Guest Blogger

"It is really a corpse, not a film."

Without doubt, one of the best ways to experience a new city is in the company of a flâneur. Walter Benjamin adopted the habit of wandering and observing the streets of Paris pretty much as a lifestyle, and the title of his unfinished project — The Arcades — came from his affection for strolling the covered shopping streets. One wonders if he would have been as at home among the plastic shopping malls and multiplex cinemas that litter our urban perimeter roads & cities.

I got to know the city of Munich many years ago by meandering the streets in the company of the filmmaker, painter, curator and ironic raconteur Lutz Becker. Lutz directed the remarkable documentary film The Double Headed Eagle: Hitler's Rise to Power 1918-1933. It was made in 1973 and is still available through Kino Video in the USA. The film unravels the rise of the Nazi party in the wake of World War I, but rather than offering a conventional view of this history through voice-over and interviews, Lutz Becker allows this disturbing saga of the rise of German fascism to unfold almost exclusively through newsreel footage and clips of feature films from the period.

It was in Lutz's company that I first visited what is now known as the Haus der Kunst in Munich. In 1931, Hitler commissioned the construction of this House of German Art, from Paul Ludwig Troost. The proposed monumental building was modeled on Schinkel's museum in Berlin, and when Hitler stuck his shovel in the ground he proclaimed that "this temple will house a new German art." The commissioner for the State of Bavaria, Adolf Wagner pronounced at the grand opening ceremony in July 1937 that "nothing that is unfinished or problematic" would make its way through the doors. Simultaneously, and only a few blocks away from the opening exhibition of National Socialist works, was an exhibition of what was defined as "Degenerate Art". This "degenerate exhibition" contained over 650 works from the collections of thirty-two German museums.

Goebbels had put Adolf Ziegler in charge of a commission authorized to confiscate from museums and art collections throughout the Reich any remaining art deemed modern, degenerate, or subversive. Over 5,000 works were seized, including many paintings by Nolde, Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, James Ensor, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh. The exhibition of a selection of these premiered in Munich before "touring" to eleven other cities in Germany and Austria. Oddly, after four months the "degenerate" show of condemned modern art had attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors, and an estimated three times the number that visited the "official" edifying "blood and earth" Great German Art Exhibition. Many of the "avant-garde" artists like Beckmann were forced to flee Germany, their works effectively censored by being removed from museums, burnt or sold abroad.

Flashing forward to today the Haus der Kunst has become one of Germany's leading galleries of modern art. It is curated by one of Europe's most manic, imaginative and maverick museum directors — Chris Dercon, who has invited the Thai artist and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul to create an ambitious new film-video installation provisionally entitled Primitive, for the museum's large 'foyer' space. This will open in the spring of 2009 alongside major exhibitions of the work of Gerhard Richter and William Eggleston. Just before the long overdue opening of his censored film Syndromes and a Century in Bangkok, Apichatpong visited the Haus der Kunst for the first time. I have since wondered if he recognized that the walls of this building breathed resonances of historical censorship. Knowing too that when he returns in 2009 that he will be welcomed through these doors to present something very "modern."

I wrote a blog for Filmmaker Magazine in March chronicling the filmmaker's own sad and bizarre spat with the Thai censors.

Now a few days after his Munich visit on April 10th, Weerasethakul was present when Thailand's exclusive censored version of Syndromes was finally released and screened for a limited run at the Siam Paragon Cineplex. This extremely modern cinema is apparently situated in one of Bangkok's glitziest shopping malls, and the opening day fell just prior to the Thai New Year weekend and was therefore quite "high profile". It seems bizarre that the only way to see this internationally acclaimed award-winning film in Thailand was in its censored form and as an "exclusive presentation". Those who bought a ticket received a souvenir postcard, containing images from the censored scenes — which will probably now become a "collector's item". It was agreed that a percentage of the box-office would go to the Free Thai Cinema Movement supported by the Thai Film Foundation.

The film was originally meant to be released locally almost a year ago, but the screenings were canceled by the director after the Censorship Board ordered that four scenes had to be cut: Doctors drinking whiskey in a hospital conference room, a doctor kissing his girlfriend, and then having to adjust his erect penis inside his trousers, a Buddhist monk playing a guitar and a pair of monks playing with a remote-control flying saucer.

After much argument and "constructive discussion," the Thai censors in fact demanded the removal of six scenes that they "deemed harmful". Incensed, Apichatpong replaced the cut footage with scratched, silent black leader. The blacked out scenes run in length from 16 seconds to around 7 minutes, and for a total of around 15 minutes.

The cut scenes have all been uploaded to YouTube. These include a scene in which a monk plays a guitar, which was cut because the censors believed it gave the wrong impression about how Buddhist monks should behave. Buddhist monks do not play guitars. The longest of the banned scenes was cut because it reflected poorly on the Thai medical profession. Doctors do not drink whiskey while they are on duty in the hospital and they would never keep a bottle hidden away inside a prosthetic leg. Never! Again, censors were uncomfortable with the depiction of Buddhist monks playing with a toy remote-control flying saucer, especially such a "cool toy" as this.

Unlike the Degenerate Art show in Munich of 1937, thousands of people regretfully did not show up at the Siam Paragon — probably only a hundred accompanied by many television news crews. The show apparently opened with a discussion and Apichatpong recognizes that he was tired and has written that he "became very aggressive lambasting the stagnant system that we are floating in… Something possessed me and I couldn't help it. Somehow I thought this was useless in this glitzy cineplex…but this was the last chance to display my accumulated anger. This was not only about this film…there are countless films, self censored, censored, banned. Where is the audience's voice? In a way it was liberating but while watching the film, I felt so bad of course. It was the most stupid film ever shown. (Even though I enjoyed the black scratches…) Somehow with some scenes removed, especially the longest one, it completely changed the movie. When you consider that the cut scenes don't have much narrative connection with the others, the movie just fell apart…so, it is really a corpse, not a film."

Unsurprisingly quite a number of people, both Thai and foreign visitors, complained to the cinema about the film when they were confronted with "meaningless blackness". The cinema was forced to display a board at the ticket booth explaining what was actually screening and that they should only see it, at their own risk. "I feel sorry for the unknown audience to have to put up with our 'statement.' But come to think of it, this is amazing…maybe this will be only one time we could do this in a commercial theater here."

I have been having a minor spat with a renowned media professor here in London who complained that the exotic red dressed secretary in a recently broadcast episode of Mad Men dared to proclaim in a scene set in 1960 that "the medium is the message, as they say", even though McLuhan's famous book wasn't published until 1964. I have tried to point out that McLuhan's hugely influential study, which commented upon the advertising industry and the boys of Madison Avenue, was in fact The Mechanical Bride, and was first published in 1951. Then, reaching for a glass of the ad-man's drink of choice, I thought that perhaps during the now seven-minute blacked-out scene of Syndromes — the Thai audience could not have failed to recognise and contemplate "the message". One local critic wrote of the premier that "while the censored version may not be pretty to look at, it's a harsh, bold statement about censorship in Thailand and the authorities' complete disregard for freedom of artistic expression. The fact that these scenes have been censored is far more damaging to the image of Thailand. If the film had been allowed to un-spool a year ago without any cuts, it would long be out of the consciousness of the mainstream viewing public. Before the censorship debacle, Syndromes and a Century was a remarkable film. Now, it is truly historic." Things don't change, much.