealing Hunt’s appointment on Twitter, where a shocked Kwarteng read about his replacement.

Summarising her premiership, Truss writes: “Things did not work out as I had hoped. My time in Downing Street was brief, and I did not have the chance to deliver the policies I had planned.” That first sentence brings to mind Hirohito’s famous understatement, when his country surrendered in 1945: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

Outstanding!The Relief from Rodin to Picasso

Outstanding! The Relief from Rodin to Picasso, held last year in Frankfurt, was the first exhibition since 1980 to survey the modern history of relief sculptures. Its scholarly catalogue (edited by Alexander Eiling, Eva Mongi-Vollmer, and Karin Schick) is only the second English-language book on the subject, and the first—Relief Sculpture by L.R. Rogers—was published fifty years ago.

Outstanding! begins with an explanation of the three traditional categories of relief (bas-relief, haut-relief, and relief en creux), though the exhibition defined the relief more broadly: the impressive collection of works on display included examples of mixed-media assemblage and trompe-l’œil paintings. The catalogue was originally published in German as Herausragend! Das Relief von Rodin bis Picasso.

Analogue: A Field Guide

“It’s only now the analogue world is effectively over that we can grasp its extraordinarily rich legacy,” writes Deyan Sudjic in the introduction to his new book Analogue: A Field Guide (published in the US as The World of Analog: A Visual Guide). Sudjic features 250 of “the most ingenious consumer artefacts ever produced,” gadgets made possible by the vacuum tube and the transistor, and rendered obsolete by the smartphone. (He cites the release of the iPhone as “a kind of mass extinction event for a vast range of analogue products”.)

Analogue includes numerous industrial design classics: the Polaroid SX-70 instant camera, the Sony TR-610 handheld radio, and the JVC RC-M90 boombox. There are devices made from Bakelite (the Ericsson DBH 1001 telephone) and plastic (the Panasonic Panapet portable radio), and once-familiar product ranges from former consumer technology giants like Sony (Walkman, Watchman, and Handycam) and Kodak (Brownie and Instamatic). Each product is beautifully photographed against a white background, and the images are so clear that the buttons and dials are all legible.

Some of the featured objects also appear in the Phaidon Design Classics series, and in design histories by Charlotte and Peter Fiell (Design of the 20th Century, A–Z of Design and Designers, Plastic Dreams, and Industrial Design A–Z). A History of Industrial Design (by Edward Lucie-Smith) features a chapter on consumer technology, and Extinct (which includes an essay by Sudjic) and Essential Retro (by James B. Grahame) also cover vintage devices, though Analogue is the first book to feature such an extensive guide to analogue design and technology.

Kubrick:An Odyssey

Two rival biographies of Stanley Kubrick were published almost simultaneously in 1997. John Baxter and Vincent LoBrutto’s books were both unauthorised accounts, though LoBrutto’s was considerably more accurate than Baxter’s. They are now joined by a third major Kubrick biography, Nathan Abrams and Robert P. Kolker’s Kubrick: An Odyssey, which was released earlier this year.

The previous biographies were published before the release of Eyes Wide Shut—the subject of another Abrams and Kolker book—making Kubrick the first biography to cover the director’s entire career. Kubrick has the same strengths and weaknesses as their Eyes Wide Shut book: impressive research, some questionable opinions, and imprecise referencing. (The authors previously dismissed that film’s state of incompletion at the time of Kubrick’s death as “ultimately irrelevant”, though in their biography they take it more seriously, calling it “the most serious controversy of Kubrick’s career”.)

Kubrick is particularly significant as the first biography based on material from the Kubrick Archive, making it more reliable than its predecessors. When Kolker and Abrams occasionally veer into speculation, though (“perhaps...”), they are on shakier ground, and their regular references to the significance of Kubrick’s Jewish identity (a thesis developed by Abrams) feel extraneous.

Kolker and Abrams are also the first Kubrick biographers to receive cooperation from the director’s family. The book benefits substantially from this level of access, but it’s also a double-edged sword: Kubrick’s brother-in-law, Jan Harlan, who acted as a liason, sometimes attempted to steer the authors in directions that contradicted their own research. (All the writers can do is to ask rhetorically, “as with so much in Kubrick’s life, which version is true?”)

