영화를 통한 트라우마의 알레고리적 재현과 정치적 미학: 아피찻퐁 위라세타쿤의 <찬란함의 무덤> 연구

Abstract

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2015 film Cemetery of Splendoris a monumental achievement that allegorically represents the trauma of modern Thai history, which can be effectively analyzedthrough these three dimensions: spatiality, corporeality, and temporality. First, the overlapping spaces of hospital/school/cemetery function as a heterotopia thatcompresses and expresses thepower relations and historical trauma of Thai society. Additionally, the bodies of patients(soldiers) smitten with (kind of) sleeping sickness and Jenjira’s disabled body become sites of resistance explained through Jacques Rancière’s concept of the ‘distribution of the sensible’,as these bodies resist the dominant sensory order and enable a new distribution of the sensible. Finally, the film’s non-linear temporality, which can be explained through Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the ‘Time-image’, serves to summon and redistributetraumatic memories hidden by Thai official history. In this way, the history of military dictatorship and political oppression is represented indirectly through the metaphors of the hospital/school/cemetery space and the symptoms of sleeping sickness and physical disability, functioning as an effective strategy for political expression within a reality of governmental censorship and control. Furthermore, the effect of these allegorical representations is intensified through the portrayal of solidarity and care between Jenjira and Itt/Keng. Their relationship practices a new distribution of the sensible within heterotopic space, which, combined with temporality reconstructed through ‘Crystal-images’, presents new possibilities for overcoming trauma. Consequently, while the film criticizes the reality of political oppression through its strategies of allegorical representation, it simultaneously explores the possibility of an alternative community that could transcend this reality. In this way, Cemetery of Splendoropens new aesthetic possibilities for contemporary political cinema.