On The Phenomena Of Metamorphosis In Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Films

By now,Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul has made 7 feature films.The topics of his film consist of Thai politics,folk customs and religious beliefs.He combines his films with personal life experiences and beliefs,ending up with primitive film worlds full of mysteries.These worlds are non-human centred in space and time,where human and non-human,past and present mutually metamorphose themselves into each other.Human beings,as subjects of this transformation,can metamorphose themselves metaphorically into different identities,spatially into non-humans or human beings in another form,temporally into past or future.The phenomena of metamorphoses,therefore,are characteristic and are actually happening in his films,which also have vital influences on his narrative styles.This essay,focusing on the phenomena of metamorphosis in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's feature films,contains three major parts.The first part is an introduction of the context,including the context of creation and director,as well as a definition of metamorphoses.The second part integrates various phenomena of metamorphosis into three perspectives: the metaphorical metamorphosis,the spatial metamorphosis and temporal metamorphosis.It also discusses the change of identity,body,as well as the special temporality resulted from human's metamorphosing themselves into spectres.The third part will go deeper into the cultural implication of the metamorphoses,especially the relationship between metamorphosis and the widely discussed issue of ‘Thainess' in Thai society.On the other hand,this part also contains a discussion of the innovation of metamorphoses in audio-visual language,and analyse particularly the distinctive sense of reality in Apichatpong's film.