Wildtype 2022

Wildtype, a two-day programme of new short films, began yesterday. Like last year’s event, Wildtype 2022 includes a strand dedicated to political documentaries, which is this year titled Politicx. Wildtype, curated by Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa and Sasawat Boonsri, is an offshoot of Sonthaya Subyen’s Filmvirus group.

Politicx begins with Kanyarat Theerakrittayakorn’s Develop Viriyaporn Who Dared in Three Worlds (เจริญวิริญาพรมาหาทำใน 3 โลก), a quest to reveal the true identity of the mysterious Viriyaporn Boonprasert, the pseudonymous director whose satirical films have perplexed Thailand’s close-knit cinephile community. There’s no Scooby Doo-style unmasking moment, though plausible suspicions are raised, followed by bemused denials.

The most directly political films in Politicx are both named after the pro-democracy red-shirt movement. Supamok Silarak’s Red Poetry: Verse 1 (เราไป ไหน ได้) documents the activities of Vitthaya Klangnil, who formed the group Artn’t with Yotsunthon Ruttapradit. The film shows the Thai flag they exhibited, with transparent material in place of the central blue stripe. Vitthaya is also shown carving “112” into his chest, in protest at the lèse-majesté (article 112) charges they faced. In the heartbreaking Red’s Scar (บาดแผลสีแดง), Nutcha Tantivitayapitak interviews a protester falsely accused of arson following the 2010 massacre. Tragically, his mother and son both died while he was in jail.

Wildtype 2022 runs until 9th October. Politicx was shown yesterday at Doc Club and Pub in Bangkok and Chiang Mai University’s Faculty of Political Science and Public Administration. It will be shown again on 8th October at Mueang Thong Rama in Phayao and Bookhemian in Phuket.

“A relentless barrage of highly personal attacks...”

The long-running BBC1 satirical panel show Have I Got News for You marked the end of Boris Johnson’s premiership with a special episode titled Have I Got News for Boris on 2nd September. The programme recounted Johnson’s numerous scandals (such as unlawfully proroguing parliament and breaking coronavirus pandemic restrictions), though two words in the script—“cosmic cunt”—led to tabloid outrage two days later. The Mail on Sunday’s front-page headline on 4th September was “BBC COMIC’S C-WORD JIBE AGAINST PM”.

The Mail accused presenter Jack Dee of insulting Johnson, though in fact the alliterative pejorative was a quote from The Times, which attributed it to an unnamed cabinet minister in an article published on 9th July. The Mail’s hyperbolic description of the show as “a relentless barrage of highly personal attacks” and “a torrent of ‘spiteful and crass insults’” is an indication of its anti-BBC bias.

There have been two previous front-page tabloid headlines about the c-word. On 4th February 2017, The Sun (“BECKS C-WORD FURY AT ‘SIR’ SNUB”) revealed a leaked email in which ex-footballer David Beckham had called the Honours Committee “unappreciative cunts”. (Beckham had obtained an injunction preventing The Sunday Times from publishing the email, though other papers were not bound by it.) On 15th May 2015, the Daily Star (“BEEB CALLS FARAGE C-WORD ON TELLY”) gleefully highlighted a slip of the tongue by journalist Norman Smith, who had referred to politician Nigel Farage as a “cunt” rather than a ‘cult’ during a live BBC News TV report.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit films (An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug, and The Battle of the Five Armies) were prequels to his Lord of the Rings trilogy (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King), making the blockbuster new Amazon Prime Video series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power a prequel to the prequels. Released on 2nd September and directed by J.A. Bayona (who made The Impossible), the series is Prime Video’s first major franchise, and another escalation in the vast original-content budgets of the streaming platforms.

At a cost of $465 million, the first season of The Rings of Power averages $58 million per episode. (Compare that to Boardwalk Empire, with its $18 million pilot, which set records a decade ago.) So, on a per-episode basis, The Rings of Power is the most expensive show in the history of television. Yet it feels entirely cinematic rather than televisual: as in the original film trilogies, there are sweeping aerial shots of New Zealand’s vistas (filmed with drones this time, rather than helicopters) and theme music by Howard Shore. This epic spectacle is impressive, though stilted performances in the Elven sequences highlight the lack of A-list actors.

