Describing the motivation behind his feature The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015), Ben Rivers said: “I wanted to move among different realms of reality – storytelling, songs, observation of a film being made, fiction – so that, in the end, the viewer is uncertain about where the fiction begins and ends.”1 It’s not surprising, then, that Rivers has collaborated with director Anocha Suwichakornpong, whose films Mundane History (2010) and By The Time It Gets Dark (2016) cloak the pursuit of documentary in the guise of narrative portraiture. Like Rivers’s docufictions, Suwichakornpong’s films produce complex collage-like stories that shapeshift between generic categories. KRABI, 2562 is the result of their collaboration: a hybrid multidimensional story unreliably narrated by a cast of real and imagined characters, that weaves together elements of ethnographic documentary, psychogeography, detective fiction, historical reenactment and camp costumery into a luminous, self-reflexive tapestry of kitsch, noir, elegy and exposé. If The Sky Trembles left us “uncertain about where the fiction begins and ends”, KRABI bends even this strange teleology entirely out of shape, folding fictions into fictions and unsettling the parameters of cinematic reality.
Rivers and Suwichakornpong first worked together in 2018 on an installation titled ‘The Ambassadors’ for the inaugural Thai Biennale. It was during location scouting for this project that the scope for a feature-length experimental documentary arose, inspired by the area’s curious constellation of histories and temporalities. Landscape permeates KRABI as both consolation and threat, a reminder of the more-than-human temporalities enshrined in its crevices and contours. Repeated images of the island’s coastline, with its karsts and caverns of stalactites, lagoons and gently lapping waves, accumulate like sediment, suggesting the way in which landscape crystallises cultural histories and folklore, just as it is also a record of their erosion. Images of artificial nature – emblems of the island’s rampant commodification of its natural resources – are equally present. On the mainland, a large light installation resembling a tree trunk glows with lurid pinks and purples. Sun-bleached billboards promoting local island paradises peel off and are papered over. What emerges is a picture of Krabi’s identity as built upon decades of dissonance between representation and reality, in which inexorable cycles of landscape mythologisation, capitalist exploitation and self-cannibalisation increasingly muddy the waters in between. In KRABI, the appearance and disappearance of a stranger frames an exploration of sites in which the island’s prehistoric past, folk history and contemporary industrial tourism collide. Through her, we’re shown a fertility shrine in a coastal cave filled with phallic votives and bikini-clad selfie takers; the forgotten farmyard idyll of a retired boxing champion; a derelict cinema now home to 20,000 starlings; a guardian spirit and a lone projectionist.
If both Rivers and Suwichakornpong share a playful attitude to experimentalism, they are often preoccupied by very different things. Suwichakornpong’s work is deeply informed by the sociopolitical history of Thailand: By The Time It Gets Dark explores the 1976 student massacre in Bangkok by Thai state forces, tracing the burden of this history on a handful of individuals including the character of a filmmaker who is attempting to reconstruct the event. By contrast, Rivers’ films are characterised by an interest in speculative geographies, the possibility of utopia and the “construction of hermetic worlds”.2 Where Suwichakornpong is committed to “realism as a form of cinematic practice that is grounded in narrative fiction”, Rivers is known for a kind of magical realism that sometimes verges on surrealism.3 These differences collide in KRABI and produce a film that quietly dispels the fantasy of the ethnographic documentary as a neutral object, centring subjectivity, fiction and illusion to put the forms and politics of observation and documentation under scrutiny. One hallmark of the duo’s collaboration is evident from the first frame: against Rivers’s typically masculine eccentrics, this ‘figure in the landscape’ is female. Nameless and inscrutable, her attachment to the place is unclear, her motivations unexplained. She navigates the island