MEMORIA : TO SAVE THE WORLD IS TO LISTEN, MAYBE
Translated and edited from Thai to English via Chat GPT
In the 1975 film “India Song” by Marguerite Duras, the lives of white people at an embassy in India are depicted as empty and luxurious. The characters appear more like ghosts than humans, simply walking, standing, lying down, watching, and dancing in a strange place at the edge of the world. Throughout the film, there is a voiceover which sometimes includes dialogue, descriptions of the future of certain characters,criticizing them , and stories that are not related to the plot. Some of the voices are from people not in the scene, while others are the murmurs of Laotian women singing and begging for food. None of the sounds heard come directly from the characters’ mouths, as they remain silent throughout the entire film while unidentified sounds surround them.
In one scene, the voiceover describes the Vice-Consul’s unrequited love for Anne Marie Stretter, a young woman who is the main character. He is rejected by her, and he screams in agony. Despite having left the room, embassy, or even died, his screams still echo in the air. Throughout the story, we can still hear his screams mixed with the murmurs of Laotian women whom we never see. The sounds are suspended in the air, the walls of the room, the ruins, the leaves, and the rocks. It is a sound similar to the one that Jessica might hear by chance in the movie MEMORIA.
Jessica is a white botanist, and her younger sister is a theater actress who married a professor in Bogota. Jessica conducts research on orchids in farms in the town of Medellín. She came to Bogota because her sister was admitted to the hospital and needed help signing a loan agreement to expand her farm. Jessica also came to buy a refrigerator for her orchids and conduct further research in the library.
One night, she woke up in the middle of the night at her sister’s house because she heard a “bang!” sound. Initially, she thought it was coming from a nearby construction site, but her sister confirmed that there was none. Eventually, she realized that the sound was originating from inside her own head. She sought out a sound engineer to recreate the sound and make it audible. The engineer worked on expanding and adjusting the sound until it closely resembled what she had heard. As she continued to hear the sound, the engineer drew inspiration from it and composed a song for her before disappearing.
In the hospital, she met Agnes, an anthropologist who had studied the excavated skeleton discovered in another city. Agnes introduced Jessica to the bones of a woman with a hole in her skull, and explained that the skull drilling ceremony was performed to release evil spirits. Numerous skeletons were discovered at the excavation site, and Agnes was planning to accompany the excavation team. She traveled to the city, passed through a military checkpoint, saw an excavation site, went for a walk, visited a doctor for her headache, and accidentally met a stranger who seemed familiar. The man was scaling fish by the riverbank and overheard everything, remembering even the details of a stone, and had an answer to the sound in her head.
Similar to India Song, the essence of MEMORIA is rooted in sound. According to Jessica, it’s a sound that emanates from the core of the earth, heavy and metallic, echoing through space. While speaking with a sound engineer, she requests to explore sound libraries used in film production. It is revealed that the sound closest to what she heard is that of a body ‘wrapped in cloth colliding with wood.’ Initially, the sound that Jessica heard was one of agony and torment caused by abuse. It is a sound that reverberates in silence, a reminder of the scars of history, that she hears and will continue to hear.
In this sequence, Hernan takes the sound that she perceives and translates it into a visual representation via sound graphs, which can be altered and expanded. These graphs make audible things that are imperceptible to the eye, such as sound. The ability to “read” things that cannot be seen, like sound, resurfaces in the scene where Jessica enters the anthropologist’s laboratory and Agnes inquires if she can identify the gender of the skeleton based on its bones.
It’s as if every living being, even inanimate objects like bones or stones, carries its own recorded memories. Each thing has its “narrative sound,” which we often perceive as silent, but which echoes incessantly, unheard and unseen, because we have never truly listened.
In the opposite direction, certain objects constantly emit sound, producing an annoying and overwhelming noise that drowns out other sounds. These objects are monuments scattered throughout Bogota with a similar appearance to Hernan’s riverside stones. They begin with monuments of heroes who created beautiful and virtuous memories, broadcasting the official sound of historical names for everyone to hear. Films often capture these monuments, from libraries to city squares, and even in small towns with artistic sculptures. The sound of the stones that become monuments is clearer than any other sound, whether it has a specific meaning (as a monument or artwork) or not, but only some sounds are allowed to be heard.
This is a counter-image to the sound of Hernan’s stones. The sound of memories of a man who was abused, whose stone was not a monument, but simply a silent stone on the riverbank. It is an indecipherable ‘picture,’ like a scene from a crime that has left behind the marks of murder.
