SalayaCountry: ThailandArea: 13km²Time zone: GMT +7

Salaya is a tambon (sub-district) of Phutthamonthon district, Nakhon Pathom province, to the west of Bangkok and part of the Bangkok Metropolitan Region. It contains six mubans (villages).

In Tongpan (1977), a revolutionary Thai Third Cinema film made at the height of political unrest and brutal repression in 1970s Thailand, we see a re-staging of a seminar which took place in Isan, in the northeast of Thailand, to discuss the building of Pa-Mong dam along the Mekong river and the effects it would have on the local village communities. Made by the Isan Film Group, students and activists who had never made a film before, Tongpan is a radical self-reflexive work questioning which voices are heard within institutional spaces and thus define history. When a student activist persuades the local villager Tongpan to tell the seminar about his precarity and to join their struggle, rather than a democratising liberatory process, the film portrays Tongpan’s exclusion and alienation among the overpowering voices of student vanguardists, bureaucrats and academics. Scenes constantly shift between the seminar – Tongpan sitting quietly in a corner while academics wax poetic about the plight of villagers – and cut to Tongpan’s reality, caring for his sick wife and their precarious surroundings in a makeshift home.

Screened midway through the 69th Flaherty Film Seminar in August this year, the film immediately rippled through the audience, with its implications for our own privileged positionalities. Tongpan questions the ethics of activism, and the modes which can engage a more meaningful form of collectivism. The Flaherty Film Seminar is almost a mythical event in the film world, attended by mostly industry programmers, critics, filmmakers and academics. Something between a film festival and an academic conference, it is characterised by its radical political programme of non-fiction experimental films, and a similarly rigorous schedule: for a week, participants watch the same daily 8-hour programme of films together which are only revealed when the lights go down, followed by intense and at times combative seminars with the featured filmmakers. What does it mean to have your voice heard? And how can solidarity resonate beyond these exclusive, erudite spaces to actively listen to the voices which linger on the margins?

For the first time in its history, the Seminar was held in Thailand, rather than its normal stomping grounds in upstate New York, under the curatorial direction of the programmers May Adadol Ingawanij, a UK-based Thai academic, writer and curator, and Julian Ross, a Netherlands-based academic and curator. An attempt to move the spectatorial gaze away from a US-centric institutional space, May notes in an interview with Art & Market that they sought to “decentre” and “build another model or infrastructure for inquiries, encounters and exchanges, one that is not so dependent on the patronage or the mediation of the institutions and spaces of the geopolitical centre.”

Instead, the Seminar took place at the Thai Film Archive, itself a one-of-a-kind institution in Southeast Asia, which expanded from being a single unit of the National Archive 40 years ago into an independent public institution, which now maintains its programming and operational autonomy. Kong Rithdee, the deputy director of the TFA, tells me, “We are in the business of preserving people’s memory,” as the TFA’s Movie Rescue Unit has worked to retrieve almost anything made or related to Thailand, including home-movies, newsreels and amateur films.

A sunny June day, outside the Thai Film Archive on a morning before the screening. The building is designed in line with the former director Dome Sukwong’s request for a wooden cinematheque, referencing the old established picture houses including Sala Chalermkrung Royal Cinema. The former director also expressed his desire for a “cinema in the sky”, comparing the structure to a literal “temple of cinema” for worshipping cinephiles in its wooden-exterior 400-seater screening space. TonSilp Studio and Kor Kan Dee Architect were the two architectural firms chosen to design the building, which was expanded after 2009.

The TFA hosts seminars, workshops and film festivals (of note is the Thai Short Film and Video Festival). They often work with younger filmmakers who are seeking to bring the archives into their own practice – as in Chanasorn Chaikitiporn’s films which deal with both historical and personal memory through archival footage. “We try to create a balance between history as thought of as historical objects or historical memory,” Rithdee adds, “but also history in the making, history as it is happening right now.”

May and Julian centred this year’s iteration around the theme “To Commune”. Not only did we commune around cinema and the seminar discussions, we had every meal together in the courtyard of the Thai Film Archive, a setting akin to a school cafeteria, facilitating new allies and groups that re-shuffled easily.

With the TFA in Salaya, on the edges of Bangkok, many nights were spent at a local hotel bar, mostly utilised for its golf club – empty except for a single waitress singing karaoke before our arrival. Most of the rigorous debates took place on these balconies overlooking deserted artificial hills.

On a guided tour of the archives, we watch the scrupulous work of the archivists, checking film rolls for damage for upcoming restorations. From there, we visit the colourists, the freezing storage cupboards for the film reels and the digital storing suite.

Throughout the seminar, the twin practices of listening and speaking stand out, to me, as our mode of communing – the exchange of undulating, contradicting perspectives during the seminar, but after arriving back home in London to write, the voices from those films resound continuously. In Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening (2002), he writes: “Why, in the case of the ear, is there withdrawal and turning inward, a making resonant, but, in the case of the eye, there is manifestation and display, a making evident?”