“Shamefully presents a negative image of Thai society...”

As incredible as it may seem, thirty years ago a dictionary was burnt in the streets of Bangkok and banned by Thai police. The Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture was published in 1992, and soon attracted controversy in Thailand, as its entry for Bangkok described the city as “a place where there are a lot of PROSTITUTES”. (The capitalisation indicated a cross-reference; it was not for emphasis.)

This mention of the city’s somewhat seedy reputation (on p. 79 of the hardback edition) infuriated some Bangkokians, who burnt the dictionary in protest, and it was officially banned on 4th July 1993. The publishers quickly removed the offending text, in time for the paperback edition.

Censorship in Thailand is frequently a face-saving measure, a form of reputation management to ensure that negative images are whitewashed from cultural representations of the country. As discussed in Thai Cinema Uncensored, this results in media, literature, and films “that present a rose-tinted view, rather than holding a mirror up to society.”

This has been the case for almost a century, as the silent film Suvarna of Siam (นางสาวสุวรรณ) was censored in 1923 to prevent the portrayal of capital punishment in the country. Similarly, one of the reasons given for the censorship of Syndromes and a Century (แสงศตวรรษ) was that it “shamefully presents a negative image of Thai society for foreign audiences.”

Bangkok Inside Out was banned here for the same reason, after the Ministry of Culture objected to its photo of a go-go bar. More than fifty years ago, the travelogue Bangkok After Dark (written by Fred Poole under the pen name Andrew Harris) was also banned for its focus on the city’s red-light districts.

16 ปีแล้วไอ้สัส(‘it’s been 16 years, ai sat’)

Rap Against Dictatorship released their new single 16 ปีแล้วไอ้สัส (‘it’s been 16 years, ai sat’) yesterday, on the sixteenth anniversary of the 2006 coup. The title echoes a lyric from another recent single, Long Live the People—“7–8 ปีแล้วนะไอ้สัตว์” (‘it’s been 7–8 years, ai sat’)—and the จะ4ปีแล้วนะไอ้สัตว์ (‘it’s been 4 years, ai sat’) concert. (Ai sat is a strong Thai insult.)

In their most famous music video, My Country Has (ประเทศกูมี), Rap Against Dictatorship recreated an infamous photograph of the 6th October 1976 massacre. For the 16 ปีแล้วไอ้สัส video, they have recreated the moment when Nuamthong Praiwan crashed his taxi into a tank to protest against the coup. (The incident was also painted by Uthis Haemamool in 2019.) The song is dedicated to Nuamthong, as was the documentary Democracy after Death (ประชาธิปไตยหลังความตาย), and the video includes extracts from his suicide note, as does the short film Letter from the Silence (จดหมายจากความเงียบ).

The 16 ปีแล้วไอ้สัส music video also features archive footage of some of the major political events of the past sixteen years, including the Ratchaprasong massacre, the announcement of the 2014 coup, and a Harry Potter-themed monarchy-reform protest. Young Ohm’s single Bangkok Legacy (บางกอก เลกาซี่) also includes a reference to the Ratchaprasong massacre: “คงแยกไม่ออก ระหว่างทหารกับฆาตกร” (‘there is no distinction between soldiers and murderers’).

16 ปีแล้วไอ้สัส features guest vocals by Chaiamorn Kaewwiboonpan, whose single 12345 I Love You has become an anthem of the anti-government protest movement. Footage of the recent protests also appears in two previous Rap Against Dictatorship music videos, Ta Lu Fah (ทะลุฟ้า)—which references Chaiamorn in its lyrics—and Reform (ปฏิรูป).