If memories are stored in sound form in various objects that surround us, then who is the old Hernan who stores every memory within him? Is he a human being, an extraterrestrial with superior technology, or an object like the hard disk he claimed to be?
In a riverside setting, Hernan tells Jessica that he doesn’t dream when he sleeps. However, Jessica, who has trouble sleeping, wishes she could dream to escape the noisy waking world. Hernan then lies down in the middle of the river, and the camera shows close-ups of his half-opened eyes and mouth, as well as his muddy pants and still shoes. Jessica informs him and the audience that he didn’t just sleep, but died and returned from death. This scene of death is reminiscent of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s SILENCE*1 art video, which briefly appeared in his other exhibition A Minor History Part 1*2
The video depicted a soundless city until the sudden projection of corpses from the October 6th massacre, revealing their mutilated faces in close-up shots. The exhibition seems to be playing with the contrast between silence and noise in Jessica’s mind, with the dead and death making the city quiet for decades now creating sounds through the mandatory gaze at the corpses and the legend of the soundless city. The main piece of ‘A Minor History ‘ also tells the story of a naga that eats the corpses of those who were abducted, killed with a cement rod inside their stomachs and thrown into the Khong River, which possibly led to the naga’s own death. This exploration of killing and disappearance allows A Minor History to mirror MEMORIA.
Hernan is not just a human/alien/hard disk, but also like bones in a tomb. He is a ghost, a person who disappeared and died in the long history of the masses who were forcibly disappeared in Colombia, Latin America, and possibly worldwide. He represents the hard disk of the history of silence, waiting for Jessica to listen and hear.
If Jessica is unable to sleep due to an unfamiliar sound, her desperation to rest leads her to request sleeping pills from her doctor. The doctor believes that reliance on sleeping pills will prevent Jessica from experiencing the beauty and sadness of the world, and instead offer a religious escape (referred to as “the opium of the masses” by Marx). Jessica’s insomnia can be compared to soldiers in “Cemetery of Splendour” who refuse to awaken and allow the villagers to care for them. It is said that these sleeping soldiers are drawn into their dreams to serve as an army for the king in a past world. Sleeping has become a form of surrender.
If both soldiers and Jessica’s sleep are forms of surrender and escape from the sadness in the world, Jessica’s dreams may occasionally serve as a form of resistance by refusing to fall asleep and becoming a part of her sleep. Conversely, Hernan’s eternal sleep is a defeat, as he puts it. However, the survival of “memory” against death, which contradicts “history,” and the persistence of memory of October 6, have transformed death (which is essentially killing) into a true struggle, giving voice to a silenced perspective.
But the voice was even vaguer. The film hints at the unbelievable nature of the sound throughout. Jessica’s loud voice was initially mistaken for construction noise coming from the next-door building. Later, a man she met by chance on the street mistook the sound for a gunshot. The loud sound could also be the noise of a bus exhaust pipe or even an explosion. In this scene, the sound becomes ambiguous, depending on people’s different experiences. The loud sound continues to appear later, both loudly and softly, in different locations. Finally, we hear it again at the end, as the sound of a spaceship exploding in the middle of the jungle and the sound of thunder before the rain. The loud sound transforms into a sound from inside her head, nature, and synthesis. If the sound is memory, it is covered unclearly and can lead us astray.
When we hear what Jessica hears, we may only hear a part of it. The sounds we hear are conversations, wind, atmosphere, hitting or burning, screams, and poetry readings. But what did Jessica really hear? Did she hear someone talking or telling a story? When she felt a sting in her nose, did she hear the sound or feel it more profoundly than the sound? Or did she feel her mother’s shirt? Did she hear the pillow being patted down or Hernan’s story? The sound she heard could have been the sound of something happening or the sound of a memory reconstructed by him. When Hernan said she was “reading” his memory, did she read it aloud, or did she listen to his voice? Did she comprehend the true meaning of what she heard?
When she cried, Hernan asked her, “Why are you crying? It’s not your memory.” In this scene, what deeply touched her? Did she access the empathy that human friends should have for each other or something more? How believable is the sound she heard, and what kind of experience did it provide for her?
In this scene, Tilda Swinton appears to use her body and aura to portray a character that is more than just her own. She plays three different roles: a white colonialist who although does not come to dominate but to do business but She is no different from the white people in the colonial era of Kolkata in India Song who may hear everything but do not really listen to it , an outsider who listens attentively to the suffering of indigenous people who have been oppressed by colonialists, and an androgynous presence that adds a non-human element to the scene. When the camera focuses on Jessica’s face, her appearance is so strange that she looks like an extraterrestrial. Prior to hearing the sound, strange events occur, such as alarms going off and lights going out. The image is reminiscent of a story about extraterrestrials visiting Earth. When the lights go out, she becomes a dark shadow, as if part of the extraterrestrial image.