In Listening, resonance is a word that returns constantly. Nancy suggests that listening is about being “struck” by the way a sound produces a resonance within oneself and within another. This resonance is not just an echo but a transformation that penetrates both the listener and the speaker who hears their own voice emerge outside of themselves. While sight frequently offers a totalising sense of identification between the subject as viewer and film as object, listening often offers something more fluid, affecting and relational.

As we gathered on the wooden steps of the Thai Film Archive’s atrium for the opening night, Rithdee explains that the opening film, a restored popular amateur regional Thai film, Tamone Prai [Savage Jungle] (1959) directed by Thamrong Rujanaphand, has intentionally not been subtitled. Instead, we engage in an intentionally, opaque mode of listening to the live dubbing by Cosit Kritanan and Sivapon Phuakpiwiem accompanied by musicians.

The performance harks back to the traditional cinematic practices in Thailand, when mobile cinema-troupes would travel around the country with a silent 16mm reel and a live dubber, a popular practice from the 1940s to 1970s. Cinema was not relegated to indoor picturehouses, but existed as an itinerant phenomenon, porous and exposed to the natural environment. Historically, many audiences would attend screenings when voiced by an acclaimed dubber; they’d recognise his voice, his gestures and how the corporeality of his voice alters and re-imagines relics of moving images.

A few days into the seminar, during an afternoon screening, I wandered away for a quick nap. In lieu, I was pulled to the Spaceship of Nabua, an installation from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Primitive project which sits at the heart of the Thai Film Archive’s display below the main staircase to the cinema.

Working with local villagers in Nabua to construct a “spaceship”, Weerasethakul and the community conceived a coconut-like wooden structure with a small portal into a red-lit interior. It was first occupied as a makeshift teenage drinking spot, then used to store grains. When it fell out of use and became overgrown with vines and weeds, the TFA decided to restore it.

The distinctive coconut-shaped sculpture sits at the heart of the Thai Film Institute, looking out onto the open-air auditorium, which hosts interactive film screenings. During the Flaherty, both the opening night and a performance-lecture by Saeed Taji Farouky took place under the spirit of the Nabua Spaceship.

Weerasethekul imagined a time-travel machine that was both primitive and hypermodern, able to transcend the weight of history. In Nabua, a northeastern village which was occupied by the Thai military during the Cold War, many villagers, often farmers, were tortured, killed, or forced to flee into the jungle, accused either of being communists or harbouring them. Now a relatively quiet town, Weerasethakul’s project interrogates attempts by the younger generation of teenagers to reconcile this history inherited from their parents.

I crawl inside barefoot and lie down next to a life-size prop of a character in Weerasethekul’s 2010 film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Boonmee’s monkey son, who rests at the centre beside a space helmet. He is bigger than me, and we are both bathed in red. I close my eyes with recorded sounds from Nabua enveloping us – the cicadas at night, thunder, grass rustling, a man’s voice. Listening from within the spaceship, the sound envelops the space, turning inwards as if travelling within the walls of another body. Nancy writes, “The ear opens into the sonorous cave that we then become,” referring to the womb as a cave. Rather than an attempt to escape the past and these seemingly irreconcilable histories, the Spaceship offers another form of departure. Perhaps, the Spaceship is part of Weerasethakul’s reincarnations, an ear that listens between past and new lives in incubation; an ear that listens before it can see.

  The simultaneously ephemeral and resonant capacities of sound are examined in evocative modes in two films which  attempt to commune with the past through the voice. Palestinian artist Jumana Manna’s film A Magical Substance Flows Through Me (2010) and Okinawan artist Chikako Yamashiro’s Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat (2009) are both striking and sensorial in their examination of history, nationalism and marginal histories through alternating modes of aural embodiment.

Yamashiro’s seven-minute video piece is composed of a single wide-shot close-up of the artist’s face, looking off to the left of the screen, against a white background. Yamashiro looks into the distance, gaze averted from the camera. As she opens her mouth to speak, a man’s voice comes out. The voice belongs to an elderly Okinawan man who recounts his experience enduring and surviving the 1945 Battle of Okinawa.

When the elderly population in Okinawa learned that the Japanese government was planning to omit any mention of the Battle of Okinawa and the colonisation of the island  in school textbooks, they decided to speak up after decades of silence. Okinawa and its archipelago were originally annexed by Japan in the 18th and 19th centuries, and formally incorporated as part of Japan during the Meiji era. During the Second World War, Okinawa was a fierce battleground between Japanese and American forces. When it became evident that the Japanese were losing the war, the Japanese Imperial Army forced Okinawans to commit mass suicide. Civilians were forced to jump off cliffs into the sea or bombed in caves. Historians underscore the racism underlying these tragic events, as the Japanese Imperial Army did not regard Okinawans as equal citizens, and were suspicious of their alliances.

