PAST REFRACTIONS Anocha Suwichakornpong’s By the Time It Gets Dark
One of the most compelling shifts in popular film discourse in the digital age has been the onus placed on accuracy. A factual or historical film is now subject to a content-churning rigour – though it’s highly unlikely you’ll soon see the headline ‘What By the Time It Gets Dark Gets Wrong About the 1976 Thammasat University Massacre’ ripple across your social media timelines. Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong’s second feature, which premiered at the 2016 Locarno Film Festival, functions almost as a rebuke to its own historicity. It captures a dreamlike, free-associative mood in response to the memory, rather than the actuality, of an event that saw forty-six students killed, 167 wounded and more than 3000 arrested.
These numbers themselves represent some degree of conflict, with survivors of the massacre claiming that the death toll was much closer to 100. Journalist Feliz Solomon describes the political situation that turned a protest into a slaughter:
The campus had been occupied by leftist student demonstrators who opposed the return to Thailand of a former dictator [Thanom Kittikachorn]. The military and arch royalists accused them of being antimonarchical communists, and the military, police and right-wing paramilitary forces had Thammasat surrounded.
With thousands of students under siege, authorities opened fire onto the campus with M-16s, recoilless rifles and grenades. For several hours, these forces – later joined by vigilantes – shot, beat, raped and murdered unarmed students, some as they tried to either flee or surrender.
