“Memoria” in the cinema: Big Bang Theory – culture

Over fifty times, the industry journal Variety counted, the ominous “bang” can be heard in this film, which assails Jessica every day. At the beginning she is woken up by it, she walks through the nocturnal room and looks out the window. Outside, the parking lot with a dozen cars, their headlights start flashing in fright, the security systems are blaring, calm is slowly returning. Nobody else hears Jessica’s bang, just us viewers, a privilege, an insecurity, a stigma. And: pure suspense.

Tilda Swinton is Jessica, she has known the director Apichatpong Weerasethakul for many years. “Memoria” is his first film that he didn’t shoot in his native Thailand, but in Colombia, in Bogotá. I hope, says Swinton, that there will be a Scottish Weerasethakul soon. The director received the Jury Prize for “Memoria” in Cannes in 2021 – for “Uncle Boonmee Recalls His Past Lives” there was the Palme d’Or in 2010.

The heroine suffers from Exploding Head Syndrome, which the director also experienced himself

Jessica’s bang is a sound out of nowhere, with no origin, pointing to our uncertain attempts to penetrate the mystery of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films, which are synthetic and natural at the same time. He himself has experienced the disruption of such intractable bangs, which is Exploding Head Syndrome (EHS), which is more of a nuisance than painfully morbid. They are repetitive noises, inside the head, mostly occurring at the point between sleep and awakening when consciousness is least protected.

Jessica wants to do something about the mysterious phenomenon and visits a sound engineer in his studio, the young Hernán, who artificially recreates the sound with his equipment, according to her descriptions. “It’s like an enormous ball, made of cement,” she explains to him, “falling into a metal well surrounded by seawater.” Perception as a form of poetry. How big is the cement ball? Jessica separates her hands to accentuate the bang coming out of her mouth. “After that it shrinks…” She struggles to get the foreign Spanish words out of herself, sometimes she has to switch to English. A poetry for which the whole body plays together. Hernán shows her various sound variations, she listens. More tierra, she demands, “it has to sound earthier, like a rumble from the core of the earth”. Now he shows her a library of cinematic sound effects on his computer, all precisely named and very absurd: “Body meets duvet meets bat.”

Imagination is absolute, that has been a motto of cinema from the very beginning. The sound only comes into its own in the description, so a visit to the recording studio is reminiscent of the practice of psychoanalysis, where dreams and their content only take shape in associative, groping descriptions. The psychoanalytic technique also has a lot to do with poetry, the language does not serve the purpose of naming anything exactly.

Bogotá is a bustling city, most of the shots here are full of people hurrying across the frame. The settings are inspired, says Apichatpong Weerasethakul, by Colombian painter Ever Astudillo, as he brings together people and space. Jessica visits an exhibition with his paintings.

As always with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the film takes a completely different direction after an hour. A scientist, played by Jeanne Balibar, told Jessica about 6,000-year-old human remains found during a tunneling project through the Andes. So Jessica goes to the country, and at a river she meets a man who also goes by the name Hernán and is peeling fish. I can’t forget, he says, my memory is overflowing, so he doesn’t watch anything anymore, no films, no TV. He doesn’t even dare to dream, when he sleeps he lies there like a dead man. The time stands still.

Perhaps my most Buddhist film, says Weerasethakul, with its juxtaposition of space and emptiness. It’s about subjectivity, in its most subtle form, without one becoming a subject. The memories jump from one to the other. Jessica Holland, that’s the name of the young woman in the fantastic phantom film “I Walked with a Zombie” by Jacques Tourneur – the director is extremely important for Weerasethakul. This Jessica is attracted to the sound of voodoo drums on a Caribbean island, she falls for the cult. “I believe that my Jessica, like the Tourneurs, does not really exist, she has a surreal dimension that only cinema can give… She is the cinema.”

memory, 2021 – Director, Script: Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Camera: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. Editor: Lee Chatametikool. Music: Cesar Lopez. Starring: Tilda Swinton, Agnes Brekke. Port-au-Prince, 136 minutes. Theatrical release on May 5th, 2022.