Experiencing memory, remembering experience

Some remarks on Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Memoria”

Tilda Swinton’s film career is saturated with the weird and wonderful. Her broad range, and excellence across that range, is unquestionable. One has only to think that the same person has brought to life Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and C.S. Lewis’ White Witch — or is now a part of the antithetical canons of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Wes Anderson. Her career is a shining example of how finely one actor can navigate realism and fantasy.

No wonder, then, that she so expertly handles the blending of the two in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, which is magical realism at its most soporific, contradictory and anti-intellectual. I mean this all in a good way. The film, to my mind, acts as a prismatic exploration of the different functions of memory, and how we access memory through emotional experience. I shall attempt to shine a light through this prism in the following remarks.

Tilda Swinton in Memoria (2021)

The film is almost impossible to summarise — the plot is nowhere to be found online — but for the sake of clarity later, here is a full synopsis (fittingly written from memory).

Swinton plays Jessica, a Scottish woman visiting her ill sister in Bogotá. We begin the film with her asleep, in a dimly lit room with not even the slightest movement on screen for what feels like five minutes. Her sleep is interrupted by a sudden, loud, textured sound. She rises slowly from bed and inches to another room. She thinks the sound is down to building work next door, but things get complicated when she hears the noise again at random moments, and realises no one else can hear it. Reality seems to be decomposing for Jessica, as the film follows her on a journey of almost unconnected experiences. She attempts to have Hernán, a young sound engineer, replicate the mysterious sound for her; she later tries to revisit Hernán, but he seems never to have existed. She comes across an impromptu jazz ensemble, interacts with archaeologists piecing together 6,000-year-old skeletons, and seeks help from a Christian doctor for her uneasiness and lack of sleep.

In the final stretch of the film, she encounters an old man called Hernán, played by the superb Elkin Díaz, who matches Swinton’s impeccable screen presence and elevates the film to its finest point. This Hernán lives a humble life scaling fish, and is cursed with remembering everything that ever happened in his village, but never has dreams. (Is he the same Hernán as the young sound engineer who disappeared, or his spiritual counterpart, or neither? That goes as unexplained as everything else in the film.) Jessica asks him to fall asleep and then to tell her what he experienced when doing so. He obliges, and, after entering a minutes-long deathlike state, comes back to life. The pair seem connected through shared memories of events far in the past, such as the memory of two men mugging a third — and yet, when the pair head inside Hernán’s house, they seem to hear this event happening outside.

The film swerves into a startling sci-fi conclusion, as the origin of Jessica’s solipsistic sound seems to be revealed, perhaps echoing an earlier moment where Jessica’s sister speaks of a deliberately un-contactable people living in the jungle…

The film’s opening, in a room of washed-out greys and a lethargic, almost zombie-like Swinton, prepares us for the register of the film. The whole piece moves in the space between waking and sleeping, the most nourishing space for an exploration of how our senses interact with our environment, how they begin to internalise until they are completely turned away from the outside world. We are not led to believe Jessica is dreaming everything that she sees (no one wants an Alice-in-Wonderland ending). But there is a clear interest in dream-like experience, and how, within such experience, we let go of our sense of time and logic.

Weerasethakul (who also goes by Joe), speaking of his earlier films, commented that “Many people found it very rewarding when you don’t think, when you don’t have any logic”. As such, he is a great proponent of sleeping during his films, as a way to enrich personal experience — and, perhaps, to consolidate the memory of these films, in so far as memory is processed and reinforced during sleep.

Recollection and dreaming — similar territory to that of Joe’s 2010 Palme D’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. The title, to indulge the classicist within me, suggests a Thai setting of Plato’s theory of recollection, in which our souls have experienced things before our lives began, and we gain knowledge by remembering these experiences (see for example the dialogue Meno 81a-84b. The boy retrieved knowledge ‘as if in a dream’, says Socrates. Does the maker of Memoria want us too to find knowledge while sleeping during his films?). I was also reminded of Plato’s allegory of the cave (Republic book VII), when the dying Boonmee leads his nephew and sister-in-law to the cavern where he insists he was born. The ghostly metaphysics and absurd events of Uncle Boonmee are presented with the same straightforwardness and honesty that we experience in dreams.

Memoria, like Uncle Boonmee, could be described as benignly soporific — “slow cinema that decelerates your heartbeat”, as Peter Bradshaw calls it. In an apparently similar vein, Joe’s films are often described as ‘meditative’ — a label some take to be critics’ code for ‘directionless’ or ‘not really about anything’. Taken literally and not cryptically, however, ‘meditative’ is actually a great compliment. Meditation is the process of sense-heightening, training to a state of present-mindedness. Memoria is meditative, in the sense that the extended long takes and lack of dramatic action are sense-heightening — we are drawn to the slightest movements within the frame when the frame does not move for minutes on end.

We are dealing with a strange contradiction here. The soporific aspects of Memoria (the long takes, the lack of movement, the literal sleep of the characters) are also its meditative aspects. And yet sleep (lack of consciousness) and meditation (heightened consciousness) are opposites. Films like Memoria ask us to sustain this kind of contradiction and see where it leads.

Tilda Swinton and Elkin Díaz in Memoria (2021)

Around the midpoint of the film Jessica stumbles across a jazz ensemble playing a piece, and she stays to listen to them perform. It’s a fine touch of a scene that adds to the depth of theme of both meditation and memory. I understand the state of ‘flow’ which many artists and musicians speak of as a kind of active meditation, the achieving of a heightened consciousness through the creation of art. At the same time the ‘music video’ in the film is a perfect visual cue for muscle memory — ‘memory’ that is no longer about actively remembering an experience, but memory that finds its expression in a physical action. In the context of the film, the performance of music is a counterpart to Jessica’s repeated experience of the unearthly sound, and her efforts to recreate her memory of the sound with the younger Hernán.

