This is the film you simply have to see this weekend. Uruphong Raksasad's Pleng Khong Kao (The Songs Of Rice) is a lyrical poetry of image and sound, as beautiful as 19th-century pastoral paintings and as evocative as murmured hymns. In a compact 75 minutes, we see muddied beasts stomping the paddies and whirring tractors aglow with nocturnal eyes; we hear the chanting for the Rice Goddess and rhythmic windpipe numbers for the harvest dance. We even marvel, unlikely as it seems, at a zonk-out sci-fi rendition of a northeastern rocket festival, ablaze with fire and sparks and songs and joy.
Pleng Khong Kao (The Songs of Rice) A documentary film by Uruphong Raksasad. Showing at 7pm on weekdays, and 3pm on weekends at SF CentralWorld. It will open at SFX Maya Chiang Mai on Jan 29, and at SF Khon Kaen on Feb 5.
Abstract in form, The Songs Of Rice is however grounded firmly in the flesh of the land and the atlas of wrinkles on the farmers' faces. That's why the film can be read on many levels: as an agricultural documentary, a sensory journey through folksy music video, an aurally addictive tone poem, or a tour of rice-growing villages and their festivities. And yet what it is in essence is a rapt celebration of the crop whose connection with Thai life is cultural, spiritual, political and forever inseparable. The crop — rice — which we all have fallen into the habit of taking for granted. With this film Uruphong, who came from a farming family in the North, has completed his agricultural trilogy. He began eight years ago with Stories From The North, followed by Agrarian Utopia in 2010, an award-winning non-fiction film based on the life of two farming households. Taken together, the three titles form one of the most important anthologies on the subject of Thailand's farming, and that's largely because Uruphong's aesthetics lifts his material beyond informative-ethnographic doc-making into a kind of visual essay that has human beings at the centre. Actually, for all the photogenic beauty and fluid movements of his movies, what Uruphong contributes to Thai cinema is to put rural people, their beasts, their livelihoods, and the verdant Elysium of Thailand's endless paddies — in short, the things we've rarely seen in the movies in the past 30 years — on the big screen.
In The Songs Of Rice, Uruphong frees himself from narrative structure and lets the film glide along the tempo of his audiovisual collage. There's neither "story" nor explanation here, and the viewers may spend the first five minutes trying to figure out what route the film is taking as we watch rice fields, farmers and buffaloes in a succession of precisely composed shots. But once we realise that we're in the terrain of poetry and not prose, we become transfixed by the blissful power of the image. Uruhpong takes us to Hat Yai, where villagers celebrate kuan khao tip rites; to Chon Buri, where the hooves of fat beasts clomp the earth in the famous buffalo race; to Amnat Charoen, where grannies sing and dance in the field while making som tum; to Loei, where a woman sings a heartaching song about a dead mother who's been waiting in the netherworld for her son to make rice offerings to her.
At about midway, we're in a northeast town where young men sing and dance as they light up giant circular discs — a variation of the bamboo rockets — that lift off into the sky like homemade UFOs. Some of Uruphong's most stunning cinematography is in this sequence, especially the Steadicam shots that immerse us in the gutsy thrill of celebration and the trancelike anticipation of the people looking up at the sky — for a moment, we thought we were watching the Soviet sci-fi of Andrei Tarkovsky, with its mix of existential daze and heightened reality.
In fact, the film leaves out all indicative signifiers (we don't know what festivity we're watching and where it takes place; there's no explanatory text, except at the end credit). By doing that, by stringing together different episodes filmed around the country without telling us what we're watching exactly, Uruphong metamorphoses his images from the textual level — which gives information — into the sensory and even spiritual level. To achieve this effect the film deploys various cinematic devices — dramatic slow-motion, tracking shots and even a paragliding camera — and it's possible to say that Uruphong is romanticising the dusty reality of his subject matter. But the easy way to counter the charge is the humanity of the image, in those faces foregrounded in the landscape, those dancing figures, those bouncy or melancholic songs that form a sonic tapestry of the countryside. Most importantly, the filmmaking here is humble: Uruphong positions himself and his camera at the same level as the villagers he's filming. Here's a homeboy celebrating his own people.
In the global strand of documentary filmmaking, Uruphong may find his kindred spirit in Harvard University's SEL — Sensory Ethnography Lab — a band of documentary filmmakers who explore the boundaries of sound, image and their relationship with human beings in films like Manakamana (taking place entirely in cable cars), Leviathan (about a fishing boat in the middle of the ocean) or Sweetgrass (about sheep and shepherds of Montana). But while SEL movies are formal experimentation in visual prose — Leviathan, for instance, has images replicating a fish's eye view and even a barnacle's eye view — Uruphong's brand of documentary is gentler and more rooted in the tropical sensibility that values beauty, joy, tradition and humanity.
So, again, please go watch it. The film is showing only once a day at 7pm on weekdays, and 3pm on weekends at SF CentralWorld. It will open at SFX Maya Chiang Mai on Jan 29, and at SF Khon Kaen on Feb 5. We eat rice every day, but only once in a long while do we have a film that celebrates the spirit of rice in such a beautiful and joyous way.
