Paper short abstract:

Following Deleuze, we propose the concept of "ethno-cinematographic rhizome" as a tool to visually express socio-cultural multiplicities and assemblages. We put the example of the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul that brings together the sacred and the profane in the Thai province of Isan.

Paper long abstract:

Following the non-representational philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and his concept of rhizome as a non-hierarchical epistemic model based on multiplicity, we propose the concept of "ethno-cinematographic rhizome" as a possible alternative of ethnographic cinema and visual anthropology, visually expressing the connection of heterogeneous human and non-human, natural and supernatural, sacred and profane elements in the same "plane of immanence", transgressing rational fixed points with the freedom that art gives.

An "ethno-cinematographic rhizome" would be a model of knowledge and presentation of an ethno-social world built with image and sound, where the backbone is time and expressed through "percepts", that is, appealing to the sensory perception of the spectator more than to his rational conceptions. Instead of a closed structure that "represents" "objectively" the actual reality, it is a map that lacks structure although it does have "plateaus" of meaning, opening subjectivity and time to virtual potentialities, combining territorialization and deterritorialization lines.

We put as an example the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, expressed in his filmography since Mysterious Object at Noon [2000] until Cemetery of Splendor [2015]. Between realistic documentary and surreal fiction, it is an example of an ethno-cinematographic rhizome based on a complex assemblage of experiences, sensations, dreams, memories, legends that seeks to express the deep ethnological reality of the Thai province of Isan. The sacred in Isan (temples, but also cemeteries, caves, the jungle itself) is "reenchanted" in his cinema by the assemblage of its spiritual, supernatural, magical, animistic, mythological elements with profane, natural, human, experiential elements.