Episode 83 - By the Time It Gets Dark (Anocha Suwichakornpong, 2016) (with Felicity Gee)
By the Time It Gets Dark (Anocha Suwichakornpong, 2016).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Episode 83 sees Chris and Alex trace the magical realist threads and overlapping timelines that build Anocha Suwichakornpong’s often confounding drama By the Time It Gets Dark (2016) (known in Thai as Dao Khanong), replete with its shifting realities, fleeting digital VFX and a pivotal citation of the ‘father of fantasy’ (as well as one of cinema’s first animators) Georges Méliès. Joining them to discuss Suwichakornpong’s mesmerising, kaleidoscopic, and highly original second feature film that dramatises the events of the 1976 Thammasat University massacre is Dr Felicity Gee, Senior Lecturer in Modernism and World Cinema at the University of Exeter, and author of the recent Magic Realism, World Cinema and the Avant-Garde (London: Routledge 2021). Listen as they discuss the film’s ‘magical realist’ identity and the term’s vexed relationship to surrealism, (Low) fantasy storytelling and animation; the possible connections between fantasy narratives and world cinema; imagination, image-making and illusion from Méliès to Chris Marker; the reflexive staging of history and how Suwichakornpong crafts a collage effect that evokes the slipperiness of experience and memory; cinema’s capacity to spin an eternal present, and the stakes of the film’s own temporal confusion; and the politics of glitch art, and how By the Time It Gets Dark offers spectators an affective assault on both narrative and image that mirrors the violence and brutality of its historical subject matter.
Suggested Readings
Betancourt, Michael. 2017. Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post-Digital Aesthetics. London and New York: Routledge.
Carroll, Noël. 1988. Anti-Illusionism in Modern and Postmodern Art. Leonardo 21, no. 3: 297-304.
Gee, Felicity. 2021. Magic Realism, World Cinema and the Avant-Garde. London: Routledge.
Jameson, Fredric. 1986. On Magic Realism in Film. Critical Inquiry 12, no. 2 (Winter): 301-325.
Jameson, Fredric. 1995. “On Soviet Magic Realism.” In The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, 87-113. London: BFI Publishing.
Rickards, Carolyn. 2018. “British Social Realism as Wonderland Fantasy in Electricity (2014).” In Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres, edited by Christopher Holliday and Alexander Sergeant, 175-190. London: Routledge.