#MEMORIA MOVIE MOVIE#
#MEMORIA MOVIE SERIES#

Perhaps that’s part of the point: to remain shrouded in mystery, just as Jessica’s sound is to her. With Memoria itself remaining elusive to all those unwilling to follow the film on tour like roadies to a rock band, the meaning becomes similarly unobtainable. They tend to benefit from repeated viewings, with their meaning becoming more solvable when returned to. His movies are cryptic and layered with complex concepts that are expressed through abstract methods. Weerasethakul’s work is notoriously difficult to pin down. The question, then, is whether the attempt at creating the experience of sensorial immersion, exclusivity, and temporality, is worth the expense of potentially large amounts of people not being able to ever view the work.

Cinephiles ambitious enough can and will find ways around region-blocking, lessening the ultimate impact of the film’s intentional inaccessibility. The artistic significance of this release strategy only truly succeeds if it’s universal. If and when a digital and/or Blu-ray release occurs overseas, North Americans will still be exempt from being allowed to view the film at home, due to regional coding and differences in international licensing. As of January, only two theaters in the US have shown the movie-New York and Chicago, each for one week. Even for those willing and able to travel to see the picture, there's no guarantee it will screen at an accessible theater. Though Neon suggests that the film is meant to continue its multi-locational tour indefinitely, the question of when, if ever, it will be screened in a given location has no certain answer. It's a concept that works better in theory than in practice. With Memoria, one has to be present at a given location, in a given moment. One doesn’t need to visit the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. It’s true that art exhibits also stick to cities and rarely make appearances in lesser-populated areas, but in the current era, a vast majority of crucial artworks have been digitized and are thus accessible to anybody with a computer. One could compare it to Weerasethakul's art exhibit in France, but its subjective status as art doesn't make its being exclusive any better. The argument of Memoria's artistry warranting its unavailability is faulty. Those fortunate enough to get the opportunity to visit the exhibit, to hear the album was surely a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but for those unable to attend during its short-lived lifespan-for financial, locational, or any other number of reasons-it may as well have not been released at all. Opponents to the release considered it to be not only bad for fans but also for the genre. It was an album that essentially lived and died there, with no digital or analog release of the album planned to occur. In 2019, Hip-hop artist Yasiin Bey released his latest album Negus in perhaps the most novel method possible: as a two-month-long “listening art installation” at Brooklyn Museum. Beyond availability, is there even a clear distinction between the filmmaker’s art exhibit and his more widely-available feature films? Stills of the exhibit on the museum’s website show obscure images not unlike what's found in Weerasethakul's feature films.

#MEMORIA MOVIE SERIES#

The exhibit, titled “Periphery of the Night”, featured a series of dark rooms in which projected videos create a multimedia experience meant to “ us to experience new cadences and us”. In 2021, he had a featured exhibit at the Institut d'art contemporain de Villeurbanne in France.

#MEMORIA MOVIE MOVIE#

Seeing a movie in a theater, sitting amongst strangers with the benefit of large screens and immersive sound equipment, is undeniably a different experience from watching the same film at home.īeyond his career as a filmmaker, Weerasethakul has established himself as an artist in other mediums. In the wake of closures, Christopher Nolan, a champion of movie theaters everywhere, wrote a heartfelt ode to cinemas and those who run them. While partially a financial decision, keeping films at least initially in the theater also occasionally came at the request of the films’ directors. Instead of becoming available to stream, movies were pushed back indefinitely to wait for cinemas to open again. In the past couple of years, in order to ensure that moviegoers were still physically going out to cinemas, many high-profile films have had their release dates delayed in reaction to cinemas’ extended closures. Neon’s release of Memoria simply takes this practice and exaggerates it to an entirely new level. Giving significant importance to a theatrical release is by no means an uncommon practice for movie studios, especially as of late. Memoria’s one-of-a-kind transcendental experience benefits heavily from the theater experience, and some may argue that’s reason enough to keep it there.

Memoria movie