The biography has a bibliography and a comprehensive index, but there are no footnotes, and quotes often appear in the text without attribution. This makes it needlessly difficult to identify the sources of quotations, beyond those that are familiar from other publications. (Kubrick joins more than sixty other Kubrick books on the Dateline Bangkok bookshelves.)

Eros Reinterpretation

Eros Reinterpretation was the inaugural exhibition at Ming Artspace, a new Bangkok gallery founded by Vichai Imsuksom. The group exhibition featured photography, installations, and video art from thirteen Thai artists, linked by their exploration of erotic imagery.

The show’s most daring artwork was produced by Vichai himself, with Kittisak Tongprasert. Their video installation Eros: The Secret Room consists of three videos of themselves (each around five minutes long) that blur the line between art and pornography. The only comparable works in Thai art are perhaps Thunska Pansittivorakul and Harit Srikhao’s documentary Avalon (แดนศักดิ์สิทธิ์), and Ohm Phanphiroj’s short film The Meaning of It All.

Eros Reinterpretation opened on 12th January and closed on 3rd March, though its lavish exhibition catalogue, limited to 1,000 copies, also serves as a survey of Thai contemporary erotic art. Some (explicit) sections of the book are sealed with perforations, which is reminiscent of Uthis Haemamool’s novel Silhouette of Desire (ร่างของปรารถนา) and the sealed sections in magazines such as Bizarre.

The catalogue is beautifully printed, with a debossed (and somewhat suggestive) cover design, foldouts, selected translucent pages, two notebooks, and several items of ephemera (postcards, stamps, and a flyer) laid in. Alongside other recently published works, such as Ark Saroj’s Lust and Love and Shotbyly’s Vintage Magazine series, Eros Reinterpretation signals a new frankness in Thai art publishing.

In fact, the new issue of Shotbyly’s Vintage Magazine (vol. 2) was printed by the same company as the Eros Reinterpretation catalogue, after the printer of the first issue refused to handle the more explicit imagery in the second one. The second issue of Vintage Magazine, limited to fifty copies, is a portfolio of photographs of model Theeraphat Khajornsuwan. Unlike the first issue, the second includes frontal nudity and other graphic content.

The Sarawak Report: The Inside Story of the 1MDB Exposé

British journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown has been sentenced in absentia to two years in jail by a Malaysian court. She was sued for defamation by Nur Zahirah, Sultanah of the Malaysian state of Terengganu, on 21st November 2018, a few months after the publication of her book The Sarawak Report: The Inside Story of the 1MDB Exposé.

Rewcastle Brown’s investigative reporting exposed the 1MDB scandal that led to the imprisonment of former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak on corruption charges. Less than a week before Rewcastle Brown’s conviction on 7th February, Razak’s twelve-year sentence was reduced by half.

The Sultanah—wife of Sultan Mizan Zainal Abidin—had originally sought 100m ringgit in libel damages, though the High Court ruled in Rewcastle Brown’s favour, dismissing the case. The Court of Appeal overturned that decision on 12th December last year, and awarded damages of 300,000 ringgit.

The case stems from a single sentence in The Sarawak Report implying that the Sultanah was instrumental in the establishment of 1MDB, referring to “the wife of the sultan, whose acquiescence was needed to set up the fund” (p. 3). After the initial lawsuit, Rewcastle Brown clarified that she should have named the Sultan’s sister rather than his wife, and the text was changed in later editions. She also explained that the ambiguous pronoun “whose” referred to Sultan Mizan himself.

2475นักเขียนผีแห่งสยาม (‘1932: the ghost writer of Siam’)

In the years following the 2014 coup, the military government set about removing public reminders of the 1932 revolution, when Thailand transitioned from absolute monarchy to parliamentary democracy. In the catalogue for his exhibition The L/Royal Monument (นิ/ราษฎร์), Wittawat Tongkeaw describes the disappearance of “physical components—names, plaques, monuments” commemorating the revolution. Similarly, in his chapter in Rama X (edited by Pavin Chachavalpongpun), Chatri Prakitnonthakan discusses “the destruction of significant buildings and monuments related to the memory of the People’s Party”.

