The most beautiful, interesting and simply remarkable film I watched in 2012 was, without a doubt, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Mekong Hotel. An exercise in patient listening and a series of variations on story-telling, the film accompanies a group of humans and spirits as they calmly discuss, among other things, the Thailand-Laos border, the Mekong River 2011 floods, military training and the love of the nation, being 600 years old, and the pob spirits' cannibal tendencies. The key to the film - as in many others by Weerasethakul - is the radical refusal to establish any ontological distinction or hierarchy between these characters and conversations. In other words, it bypasses the division between documentary and fiction, 'real life' and sci-fi. Describing the film with these categories, as tends to be the case, is in my opinion highly inappropriate, since the film ignores them and renders them irrelevant. Mekong Hotel is built around a single plane of existence where ghosts, humans, memories and stories coexist with one another - with the film itself becoming a vehicle for trying out different ways of hosting them. Even the rehearsals for the soundtrack and the bad takes are welcome (in fact, the variations on the guitar theme that make up an important part of the soundtrack mirror the rhythm and the approach of the film as a whole as a succession of 'attempts').
I first saw the film at the Hackney Picturehouse as part of the London Film Festival, i.e. a digital projection on a huge screen. This is important; I've later seen it again on my laptop and tablet, and found the experience lacking. The absolute stillness of the projection and the clarity and definition of the image as seen on the big digital screen is I think an integral part of the film. The camera never leaves the tripod and in fact never moves; the maximum depth of field allows everything to be always in focus. This creates a visual unity that becomes the right context for the 'ontological democracy' described above - the visual language of ontological non-distinction.
Approaching the film from an anthropological angle is interesting, as it relates to current debates that have highlighted the limitations of our so-called universal ontology, i.e. our theory of reality, which we tend to take for granted. In the West, we live within one nature only, and many cultures; the more or less clear separation between life and death; the hard reality of bodies and the mystical domain of ghosts and spirits. What anthropologists have shown is that rather than a description of 'reality', these precepts are rather a 'theory' of reality - and one amongst many, for that matter. Weerasethakul's films precisely allow us to participate in and experience an alternative ontology. I would hope that rather than reducing it to a mere 'belief' or esoteric tale, we can learn to be in it and, in turn, question the universality and even adequacy of our own ontology.
Suggested accompanying reading: anything by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, for example Metaphysiques Cannibales.
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