New Thai Cinema and the Poetics of Resistance

Abstract

Throughout its history, Thai cinema has been entangled with institutions of state power. Through invasive systems of censorship and discursive regulation, the state not only regulates public expressions but also sculpts particular forms of national identity, silencing other forms of remembrance and identification. Against these pressures, independent filmmakers in Thailand creatively negotiate the boundaries of state censorship through silences, narrative discontinuities and elliptical plot structures to simultaneously evade state censorship and renegotiate national systems of memorialisation under military rule. This paper investigates how the Thammasat University Massacre is remediated through Anocha Suwichakornpong’s 2016 film Dao khanong (By the Time It Gets Dark), and finds that the film intentionally evades direct representation of the massacre to instead disarticulate national memory cultures and reimagine unconsolidated futures disentangled from institutions of authoritarian power.