‘Memoria’, ‘Trenque Lauquen’, and the ‘Mundus Imaginalis’

A still from ‘Memoria’

‘Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past lives’, an odd and mischievous film by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, is about ghosts, spirits, and death, which are all accepted as normal phenomena that we encounter in everyday life. Its charm and weirdness lie in this calm sense of acceptance. At an evening meal the ghost of Boonmee's dead wife appears so undramatically and with such restraint that the incident hardly feels unusual. Another uninvited guest turns up; a hairy figure with glowing red eyes, Boonmee's long-lost son Boonsong, has become a monkey spirit. Even more peculiar is a later scene in which a princess has a sexual encounter with a catfish. It isn't clear how these characters relate to Boonmee's past existences.

‘Memoria’, shot in Colombia, is the first of Weerasethakul’s films to be set abroad. It begins with a loud thump in the night, or perhaps early in the morning, because there is just enough light in a dark room to reveal a woman who is sharply awakened by the noise, which she later describes as ‘a rumble from the core of the Earth’. She sits up in bed, listening and looking for the cause of the disturbance, and it gradually becomes clear to her that she may be the only person who has heard the sound. The woman is Jessica, a Scottish orchidologist who lives in Medellín, and she has come to Bogotá to visit her sister, who is unwell. Because this repeating noise disturbs her waking life and prevents her from sleeping, she begins a search for its source. She walks the streets of Bogotá, visits an art gallery, shops for a fridge for her orchids, sits with her sister in hospital and talks to an archaeologist who is studying ancient human remains. Later, Jessica calls in to a recording studio and asks the engineer, Hernán, if he can recreate the noise digitally, based on her description of it. He manages to do so, but when she returns to the studio the following day, she is told by puzzled staff that no one by the name of Hernán has ever worked there.

Jessica subsequently meets an older man in the countryside, also called Hernán, who may be his doppelganger; he says that he has never left his village because he remembers everything that ever happened to him and can’t risk being overwhelmed by new experiences. As she chats to him, strange memories flood into her consciousness, as if she has tuned into another frequency, or to someone else’s consciousness. Hernán shares a drink, talks about his personal life, and Jessica becomes a vessel – an ‘antenna’ is his word – for alien perceptions, thoughts and recollections. An unexpected explanation for the sound and uncanny happenings eventually emerges, all of which appear to be presentiments of a profound shift or change in the world. Jessica, possibly the only person aware of them, has experienced a kind of annunciation.

Another enigmatic film set in South America, the epic ‘Trenque Lauquen’ by the Argentine director Laura Citarella, is similarly involved with puzzles and quests. Laura, a botanist working on research in Trenque Lauquen, a town southwest of Buenos Aires, has disappeared, leaving behind only a cryptic note that says ‘Goodbye, goodbye. I’m leaving, I’m leaving’. Rafael, Laura’s older boyfriend, and Ezequiel, her close colleague, drive through the countryside trying to find her. As the film, with its echoes of the world of David Lynch, unfolds in twelve chapters (divided into two long parts), the searches spread and proliferate. In time it is revealed that Laura has contributed to a radio programme about interesting and forgotten women, her research prompting her and Ezequiel to try to unravel another mystery, also about a woman who has disappeared. She finds clues and codes in books, erotic letters, and faded photographs, and it seems possible that her obsessive search has has caused her to go missing . The first half of the film is agreeably slow, but the second, differently structured, is quick to introduce a new mystery that transfers the narrative to another, almost supernatural, plane. An unidentifiable dead being is discovered near the lake that shares its name with the town; the body is shown at the water’s edge in an extended and unsettling long shot. Laura encounters an enigmatic doctor who is in charge of the situation; she is pregnant and perhaps a reincarnation of the missing woman for whom Laura has been searching. The story, with all its untied ends, has taken on metaphysical dimensions, but it is also down-to-earth and humorous. As someone asks Ezequiel, questioning the reasons behind his search for Laura, ‘What makes you think she wants to be found?’

These films may have something to do with the mundus imaginalis, a term coined by the French philosopher and orientalist Henry Corbin to refer to the liminal state that lies between pure being and everyday life. It is an idea that alludes to a concept of ‘imagination’ as a high and subtle form of consciousness, possessed of being, will, and objectivity, which has its origins in the thought of the medieval Islamic mystics Ibn Arabi and Suhrawardi. In traditional Islamic metaphysics the ‘imaginal’ is not just ‘fanciful’ or ‘possible’ but more real than the ordinary; its creative energy is capable of causing radical changes in what goes on around us and how we perceive it.

For further exploration:

‘Memoria’ trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDU6B93ltds

A review of ‘Memoria’: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/jul/15/memoria-review-apichatpong-weerasethakul-tilda-swinton

‘Trenque Lauquen’ trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDPaCJvfw-Y

A review of ‘Trenque Lauquen: https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/trenque-lauquen-review-laura-citarella/

A complex article by Henry Corbin on the‘Mundus Imaginalis’: https://www.amiscorbin.com/bibliographie/mundus-imaginalis-or-the-imaginary-and-the-imaginal/

Current listening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r38w0TawkcM

Image on title page: a still from ‘Memoria’