Department of Comparative Literature
Seeing in the Dark: Apichatpong Weerasethakul and the Turn to Sleep
Date: Tuesday, 11 May 2021
Time: 9:30 AM HK Time (GMT +8)
Speaker: Professor Jean Ma
This talk presents material from Ma’s current book project At the Edges of Sleep. The book centers on Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who holds a unique position as a prominent contemporary artist, experimental filmmaker, and one of the most lauded directors of global art cinema. His work embodies a turn to sleep as an object of knowledge and aesthetic resource in contemporary culture, one that breaks from longstanding conceptions of slumber as passivity and deficiency. By incorporating sleep as a represented action as well as a part of the viewers’ experience, Apichatpong forges new approaches to filmic form, moving image technologies, and spectatorship. The talk focuses on his 2015 feature film Cemetery of Splendor, which depicts a mysterious epidemic of sleeping sickness in northeast Thailand. In this film, sleep activates an awareness of other realities beyond the frame and below the surface. It opens up passageways between past and present, between the dead and living. Even as sleep suggests a condition of collective hypnosis, it also generates a deeper vision that cuts through the fog and frames the present in a historical perspective.
About the speaker
Jean Ma is the author of Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema (Hong Kong UP, 2010) and Sounding the Modern Woman (Duke UP, 2015). Her editorial work includes the anthology Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Duke UP, 2008), a special issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas on sound and music, and a book series at the University of California Press on “Music, Sound, and Media.” Her writing has appeared in Grey Room, Camera Obscura, Criticism, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and Film Quarterly, as well as in numerous edited volumes. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University, where she teaches in the Film and Media Studies Program.
Please register at https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=75121 for Zoom details.
For general enquiries, please contact Tilly Wong at tiwyw@hku.hk