Националната идея в съвременното тайландско кино: образи, сюжети, персонажи
The National Idea in Contemporary Thai Cinema: Images, Plots, Characters

Summary/Abstract: The text presented here emphasizes on those contemporary films which represent the history of Siam/Thailand and manifest the typical for the country triad “King – religion – nation”. This research focuses on the confrontation between the traumatic and the triumphant memory of historicity and its mission is to construct the image of “self” (the image of the greatness of Siam/Thailand) and to promote a public, controlled image of the nation. The cinema presents the extraor- dinary opportunity to actualize the aesthetic distance of the events which took place back in time. The film has two perspectives – on one hand, it represents the past, and on the other hand it projects “once” in the present “now”. In this train of thoughts the epic genre takes over once more characters from history in order to construct and represent collective national memory in a quest for (and also creation of) these places of memory. The text also focuses on the establishment of Thai cultural memory through plots which represent the ordinary human and the super-hero (who has once been also an ordinary human), who is not part of the Crown or the religious community sangha, but who manifests the national identity and idea strongly enough. Lastly, the text touches upon those images and plots, which point to an alternative direction of expressing national identity: through specific characters, some of which remind of Michael Herzfeld’s ideas and his thesis for cultural intimacy.

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