with the ease of a shared language but resents intrusions into her privacy, introducing herself to strangers variously as a market researcher, a traveller re-tracing her parents honeymoon trip, and significantly, a location scout for movies. Her protean anonymity – as voyeur, reconnaisseuse, holidaymaker, as both foreign and familiar (and thus echoing the position of the filmmakers) – allows Krabi to question the very impulse to document, reminding us of the stories and histories that get lost, edited out or glossed over in the attempt. With this as its focus, KRABI can’t help but cast a self-reflexive glance at the role of filmmaking in the construction of place. Its landscape layers memory like geological strata, and so too does the film draw multiple modes of documentation and layers of cinematic reality into uneasy rapport. A smooth-skinned actor in Tarzan garb, wild hair and aviators shoots a commercial for a soft drink, waist-deep in the picturesque waters of Koh Phi Phi Le island (famously the setting for Danny Boyle’s The Beach [2000] and neighbour to ‘James Bond Island’), his complexion protected between takes by a millennial pink umbrella. While pissing in the undergrowth, the actor comes face-to-face with what we’re supposed to understand as a ‘real’ Neanderthal, crouched and inquisitive. This moment of self-conscious theatricality is characteristic of Rivers’ work, and the scene playfully exploits the hallucinatory aesthetic of historical reenactment as it teeters between the farcical and the open-hearted, in a way reminiscent of the CGI dinosaurs in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011). But if this moment strikes us as ridiculous, perhaps it is only so in order to remind us of the absurdity of a crude idea of indigeneity being aped, literally, to sell fizzy drinks. After the commercial wraps, we watch the actor pick at his dinner, troubled by the encounter. The restaurant wall behind him features a faded seascape fresco of Phi Phi island, a clever visual echo of the commercial’s composition. Its desaturation is heavy with implication, not least in light of the fact that Phi Phi’s beaches are now strewn with tourists’ litter, its coral reefs irreparably damaged by boat anchors, rising sea temperatures and sun cream.4 Though Krabi’s inhabitants still dine out on its glossy Hollywood image, the island’s landscapes are under increasing threat, and the veneer wears thin.
The film is studded with these meta-cinematic details. The director of the commercial, for example, is filmmaker Oliver Laxe (Fire Will Come, 2019) who also played the doomed documentarian in The Sky Trembles. Similarly, the visitor’s tour guide mentions a film by a local artist that was censored for being “offensive to the community”, a self-reflexive nod to Suwichakornpong’s Mundane History, the first film to receive Thailand’s most restrictive viewing rating for its scenes of nudity and masturbation. In this way, KRABI is as much about its island namesake as it is about its own industry, materiality, precedents and processes. The film’s obsession with its methods of production implies an uneasy inheritance. A self-described “ethnofiction”, it is haunted by the fraught tradition of ethnographic documentary and the imperialist agendas from which it struggles to disentangle itself.5 Think of Basil Wright’s The Song of Ceylon (1934), Robert J. Flaherty’s Moana (1926), or the early Empire Marketing Board films, whose spectacles of otherness, however ennobling, ultimately served to justify colonial rule and its ‘civilising’ influence. The term ‘ethnofiction’ stems from the work of Jean Rouch, whose 1960s ethnographic films recognised the camera as an inevitable participant in the scene under observation. Though its presence precluded the kind of unaffected candour longed for by anthropologists (the ‘pure event’), Rouch claimed that the camera might actually provoke more spontaneous or “truthful” behaviour from its subjects, a kind of “psychoanalytic stimulant, which lets people do things they otherwise wouldn’t do”.6 His films experimented with reenactment and direction as part of the documentary form, a practice to which Rivers is indebted. But Rouch’s search for sincérité does not absolve his films of their paternalism or their colonial gaze, and the influence of those early ethnographic films still lingers in the construction of southeast Asia in the western imagination.
