By the Time It Gets Dark (2016) (with Felicity Gee)

Fantasy/Animation

Episode 83 sees Chris and Alex trace the magical realist threads and overlapping timelines that build Anocha Suwichakornpong’s often confounding drama By the Time It Gets Dark (2016) (known in Thai as Dao Khanong), replete with its shifting realities, fleeting digital VFX and a pivotal citation of the ‘father of fantasy’ (as well as one of cinema’s first animators) Georges Méliès. Joining them to discuss Suwichakornpong’s mesmerising, kaleidoscopic, and highly original second feature film that dramatises the events of the 1976 Thammasat University massacre is Dr Felicity Gee, Senior Lecturer in Modernism and World Cinema at the University of Exeter, and author of the recent Magic Realism, World Cinema and the Avant-Garde (London: Routledge 2021). Listen as they discuss the film’s ‘magical realist’ identity and the term’s vexed relationship to surrealism, (Low) fantasy storytelling and animation; the possible connections between fantasy narratives and world cinema; imagination, image-making and illusion from Méliès to Chris Marker; the reflexive staging of history and how Suwichakornpong crafts a collage effect that evokes the slipperiness of experience and memory; cinema’s capacity to spin an eternal present, and the stakes of the film’s own temporal confusion; and the politics of glitch art, and how By the Time It Gets Dark offers spectators an affective assault on both narrative and image that mirrors the violence and brutality of its historical subject matter.