ABSTRACT
Although Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul has been the subject of considerable acclaim since the late 1990s, his recent accomplishments have been the focus of greater attention, particularly following his win of the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes film festival withUncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives(2010). In this and his other celebrated films, he employs a delicate imagery that is quotidian and mystical, wry and melancholic, to a degree arguably unmatched in contemporary cinema. Critics frequently herald Weerasethakul both for his fluid approach to time and his use of saturated color; meticulously cultivated, rich and sumptuous hues bleed from one film to the next to construct a sensibility, at once dreamlike and grounded and a cinematic experience, that is both hypnotically enigmatic and inherently recognizable. Color in his films, though, has a larger purpose than style: in helping to situate scenes between dream and reality, it also questions the intertwined positions of spatial depth and time, of personal and collective visual perceptions, and of experiences and memories in the cinema itself.