Silhouette of Memory

Pornchai Lerdthamsiri’s Silhouette of Memory (เงาภาพ) features oil and watercolour paintings spanning the last sixteen years of Thai politics, from the 2006 coup onwards. The exhibition is at Kinjai Contemporary in Bangkok from 2nd to 17th September. (The gallery is also home to the Museum of Popular History, a collection of memorabilia and ephemera from contemporary Thai politics.)

Pornchai illustrates the resurgence of the yellow-shirt movement and their occupation of Suvarnabhumi airport in 2008, and the Constitutional Court’s dismissal of PM Samak Sundaravej that same year, though his main focus is the red-shirt protests. He captures the optimism of the red-shirt rallies in the first few months of 2010, followed by their violent suppression by the military. In one painting, soldiers are shown firing from the SkyTrain platform at wounded civilians sheltering at Wat Pathum Wanaram. (Wittawat Tongkeaw’s painting Interregnum/สิ้นสุดพุทธาวาส was also inspired by the Wat Pathum Wanaram incident.)

Alongside these older works in oil are fifty new watercolour paintings documenting the recent student protests against Prayut Chan-o-cha’s government. Whereas other artists—including Wittawat, Lucky Leg, Tawan Wattuya, and Jirapatt Aungsumalee—have painted portraits of individual protest leaders, Pornchai’s watercolours show the protesters en masse. He also depicts the use of water cannon and rubber bullets to disperse the protests.

“I hope I can always stand on the side of the sheep...”

Five publishers of children’s picture books were each given nineteen-month prison sentences in Hong Kong yesterday. They had been held in custody since their arrest more than a year ago, and were all convicted of sedition after a two-month trial. The defendants were members of the General Union of Hong Kong Speech Therapists, which has since been disbanded. They had published three books about a sheep village (羊村) facing attack by wolves, a metaphor for China’s dominance over Hong Kong.

One of the titles, The Guardians of Sheep Village (羊村守衛者), is an allegory of Hong Kong’s 2019 pro-democracy protests. Another, The Twelve Warriors of Sheep Village (羊村十二勇士), refers to a dozen Hong Kongers who were arrested in 2020 when they attempted to escape into exile by speedboat. The third book in the series, The Cleaners of Sheep Village (羊村清道夫), is a reference to medical workers who went on strike in an attempt to force Hong Kong to close its border with China at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

District Court Judge Kwok Wai Kin condemned the publishers for what he described as “a brain-washing exercise with a view to guiding the very young children to accept their views and values”. The defendants—Man-ling Lai, Sidney Ng, Samuel Chan, Tsz-ho Fong, and Melody Yeung—had all pleaded not guilty, and Yeung said in court: “My only regret is I couldn’t publish more picture books before getting arrested.” Referring to the political analogy in the books, she added: “I hope I can always stand on the side of the sheep.”

Nevermind

A lawsuit against grunge rock band Nirvana was dismissed by a Central District of California judge yesterday. Spencer Elden, who was photographed as a baby for the cover of the classic album Nevermind in 1991, had filed three legal actions against the band, seeking compensation for alleged sexual exploitation. Judge Fernando Olguin ruled that the ten-year statute of limitations had expired, and therefore “it would be futile to afford plaintiff a fourth opportunity to file an amended complaint.”

Although Elden was clearly unable to consent to the use of his image at the time, he has since publicly endorsed the album cover, somewhat negating the accusations in his lawsuit. Nevermind is one of the most acclaimed albums of the 1990s, and its lead single, Smells Like Teen Spirit, is one of the most iconic songs of the decade.

Battleship Potemkin

The classic Battleship Potemkin (Бронено́сец «Потёмкин») will be shown at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya on 7th September. The film is an agitprop dramatisation of the 1905 Russian Revolution, though it also demonstrates director Sergei Eisenstein’s revolutionary montage editing technique, and the ‘Odessa steps’ massacre is arguably the most famous sequence in silent cinema.

The archive’s 16mm print was donated by the embassy of the Soviet Union and first shown as part of the หนังดีที่สุดในโลก (‘greatest films in the world’) programme, one of the inaugural events of the Thailand Cultural Centre in 1987. The print is an unrestored, edited version (just under an hour long), with an English-language voice-over that fills in the gaps in the narrative.

