Thammasat University students who are interested in film, art, psychology, sociology, political science, and related subjects may find a newly available book useful.

At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators is an Open Access book, available for free download at this link:

https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/58587

Its author is Professor Jean Ma who teaches art history at the Stanford Arts Institute, Stanford University, California, the United States of America.

The TU Library collection includes many other books about different aspects of film.

Professor Ma’s book discusses at length the artistry of Thai film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. She notes,

The 2018 International Film Festival Rotterdam included among its programs a specially commissioned work by Apichatpong Weerasethakul that resists ready classification. SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL, presented by the festival organizers as an “immersive one-off filmproject,” cannot be described simply as a film or straightforwardly as an installation, despite having the characteristics of both categories. Its filmic component consisted of a found footage montage, compiled from the collections of the Netherlands’ two largest film archives, the Eye Filmmuseum and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Landscape imagery—of earthly terrain, sky, and bodies of water (in a nod to the maritime siting of the festival)— dominated the visuals. Accompanying the images was a dense soundtrack of natural ambient noises, such as the lapping of waves and the soughing of leaves stirred by wind. These sounds were created from field recordings made in Thailand by Apichatpong’s frequent collaborator, the sound designer and artist Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr. The fragments of footage, which ranged from the earliest years of moving pictures to more recent aerial drone imagery, unreeled like a series of shifting views from a journey across places and periods, animated pages from an album of nature and history.

This found footage film, with a total length of twenty hours, was screened for several days, but not in one of the many commercial movie theaters in central Rotterdam dedicated to the festival. Rather, it was exhibited in a customized screening environment designed by Apichatpong and installed in a cavernous double-story hall inside the city’s former Chamber of Commerce. The film was projected on a large, perfectly round screen hung at one end of the hall, in front of a wall of windows. At the opposite end of the hall was a balcony with rows of seats, approximating the arrangement of a conventional screening venue. In the ample space between them was an intricately interlocking platform on which eight beds were arranged at varying heights diagonal to the screen. These could be reserved on a nightly basis (for a fee of 75€) by those wishing to experience the entirety of the piece’s duration. Each was equipped with a nightstand, a bed made up with fluffy pillows and duvets, and even slippers and toiletries for the occupants. Thus, in addition to being a film and an installation, the work also fit the description of “an actual, operational hotel.”…

SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL holds a magnifying glass to early cinema to expose its visual fascination with, and ritualistic evocations of, the act of sleep, and then, with another gesture, refracts its beam in the direction of the audience to induce a mimetic response to the figures on the screen. Scenes of slumber floated across the round screen, like clouds passing before a moon; meanwhile, the design of the installation resulted in a space of darkness, enclosure, and comfort irresistible to even the most finicky of sleepers. Footage and architecture converged around an endeavor to wholly integrate slumber into the experience of SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL, both visually and phenomenally. In this endeavor, Apichatpong challenges the usual definition of cinema as a medium of animation, revealing a preoccupation with stillness and inaction that emerges in the medium’s infancy, running in parallel with and inseparable from the appeal of movement and dynamism. Furthermore, he puts his own spin on the notion of putting one’s audience to sleep, in a clear rejection of the more commonplace implications of this phrase. Discussing the piece, Apichatpong suggests that “asleep, you become part of another kind of cinema in the making.” If the questions raised in SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL about the preferred objects and qualities of spectatorial attention seem intended as a provocation targeting conventional assumptions about the viewing experience, those audience members who arrive with a prior familiarity with Apichatpong’s body of work will already be prepared to grapple with these questions. Dormant figures and bedroom scenes recur throughout his art and filmmaking to a striking degree. They appear in the narrative feature films on which he has built his reputation as one of the foremost auteurs of contemporary cinema: Blissfully Yours (Sud Sanaeha, 2002), which made his name on the global film circuit when it received Le Prix Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival; Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee Raluek Chat, 2010), the first Thai film ever to receive the prestigious Palme d’Or; Cemetery of Splendor (Rak Ti Khon Kaen, 2015), whose story centers on a group of soldiers afflicted with a sleeping sickness; and Memoria (2021), whose main character Jessica Holland is named after the sleepwalking woman in the American horror film I Walked With a Zombie. Such scenes also appear across the corpus of photographs, videos, installations, and performances Apichatpong has produced as an artist, simultaneous with his filmmaking career. The sleeping body finds a natural lodging within his minute explorations of the spaces, rhythms, and materialities of everyday life. It also melds seamlessly with the languorous tempo of his moving- image works, which tend to pause the gaze in prolonged moments of stillness or set it adrift in hypnotic flows of images. Apichatpong’s name comes up frequently in contemporary accounts of slow cinema, where he is cited as a key figure in the emergence in recent decades of a distinct aesthetics of slowness in global art cinema and beyond. His ongoing inquiry into states of somnolence is consistent with the formal strategies of deceleration and reduction that distinguish this cinema of slowness, along with the “relaxed form of panoramic perception” with which the latter is associated. At the same time, the affirmation of sleep as an integral part of the audience’s experience of the work—suggested in many of Apichatpong’s projects, but nowhere quite as emphatically as SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL—goes a long way beyond the drifting forms of attention typically attributed to slow cinema. On the one hand, the piece’s address to and interpellation of an unseeing, unconscious viewer, combined with its marathon running time, calls to mind a longer history of avant-garde challenges to the norms of aesthetic contemplation. Consider, for instance, the opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), a collaboration between the composer Philip Glass and theater artist Robert Wilson. When asked about the opera’s five-hour length, Glass shares a view expressed by his collaborator: “Well, you know, if you fall asleep, when you wake up it’ll still be going on.”  In his other theatrical projects, Wilson composed performances of even more extreme durations, extending from twelve hours up to seven days and thus engendering a “long wave rhythm” of attention inclusive of deep relaxation, diverted focus, and sleep. The cultivation of what Richard Schechner terms “selective inattention” as an alternative mode of reception—often by means of temporal dilation—threads throughout the postwar American avant-garde, connecting the durational media of music, performance, and film. By situating SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL against this historical background, we can better grasp dimensions of this work that escape purely cinematic frameworks of analysis—such as the notion of spectatorship as participatory, real-time performance that is implied in Apichatpong’s comment about the piece. Sleep is not merely an acceptable state in which to experience this work, but the most ideal. This position signals a decisive turn away from the focused vision and concentrated attentiveness that are traditionally prioritized as hallmarks of the aesthetic encounter, and that continue to operate as regulating ideals in contemporary debates about spectatorship.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)