Most notoriously, a plaque in Bangkok’s Royal Plaza was covertly replaced in 2017 with a new plaque honouring the monarchy. Leaders of the recent student protest movement created a new plaque with a democratic inscription, and installed it at Sanam Luang on 20th September 2020, though it was removed by the authorities almost immediately. Reproductions of the new plaque have been shown at various exhibitions, including Wittawat’s 841.594, and it appears prominently in Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s film 100 Times Reproduction of Democracy (การผลิตซ้ำประชาธิปไตยให้กลายเป็นของแท้).

The new plaque is an indication of a political awakening among young Thais—known as ta sawang—and a renewed interest in the 1932 revolution specifically. One of the groups organising the recent protests is called Khana Ratsadon, in tribute to the political party of the same name that led the 1932 revolution. A new library of pro-democracy books is called 1932 People Space Library, its name referring to the year the revolution took place. Souvenir items from 1932 were displayed at the Revolutionary Things (ของ [คณะ] ราษฎร) exhibition in 2018. Charinthorn Rachuratchata’s exhibition Museum 2032 (พิพิธภัณฑ์ ๒๕๗๕) looked forward to the revolution’s centenary.

This revival of interest in the events of 1932 is a relatively recent phenomenon. In 2010, vox pop interviews for Abichon Rattanabhayon’s short film The Six Principles (สัญญาของผู้มาก่อนกาล) demonstrated the public’s apathy towards the revolution. But a few years later, in 2013, the change in attitudes was apparent when Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s documentary Paradoxocracy (ประชาธิป'ไทย) achieved unexpected box-office success. (Paradoxocracy features an extended discussion of the revolution, and begins by reproducing the text of a 1932 manifesto railing against King Prajadhipok.)

The 1932 revolution is central to the plot of a new book, 2475 นักเขียนผีแห่งสยาม (‘1932: the ghost writer of Siam’), by Tanis Werasakwong (known as Sa-ard) and Podcharakrit To-im. The book tells the full story of the revolution in the form of a graphic novel, featuring prominent politicians of the period—and even King Prajadhipok—among its main characters. The project’s website describes the revolution as “an event in Thai history that has been erased from collective memory”, a point also made in Prabda Yoon’s short film Transmissions of Unwanted Pasts (วงโคจรของความทรงจำ).

The Showman:Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky

Simon Shuster’s superb new book The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky, published last week, is a unique profile of Ukraine’s President, from a writer who has spent more time with Zelensky and his inner circle than any other journalist. Shuster has reported on Zelensky for Time magazine since 2019, and his dispatches throughout the Russia-Ukraine war have been essential reading. He was embedded in the presidential compound for months on end, yet his reporting on Zelensky has remained scrupulously objective.

Zelensky cooperated with Shuster to such an extent that the President’s staff raised objections to it, as the author explains in his prologue: “Some of Zelensky’s aides, in particular the ones responsible for his security, did not always appreciate the access the president gave me, especially on the days when he invited me to travel with him to the front. He never explained his reasons for doing that. His staff only said that he trusted me to write an honest account.” When Shuster initially proposed the book—under the working title The Fight Is Here: Volodymyr Zelensky and the War in Ukraine—the President, with a degree of modesty, “felt he had not lived or achieved enough to be the focus of a biography.”

Shuster praises Zelensky’s bravery as a wartime leader, and admires the President’s genuine and selfless concern for his people. But although this is an authorised biography, it’s certainly not a hagiography. Shuster makes clear, for example, that Zelensky was at fault for Ukraine’s lack of preparedness when the war began: “He had spent weeks playing down the risk of a full-scale invasion and assuring his people that all would be fine. He had refused the advice of his military commanders to call up all available reserves and use them to fortify the border. Apart from the calamity of the invasion itself, the president would need to face his own failure to foresee it.”

