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Animism and the Performative Realist Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul

As an internationally recognised researcher on the filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ingawanij was invited by the editors to contribute this peer-reviewed article. It is published in the first comprehensive edited volume on posthuman cinema and the environment. The extent to which Weerasethakul’s artistic practice invokes historical ruins, obsolete media artefacts, and legacies of political destruction from the Cold War period in Thailand and Indochina became apparent to Ingawanij in the course of researching her project on the relationship between film exhibition and live performance in Cold War Siam/Thailand. This article forms part of the concluding section of her monograph for the project funded by the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. To explore the aesthetic, thematic and theoretical ramifications of the connection between Weerasethakul’s art and the historical debris of the Cold War, which have received little in-depth analysis, her article proposes performative realism as a framework for interpreting his works. Approaching animism as a non-anthropocentric structure of perception and a ritualistic technology of transmission with deep pre-national and regional roots, Ingawanij proposes a definition of performative realism in terms of animism’s capacity for shaping the relationship between the human, the non-human and the temporally non-linear world. Ingawanij’s article contributes to an emergent theoretical discourse in world cinema studies. It reconsiders – rather than vacates – the terminology of realism, dissociating realism from the paradigm of monocular perspective privileging visibility and the epistemological assumption of human centrality. In methodological terms, the article extends the findings of Ingawanij’s Leverhulme-funded research project by using a media archaeological reading to contextualise the historicity of contemporary art and film.