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Apichatpong Weerasethakul: An Interview

Video Data Bank

2018 01:15:27 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9HD video
Tags:
VDB Interviews , Visiting Artists Program

Description

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a venerated Thai artist and moving image maker who has directed many short works, and several feature films. In this interview, Apichatpong and Daniel Eisenberg — a Chicago-based artist and professor of film and video at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago — discuss Apichatpong’s films along with his perspective on the contemporary film industry and art world.

"Apichatpong’s films always hum with subversive tension that exists just beneath their calm appearances — the Thai-Burmese border disquiet in Blissfully Yours (2001), the foreboding gay love in Tropical Malady (2004), the Northeast’s communist past in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) — and this friction between tranquility and anxiety, between bliss and pain, is a textural element that gives his work a rarified beauty."

— Kong Rithdee, Cinema Scope, 2015

The Video Data Bank is the leading resource in the United States for videotapes by and about contemporary artists. The VDB collection features innovative video work made by artists from an aesthetic, political or personal point of view. The collection includes seminal works that, seen as a whole, describe the development of video as an art form originating in the late 1960's and continuing to the present. Works in the collection employ innovative uses of form and technology, mixed with original visual style to address contemporary art and cultural themes.

Founded in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement in the United States, the Video Data Bank is one of the nation's largest providers of alternative and art-based video. Through a successful national and international distribution service, the VDB distributes video art, documentaries made by artists, and recorded interviews with visual artists, photographers and critics. 

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