Rather than the exaggerated Churchillian comparisons made by some other journalists, Shuster’s assessment of Zelensky is surprisingly ambivalent. He even admits to being “worried” about the President’s potential commitment to democracy in a post-war Ukraine, once restrictions on the media are eventually lifted: “I don’t know how Zelensky will handle that fraught transition, whether he will have the wisdom and restraint to part with the extraordinary powers granted to him under martial law, or whether he will, like so many leaders throughout history, find that power too addictive.”

Pac-Man: Birth of an Icon

The Japanese arcade video game Pac-Man (パックマン), designed by Tōru Iwatani, was released by Namco in 1980, at the height of the so-called golden age of video arcades. In the 1970s, Atari’s Pong and Taito’s Space Invaders (スペースインベーダー) had defined video games in the public consciousness, though Pac-Man would supersede them both to become arguably the most iconic video game in history.

Pac-Man’s initial appeal came from Iwatani’s creation of what Steven Poole (in his book Trigger Happy) calls “[t]he first videogame ‘character’ of all”. In their book Pac-Man: Birth of an Icon, Arjan Terpstra and Tim Lapetino argue that the game’s distinctive mascot is now a ubiquitous cultural symbol: “Pac-Man’s appeal as a character transcended arcades and moved into the wider realm of popular culture.”

Pac-Man: Birth of an Icon, published in 2021, is the definitive history of Pac-Man, covering every aspect of the game’s development and release. It’s both a coffee-table book with beautifully-reproduced illustrations (including numerous documents from the Namco archive) and a meticulously researched, comprehensive account of the game’s history.

One indication of the book’s attention to detail is that its title also appears in Japanese (パックマン:アイコンの誕生). Appendices include a complete Pac-Man gameography and the first English translation of Iwatani’s Japanese-language memoir, Pacman’s Method (パックマンのゲーム学入門).

Retro Gamer magazine (no. 61) also covered the making of Pac-Man (which it called “gaming’s most iconic videogame character”), but Pac-Man: Birth of an Icon is the first book on the history of the entire Pac-Man phenomenon. Leonard Herman’s Phoenix was the first general history of video games, and Tristan Donovan’s Replay is the most comprehensive guide to the subject. Push > Start was the first visual history of the medium.

Lust and Love

Ark Saroj’s photobook Lust and Love was released yesterday. The book was inspired by New York photographer Peter Hujar’s monograph Love and Lust and, like Hujar, Ark photographs his friends and former lovers: “They are real people and with some of them I have shared intimate moments.” One of Lust and Love’s most explicit images—a black-and-white double-page spread—was shown at the KinkyBKK exhibition at Silom’s Pulse Gallery from 8th to 30th September last year.

An essay by artist Oat Montien in Lust and Love compares Ark and Hujar’s nude portraits: “both of their works subvert the lines between fine art and pornography... They give us the license to really meditate on their very graphic material on a deeper level beyond the immediate shock and taboo.” The same also applies to other photographers, such as Ohm Phanphiroj and Shotbyly, whose work demonstrates the increasing visibility of LGBT representation in contemporary Thai art.

Pat Yingcharoen: Collective Convalescence

Collective Convalescence is the first monograph on the young Thai artist Pat Yingcharoen, whose paintings combine tragic images of violence from art history and photojournalism. The elegantly designed book features an essay by Panu Boonpipattanapong and an interview with the artist by Korn Karava. (Korn also edited and published the book, which is the second volume in a series that began with No God No King Only Human.)

Like many artists of his generation, Pat experienced a political awakening following the 2014 coup. It was this newfound awareness, known in Thai as ta sawang, which first led him to transition from “conducting painting experiments to focusing more on the historical aspects.” (Novelists Uthis Haemamool and Veeraporn Nitiprapha have also discussed their ta sawang experiences, and it was a recurring theme in interviews with film directors for Thai Cinema Uncensored.)

In particular, Pat often incorporates elements from photographs of the 6th October 1976 massacre, which he regards as “among the most iconic depictions of Thai history”. In his essay, Panu explains that these images of hanged and desecrated bodies are juxtaposed and decontextualised, so that “new dimensions of history that may have been previously suppressed are discovered.”

