Still Life The Films of Tsai Ming-liang
Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang’s body of work is characterised by silence, stillness and dislocation, with narratives that unfold slowly and urban settings that face deterioration. In these cinematic landscapes, time passes and decay is inevitable – but fatalistic beauty teems in the wreckage, writes Anthony Carew.
56 • Metro Magazine 183 | © ATOM FOCUS ON ASIA AND THE MIDDLE EAST Tsai Ming-liang’s latest film, Journey to the West (2014), feels more like a piece of video art than a traditional narrative picture – a fact that betrays its relationship to Tsai’s film series Walker, which sees the director dabbling in something close to performance art. But, even though it feels like an anomaly for the 57-year-old Taiwanese auteur, the film continues to exemplify his signature predilections. Journey to the West’s entire synopsis and one-line synopsis are very much the same: on Marseille streets, a monk walks so slowly that his movements border on imperceptible. Its long takes and slow pace are reminiscent of the director’s previous work, too, and in this way the film is almost a wry self- parody or a symbolic depiction of how Tsai sees himself in the greater cinematic landscape: he, the Buddhist, humble and frail and moving at a snail’s pace – a figure of stillness in a world rushing around him. These same traits embody Tsai’s films over the past two decades. Even in the ‘rarefied’ realm of the film- festival circuit – which he has never broken out from, with not even a solitary instant of indie crossover – his works are oases from the cacophony of jittery editing and lurid colour-grading, of overplayed scores and over- determined drama, of three-act resolutions and desper- ate attention-seeking. Before long-take cinema became a programmable festival strain, Tsai had been cultivating his own auteurist aesthetic, a singular cinematic realm engrossed in stillness and silence (and occasional musi- cal numbers). Film by film, across his ten true feature films – from Rebels of the Neon God (1992) to Stray Dogs (2013) – he’s cut less and less; Stray Dogs even climaxes with an unbroken thirteen-minute shot of two figures standing still in front of a mural. And all of these slow, stilled films take place in the one narrative world. The monk in Journey to the West is played by Lee Kang- sheng, who has been in every one of Tsai’s features, and his character in each of Tsai’s earlier ten films has been named Hsiao-Kang. The Wayward Cloud (2005) builds on the experiences of the same characters from What Time Is It There? (2001), with the short film The Skywalk Is Gone (2002) bridging them. But, even when the connections aren’t so explicit, Tsai’s films all seem to progress from one to the next – as though they are just one long, singular work, episodically told. Tsai’s works are meditations on the same themes, with isolated, alienated characters living silent lives filled with longing, much of it sexual; his films ‘express the failure of erotic desire to be realized in contempo- rary urban space’.1 Sexual perversion incites no fears for the filmmaker, mounting desire leading his charac- ters to engage in rough trade and rough sex, to fuck watermelons and wicker baskets, to turn plastic and tinned tomatoes into sexual props, to seek out work in pornography or as escorts, to cross previously un- crossed lines of same-gender congress. Though his films are stilled and operate with little to no dialogue, there is never a sense of stasis. The camera may rarely move, but on the soundtrack there’s always the sound of water trickling, rushing and splashing, and dripping PREVIOUS SPREAD: TSAI MING-LIANG ABOVE, FROM TOP: STRAY DOGS (TWO IMAGES); REBELS OF THE NEON GOD; THE WAYWARD leaks, gurgling pipes, flooded floors, shadowy sew- CLOUD OPPOSITE: JOURNEY TO THE WEST (TWO IMAGES) ers and public restrooms are staples in Tsai’s work.
58 • Metro Magazine 183 | © ATOM www.metromagazine.com.au | © ATOM | Metro Magazine 183 • 59 Even familiar cities can be made unfamiliar by their changing faces, the past remaining elusive when the present doesn’t resemble the landscape of your memories. The past lingers, always.
