Recommend some Tsai Ming-Liang

I like Rebels of the Neon God and The River (sort of bookends in the family cycle), but I think What Time Is It There? was a leap forward. Goodbye Dragon Inn almost requires a theater viewing, I think.

sleep's place has unbelievably bad plumbing.

The Hole's OK but I like it least of the family-centered films due to the Dennis Potterlike musical numbers, a trope I thought worked better in the new Wayward Cloud.

Realism?

-- Eric H.

Yeah, I mean feel free to define realist cinema and explain why Tsai falls outside that. I've probably misunderstood the term.

OK, possibly unclear use of "all", but of course I can only speak for all the ones I've seen, listed in the previous post. None of which have any musical numbers.

Yeah, well, I always give Ozu-influenced filmmakers the benefit of the doubt.

Finally saw What Time Is It There? -- the last ten minutes almost made cry. Funny in an Buster Keaton way. The only false note was the mother talking to the fish: the only thumpingly explicit scene.

NY retro plus his new Face:

http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/film/80547/tsai-ming-liang-taiwans-art-house-auteur

face is fantastic, like fellini meets roy andersson

no mention on this thread of goodbye, dragon inn -- definitely one of my top-10-of-the-'00s.

Face is a mess.

goodbye, dragon inn -- definitely one of my top-10-of-the-'00s

Definitely within the top 50 for me.

You give out four stars that often?

You're right. Top 20-ish.

I'm kind of intrigued that it played that well for you at home; sitting in a theater watching it, well, you can imagine. (I saw it in the morning at the Toronto fest.)

If it helps, people kept coming in and out of my apartment and sitting down next to me.

were any of them former Shaw Brothers actors?

As much as I've learned to like a couple of Tsai films, I can't resist the irresistable urge to vacuum and make dinner while the moves are on.

well for GBDI you could mop the floor and make popcorn.

And deliver a pink dinner and empty rainwater and dust off ghost peanut shells.

oh, the buns! Forgot about them.

am getting so much out of screening this guy's stuff, having previously only seen a couple.

i don't know a lot about taiwanese cinema - is there anyone working in the same sort of circles i should be aware of?

edward yang, edward yang, edward yang

hou hsao-hsien, hou hsao-hsien, hou hsao-hsien

Jia Zhangke, whose movies are a little faster.

thanks a lot y'all. i've seen a little of each, but yang in particular i've totally overlooked. i can't get hold of anything that isn't yi-yi here but will make some efforts.

Taipei Story is good, do is everything else

Jia Zhangke, whose movies are a little faster.

mainland director iirc

mainland director iirc

i meant to say that i will be almost racistly liberal with my definition of taiwanese cinema. TML works all over so malay or whatever is also acceptable. i get, more, the bresson comparison after seeing i don't want to sleep alone, it's more stylistic links i'm exploring.

rebels of the neon god was nice

Not a single mention of I Don't Want To Sleep Alone? Probably one of my favourite films of the last 5 years or so.

Also:

Tom Lin Shu-Yu: http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=107670

And Tzu-Jui Hsu's "Rondo" if u can find it.

i don't know a lot about taiwanese cinema - is there anyone working in the same sort of circles i should be aware of?

― Earning your Masters in Library and Information Science is beautiful (schlump), Sunday, April 18, 2010 5:51 AM (5 months ago)

Ang Lee, but before you LOL check Raise The Red Lantern and Eat Drink Man Woman.

except Raise The Red Lantern is Zhang Yimou

(who is not from Taiwan)

haha... why did I think that was Ang Lee? Doesn't he have a period piece along the same lines? #toolazytogoogle

Not a single mention of I Don't Want To Sleep Alone? Probably one of my favourite films of the last 5 years or so.

― thubms up for lesebons (admrl), Tuesday, September 21, 2010 9:29 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

wayward cloud, too. obscenity, symbolism, musical numbers and all. less impressed with what time is it there, despite the beautiful photography. seen it three times and still can't quite get past the surface.

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

I watched The Hole recently (it’s on Kanopy but the restored version is available on VOD) and I wished I had watched it earlier in the pandemic. It captured the emotional tenor of this time so presciently well. I actually think it might be hard to top in that regard.

finally saw Days last night, damn y'all

it was an outdoor screening so it came complete with outside noise, somehow perfect, despite the group beside me who wouldn't stfu

!! ... starts streaming a week from Friday, I think? really looking forward to it

Where is it going to stream again? I assume Mubi.

looks like it'll be a virtual cinema thing, found it at https://projectr.tv/ through the distributor's site. not sure if anywhere else.

Tsai Ming-liang: TV, Documentary, and Short Films

Please note The Moon is Gone, a TV production, does not have any subtitles. None are available so far as I'm aware. All other titles either have subs or are purposefully presented unsubtitled.https://t.co/52vWLI4acO

— JackEason (@realJackEason) November 5, 2021

Goodbye, Dragon Inn is one of the surest comedies of the last thirty years.