Images of the 1976 massacre are depicted prominently in several of Pat’s works. In Sacred Punishment, one of the victims is transposed into a reproduction of William-Adolphe Bouguerau’s Flagellation of Our Lord Jesus Christ (La flagellation de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ). In Beater, Neal Ulevich’s infamous image of a man holding a folding chair is superimposed over a detail from the same Bouguerau painting. In Martyrs, another victim is placed in the centre of Andrea del Sarto’s Disputation on the Trinity (Disputa sulla Trinità).

The artist’s other visual references to the massacre are more subtle. Onlookers from the background of Ulevich’s photograph appear in Under the Blue Moon (shown at his Blue Rhapsody exhibition at Number One Gallery last year) and From Jesus to the Void. The distinctive tree trunk from which a victim was hanged in Ulevich’s picture appears in the backgrounds of Imaginary Horizon—a reproduction of Bouguerau’s First Mourning (Premier deuil)—and Cain and Abel. (Another young Thai artist, Pachara Piyasongsoot, also painted the same tree trunk, in The Garden.)

Pat Yingcharoen: Collective Convalescence was published last month, in an edition of 300 (mine being no. 294). Each copy is numbered and signed with a flourish by the artist. (Curiously, he spells his first name Patt, while the book uses an alternative English spelling, Pat.)

The Amazing Movie Posters of Thailand

The Amazing Movie Posters of Thailand, by Neil Pettigrew and Philip Jablon, is—to borrow the adjective from its title—an amazing book. Featuring more than 500 posters, including many full-page reproductions, it’s the most extensive guide to Thai film posters ever published.

The Amazing Movie Posters of Thailand includes a brief history of Thai film poster production, paying particular tribute to Somboonsuk Niyomsiri (also known as Piak Poster), “[t]he father of Thailand’s style of hand painted movie posters”. The Thai poster for Apocalypse Now, painted by Tongdee Panumas, is singled out as “a contender for being the greatest film poster of all time. Not just from Thailand but from any country.”

The book also features the most comprehensive roster of Thai poster artist biographies ever compiled. The entry for Somboonsuk highlights his design for the French film Temptation (L’Île du bout du monde), which “revolutionised the look of Thai cinema posters in 1959 by using an offset printer which allowed for more richly colourful artwork.” (An exhibition of Somboonsuk’s work was held at the Thai Film Archive last year.)

The Amazing Movie Posters of Thailand is published by the founder of the horror film magazine The Dark Side, thus it focuses heavily on horror and exploitation posters. The final few chapters are devoted to gory and erotic posters, including one for the Hong Kong film A Gambler’s Story (邪斗串), described as “perhaps the all-time most explicit movie poster ever produced in Thailand.” (These posters—displayed in seedier cinema lobbies, not on public view—were more graphic than the films they advertised, as discussed in Thai Cinema Uncensored.)

Co-authors Pettigrew and Jablon are both Thai poster collectors. (Jablon is also a dealer.) Pettigrew has previously written about Thai horror and sexploitation posters in The Dark Side (no. 167, 168, and 180). Jablon organised a poster exhibition at this year’s Singorama Film Festival, and wrote the excellent Thailand’s Movie Theatres.

Gilbert Brownstone’s Thai Movie Posters (Affiches de cinéma thaï/โปสเตอร์ภาพยนต์ไทย), published in 1974, was the first survey of Thai film posters. After almost fifty years, another book on the subject was long overdue, and The Amazing Movie Posters of Thailand was well worth the wait.

Starpics magazine released a special issue (no. 3) on the history of Thai film posters in 1997, which is also a great resource. There are catalogues to the Bai Pid (ใบปิด) and Thai Film Posters (ใบปิดหนังไทย) exhibitions, and other poster exhibitions include Eyegasm and Rare Thai Movie Posters (ลับแลโปสเตอร์ ภาพยนตร์ไทย). There is a short essay on Thai film posters in Thai Cinema (Le cinéma thaïlandais), and vintage posters are illustrated in Dome Sukwong’s A Century of Thai Cinema.

