„Tropical Malady”, or on Humans, Animals and Spirits in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film
Krzysztof Loska
krzysztof.loska@uj.edu.plJagiellonian University (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4078-798X
Abstract
The paper analyzes the relations between humans and non-humans and explains the process of „becoming-animal” (devenir-animal) on the basis of the film entitled Tropical Malady (Sat pralat, 2004) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The source of inspiration is multinatural perspectivism introduced by Philippe Descola and Eduard Viveiros de Castro to ethnographic research on animistic beliefs, and by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Moving away from an anthropocentric perspective, the author draws attention to several major problems: the need to challenge the opposition between nature and culture, questioning the mental discontinuity between different types of entities, pointing to the possibility of liberating humans from subjectivity by freeing them from established categories (biological, social, cultural ones) and opening them for relations with Others (animals, ghosts, plants).
Keywords:
Thai cinema, animal studies, multinatural perspectivism, animism, Gilles Deleuze, Félix GuattariReferences
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Authors
Krzysztof Loskakrzysztof.loska@uj.edu.pl
Jagiellonian University Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4078-798X
Professor of Human Sciences and the Director of the Institute of Audiovisual Arts at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He is the vice-president of the Polish Society for Film and Media Studies and member of Editorial Advisory Board of the bi-monthly Ekrany. He has authored 150 papers and dissertations on media, popular culture, film history and Japanese cinema, published in various journals (Kwartalnik Filmowy, Studia Filmoznawcze, Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, Ekrany, Kultura Współczesna, Ethos) and edited volumes. He has published twelve books (in Polish), e.g. Dziedzictwo McLuhana – między nowoczesnością a ponowoczesnością [McLuhan’s Legacy: Between Modernity and Postmodernity] (2001), Poetyka filmu japońskiego [Poetics of Japanese Cinema] (2009), Kenji Mizoguchi i wyobraźnia melodramatyczna [Kenji Mizoguchi and the Melodramatic Imagination] (2012), Nowy film japoński [New Japanese Cinema] (2013), Mistrzowie kina japońskiego [Masters of Japanese Film] (2015) and Postkolonialna Europa. Etnoobrazy współczesnego kina [Postcolonial Europe: Ethnoscapes of Contemporary Cinema] (2016).
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