![]() Anyway, the film’s central enigmatic sound, and Jessica’s quest to understand it and its relationship to her and the world around her, takes her to sound studios and recording engineers, but ultimately into the small jungle village and a person who has made his life a kind of living repository of memory. ![]() Memoria, in its central…I hesitate to call it a mystery, as if it were a puzzle with a solution. If only we can find a way to operate it properly.” It’s an approach to art that suggests that by working with these tools and forms that allow us to approximate human experience, we can somehow try to understand ourselves better. There is a quote from him, cited in James Quandt’s 2010 book on the director for the Austrian Film Museum, where Joe says “Our brain is the best camera and projector. And thus its exploration of the relationship between cinema and the senses, between cinema and its ability to recreate the sensory experience of day-to-day life, is of a piece with something Joe has always aimed for in his films. It prompts us to consider our connection to our senses and how we make memories.įor all the ways that Memoria is something new among his feature films, taking Joe beyond Thailand to Colombia (this is his first feature shot outside his home country), it is still recognizably one of his films through and through. In this sense, your invocation of sleeping and dreaming is appropriate, though it’s a dream that makes us more aware of our connection and place in the world, not less. The sensory experience of the film that you describe has the potential, if one has eyes to see and ears to hear, to awaken or re-awaken us to the world outside ourselves. ![]() And the result is a profound, quietly exhilarating film and one of the best cinematic experiences of the past year.Īnders: When I say that Memoria was one of the greatest cinema going experiences I’ve had in ages, it’s not just because of the limitations the pandemic has placed on theatrical experiences. ![]() It invites us to enter into Jessica’s headspace and experience the world as she does. There is a plot, which follows Jessica from Bogota to a small village in the jungle as she tries to figure out the source and meaning of the noise in her head, but the tension of that central mystery does not propel Memoria like a conventional film. Of course, being a film by Joe, Memoria is not about a narrative progression in the way most films are. Suffering from a mental issue in which she hears a loud, guttural, explosive noise at random intervals, known as “exploding head syndrome,” Tilda Swinton’s Jessica searches for answers across Colombia, but doesn’t find any easy ones. Clearly, the sleeping world and what bleeds out of dreams into our waking day continues to fascinate Joe, but it’s the absence of sleep that transfixes our attention in Memoria. Memoria, Joe’s celebrated new film, is about a character trapped in the waking world. They were prisoners of the dreaming world. Aren: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s last feature film, Cemetery of Splendour, was largely about a group of Thai soldiers suffering from a mysterious sleeping sickness.
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