EXCERPT
The mythological was a crazily imaginative genre of Thai B-movies. Making delightful uses of rudimentary special effects, its flaming creatures were constantly changing outward appearance and shifting figural form in epic tales of thwarted love and immutable destiny. Assembling moments of eruptive beauty from five of these films, all of which were made in the early 1980s, TIME OF THE LAST PERSECUTION reanimates the force of metamorphosis in the rhythm of a soaring cadenza. Structured through the rapid montage and the close-up, yet observing the gliding pace of the circular slow motion, the video strips away the theatricality of the dubbed dialogues, which used to mark these films as lowbrow entertainment, and returns instead to the enigma of the silent film. Images of silently screaming faces, and of bodies and strange things crumbling spectacularly off the frame, are charged with a renewed intensity. At the heart of it all is an indeterminate gesture: the look offscreen of an old man who may be dying, the magnificently unreadable face of the long departed director and actor Sor Atsanachinda. This is less a homage to a minor genre than a study in repetition, one which brings to life the anarchic energy and the intensity of yearning latent in that which has become obsolete. (Text: Dr. May Adadol Ingawanij)