Haunted Time, Still Photography and Cinema as Memory: The Dream Sequence in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

In Southeast Asian cinemas and its theorizations, ghosts have come to occupy an important role as figurations of a precolonial or premodern age. As beings with temporalities „out of joint“, they blur the linearity of time and history and often appear as carriers of memory and trauma. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film „Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives“ (TH 2009) deals with the traumatic past of the Thai Northeast. Focusing on an analysis of a dream sequence from the film, I will show how „Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives“ features various ghost and spirit characters that stem from a reimagination of the premodern and at the same time refer to modernist cinema – namely, the work of Michelangelo Antonioni and Chris Marker – and its critique of modernity’s belief in the evident and veracious photographic image. From this interplay arises a nexus of meanings that is charged with a critique of the state politics of repression and image control