KRABI’s multidimensional metacinema is an intervention: it lays bare the apparatus of cinema, the tools and players that construct its reality, without enacting a demystification or disenchantment of place. In doing so, it reminds us that the camera is not a disembodied or neutral instrument of documentation, but a tool that transfigures truth into fiction. In this light, the caveman commercial seems a direct reference to early ethnofictive reenactments, in which Laxe (perfectly European, stylish and dispassionate, orchestrating a scene of mock-indigeneity to sell soda) is a Rouch for late Capitalism. The film’s implicit concern with the legitimacy of ethnographic cinema is also present in its recurrent theme of the mistranslation and misappropriation of folklore. On the boat to Phra Nang cave, a promising location, the visitor’s earnest tour guide struggles to speak over the sound of the engine: “There is an old story…” she says, recounting the legend of a vengeful spirit turned to stone by a shaman that purports to explain the cave’s distinctive rock formations. “I can’t hear you”, replies the visitor, bluntly. In KRABI, stories are told for a reason, speculatively and politically charged. From the sugarcoated folklore peddled by locals to tourists and their hypertrophied visions of the island, to our unnamed visitor’s enigmatic aliases or the boxer’s reminiscences of a pre-industrial past, KRABI’s fictions are as vulnerable to censorship and distortion as they are capable of myth-making and metamorphosis.
The film’s persistent shots of abandoned and overgrown places, of buildings and tourist information signs slowly reclaimed by nature, further evoke the slow inexorability of a deep time in tension with the accelerating economic and ecological degradation that KRABI documents. At times, these images overlap with another endeavour – to film the spaces of cinema. The derelict movie theatre, for example, or the sunlit interior of a cave, empty except for a camera tripod, which precedes a clip from the aforementioned censored film showing a woman rescuing gold bars from a crevice in a rock face. The overgrown is accompanied by the unearthed: as the visitor explores the island, she passes the exposed skeletal remains of what looks like a giant entwined with an enormous snake. This mock archaeological dig is in fact an installation by a Taiwanese artist who also participated in the 2018 Biennale, but it easily lends itself to Krabi’s mythos.7 Later, we watch figures in white forensic overalls scour the vegetation in what looks like an abandoned animal sanctuary, where unconvincing replica beasts bare their teeth amid the untended grass. Excavation and its agents are a frequent visual preoccupation of Rivers’, and while this scene takes on sinister significance in the context of our visitor’s disappearance and the ensuing investigation, it also gestures metaphorically to the film’s engagement in an archaeology of sorts; a process of recovery. As the visitor explores the farmyard home of the ancient boxer, we’re afforded a glimpse of the traditional labour force left out of Krabi’s commercial façade. Of course, if she really is a location scout, this secret backwater arcadia may, too, be lost to the lure of the big screen. Read thus, the slow, wide-angle shots of the boxer’s house take on the tone of a recce: notes towards a future film. This ambiguity, compounded by KRABI’s generic hybridity, adds a further dimension to the film’s ambivalence towards the practices in which it is complicit. Through its meditative exploration of landscape as locus for mystery, memory and deep time, KRABI subtly unsettles the forms and intentions of ethnographic documentary and cinematic ‘recovery’, offering itself as a record of material witnessing that prompts urgent questions about the ways in which place and its inhabitants are irrevocably altered by the act of filmmaking.
This essay first appeared in Another Gaze 04. You can buy this and other issues here. You can also donate to help keep us going. KRABI, 2562 is now available to watch on MUBI
Phoebe Campion is a writer and researcher from London, working at the intersection of literature, visual culture and the GeoHumanities. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, exploring questions of attention and ecology in Anthropocene poetics. She is a staff writer for Another Gaze and an editor for King’s Review.
1. Ben Rivers, ‘The films that influenced The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers’, BFI, Feb 2017 2. Jonathan Griffin, ‘Ben Rivers’, Frieze, January 2010. 3. ‘In the Holocene’, Indiegogo 4. Hannah Ellis-Peterson, ‘Thailand bay made famous by The Beach closed indefinitely’, The Guardian, October 2018. 5. Alice Hattrick, ‘Interview with Ben Rivers’, The White Review, July 2012. 6. G. Roy Levin, Documentary Explorations: 15 interviews with Film-Makers, New York: Doubleday, 1971, p.136 7. ‘Taiwanese artworks take center stage at Thailand Biennale in Krabi’, Taiwan Today, November 2018.