When Yamashiro embarked on making this project, she decided to become the “throat” and “mouth” of the survivors. Yamashiro memorised the survivors’ testimony and lip-synced his words as if they were her own – the laborious act of memorisation testifying to Yamashiro’s active determination to create a lineage of Okinawan history, one that takes continual practice to recite and remember. As the film continues, tears fall from her eyes running down her cheek, a tension held between witnessing and embodying. Then, a projection of the man’s face superimposes Yamashiro’s own. His eye is aligned above her temple, and his tears run down her face like a bead of sweat, his mouth out of sync above her own. Yamashiro’s face becomes a screen, a projection of the palimpsestic relationship of their intertwined histories – his tears becoming her own, his wrinkles and his lips becoming hers, a haunting, ghostly convergence.

However, it’s the emergence of her voice that separates them. As he calls for the end of war, we hear her own political assertion, carrying forth his desires across time and bodies with her own voice. Both voices are marked by their singular presence, their own memories, but when spoken together, they become a chorus, a multigenerational voice that reverberates.

Choosing to privilege sound as her archival medium, Yamashiro appears critical of the fetishistic “touristy” images of Okinawa which exclude from the frame the colonial violence that Okinawans continue to endure, now under the US military. Sound pierces beyond the image, ricochets around the audience, a demand to be heard and for new voices to emerge.

Palestinian artist Jumana Manna’s A Magical Substance Flows Into Me (2015) similarly imagines the body as a repository for memories of diaspora, in particular the memory of song. Positioning herself as a spectator, her own subject, quasi-anthropologist and archivist, Manna builds her film around the research of German-Jewish ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann, who ran the “Oriental Music” radio programme by the Palestine Broadcasting Service during the British Mandate period when he migrated in the 1930s to Palestine.

Manna scrutinises Lachmann’s ethnographic search for an “untainted” local Oriental music, as viewed from his Jewish European lens, and rebukes it with her own multivalent record of those same communities he studied. The film examines the complex shared diasporic Arab musical traditions between Palestinians, Mizrahi Jews, Bedouins, Coptic Christians, who all exist within the borders of historic Palestine. Manna remains critical of the realities of settler colonialism while exposing the binaristic contradictions instituted by an ethno-nationalist Zionism. In one scene, a young Moroccan-Jewish woman sings and cooks, then professes, “I was born in a house where the image and the flag of Israel were hung and myths were told […] The Israeli picture they painted for me was very flat and in denial. I don’t want to be in denial – be that of Judaism, Jewish Moroccan culture or our Arabhood and Berber culture.” The film sits at the heart of these contradictions. Negar Azimi writes how A Magical Substance examines “the aural set against the notion of impossibility” with impossibility itself as a “trope of the Palestinian landscape”.

Throughout the film, Manna sets these musical vignettes up against staged sequences with her own family in their home. Manna’s father provides a counter-oral history to Lachmann’s. We hear him reading from a report of massacres during the Nakba, or recall his own exchanges with his Mizrahi Jewish friend who ironically hums “You Oppress Me” by iconic Arabic singer Umm Kulthum.

A Magical Substance examines the heart of this paradox – communities that invite Manna into their spaces while simultaneously upholding and enacting apartheid. In one scene, Manna visits a Kurdish-Israeli man in his office. The camera alternates between close-ups of maps titled “Tables of Land Expropriation,” and a medium shot of the man singing a traditional Kurdish song. The visual sequence is accompanied by a voiceover of Lachmann’s writing, read by Manna, which frames the song as part of a “low standard of civilisation” and a part of a “demonic” ritual.

Manna skillfully unravels the contradictions between different modes of identification: the Kurdish-Jewish man is reduced to a primitive anthropological subject through Lachmann’s European-Jewish lens while Manna’s camera reveals how a population of two million Mizrahi Jews in Israel are nonetheless complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

In Manna’s most recent film Foragers (2022), Palestinians in the West Bank testify in a fictional Israeli court for the traditional history of foraging za’atar and akkoub as a new Israeli law criminalises the practice of wild harvesting. In these moments, their voice both makes evident the realities of Israeli occupation while almost making resonant these fictional “rehearsals for liberation”, Manna notes.

Throughout the Flaherty, I felt frustrated by what images can offer us in our political realities, in the everyday, of how they can reach voices beyond our own, and Manna’s words resonate deeply: filmmaking as a rehearsal for liberation. Just as Yamashiro’s acts of memorisation require rehearsal, acts of organising and protest are laborious forms dependent on perseverance – one where failure is met by practice and repetition. Despite the complex and often frustratingly unanswerable questions raised by the Flaherty’s seminar, the continual questions prompted by these voids are more fruitful than attempts to reach a concrete conclusion. Rehearsal and its demands are a clearer vision of liberation in their accumulative process rather than a singular moment.

What drew Manna initially to making A Magical Substance was this inexplicably magical and affective quality of sound which transmits almost imperceptibly between different bodies and across borders. “The visual is tendentially mimetic and the sonorous tendentially methexic – that is, having to do with participation, sharing or contagion,” Nancy writes, and here, song lives on like a contagion, like the revolution – an intergenerational transmission maintained through the spirit of infectious repetition. .