Battleship Potemkin was previously screened at the archive in 2011, with live music by Nipat Chaisap. It was shown twice at Bangkok Screening Room, in 2018 (with a soundtrack by the Pet Shop Boys) and 2020 (with live music by Viveka).

“He went to an Imam Hatip school, that’s why he’s perverted...”

Gülşen, one of Turkey’s most popular singers, has been arrested after joking about the country’s religious school system. At a concert on 30th April, she teased a member of her band, saying: “İmam hatipte okumuş daha önce kendisi, sapıklığı oradan geliyor” (‘he went to an Imam Hatip school, that’s why he’s perverted’).

A video clip of the on-stage comment, filmed at the JJ Arena in Istanbul, was posted online by an audience-member. The singer has been charged with inciting hatred and division. She was detained in custody yesterday, after bail was denied. Ironically, she also appeared behind prison bars in the music video for her most recent single, Lolipop, released earlier this year.

ไม่มีคนบนฟ้า(‘no one in the sky)’

The ไม่มีคนบนฟ้า EP was released on CD by t_047 last year. The title track, which was also released as a single, translates as ‘no one in the sky’, and in Thailand the sky is often used as a metaphor for the monarchy. The lyrics also criticise “people who claim to be deities which I find so lame”. But, perhaps to avoid accusations of lèse-majesté, the band added a disclaimer on their YouTube channel: “ไม่ได้มีเจตนาเพื่อโจมตีบุคคลใดบุคคลหนึ่ง แต่มีความตั้งใจตักเตือนบุคคลหลายกลุ่ม ที่ตั้งตนสูงส่งกว่าสามัญชนคนธรรมดา” (‘it was not intended to attack any individual, but with the intention of admonishing many groups who elevate themselves above ordinary people’).

The ไม่มีคนบนฟ้า music video features footage of riot police deploying water cannon against anti-government protesters. The EP also includes ความฝันยามรุ่งสาง (‘dreaming at dawn’), which was one of several singles released on the 45th anniversary of the 6th October 1976 massacre.

Songs by a more controversial Thai band, Faiyen, have resulted in lèse-majesté charges against the band members themselves and protesters who sing the tracks. Protesters sang Faiyen’s song โชคดีที่มีคนไทย (‘lucky to have Thai people’) outside Bangkok South Criminal Court on 28th July; they also sang it, along with another Faiyen track—ใครฆ่า ร.8 (‘who killed Rama VIII?’)—at Victory Monument yesterday.

The Genius of Prince

The US Supreme Court will rule later this year on a long-running copyright lawsuit between photographer Lynn Goldsmith and the Andy Warhol Foundation. Warhol was commissioned by Vanity Fair to create a portrait of Prince, and the magazine paid Goldsmith for the rights to use her black-and-white Prince photograph as the basis for Warhol’s painting. Both Warhol and Goldsmith were credited when the image was published in the November 1984 issue (on p. 67), to illustrate an article titled Purple Fame.

The dispute stems not from that original publication, but from a commemorative magazine, The Genius of Prince, released in 2016 by the publisher of Vanity Fair. The cover illustration for The Genius of Prince was another Warhol portrait, also based on Goldsmith’s photo, and this time she wasn’t credited. Goldsmith sued the Warhol Foundation, though the Foundation counter-sued and argued that Warhol’s manipulation of her image was sufficiently transformative that it did not infringe her copyright.

The precedent for transformative works constituting fair use dates to a 1993 Supreme Court verdict that permitted The 2 Live Crew’s sampling of Roy Orbison’s single Oh, Pretty Woman. Even more directly relevant is the case of another photographer, Patrick Cariou, who sued the artist Richard Prince for copyright infringement. In that instance, most of Prince’s images were deemed fair use, though the legal status of five works remains unresolved, as the appeals court was unable to “make a determination about their transformative nature” and the case was ultimately settled out of court.

