Recommend some Tsai Ming-Liang

Saw Journey to the West on the big screen. Late Tsai is pretty much the greatest thing in the world. And New Wave Film has tweeted they will release Stray Dogs and Journey together on DVD. Can't wait for that package!!!

Rewatched The Hole on scratchy celluloid with Swedish subtitles. Fourth time I've seen Tsai on big screen this year - Stray Dogs twice and Journey to the West. For that reason alone, 2014 has been a very fine cineastic year. The Hole wasn't as good as I'd made it up to be in my head, though. Amazing ending, but it meanders a bit and seems unsure how to connect all the little weird elements of it. I love the musical numbers, love the cat, loved the scene where the man flees with the cat from the exterminators' fumes, and the one where the bean-sauce-buyer walks away and into the light. But... relationship drama done better in Vive l'Amour, the scenes of loners wandering the market are amazing and moody but Goodbye Dragon Inn takes that theme and runs with it. So minor Tsai.

Stray Dogs on Netflix stream.

That's one for which you should delete the fast forward button

on the NYC Tsai retro and US release of Rebels of the Neon God

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-tsai-ming-liang-in-new-york

btw for reasons that are obvious when you see it, the most essential feature to see on a theater screen is Goodbye, Dragon Inn (showing at end of Queens series on Sunday).

I saw two of the slooooow monk movies on Saturday -- Walker, a short where Lee, in red robes, moves at barely preceptiple pokiness in a variety of Hong Kong settings, and then the hourlong Journey to the West, where he does the same in Marseille, trailed by Denis Lavant. They're more "experiential" than evaluable, but I enjoyed seeing them.

Nick Pinkerton on Goodbye, Dragon Inn:

http://reverseshot.org/symposiums/entry/329/goodbye_dragon_inn_0

forgot to post this interview:

RS: Will there be more Walker films? What particular challenges do they pose?

Tsai: I love filming the act of walking, because no preparation is needed. Just a little makeup for Hsiao-kang, and a red monk’s robe. We go to the location I have selected and begin to film. It’s like when a painter goes out to paint a still life. Have you ever heard of a painter planning or conceptualizing anything before going out to paint a still life? He paints what he finds and sees. Because the world is so full of wonders, one can never run out of subjects to paint. Why deliberately worry or challenge myself?

RS: You seem to be interested in public spaces in which lonely strangers can fleetingly intersect—markets, video arcades, movie theaters. Do you see these public spaces disappearing—or people disappearing from them? How do you think the Internet has changed the fumbling for connection that your films depict? Have you thought to try to reflect the change of these rituals in your films?

Tsai: I think that creation and life are inextricable, and beyond this there is nothing else. If a filmmaker isn’t a marketer, then essentially his work is the reflection of life through his own unique spiritual and psychological perspective. I like going to traditional markets because the vegetables sold by farmers are more fresh and tasty, and moreover the experience contains deeper flavors of life. When I was a little boy, I used to go to a market next to a clock tower with my grandmother. In my memory, that clock tower looked gigantic. A while later, when the market disappeared, the tower looked more diminutive than ever. Each time I walked past that tower I felt sorrow. Sometimes reality is so depressing one can barely face it. Those disappeared theaters from the memories of my childhood, when I began traveling the world, I realized they can be found everywhere, in equal states of dilapidation, many of which become cruising spots. I liked to go on my own adventures in these places. It’s so hard to describe the feeling I get in these spaces, like a dream covered in mold. Typical trajectories are not part of my world, or my films, and most definitely not part of my dreams.

http://reverseshot.org/interviews/entry/2043/tsaimingliang_interview_2015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2MJ68jedKc

New Tsai on youtube in HD. Have to go to bed, looking forward to checking it out tomorrow. The first few moments look like more exploration of digital imagery, which is awesome!

(hope the youtube-link works)

Yay!

D'oh, I'm always seeing sequels before the originals.

(Pretty amazing, and now I'm looking forward to the first six.)

Damn, I love what Tsai is doing at the moment. I just simply love it. My favorite artist at the moment, I think. Color, light, movement, body. The most important research into the posibilities of the digital image. I want someone to do an exhibition of this stuff in a museum in Copenhagen. Wish I knew how to do it myself.