The Art of Origami Books: Origami, Kirigami, Labyrinth, Tunnel and Mini Books —By Artists from Around the World

The Art of Origami Books: Origami, Kirigami, Labyrinth, Tunnel and Mini Books by Artists from Around the World, by Jean-Charles Trebbi, was originally published in French (as L’art du livre origami) in 2021. It includes numerous examples of origami books by contemporary artists, though the most interesting chapter, by Jacques Desse, gives a brief illustrated history of ‘leporello’ books. The chapter on ‘tunnel books’ also includes illustrations of vintage examples.

Trebbi’s previous books include The Art of Cutting (L’art de la découpe) and The Art of Pop-Up (L’art du pop-up). The Century of Artists’ Books, by Johanna Drucker, covers the related topic of books designed by artists, and John Smith’s Notes on the History of Origami is a concise history of origami as an art form.

Britain’s Best Ever Political Cartoons

Tim Benson, Britain’s leading authority on political cartoons, compiled an anthology of Britain’s Best Ever Political Cartoons in 2021. Almost 200 cartoons are included (mostly in black-and-white), from the satirical prints of James Gillray (such as The Plumb-pudding in Danger) to The Guardian’s Steve Bell. Benson’s introduction gives a concise history of British political cartoons, and he cites David Low as “[t]he greatest political cartoonist of the twentieth century”. The book concludes with a selection of recent cartoons, reproduced in colour.

Rude Britannia, The Offensive Art, and The History of Press Graphics 1819–1921 also feature examples of classic British political cartoons. The Rude Britannia exhibition catalogue includes one of Gerald Scarfe’s best Margaret Thatcher caricatures. (Thatcher is underrepresented in Britain’s Best Ever Political Cartoons, and Scarfe’s work is omitted.) Victor S. Navasky profiled key political cartoonists in The Art of Controversy.

The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear

The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear was published earlier this year, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of William Friedkin’s classic horror film The Exorcist. Author Nat Segaloff was Friedkin’s authorised biographer, and he covers the making of the film in considerable detail, with chapters on the three stages of production and the film’s release.

The book also discusses the various Exorcist sequels, which are of interest only to completists. Segaloff’s synopses of all these spinoffs are largely superfluous. Fortunately, though, the first half of the book is devoted to the original 1973 film.

Mark Kermode’s book on the film, from the BFI Film Classics series, remains the definitive study, and Segaloff interviewed him for The Exorcist Legacy. In fact, Kermode has become such an authority on The Exorcist that Segaloff dedicates his book to him alongside Friedkin and William Peter Blatty (who wrote the original novel).

Tang Chang (1934–1990): Non-Forms

Tang Chang, one of Thailand’s greatest modern artists, is the subject of a retrospective that opened earlier this year at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Tang Chang (1934–1990): Non-Forms (subtitled Non-Formes in French) features his iconic self-portrait from 1973: the painting shows the artist with no eyes or hands, his symbolic self-mutilation a desperate response to the massacre of pro-democracy protesters that took place that year. The bilingual (English and French) exhibition catalogue (bound in the Japanese stab style) quotes his description of the work as a tribute to those “rising in anger against the military dictatorship on 14 October 1973.” Several of his concrete poems (กวีรูปธรรม), commenting on the massacres of 1973 and 6th October 1976, are also included.

I’m Starving Artbook: Sweets and Politics

Comic artist Kwanrapee’s I’m Starving Artbook: Sweets and Politics (เดี๊ยนหิว!!! Artbook: ขนมหวานและการเมือง), published earlier this year, is a record of the stickers, fleurons, and illustrations she created between 2019 and 2022. This was a period of protest against Thailand’s military government, and the book’s title has a clever double meaning: “If this artbook accurately depicts my hunger, then I also hunger for freedom and democracy.” (Similarly, on the cover of the fourth edition of Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit’s A History of Thailand is Thienchai Nokngam’s painting Seafood, which also makes “a comparison between democracy and food... Everyone likes eating deep-sea fish and deep-sea shellfish, in the same way they want to have a deep, full-blown version of democracy.”)