Uninspired by Current Events: Sorry Stories

Saratta Chuengsatiansup, the artist behind the Uninspired by Current Events page on Facebook, has released a book of his work. Uninspired by Current Events: Sorry Stories reproduces some of the digital artworks he has been posting daily since last year, alongside a handful of new images.

Despite the ironic disclaimer in its title, Uninspired by Current Events provides a topical, satirical commentary on Thai news and politics. The book also features short poems, in both English and Thai, to accompany each illustration, and the poetry is as sharp and subversive as the images themselves.

WeVo

An exhibition in Bangkok yesterday and today marked two years since the formation of WeVo (We Volunteer), a group of volunteer guards who provide protection for protesters at anti-government rallies. The guards, led by Piyarat Chongthep, have previously been labelled agitators, and they were accused of using violent tactics—throwing firecrackers and other projectiles—to repel riot police (on 28th February last year, for example).

The 2nd Anniversary of We Volunteer (งานครบรอบ 2 ปีกลุ่ม We Volunteer) exhibition was held at the Jam Factory. Rubber bullets fired by riot police were on display, as was the mock guillotine previously seen at Democracy Monument on 18th July last year. Supong Jitmuang’s documentary Mob 2020–2021 was shown at the event yesterday.

Quote of the day...

“Prayut will respect the court’s opinions because he has never thought of himself as being above the law.”
— Thanakorn Wangboonkongchana

Today sees the resurrection of Dateline Bangkok’s ‘quote of the day’ feature, an occasional series of I-can’t-believe-they-said-that quotes from Thailand. A government spokesman was quoted by the Bangkok Post newspaper today, assuring Prayut Chan-o-cha’s critics that the Prime Minister “has never thought of himself as being above the law.” This is, to say the least, somewhat ironic given Prayut’s role as leader of the junta that overthrew an elected government in 2014.

Prayut himself has provided two previous quotes of the day: he claimed that “we respect democracy” barely a fortnight after his coup, and he admitted that the army still used GT200 devices three years after they were exposed as a hoax. Other quotes of the day from yesteryear: a yellow-shirt leader said that Thailand should be more like North Korea, the Information and Communication Technology Minister openly admitted to violating the Computer Crime Act, Suthep Thaugsuban hypocritically condemned protesters for blocking roads, an Election Commission spokesman claimed that an election would lead to a coup, and a Ministry of Culture official dismissed the work of Thailand’s most acclaimed filmmaker.

“I have decided to take legal action against The Economist...”

An Iraqi soap opera actress has announced that she plans to sue The Economist over its use of her photograph. The magazine used a photo of Enas Taleb to illustrate an article about female obesity in the Middle East. Taleb told the online magazine New Lines: “I have decided to take legal action against The Economist... I am demanding compensation for the emotional, mental and social damage this incident has caused me.”

The article, headlined Weighty Matters, appears on p. 34 of the current issue (vol. 444, no. 9,307) of The Economist, published on 30th July. The Economist was last successfully sued for damages in 2004, after it alleged “a whiff of nepotism” in the appointment of the Singaporean Prime Minister’s wife as head of a state investment agency.

Dianagate

This month marks the thirtieth anniversary of the so-called ‘Dianagate’ scandal, the publication of a telephone conversation between Princess Diana and James Gilbey, with whom she was having an affair. A transcript of their phone call was printed in The Sun newspaper on 24th August 1992, under the banner headline “MY LIFE IS TORTURE”. The headline is a quote from the tape: Diana says that Prince Charles “makes my life real, real torture, I’ve decided.” (The tape was later sampled by the techno band House of Windsor for their novelty single Squidgy, a reference to Gilbey’s pet name for Diana, and Dianagate is also known as ‘Squidgygate’.)

According to The Sun, the call was accidentally recorded by a radio ham, Cyril Reenan, on New Year’s Eve 1989. A second amateur radio enthusiast, Jane Norgrove, subsequently provided the paper with her own tape of the call. The clarity of the tapes, and the unlikely coincidence of two accidental recordings of such a significant conversation, led to (as yet unproven) allegations that landlines in royal residences had been tapped.