The first one is on youtube as well, but not in HD:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLCM5UXXEAA

The clarity of the HD vid was crucial for No-No; the ramping on the beads of sweat falling.

Yup. That is also why it could be cool to see in a museum, where you can walk upclose to the pictures. Stray Dogs is shown as an installation some places, where each shot is shown on different screens. That sounds awesome.

Those are some pristine images.

Insights: http://entropymag.org/slowness-as-an-act-of-rebellion-on-tsai-ming-liangs-walker/

The two I've seen are particularly "experiential"... I think they sort of need to be seen in a big room in the dark.

http://bombmagazine.org/article/916542/tsai-ming-liang

One person thought he stepped on a used needle in the forest, and he was afraid he got AIDS, but actually it was a snake bite.

And New Wave Film has tweeted they will release Stray Dogs and Journey together on DVD. Can't wait for that package!!!

Finally caught up w/ Journey to the West as part of this tasty double disc set, not on a big screen sadly, but still extraordinary looking - I remember Nakh correctly saying that New Wave's DVD of Unrelated looked like shit, but they've done well by Tsai here - sound, colour, all v. beautiful, there's a shot of a deep red wall that's ravishing, and that's matched to the colour of the red monk robes that are the film's key visual motif. The opening shot of JTTW reminded me strongly of Lynch's Eraserhead - a horizontal face, slowly observed - but here you could study every fissure of Denis Levant's craggy face, his forehead a knot of tension, his eyes dark like blood. Throughout, I was asking myself, how (or how much) is this film directed? Of course, such long takes imply an act of passive observation - the film's epigraph seems to corroborate this - but there's an element of comedy at work too, the walker's slow, inexorable creeping into frame, the way people pay him so little attention, walking round him, stepping out of his way - they literally let him 'be'

"Afternoon is a feature-length experimental film that could be taken as the most complex DVD extra ever made. But for devotees of Tsai and his onscreen alter ego, actor Lee Kang-sheng, the film is hypnotic, even as the perversity of its stasis prompts a viewer to wonder whether it has a trajectory or is simply going where it will.”

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-venice-toronto-2015-tsai-ming-liangs-afternoon

I wish Bela Tarr was having as productive a retirement.

Ah, thought I'd posted this a few weeks back - TML's first mainland exhibition at Guangzhou's Times Museum was amaaazing:
http://en.timesmuseum.org/exhibitions/detail/id-599/

Had completely transformed the space into a weird paper-mache/cottonwool labyrinth with screens looping shots, plus a cosy, cocoon-like environment with angled screens with Stray Dogs on a loop.

daring to make a cosmically slow movie about nothing and everything and fill it w/ so many sequences of people sleeping - and pissing! i stayed awake and crossed my legs

― sʌxihɔːl (Ward Fowler), Sunday, 22 June 2014 19:25

Ha, yeah, I was the only person to stay awake/in-the-room for the entire screening.

A lot of stuff up on Mubi right now

don't think he ever topped Viva L'amour and Dragon Inn. But everything is awesome.

http://metrograph.com/edition/article/12/chasing-the-film-spirit

http://i.imgur.com/zkFqjfN.jpg

Since early on, there has been a persistent, mysterious image imprinted in my memory banks: a brilliant carp spirit who has taken on the form of a beautiful woman emerging from a pond, vividly glistening, dazzling and unforgettable. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized this image came from a film—based on an old fable—made in Mainland China in the 1950s called Chasing the Fish Spirit. It depicts a divine encounter between a penurious scholar and the fish spirit in a garden. It was not the first film I ever saw; my grandmother and grandfather were the biggest cinephiles I knew, and we started going to movies together when I was three years old. We would go to the cinema twice a day, everyday. Sometimes we would watch the same film over and over again, and sometimes we would find different cinemas to watch something new. That was a golden age for cinema, and I’m proud my childhood coincided with that time.

When I was 20 years old, I left my hometown of Kuching, Malaysia. That small town had about a dozen cinemas in which I lingered. They were indelible. Years later when I returned for the first time, I found they had all been demolished, except one, which no longer showed film. It had become a market for various knicknacks. I saw very clearly then that I came into this world at a time of unprecedented rapid change. I couldn’t help but feel wistful and melancholy. Later when I began to make films, I started to have a recurring dream about a cinema called the Odeon, and I had it often until I was 40 years old. I didn’t understand it at all. It didn’t occur to me in my everyday thoughts and yet it presented itself to me each night. Perhaps, I thought, it meant that I was getting old?

