This is the audio recording of Professor Judith Butler's public lecture at trinity College on Thursday February 5th, 2015: Vulnerability and Resistance Revisisted. 

Judith Butler - 'Vulnerability And Resistance Revisited'

Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul discusses his life and career in an HBO Directors Dialogue from the 48th New York Film Festival in 2010. His new film, CEMETARY OF SPLENDOR, will have its U.S. premiere at the 53rd New York Film Festival, which begins this Friday. 

Leading up to this year’s NYFF, we’ve been looking back at some events from our archives that feature some of the stars of this year’s lineup. In case you missed it, check out last week’s wide-ranging discussion with THE WALK director, Robert Zemeckis. 

At the 48th NYFF back in 2010, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s last film, UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES, had its U.S. premiere after winning the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes. During the festival, the director joined programmer Dennis Lim on stage in our Walter Reade Theater. Their far-reaching discussion touched on many aspects of Weerasethakul’s illustrious career, from his unique approach to structure and sound design, to the influence of science-fiction on his work. 

This podcast is brought to you by The Film Society of Lincoln Center. Film Lives Here.

www.filmlinc.org

Photo by Godlis


#50 - Apichatpong Weerasethakul in 2010

Antanas&Gailė_That's The TimeThat's The Time

Intergrade Hole
Sound sculpture, 12:25min (loop), 2015

"I have often wondered, when I looked at the tiny oscillations and pulsations that compose us, where, then, are our thoughts, Johor? Where, what we feel? For it is not possible that these are not matter, just as we are. In a universe that is all gradations of matter, from gross to fine to finer, so that we end up with everything we are composed of in a lattice, a grid, a mesh, a mist, where particles or movements so small we cannot observe them are held in a strict and accurate web, that is nevertheless nonexistent to the eyes we use for ordinary living — in this system of fine and finer, where then is the substance of a thought?"
— Doris Lessing, 'The Making Of The Representative For Planet 8'

Accompanied by voices from different spaces and times, Intergrade Hole by Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi and the composer Gaile Griciute takes the listener on a journey through "a deserted landscape sizzling with change". The listener is invited to enter a hole, an empty space filled with multiple temporal realities and gravitational forces. As these realities collide with each other, the boundaries between individual/collective, facts/fictions, past/present/future, are being questioned.

Nguyen-Chi travelled to Antwerp to record Otobong Nganka's recollections of her journey through the ecologically exploited landscape of Namibia, a memory of the past. These fragments are interwoven with text excerpts by Doris Lessing's space fiction novel Canopus in Argos: Archives, a memory of the future, and field recordings from Frankfurt and Vilnius resulting in an intricately layered cinematic libretto.

Installation view: contemporaryartdaily.com/2015/09/otobong-nkanga-at-portikus/
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Credits
Concept and composition: Gaile Griciute, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
Libretto: Gaile Griciute, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
Text material: Doris Lessing, Otobong Nkanga
Voices: Gaile Griciute, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Otobong Nkanga
Sound material: Field recordings in Antwerp, Frankfurt and Vilnius
Sound recording: Gaile Griciute, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
Sound engineering: Tom Forsythe

Special thanks to Arturas Bumsteinas, Claudia Famulok, Clare Molloy, Otobong Nkanga, Philippe Pirotte, Fabian Schöneich, Portikus Frankfurt am Main.

Intergrade Hole

The unauthorized mass-movements of 2015, when more than a million people crossed maritime borders into European space, demonstrated more clearly than ever before that Europe’s deterrence politics had failed. The necropolitical obstacle course created by its border regime proved unable to prevent these disobedient mobilities. What we witness today, while often termed a “migrant or refugee crisis,” is in fact a crisis of the European project. Current processes of internal re-bordering along sovereign nation-state lines and logics significantly undermine Europe’s supposed post-national ethos and trans-border imaginary. In this talk Stierl explores “Europe in crisis” and relates to some of the experiences he made through his own activist involvement in “border struggles,” as part of the activist collective 'WatchTheMed Alarm Phone' that has created a “hotline” for people in distress at sea. Advocating the freedom of movement and seeking to democratize maritime borderzones, the collective has created a presence in spaces seemingly reserved for sovereign state actors and has facilitated the safe arrival of thousands of travelers. In this talk he also draws from three “moments” in Michel Foucault’s writing and thought that help us think conceptually through the relationship between (migrations’) excess and (borders’) control and prompt us to reflect on the ways in which “Mediterranean acts of escape” transform the European socio-political landscape and community.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Law and Society, Townsend Center for the Humanities: Course Thread on Law and the Humanities, and the Institute of European Studies.

Europe in Crisis: A Foucauldian Take on... | Maurice Stierl | 4/25/16

The piece for symphony orchestra was inspired by the 14-15th century monk and engineer Thangtong Gyalpo. He is said to have built 58 sustain chain bridges in Tibet and Bhutan. 
During my one-year stay in Bhutan I have visited one of his bridges and that became an inspiration for the symphonic piece. Its mirror-like structure consists of segments that gradually transform from one into another and guide the listener into a harmonically and rhythmically insecure state through a choral (as a women choir theater performance was the source of income for Thangtong Gyalpo for the purpouse of building bridges. Now that is considered as the beginning of Tibetan opera Lhamo) towards final aleatorics, which serves as the final segment before reaching another shore.
The live recording was made in 2016/05/22 at Druskomanija Festival in Vilnius, Lithuania, performed by The Lithuanian Youth Orchestra and conducted by Ričardas Šumila.

Thangtong Gyalpo

This piece for solo cello, Sordid Signs, was inspired by Jean Genet's book The Thief's Journal. It is dedicated to and in this recording performed by Anton Lukoszevieze.

Sordid Signs

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is incredibly modest. From his first feature
Mysterious Object at Noon (2000) to the popular Syndromes and a
Century (2006) and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), his films and installations play around the world in art houses and museums with huge critical praise, he’s won the big film festivals, become a darling of the art world too. But his surreal style feels honest and convincing….if you talk with Apichatpong he’s a huge movie fan that notices the magic of the world surrounding him.

Cinemad podcasts

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

This Too Will Pass for prepared piano, 2015
performed by Jonathan Powell

This Too Will Pass

Technologies Of Non/Self is an open collective operating in the interstices between contemporary art and sonic composition.  Co-created by Gaile Griciute and Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi in 2013.