Dear Colleagues,
Please join us at the Film Studies Department in St Andrews this Wednesday (October 5) at 3pm for the first event in our speaker series. Dr Philippa Lovatt (University of St Andrews) will be presenting a talk entitled ‘The archaeoacoustics of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021)’. Please find below an abstract and bio. All welcome.
‘The archaeoacoustics of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021)’
“I was startled by the sound of an explosion. It was a bomb, at dawn, not from elsewhere but within my head. This, I later learned, is called Exploding Head Syndrome. It feels like someone snapping a rubber band inside your skull. Your skull seems to be made of metal. The immense noise reverberates around the brain, but instead of waking you up fully, it puts you in a semi-conscious state, listening, anticipating.”
These words are how Apichatpong Weerasethakul describes his experience of a short-lived medical condition that was the inspiration for his most recent feature film Memoria (2021). The film, set in Colombia, is about a Scottish woman named Jessica who lives in Medellín where she owns a small orchid farm. Jessica is troubled by a recurrent loud bang in her head that is inaudible to everyone around her. She visits a young sound engineer called Hernán who tries to replicate it using digital sound files through his mixing desk; attempting to better communicate what she hears, Jessica tells him it’s “like a rumble from the core of the earth.” In pre-production notes Apichatpong explains that he imagines Jessica’s inner world to be like the mountainous and riverine topography of Colombia that mimic “the folds of the brain or the curves of sound waves.” He notes however that with every step, Jessica’s movement barely betrays the tremors, landslides, and earthquakes of her internal landscape and the camera records only a woman walking. Like her namesake in Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943), Jessica seems to be being slowly pulled through life by unseen forces. In every scene, her movement is slow and heavy as though moving under water. In this talk, I draw from acoustic anthropologist Steven Feld’s concept of ‘acoustemic stratigraphy’, and explore the film’s topographical and auditory themes of surface and depth by attending to the film’s sonic layers, considering Memoria’s archaeological imagination through the framework of archaeoacoustics. I argue that shared listening, as both a practice and a metaphor in Memoria, provides a way of attuning to the reverberant histories of political and ecological violence and to memories of the ‘disappeared’ in both Colombia and Thailand that lie just below the surface of the landscape, in shallow graves and on riverbanks.
Dr Philippa Lovatt is Lecturer in Film Studies and Co-Director of Centre for Screen Cultures at University of St Andrews. She is currently writing her first monograph Reverberant Histories: Expanded Listening in Art Cinema and Artists’ Moving Image in Asia (under contract with Edinburgh University Press) and has previously published her work in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies; Screen; Music, Sound and the Moving Image; The New Soundtrack; Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, and Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. In 2022, she co-curated the film screening and discussion programme ‘(Im)material worlds: tracing creative practice, histories and environmental contexts in artists’ moving image from Southeast Asia and UK’ with Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn, LUX Scotland and CAMPLE LINE, which was funded by the British Council.
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Glyn Davis
Professor of Film Studies
Department of Film Studies
University of St Andrews
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