The Politics and Aesthetics of Non-Representation: Re-Imagining Ethnographic Cinema with Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Abstract

This article argues that the work of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul offers conceptual and methodological tools that may contribute to the re-imagination of ethnographic cinema beyond representation. Weerasethakul’s films emerge out of a para-ethnographic engagement with people and places, rely on participatory methods and operate as hosting devices for a multiplicity of subaltern beings and stories. They enact an inventive and often animistic “performative realism” (Ingawanij 2013a) which can be understood as political in the sense that it creates new conditions of possibility and room for alter-ontologies. The article conceptualizes this orientation in relation to the production of “assemblages of collective enunciation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986) as well as to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s (2010) idea of “taking seriously” the ontology of others, that is, the other worlds that they experience.

Keywords

• Author: Aesthetics of non-representation; Apichatpong Weerasethakul; ethnographic cinema; para-ethnographic; representation