In 2000, when I made What Time Is It There?, I found an old cinema on the outskirts of Taipei where I wanted to shoot. The feeling of being there had a flavor of death and fecundity, as though I were meeting an old lost friend. Afterwards, I chose this dilapidated old theater—perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy—as the venue for my premiere. It was a dark and stormy night, but the theater was packed. The next day the theater manager called to ask if I would enter into a partnership with him. Of course I turned down this terrible business proposal. He said to me, “Then I have no option but to close the cinema.” I responded, “Wait a minute, okay, rent it to me for one year.” During the subsequent year, I made Goodbye, Dragon Inn.

Nowadays everyone watches movies on planes. On any given flight, no matter the airline, you can choose from hundreds of films: Hollywood, Bollywood, all different types of movies. However, you can count on one thing: you’ll never find a Tsai Ming-liang picture on a plane, as I make films that have to be seen on the big screen. If this were not the case, people watching a film of mine on a plane might be confounded into thinking the small screen on the seat in front of them was broken.

Translated by Aliza Ma.

Is that the same fish-woman fable that makes up the lesser third of Uncle Boonmee...?

http://hongkong.coconuts.co/2016/07/14/genius-gets-away-burglary-calls-cops-then-willingly-returns-scene-crime-be-arrested

http://i.imgur.com/X0GpvCh.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/rXQHPiC.jpg

O_O

rad !

what's the first ?

vive l'amour isn't one of my fav tsais but i just saw dragon inn screened for the first time & thought it was incredible - marienbadesque! - where watching it at home i'd just thought it cute. i always think of morbs' phrasing (iirc), that it 'demands a cinema viewing', so tru of tsai

i wish i could see dragon inn at a cinema.

att Londoners

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/film/tsai-ming-liang-deserted/tsai-ming-liang-masterclass

Cool interview linked to that:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/apr/04/director-tsai-ming-liang-taiwan-long-take-watermelon-sex

yeah really excited about this, going to all the tate stuff and hoping to see the vr on monday

a total delight, hadn't seen any of his work going in. 'goodbye, dragon inn' on 35 mm was incredible, other favourites were 'your face' and 'no no sleep'. tsai and lee kang-sheng were there for pretty much everything, guy has maybe the most radiant positive energy and basically just wanted to talk about his films and kang-sheng forever. masterclass ran over to about two and half hours - mainly talked about moving from the cinema to the gallery and trying to get audiences into both (a lot about how he sells tickets on the streets), not much about actual filmmaking process. did say that 'goodbye dragon inn' is getting a restoration at the film archive atm.

surprised to find that I like slow films like Goodbye, Dragon Inn and Stray Dogs much more after a second viewing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X2ZNw00AIQ&fbclid=IwAR2SpiVFY7f-vSIrMw-MpJlRPkZJLX91fytP6Bt1G4Vmb_Vvox1-3sPa0nY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXTdtn1ZOHA

Can't wait! A bit annoyingly there's a retro beginning in Copenhagen this friday, and it won't have the new one. But looking forward to watching The Hole and Goodbye Dragon Inn next week.

🎥🎥🎥

NYC retro schedule, including appearances

https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5204

Rebels of the Neon God on Criterion Channel. More straightforwardly romantic than later pictures, although his camera shows more interest in the brothers' bare chests and their puffy lips than any woman. Strong Nicholas Ray and Van Sant influence. I have an affection for films and novels by artists in embryonic form.

somewhat pulpy but I loved it

Lee Kang-Sheng is great in it. he plays characters with the same name (Hsiao-Kang) in Vive L'Amour, The River, What Time Is It There?, Goodbye Dragon Inn, The Wayward Cloud, and I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, not sure what that is about

The old man does too.

Find you someone who looks at you like Tsai Ming-Liang looks at Lee Kang-Sheng, as the meme goes.

I watched a bit of The Wayward Cloud last night and thought, "this must be what Cabbage Head from Kids in the Hall's sex life is like."

Days is closer to Millenia.

Not really. Despite the by now expected static compositions, I detected more movement. I'm fascinated by how queer desire eroticizes urban landscapes.

restoration of Goodbye, Dragon Inn is astonishing