Apichatpong's 'Primitive' world

The Thai filmmaker's artistic vision fills a New York museum's gallery

A freight elevator with a fluorescent green interior transports you to the third floor. The doors open and a shaft of light cuts into the darkness of the gallery, and immediately you're inundated by flickering images of rural Thailand.You have entered the "Primitive" world of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The filmmaker's multi-platform art exhibition is at the New Museum on the Bowery in New York, a street that was once home to flophouses but is now more like the trendy nearby SoHo neighbourhood.

Lightning strikes and explosions draw your attention to the gallery's right wall, where a nine-minute video called "Nabua" is playing in a continuous loop. The stormy bolts and sparks are interrupting the peaceful calm of a temple in the northeastern village of Nabua, Nakhon Phanom. Eerily, the lightning bolts hit the chedis of the temple, perhaps awakening the spirits inside.

It was in Nabua during the 1960s that the Thai military staged a bloody crackdown on communist rebels, causing villagers to flee their homes for the jungle.

The phantoms of these now-abstract, disjointed memories are stirred to life in "primitive", which consists of seven video installations. There's also an eye-catching photo of a young man in a skeleton mask. He's "Ghost Teen".

As the explosive electrical storm and a howling dog in "Nabua" continue to shriek throughout the gallery, your eyes get used to the darkness and take in three other videos.

Looking around counterclockwise, there's "A Dedicated Machine", a 90second loop of silent grainy footage of an unidentified flying object lifting off and touching down. Or maybe it's a weather balloon.

In "An Evening Shoot", men in military garb engage in target practice with their assault rifles, aiming at the window of a wooden house to gun down its occupant. Over and over again in the four-minute video, the poor fellow is felled. Don't worry though - no Nabua residents were harmed in the making of these art films.

The UFO from "Dedicated Machine" is explained in "Making of the Spaceship", a 28minute silent documentary that chronicles the building of a major component of the "Primitive" project - an egg-shaped capsule that's a welded steel frame covered by thin wood planks.

Assembling the ship was one of the things Apichatpong did to engage the young men of Nabua. It was like performance art, he explains in an iPod video commentary available from the museum's information desk.

Once built, the spaceship is launched on a time-travel voyage to explore old dreams, navigating fragments of memories. The crew slumbers inside, bathed in red light as they rest against each other.

They are among the stars of the 28minute, two-channel sci-fi video "Primitive". The screens are set up in a corner of an adjoining room.

With images of the space travellers in suspended animation on the righ-thand screen and scenes of rural terrestrial life on the left, a man narrates his story, about how in a past life he was a dark-skinned princess.

Or a wolf. Or whatever. If the story sounds familiar, it's because you've seen Apichatpong's feature film, "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives", which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Made around the same time, "Uncle Boonmee" dovetails with "Primitive".

Tucked away in a corner is one of two music videos - "Nabua Song", a rural folk ballad sung while a melancholy man wearing woodland camouflage sits and stares and listlessly munches away on morsels of food.

In yet another room is the other music video, "I'm Still Breathing", with jangling pop rock by Moderndog that bleeds from two pairs of headphones. It's an action flick, with young men running along a dirt road, kicking a flaming ball.

Similar to Apichatpong's features like "Tropical Malady" or "Syndromes and a Century", the video is in two segments. The song ends, and then the drums keep riffing. Some of the men collapse on the roadside. Those who aren't out of breath keep running and catch a pickup. They jump in the back and keep on grooving down the road.

The song starts up again, the men strip off their shirts and boogie along while playing with smoke bombs in buckets.

More thrilling action is found in "Phantoms of Nabua", which is tucked away in another chamber. The 11minute piece is set in a grassy field at night, where a movie screen is set up to show "Nabua".

That flaming football is back and the boys kick it around for a bit. It's the kind of don't-try-this-at-home exploits you might witness in a Tony Jaa martial-arts movie. Eventually, things go amiss and the movie screen becomes a casualty - the flickering images of the lightning strikes in "Nabua" go up in smoke.

The ghosts, though, are left to hover in that art gallery in New York City.

At home in the Big Apple

Apichatpong Weerasethakul stayed for a month-long residency at the New Museum last month, showing his movies and giving talks.

He also took part in a conversation with fellow filmmaker Pen-ek Ratanaruang at the Asia Society, which held the "Blissfully Thai" screening series that showed movies by Apichatpong, Pen-ek and their compatriots. The Thai Artists Alliance in New York hosted other events for the pair as well.

Always in demand since his big Cannes win last year, Apichatpong will be heading to the Venice Film Festival at the end of August. His "Syndromes and a Century" competed for the Venice Golden Lion in 2006, and this year he'll head the jury in the fest's Horizons competition, which focuses on cutting-edge, experimental cinema.

way back when

"Primitive" is at the New Museum until July 3. Visit www.NewMuseum.org.