Toilets are their own totemic presence, the director watching on silently as his lonesome souls perform the most mundane of daily activities: pissing, bathing, brushing hair, eating, smoking cigarettes, crying silently. They’re often lower class, lower caste, or immigrants – those who’ve fallen through the cracks of society or live at its marginalised fringes. Tsai filmed almost all his pictures in Taiwan’s capital – save the Malaysia-shot I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006), and Face (2009) and Journey to the West, both made in France – and his Taipei is a city in decay. In The River (1997), Hsiao-Kang is gripped by an unnamed malady after lying in the eponymous body of water. In the almost-apocalyptic The Hole (1998), Taipei is under the grip of ‘Taiwan Fever’, which spreads, like typhoid, in unsanitary conditions – the result of residents tossing rubbish out windows and into streets – and leaves its victims acting like cockroaches. And in The Wayward Cloud, which is not only a narrative continu- ation of What Time Is It There? but also The Hole’s spiritual successor, there’s a water shortage in Taiwan (but abundant watermelons!). The concrete landscape in his films is vast and unfeeling; its towering buildings, hotel rooms, shopping centres, elevators, escalators, moving walkways, overpasses and pedestrian-unfriendly motorways make human figures seem insignificant and all too mortal. There’s undoubtedly an architectural quality to Tsai’s films, and almost all of them are chronicles of the ever-changing urban landscape: buildings falling into states of squalor, awaiting the day they’re razed and built over anew. The Skywalk Is Gone, in both its title and tale, is a clear evocation of one of Tsai’s central thematic conceits: that even familiar cities can be made unfamiliar by their changing faces, the past remaining elusive when the present doesn’t resemble the landscape of your memories. The past lingers, always; these urban buildings are haunted, both figuratively and literally, by recollections and spectres. The filmmaker’s characters die, but, unlike the buildings or skywalks of Taiwan, they don’t disappear. In What Time Is It There?, Hsiao-Kang’s father (played by another Tsai regular, Miao Tien), passes away with the droll brevity of a blunt edit – first we see Miao’s character smoking a cigarette, next we cut to Hsiao-Kang holding an urn in his lap, on the way home from the funeral. But, for his widow (Lu Yi-Ching, who has been in seven of Tsai’s features, almost always playing Lee’s mother), he remains ever-present. She’s keeping a keen eye out; if you feed a cockroach to the family fish, that could be the reincar- nated recently departed that you’ve just turned into lunch. Tsai has stated his own belief in ghosts and cited the spirits of both his own father and Lee’s father as having helped the produc- tion of What Time Is It There? run smoothly.2 In communing with the spirits, Tsai’s films are replete with Buddhist rituals: funerals and memorials, ceremonies staged
60 • Metro Magazine 183 | © ATOM for good fortune and safe passage. He signs off his every film with a simple koan, handwritten and emblazoned with his name, unfurled as a scroll. It’s the closest Tsai’s films can get to a moment of clarity; much mystery is created through unspeaking characters and their unexpressed emotions, in his fondness for the power of images over the ease of expo- sition, the cheap thrills of plot. His scripts are ‘like poetry’,3 with scenes merely outlined; his rarely cutting camera – the digital era having removed the old limitation of ten-minute takes – watching on with an air of engaged humanity. All his stark silences come not from a position of detachment, but from engagement, the director all questions and few answers, the closed loop of regular cinema narrative left open-ended. Movies, he has said, should be ‘like God’4 – not something we can easily understand nor readily comprehend.
Tsai Ming-liang was born in Kuching, Malaysia, in 1957. A Malaysian-Chinese (and, thus, cultural Other from birth), he spent his early years living a simple, rural existence. Throughout his adolescence, he spent summer stints living and working with his grandparents, street vendors who sold snacks outside cinemas then took turns going in to watch the films. The 1960s and 1970s were, for Tsai, the ‘golden age’ of Taiwanese cinema5 – something he touches on with a sense of genuine loss in Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003). In it, an old Taiwanese cinema – one of the grand palaces of yore – screens King Hu’s kung-fu classic Dragon Gate Inn (1967) on its final night open for business. Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a piece of meta-cinema: the films by Tsai and King progress alongside each other, occasionally intersecting, with Tsai showing shots of audiences watching the screen as his own audience watches the screen. The theatre is a cavernous relic, most used in its old age as a beat by local men cruising for sex – yet another decaying building that will soon be knocked down and built over, lost to everything but memory. Tsai was inspired to make the film when he dis- covered that the cinema in which he shot – the Fuhe movie house in Taipei’s Yonghe district, a 1000-seater built in 1972 and at the time facing a long, slow decline – was due to be closed. Having been haunted, in the years prior, by ‘this re- curring dream of this particular theater in Malaysia […] like THIS SPREAD, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: WHAT TIME IS IT THERE; THE RIVER; GOODBYE, these images of childhood wouldn’t let me go’,6 Tsai leased DRAGON INN; VIVE L’AMOUR; FACE; I DON’T the cinema for six months and set about exploring the build- WANT TO SLEEP ALONE; THE HOLE ing, charting this relic of a swiftly receding past. Goodbye, Dragon Inn feels like the film most nostalgic, or reverent, for his upbringing – an elegy for the lost glories of the grand, glamorous theatre-as-palace; for the Taiwanese cinema that first inspired him (Miao and Shih Chun, who both starred in King’s film, make cameos); and for his grandparents, who fed his nascent love of the silver screen. Tsai relocated to Taiwan at the age of twenty, studied drama and film at Taipei’s Chinese Culture University, and began work in the 1980s, staging productions for theatre and directing for television. When he made the transition to cinema, his early films – Rebels of the Neon God, Vive l’amour (1994), The River, The Hole – were acclaimed for the clarity of their vision, the stillness of their camera, and their tragicomic depic- tion of urban malaises both metaphorical and tangible. Tsai was the understated, unique, ever-abstruse and occasionally
www.metromagazine.com.au | © ATOM | Metro Magazine 183 • 61 In showing Lee’s ageing form via his on-screen incarnation … Tsai is mirroring his depiction of urban decay: like buildings and memories, flesh too is finite.
