The Terrorists REVIEW: pornographer and the victim by James Majmurek
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the original version is in polish, this is the google translated version.
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James Majmurek
31/07/2011
So far, the greatest discovery of the main competition for me is Thai (produced in part by the German money) movie Thunska Pansittivorakul Terrorists. The film is a documentary essay about the revolution last year’s red shirts in Thailand. From February to May last year, Thai people focused primarily on the organization of United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship on the streets protesting against government policy Abhista Vejjajivy. Front, tied as a platform for opposition to the military coup of 2006, incumbent Prime Minister urged to outsource new elections and restore democracy in Thailand. The authorities responded by increasing censorship and surveillance of community organizations, and sent the army against the protesters. Within a few months during street clashes with police forces and protesters were killed over 80 people.
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Thunska not interested, however, produce another zbanalizowanego by clock feeds the image “of riots in the periphery. The director is well aware that to show any “truth” about the Thai contemporary reality demands a rethinking and reworking television “news” form. His film does this in a very interesting and courageous (artistically, politically, morally finally) way. First of all, radically separates the three elements constructing the discourse of the film document: picture, sound and text. Each of these three elements become autonomous and collides with the other.
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Images, words and sounds come from this with radically different agendas. In the first scene we see the film for a motto the words of Walter Laquera (“he who for a certain group is a terrorist, for another may be a fighter for freedom”) and a short introductory text in the context of events. But in the next shot, we do not see any street demonstration, only the fishermen fish on the cutter. Instead of the expected image by the viewer, incomprehensible political chaos of the exotic country - the image is a daily work and physical labor, which in today’s culture of liberal democracy is consistently displaced from iconosphere. Thunska presents a few such scenes, not just workers performing different jobs, but also ordinary people walking the streets, waiting at the airport for the plane, etc. Images of street riots do not appear until later. First, in the form of filmed interviews with the participants strongly protests. Known to television images of soldiers firing guns on the street to its own citizens do not appear until the end, in the final minutes of the film.
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Thunska puts all the images in the context of the political history of Thailand the past few decades. He talks about made in the mid-70s by far-right militias pogroms of suspected leftist sympathies and Thai citizens of Chinese origin. Weaves in the story of his relationship with his mother (Tajka Chinese origin). Photos from those events illustrates the tacky, melodramatic song and interweaves private photos from the wedding, you guessed it - the hero’s parents wedding. In the narration of the film are also included (read by the teacher and appear as subtitles on the screen) you Triveja novel fragments of a young man who falls in love with another man, which complicates his relationship with his father.
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Thunska previously famous as one of the most important creators of the Thai gay cinema. His papers and short films (some time in Thailand, banned by the censors) watched erotic and pornographic images of male bodies. Gay pornography is another element in a complex discourse Terrorists, embedded in the film are scenes of naked men masturbating models, etc. This treatment fully double function here. On the one hand points to the complementarity of the struggle for emancipation of sexual minorities (and their right to represent their own sexuality in iconosphere) and the struggle for democracy - understood as the right to representation in the political field, all those for whom the system does not provide any space there. On the other hand, such images appear in a film produced especially for the international festival circuit, with the Center for the viewer, yet turn a phantasm about Thailand - known even to the Platform Michel Houellebecq - the West as a place that offers images (and images) of young, attractive, exotic and sexually available women.
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These pornographic passages provoked the greatest public opposition. In the corridors or in the festival club could hear many voices outrage - from the playful in its overt stupidity (“where people are dying for freedom, and here the guy pounding a horse!”), The ones that seem worthy of deeper consideration. The most serious argument was: Thunska assembled in one movie pornographic images and pictures of the murdered during a demonstration turns into a stream of pornographic representations of the dead bodies of people who are not able to defend themselves, who would not wish it so. The problem with this position is that it introduces one of the basic rates of the film: the parallel struggle for the right to political representation (for which he killed the victim) and the right to representation of gay sexuality. Prohibition Thunska showing old films in Thailand has imposed the same regime, against which people demonstrate in the streets.
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For me, film is a great film Thunska essay, an example of political art at the highest level, the work aware that the place of articulation is a form of politics.
(Source: krytykapolityczna.pl)
