Processos etnográficos na etnobiografia: um estudo de caso do filme “Mal dos trópicos” de Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Abstract

The present research aims to draw parallels between the filmmaking of Tropical Malady (2004), directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul in collaboration with the actors, and issues that pervade the field of anthropology studies. In a first movement, the possibility of film as a field of research is analyzed, from fiction as a possible means to reveal questions related to perceptions and meanings regarding “humanity” and “animality”, as well as memory and oblivion and the invention of a culture through the very act of filming. Emphasis is placed on work carried out previously with the theme of fiction as means as possibility of expression by the filmmaker and ethnologist Jean Rouch, in collaboration with african persons, a genre that Rouch himself will call ethnofiction(ROUCH apud GONÇALVES, 2008), and how Apichatpong is also paradigmatic in this sense for collectivize his own experiences through the intervention of the actors' actions: an act of ethnobiographing life (GONÇALVES, 2012). In order to understand the unique way in which Joe(a nickname gived by the filmmaker himself to western acquaintances) creates, decoupage is added as a method to make the film be understood by its characteristic handling, contextualizing it in its metadiscursive mode – in which the filmmaking is put on the agenda in the work –, because it is from there that we visualize the various structural and narrative doubles present. The first part (or block) of the film, 'Strange Creature', is reflected in the second part, 'A Path of the Spirit', the first being a rehearsal for the movement that will take place in the second. The characters of Sakda Kaewbuadee, the peasant Tong, and Banlop Lomnoi, the soldier Keng, are responsible for driving the film and tensing the human presence on the literal and metaphorical borders in northeastern Thailand; boundaries that also concern the notion of human nature itself, put in check at almost all times. The borders, therefore, are put under discussion through the divided structure of the film, the theme involving mythologies about “shamanism” and “doubles” and the very notion of cinema as a device that provokes questions about true and fictional reports and modes of representation. It is, therefore, these subject-characters, on this frontier between real and imagined, memory and invention, that interest us in association with the field of study of audiovisual anthropology from the perspective of ethnobiography.