overlooked member of Taiwan’s Second New Wave, arriving after contemporaries both spiritually close (Hou Hsiao-hsien) and unexpectedly aligned (Ang Lee). Both Hou and Lee appear in Past Present (2013), a Malaysian-made docu- mentary by academic Saw Tiong Guan that charts Tsai’s career. While writing his doctoral thesis on censorship, Saw had interviewed Tsai7 and immediately connected with the director’s longing for Malaysia. As a play on what Tsai had done cinematically with Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Saw takes Tsai back to the locations of his Malaysian childhood – an experience the director describes as ‘like going into a tun- nel back to [his] past’.
What I saw was cruel […] those familiar buildings were now old and dilapidated and some had even disappeared. The people that I know are old now, some have already passed away. At one point, I turned to Tiong Guan and asked him, ‘Why bring me back here to destroy my memories?’8
Past Present is itself a work about memories – those that Tsai is chasing through his films – as well as the idea that film creates its own memory. As Saw’s film stresses, Tsai’s life and his cinema are indivisible, and this is best embodied by the recurring presence of Lee Kang-sheng in his films. Tsai discovered the twenty-year-old Lee working at a Taipei arcade in 1989 and cast him in the telemovie All the Corners of the World, which aired that year. Lee remind- ed Tsai of his father – stern, taciturn, distant, a figure of weltschmerz – and, following his father’s death during the making of Rebels of the Neon God, the two have remained inseparable.9 Lee is often, quite clearly, a proxy for the director on screen: his recurring character has mourned a father (What Time Is It There?) and a mother (Face), as Tsai himself has been doing. Lee has played an immigrant outsider in Malaysia (I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone), a street vendor (What Time Is It There?), a director working on an FROM TOP: JOURNEY TO THE WEST; FACE; STRAY DOGS ambitious meta-movie on location in France (Face) and, of course, a slow-moving monk (Journey to the West). ‘I just want to keep portraying Lee Kang-Sheng with my camera, documenting him,’ Tsai says; ‘through my films you can follow the whole process of life, getting older … all depicted on the face and body of one actor.’10 Lee’s body is on dis- play throughout Tsai’s films, his ripe form often depicted as a sexual commodity – his buttocks feel like an old, familiar friend, and pissing and masturbation are shown on screen. Lee has described working for Tsai as ‘a form of torture’,11 whether walking at an excruciatingly slow speed (Journey to the West), playing dead in a river (The River) or lying in a pretend-comatose state (I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone). In showing Lee’s ageing form via his on-screen incarna- tion – in Rebels of the Neon God, Hsiao-Kang is a teenage
62 • Metro Magazine 183 | © ATOM student who has dropped out to frequent a late-night the ghosts of the past, peering forever at an unknowable arcade; by Stray Dogs, twenty-one years on, Hsiao-Kang future. Through his calm, patient, powerful works, Tsai is, is a father of two desperately scraping for survival – Tsai in his own way, art cinema’s slow-moving monk, inching is mirroring his depiction of urban decay: like buildings ever closer to the divine. and memories, flesh too is finite. The intimate, ongoing relationship between Tsai and Anthony Carew is a Melbourne-based critic. m Lee, between filmmaker and muse, is often compared to the recurring collaborations of François Truffaut and Endnotes Jean-Pierre Léaud – and Tsai himself acknowledges this. 1 Tsai Ming-liang, quoted in Samantha Culp & Tyler Coburn, ‘An Tsai has long stated his admiration for the pair, citing their Interview with Tsai Ming-Liang’, trans. Ken Chen et al., Wake: first collaboration in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) as A Journal of Contemporary Culture, Fall 2003,
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