Such speculation increased when a phone call between Charles and his mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles, was also leaked. The transcript of this so-called ‘Camillagate’ tape—recorded a fortnight before Diana’s call, on 18th December 1989—was first published by New Idea on 23rd January 1993. At the time, the magazine was owned by Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of The Sun, and it’s likely that the story was planted in an Australian magazine to provide some distance from Murdoch’s UK tabloids. Camillagate caused even more of a sensation than Dianagate, as the conversation was more directly sexual, and Charles was recorded joking about being reincarnated as his lover’s tampon: “God forbid, a Tampax!”

Ornament and Crime: Thoughts on Design and Materials

Ornament and Crime (Ornament und Verbrechen), first delivered as a lecture in Vienna and later published as an essay, is one of the most famous polemics in the history of architecture and design. Architect Adolf Loos abhorred the decorative ornamentation of Art Nouveau and the Vienna Secession, as he proclaimed in Ornament and Crime’s succinct central thesis: “the evolution of culture comes to the same thing as the removal of ornament from functional objects.”

Linking ‘primitive’ ornamentation to evolution is the most problematic aspect of Ornament and Crime, as Loos equated the tribal tattoos of Papua New Guinea with “degeneracy”. The essay is stridently moralistic, though it’s also arguably one of the first modernist manifestos, anticipating the functionalist architecture of Le Corbusier. Ornament and Crime: Thoughts on Design and Materials features two dozen essays by Loos, newly translated by Shaun Whiteside.

The Grammar Of Ornament, by Owen Jones, was the first systematic analysis of ornamental art, influencing Auguste Racinet’s L’ornement polychrome (‘polychromatic ornament’) and many other compendiums. Stuart Durant’s Ornament is a comprehensive history of pattern design and ornament since the Industrial Revolution. The more recent Histories of Ornament, edited by Gülru Necipoğlu and Alina Payne, is the first attempt at a global history of the subject.

Kenduri Seni Nusantara(‘Nusantara arts festival’)

Kenduri Seni Nusantara (‘Nusantara arts festival’), featuring more than fifty artists exhibiting at various venues in Pattani, opens on 13th August and runs until 30th November. The festival’s title refers to the Malay archipelago incorporating Indonesia, Malaysia, and the surrounding region, including Thailand’s southernmost provinces.

Thunska Pansittivorakul will be showing three video works at the ETAM Gallery: his short film Middle-earth (มัชฌิมโลก), an extract from his feature film Supernatural (เหนือธรรมชาติ), and a preview of his forthcoming collaboration with Nontawat Machai. Middle-earth premiered at the 11th Thai Short Film and Video Festival (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์สั้นครั้งที่ 11) in 2007, and has also been shown at the 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (หนังทดลองครั้งที่ 5) in 2008 and at the Jim Thompson Art Center in 2010.

Material Gworrllllllll!

Madonna and rapper Saucy Santana have collaborated on a remix of his song Material Girl, which was, of course, inspired by Madonna’s classic 1985 single. Their new single, retitled Material Gworrllllllll!, is released on streaming platforms today, accompanied by an animated video. They previously performed it at Terminal Five in New York on 23rd June.

The Terminal Five show was titled Finally Enough Love, which is also the title of Madonna’s new dance remix album. Available on vinyl and CD, it features edited remixes of Madonna’s dance singles from throughout her career, though no new material. The title is a line from the lyrics to I Don’t Search I Find, from her Madame X album. (You Can Dance, her previous dance remix compilation, was released in 1987.)

The Finally Enough Love track list is: Everybody, Into the Groove, Like a Prayer, Express Yourself, Vogue, Deeper and Deeper, Secret, Frozen, Music, Hollywood, Hung Up, Give It 2 Me, Girl Gone Wild, Living for Love, Medellín, and I Don’t Search I Find.