The Fabulist:A Novel

Uthis Haemamool’s novel จุติ was published in English translation this year as The Fabulist: A Novel. The book describes the protest movement that emerged after the 2006 coup as a “new democratic spirit, which saw citizens as the rightful owners of the country, rather than the few high-ranking officers and aristocrats who governed as though they knew what the majority needed or didn’t need.”

These pro-democracy red-shirts were opposed by the pro-establishment yellow-shirts, in a prolonged political conflict that the novel calls “a chasm between two groups who held two completely different versions of the truth.” The protests ended in 2010, when Abhisit Vejjajiva authorised the use of live ammunition by the army. As the novel puts it: “Death and casualties among Red Shirt protestors erupted after the government—led by the prime minister with the pretty face—ordered the police to ‘secure the area’.”

Interviewed by Max Crosbie-Jones for the Nikkei Asia website this month, Uthis explained that the 2010 crackdown marked the beginning of his political engagement: “Prior to that I thought that art and literature was separate from politics, but seeing so many people killed changed me. And it was even more disappointing to see members of Thailand’s literary and art circles celebrating. Politics have been embedded in my work ever since.”

In his Nikkei article, Crosbie-Jones describes the 2010 massacre, which took place at Ratchaprasong in Bangkok, as “an event that galvanized many Thai artists, writers and filmmakers to address the country’s legacy of coups, military interference and autocracy”. Similarly, Sayan Daenklom coined the term “Post-Ratchaprasong art” to describe works produced in response to the crackdown, in the journal Read (อ่าน; vol. 3, no. 2).

Like Uthis, author Veeraporn Nitiprapha was also inspired to incorporate political subtext into her fiction writing after 2010, as she explained in an interview with the Electric Literature website: “I was overcome with a deep, painful bitterness seeing the fashionable, well-educated, well-paid people of the city feeling content about the injuries inflicted upon the poorer, less educated people who were mostly from the upcountry. And it was important to write about that bitterness.”

In Thailand, this political awakening is known as ta sawang. Film directors Pen-ek Ratanaruang (“me, who five years ago had no interest in politics”), Yuthlert Sippapak (“I never gave a shit about politics”), Chulayarnnon Siriphol (“I turned to be interested in the political situation”), Thunska Pansittivorakul (“I started to learn about politics”), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (“I was politically naïve”), and Nontawat Numbenchapol (“I was a teenager, a young man not interested in politics”) all describe their ta sawang moments in Thai Cinema Uncensored.

Asian Political Cartoons

John A. Lent’s Asian Political Cartoons is a remarkable and comprehensive book, covering the history of political cartoons in no fewer than twenty countries. As the publisher claims, with justification, it is “not only the first such survey in English, but the most complete and detailed in any language.” Lent has interviewed more than 200 cartoonists—most notably, Zunar in Malaysia—and made multiple research trips to each of the countries he documents.

Histories of political cartoons traditionally focus on revolutionary France, Georgian Britain, and the Reconstruction era in the United States. Lent’s book, on the other hand, is a window into a previously inaccessible world of satirical art. He shows how cartoonists have challenged authoritarian regimes throughout Asia, and assesses the varying degrees of “freedom to cartoon” in the region (such as the repressive treatment of Mana Neyestani in Iran and Arifur Rahman in Bangladesh).

For his chapter on Thailand, Lent interviewed Chai Rachawat and Arun Watcharasawad, veteran cartoonists who have covered Thai politics since the 1970s for Thai Rath (ไทยรัฐ) and Matichon (มติชน), respectively. He discussed the Thaksin Shinawatra era with Buncha and Kamin from Manager (ผู้จัดการรายวัน), and he describes the enforced ‘attitude adjustment’ of another Thai Rath cartoonist, Sia, under Prayut Chan-o-cha’s military rule. He also covers the rise of anonymous online satirists such as Khai Maew. (Sia wasn’t interviewed for the book, though he spoke to Dateline Bangkok last year.)

The scope of Asian Political Cartoons is unprecedented, though Cherian George’s Red Lines also examines political cartooning from an international perspective. Victor S. Navasky’s The Art of Controversy covers European and American political cartoons, and Alexander Roob reproduces early newspaper cartoons in The History of Press Graphics 1819–1921.