Recalling the Past Lives of Cinema: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Abstract

This chapter considers questions of materiality by looking back at the film-to-digital transition as textually refracted in historiographic analogy. Specifically, this chapter investigates the intertwined technological, ontological and historical status of a filmic base, i.e., photochemical film or celluloid, precisely as it came to exist as a principally historical medium, replaced by digital formats. Ideas of corporeal finitude and material obsolescence are explored through Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Loong Boonmee raleuk chat, 2010), in terms of its representations of transmigration and reincarnation, with a particular focus on its use of Super 16mm film at a time in film history when photochemical film of all kinds was experiencing its own existential transformation. This formal strategy serves as the starting point for an exploration of a cinematic life cycle (often referred to in terms of the death of cinema) that includes, but also exceeds the historiographic conceptions or tropes of birth and death.