There is one moment in the final act of Memoria where Jessica suddenly seems able to control the sounds she is hearing. A dull ringing builds while she sits with Hernán, until she brings a hand to her ear, then the top of her head, after which the sound dies out. What does this control over her senses mean? Has she learned the power of meditation from the older Hernán, who entered a state of trance before her eyes? And was Hernán disconnected from the burden of collective memory in that moment, or is it this state of trance that allows him to access the past experiences of his village?

Asking these kinds of questions of a film like Memoria seems almost inappropriate. The film is not about the journey or the internal lives of its characters — though it may use these characters as vehicles for empathy.

I am chiming here with Brian Tallerico, who argues in his review that Joe wants his films to connect with the viewer “not through plot or even character, but through experience”. There’s a literal angle to this: the director Joe has himself experienced the kind of Exploding Head Syndrome that Jessica does in the film. Another angle concerns Jessica, and how she operates as a character. Joe has in fact said that he sees Jessica as ‘cinema’ itself — “She’s like a microphone or camera that absorbs sound [and] records.” In the jazz scene (discussed above) the camera detaches itself from Jessica and meanders around the musicians as they play; the same thing happens when Jessica meets the archaeologist who shows her the recently-discovered skeleton of a young girl.

Jessica is less the protagonist of Memoria than a vehicle for the viewer’s experience. She both tries to remember her own experiences (the sound only she can hear), and experiences the memories of others (those of Hernán’s village). This latter leads us to much of the film’s reception, and Swinton’s own own comments about Memoria and Jessica.

As well as seeing Jessica as a “predicament” rather than a character, Swinton has spoken of the film expressing the “reverberation of trauma in a specific place”. Colombia, like many places, has a deep history of violence and colonial oppression, and with that violence cultural erasure and disruption. While the makers of Memoria assert that the history of violence is only in the background of the film (as it is in Uncle Boonmee and Tropical Malady), the idea of cultural memory, dislocated by such violence, I find to be prominent. The archaeological angle of the film prepares the way for reflection on how the past connects to the present, and enriches the meaning of what seems to be happening to Jessica. (Almodóvar’s recent Parallel Mothers explores this angle in much the same way). The young girl’s skeleton has had a hole drilled through it to release evil spirits; would this have happened to Jessica if she were living in a different time?

We return to Jessica’s memory of the mugging (shared with the older Hernán), which seems to play out in the present. What does ‘memory’ mean if it is not about a past event? The disruption of the flow of time here suggests the disruption that a history of violence causes to the memories of a place — to the accessibility of those memories. One could again compare with Uncle Boonmee: can he actually recall his past lives, or is something stopping him?

Memoria is not about war or colonialism, but it is, in part, about how we may become emotionally connected to a past that is not our own. It is in this way an ‘anti-intellectual’ film. It is concerned with how we feel about the past, not what we think about it. Both Joe and Tilda are self-professed outsiders to Colombia; indeed, Memoria is the first of Joe’s films not to be set in Thailand. Again, Jessica is the vehicle for this: she is clearly in an environment that is not familiar to her; even her Spanish is rudimentary. James Lattimer arguesthis dynamic is mirrored in the sound design of the film: Jessica’s efforts to “tune into the foreign setting and the many distinct meanings it holds [mirror] those of the director in turn”. Despite all this, she forms an intimate bond with the older Hernán — the opposite of an outsider — by somehow tuning in to memories that are not her own, that are not about anyone or anything she knows or has learned about.

The ultimate power of fiction is its ability to activate empathy. Joe is clearly highly concerned with empathy in all his films, but Memoria, being his first film not set in Thailand, is his first film to explore it with primary focus on an outsider. Without empathy, history is simply a set of events to which we have no (emotional) connection. We empathise with history not only when we put ourselves in others’ shoes — the way we might explain empathy to a child — but also when we think of history as a set of memories as well as a set of events. That is how Jessica is able to connect with Hernán and the history of his village.

The collection Memoria’s narrative events, then, yields a careful and attentive study of memory: how we think about it, how we experience it, how it functions as a metaphor for history. The film’s title is on this analysis perfectly fitting.

When pursuing this analysis I was reminded of Mark Kermode’s response to torrential fan backlash after his unenthusiastic review of Ghostbusters: Afterlife. In this response Kermode expressed what was to me a highly thought-provoking sentiment about cinema: “In the most unexpected places, you can find things that seem to be speaking directly to you… films, at their best, bypass the intellect, [and] imprint themselves emotionally, because you experience them as a memory… cinema kind of mirrors the function of memory.” That is, the process of watching a film — experiencing a visual narrative — is like the process of remembering something.

This idea has much more utility than as a response to angry Ghostbusters fans. It resonates with my experience (and enjoyment) of cinema. I have yet to meet someone whose favourite films are their favourites because of anything other than a deep emotional response. At their best, to add to Kermode, films are cathartic. We ‘connect’ with a film that we watch because we are remembering something while watching.

Memoria presents itself to me as an examination of this enriching emotional process. Joe is right to say that Jessica is like cinema — and not just because she “absorbs sound” and “records”. She embodies not just cinema’s personal effects, but also its mode of operation. Cinema makes us experience memories, and remember experiences, at the same time.