The Phantasm of “Remaindered Life” and Doubling Deaths in Phantom of Illumination (2017)
ICGC Commons for Critical Inquiry (537 Heller Hall) and Zoom.
Abstract: This presentation draws on a Thai docufiction film, Phantom of Illumination (dir. Wattanapume Laisuwanchai, 2017). The film observes a projectionist’s last days at a single-screen theater in Bangkok before it stopped operating in 2013. The first half documents the material death of cinematic infrastructure, which, between the 1970s-90s, gave rise to urban film culture and sustained both national and transnational film productions and consumption. The second half shifts to the projectionist’s migration back to his hometown depicting his failure to reintegrate into his family’s livelihood and way of life on the rubber plantation. His community mistakes his job-related depression for a possession of an evil spirit; they summon Buddhist monks to mimic a funeral and counterfeits a cremation for him as a way to fool the spirit that his body is no longer working or available for possession. This presentation aligns the doubling deaths—material/infrastructural and symbolic/counterfeited—to observe the exploitative extractive nature of the film industry. It also seeks to contend with a way to rethink a “life-making practice” (Tadiar 2022, 14) through human labor, media, and migration in the age of disposability and hyper-techno-capitalist subsumption.
Reference: Tadiar, Neferti Xina M. 2022. Remaindered Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies
About the Speaker
Palita Chunsaengchan is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian cinema and media cultures at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Minnesota. Her forthcoming monograph, Chimeric Cinema: The Formation of Thai Film Culture, traces the history of Thai cinema from its debut in 1897 in the royal court through its uses in the aftermath of the Siamese Revolution of 1932. The book places cinema in relation Siam's ruling power and its distinct formation of semi-colonial modernity. She published in journals Asian Cinema, SOJOURN, JMPS and JAS and edited volumes. Her past publications focus on the questions of aesthetics, class-stratification and politico-religious discourses of order and control under the putatively authoritarian context of Siam/Thailand.