This alienation also invites thoughts of Aphichatpong himself as an outsider who went to make films in Colombia. He brought a unique perspective and otherness to explore what the “inside” may have taken for granted or ignored. As a result, it seemed like the voice she heard and her tears were a combination of empathy and understanding, a way to heal the world without using extraordinary powers to fight villains, like she did when playing ‘The Ancient One’ in ‘Dr. Strange’ to protect the world. Unintentionally in MEMORIA, she became a person with special powers who learned to use her own strength to listen to people’s sorrow and accept it as part of herself and as a friend of sorrowful people. However, the film did not provide a solution to the voices in her head or the salvation of humanity because of the opacity of the memories that she received. Nevertheless, Jessica’s tears in this scene reminded us of a way to access voices/memories of people who are silenced, and that is through art.
Earlier in the film, the story explored the deception of drilling into a skull to release evil spirits. The hole in the skull seemed to overlap with the tunnel drilled into the Earth’s axis, causing ancient sounds of death and the release of the deceased to be heard again, not through seances, but through anthropological excavations. In another sense, drilling into the skull or opening it also symbolizes opening new frontiers for people, whether through travel, conversation, or artistic tools.
Before young Hernan disappeared, he turned the reverberating sound of Jessica’s voice into music. He played it for her under the monument, beneath the solemn history. Hernan had transformed the quiet whisper of a stone into a musical composition. After his disappearance, the film followed Jessika as she listened intently to the music he had created, like a training for her ears. Later, Jessica wrote an unfinished poem incorporating the resonant sound with the orchids she was studying. It spoke of the decay of beauty, like the orchid trees destroyed by mold and bacteria. Jessica tried to preserve their lifespan by buying a large refrigerator to slow down the decay, just like preserving memories of people that deteriorate with time.
Until she met old Hernan, who told her he didn’t watch TV or movies because he had too many stories. She scolded him for missing out on many good things, including movies. This made us think of Jessica’s tears again, reminding us of a certain way of hearing sound and knowing what it is by listening to it through a movie. Her explanations were like audio and image narration, as if she had sat down and watched the bad memories while hearing the sounds at the same time. She saw the movies viewers didn’t see, and we all know that movies or motion pictures are important tools for recording people’s struggles. Various stories in movies link people together, making people from other planets understand the resistance of people in Hong Kong Planet , Myanmar Planet , Ukraine Planet , and Thailand Planet. Movies have the power to make us cry, even though it’s not our memory. Therefore, art and movies are one way to access the loud voices in our heads and fight for suppressed memories.
But movies have also been used as a tool for the government to advertise their propaganda, similar to the sound that Jessica heard. The ability of movies, music, poetry, and art is comparable to a specific format of evil spirits that originate from the skull of a young woman. This ability is like when the excavation of a well not only revealed a corpse but also caused contamination of the water source. The sound that Jessica heard possessed power, and the memories of people without power held power as well. Therefore, movies or motion pictures are a way to combat oppression and powerlessness, but they can also bring about destruction.
Returning to the movie, we can also view it as a horror film that centers around a woman who hears the voices of the dead begging for an investigation into their deaths. Ghostly voices haunt her until she meets a sorcerer from another world who teaches her how to understand those voices. As a horror film, Jessica must release malevolent spirits and seek revenge to regain her normal life and not hear those voices again. However, seeking revenge for specific ghosts is not the only focus of this film, as it is filled with ghosts from a long history of murder. It is about listening to realize that we are not the saviors of the world but simply listeners. We must live with the voices of the ghosts, embrace them, and never forget them. That is one way to fight.
However, all of the above is just an extension of our imagination through watching the movie and using our brains. To experience the true beauty of MEMORIA, we can use our bodies to watch the film, not just our eyes or brains to reflect on the meaning. We can use our ears to listen to small sounds, our bodies to feel the rich and soft image, or use our breathing to catch the slow rhythm of the film. In her masterclass, Tilda Swinton said that this is a movie we can feel with our senses. In this sense, MEMORIA comes close to the experience of memory, where we not only see pictures but also smell and hear them, even down to the surface temperature, just like Jessica’s feelings towards the voices she hears.
*1 https://100tonsonfoundation.org/news/silence/
*2 https://100tonsonfoundation.org/exhibition/a-minor-history/
