Film Projection and the Sacred Geography of Site-Specific Cinema in Contemporary Thailand

This chapter is about outdoor projectionists in Thailand and draws on in-depth interviews with four individuals running outdoor projection businesses and fieldwork observations of their work and that of others at different locations around the country: in the Northeastern provinces of Khon Kaen and Udonthani, the Central province of Samut Prakhan and the suburbs of Bangkok. The chapter examines a widespread form of projection practice that is not embedded within institutions of commercial entertainment, but which thrives within a ritual economy of transactions between humans and a complex cosmology of supernatural personages. The chapter contributes to an expanded historiography of film projection and presentation that would include a wider range of locations and a more complex understanding of the diversity of projection and display technologies and practice. In particular it takes up Brian Larkin’s invitation to ‘take the religious field seriously as a determinant of the evolution of what cinema does’ (2008:83).