Nokia Short, 2003
Betacam numérique PAL, 2'17'', couleur, son
Shot on a mobile telephone, Nokia Short is a brief immersion in a dulcet reverie. An act of spontaneity that is no doubt gratifying for Apichatpong Weerasethakul who is used to the economic constraints of cinematographic productions, whereby the period between screenplay and shooting can be very long and laborious, this video is representative of the formal liberty offered by the medium. The images radiate a light and joyful atmosphere: shot live on a beach, they film denuded bodies, legs and faces in very tight shots that come close to abstraction. The video's low definition is played up by the pixels' pictorial substance, and the tinted filters distance the gaze from a quest for realism to submerse it in a dream world. This is precisely the point of videos shot on telephones: one is liberated from compositional concerns to embrace handshot images whose jerky movements bring on effects of interference. One loses the clarity of vision and struggles to locate oneself, to link the diffuse impressions to a specific representation. Laughter and voices simply evoke good humour, a moment of the daily life or an evening by the sea. While there is no structured narrative built upon the images, the montage does provide some clues for interpretation through its emphasis on certain images: the eye in closeup which is shown repeatedly or the alarm clock indicating “8:06”, for example. In the festive general atmosphere punctuated by singing, shouting and bodies underwater, this alarm clock appears, as if an effort to suppress nocturnal languor.
In using the telephone as a means of filming, Weerasethakul manipulates a poor practice which allows him to break away from the constraints of cinematographic production, as well as to explore another form of image. Indeed, he does not seek to obtain the best possible aesthetic quality of his “Nokia” as the idea is not to produce a video with other means. On the contrary, the aim is to experiment on a new territory of moving image through emphasis on its technical penury. The title hence designates the medium of production and not the content to show that the departure point lies in the appropriation of a new film technique. He uses his telephone mobile as a means of proposing a state of perception which flirts with “non-mastery”, accident and a form of confusion. This praxis is similar to works filming the intimate, the banal and the day-today since the beginning of video art, whereby artists assert to work in spontaneity and to be on a quest for forms of the ordinary. The ensuing poetry is that of small things, of fleeting impressions. Nokia Short also comes close to the filmed diary and one of its key figures, Jonas Mekas for example. As in Walden (1968), one finds in this video a penchant for movement, the inconstant subjectivity of the gaze and the importance accorded to auditory substance. What takes shape is another state of the visible – at times unrecognisable – which expresses the elusive ephemerality of life and allows the evocation of hidden forms. In the work of Weerasethakul, such states of perception are in reference to the personal vagabondages linked to the quest for the supernatural and the invisible which traverses his films and videos. The filter of the telephone allows the unveiling of the diffuse and the expression of sensations, in the same way that the photographic act allows the son of Uncle Boonmee (2010) to meet ghosts.
This video can also be presented on the screens of telephones in exhibition space*. This avoids the aesthetisation produced by large projections and plays on the element of surprise brought about by the work's intrusion into the visitor's private space via a personal object with which one often nurses a coalescent kind of relationship.
* "Video, an Art, a History, 1965-2010","A Selection from the Centre Pompidou and Singapore Art Museum Collections", Singapore Art Museum, 2011
Mathilde Roman
Translated by Yin Ker
