The Stillness of A Moving Image

“Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us.” - Albert Camus

Long takes and slow cinema have been a long time acquaintance to the film club. Throughout our time, we have explored and survived through several films that have had these elements as a primary control over our experience with the film. Be it the tiring dances and long walks in Satantango by Bela Tarr, or the dormancy in Colossal Youth by Pedro Costa, or gradual exploration of geography in From What is Before by Lav Diaz, we have seen directors immerse us, with the characters and their encounters.
However, Tsai offers us a nuance. His visual language conjures up an essence of deep meditation, of contemplation, and of a “true” experience with the passage of time.

As we sit through with Lee in the bath, in No No Sleep (from the Walker series), Tsai obligates us trancefully examine closely. The water rippling out after its periodic collisions with Lee’s body, the strange effigies the eddies make only for it to become formless again, the unenthusiastic neighbor and the overpowering isolation, the bliss on Lee’s face morphing and returning with each morsel of his breaths.
For the audience, time is to be slowed down, experienced, felt, probed, and passed. The characters in Tsai's films evolve with time, as algorithmic beings destined to do so.
This can serve to us as an agreeable summary of Tsai Ming-Liang’s filmography, although by no way generalizing it.

It can come as no surprise that Tsai’s experience with theater has played a significant role in shaping his filmmaking. The unrelentingly voyeuristic camera scrutinizing, inspecting, and probing into his characters’ psyche, the seemingly desolate production design, dystopian characters stripped away of their “human” masks, and laid naked in their primal urges and their exile into isolation; the “bare” nature of theater, and its inability to hide behind smart cuts, forces the actors and the director to simulate to the truest sense possible.
By his own admission, Tsai says, “It is because of Lee (Kang-Sheng) that I gradually discovered the meaning of filmmaking. I finally have the opportunity to look at a face and its minute changes, the minute changes over time. These changes are irreversible. They reveal the truth of life ceaselessly”.

Quite like his films, his filmography evolves as a continuum.
We begin with:

Week 1

Starting with his TV film, Boys (1991), we can begin to understand Tsai’s inclination towards a docu-fiction style, quite like his New Wave predecessors. We follow the life of a junior high student, with absentee parents being bullied by his senior, while the senior himself is bullied by a group of older students. Although the film doesn’t justly capture Tsai’s aesthetic characteristics or his general dystopian ethical underpinnings, we still can perceive his voyeuristic silent pacing behind the characters.
We proceed to his first feature Rebels of The Neon God (1992). A year after Boys, Tsai has already broken away from his TV films, and has begun gradually building the barren and melancholic infrastructure for his universe. Here, we pursue a disconnected family, their son, a gang of friends, and a city – all of them suspended aimlessly, driven by a basal need to ‘feel’ something! Although still crude (when compared to his later films), Tsai situated his megaproject more definitely with Rebels.
We then proceed to Vive L’Amour (1994), which immediately turned into a critics’ favorite in the Venice film festival. The film follows the lives of three people, and their interconnection to an apartment in Taipei. The characters balance their lives between material fulfillment and spiritual emptiness with their banality sustained by their materialistic desires. Tsai has now moved away from soundtracks; unlike in Boys and Rebels where they attain a metaphysical personality for themselves. All we have are the characters, and the noises they make to distract themselves from the deafening silence.

Week 2

The River (1997), Tsai’s third film, plans a revisit to a dysfunctional family. Unlike the family in Rebels, we see tagental character arcs developing to their own spirals. The mother is having an affair with a pornographer, the father is having affairs with other men, the son deteriorates into suicide owing to a sudden neck issue. It is structurally chaotic, and rigidly astray.
The next film is The Hole (1998), an unexpected musical. Here, we begin to see Tsai sketch nuances with isolation and the human condition. Set towards the dawn of the millennium, a strange pandemic engulfs Taipei, and, as a result, a building. A few inhabitants reluctant to vacate see themselves sharing and co-living with the same resources. We explore the interposition of ‘the public’ and ‘the private’ when the residents are forced to optimize their lives to co-exist.

Week 3

The fifth film, What Time Is It There? (2001), goes to take another look at obsession and forced solitude. We follow Hsiao-kang's obsession with Paris after his brief encounter with a lady he refuses to sell his watch. Dwelling in seclusion, Hsiao begins to steadily construct Paris around himself. He watches French films, resets the watches and clocks to French time, as if to find a compromise - a compromise of having to live there spiritually, if not spatially.
In The Skywalk is Gone (2002), we come to a junction between What Time Is It There? and The Wayward Cloud. Shaing-yi (the lady who tries to buy the watch from Hsiao) returns to Taipei to find that the skywalk where she bought the watch, and Hsiao are both gone. As she struggles to find a way, she loses her ID. We find Hsiao has given up on selling watches, and has considered taking up pornography. A blaring but tranquil connection with the city, and its people. If one morphs, the other is forced to morph with it.
Extending on this connection, The Wayward Cloud (2005), we return back to Hsaio-kang, who was seen in The Skywalk is Gone, auditioning for the role of porn actor, working as one. Another musical by Tsai paying homage to American cinema, the loud and overt melancholy is mildly subverted with sardonic humor. Tsai’s musical numbers are employed as a means to condense and extrapolate the characters’ temporal and emotional vacuity. In addition, the film symbolically uses watermelons as a prop to represent both societal frustration (with the water crisis), and individual taboos.

Week 4

As an ode to traditional tranquility and cinephilia, Tsai’s Goodbye, Dragon’s Inn (2003) is possibly one of his more poetic and metaphorical works. Applauded by Weerasethakul to be “the best film in 125 years”, this film explores the story of a run down theater screening Dragon Inn (by King Hu) for the last time. An idyllic introspection into nostalgia and alienation (both temporally and ethereally), we are reminded of Tsai’s own tribulations in locating his roots.

Week 5

For our final installment on Tsai’s early filmography, we look at I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006) and Madame Butterfly (2009).
I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is possibly one of Tsai’s most tender films. Set in a severely polluted Taipei, we follow the characters and their struggle with companionship. The onset of an irreparable decay has forced the lives of these characters together. However, Tsai manages to dissolve the lines separating intimacy, companionship, togetherness and warmth. It is about our “unrelenting need to touch and be touched, hold and be held, care for and be cared for.”
Set in Malaysia, Madame Butterfly, prospects, unlike Tsai’s other depopulated films, seclusion in a busy, populated bus stand in Kuala Lumpur where a woman is left abandoned by her %% lover %%, a long way from home. As she mourns her lost love on a bed, penniless and uncertain of her fate, she is also overcome with the vastness of her freedom, and the radiance of the emptiness.
In the month of November, we begin to notice Tsai’s sharp shift in style. As a poetic eulogy into accepting the pain of seclusion, Tsai and his characters become more dismal. It is as though they are awaiting death. We barely see frantic attempts to hold on to something, but it is all in vain. We also see Tsai and his characters become more meditative simply to kill time. They don’t sleep, they tire themselves out. They are not hungry, they just don’t starve. They don’t touch, they simply graze lifelessly.
We are reminded of film scholar Christian Thompson talking about films supposedly surprising us. Refreshing our views. Thus far, it has been very clear that Tsai graciously violates this maxim to project us into his loudly empty architecture. We are no more surprised than the characters. Life and time eerily moves as cosmologically (slowly) as possible. Duration, it can be said, is Tsai’s primary protagonist. Everyone else are mere puppets.

Week 6

Stray Dogs (2013), can be seen as an ad hoc bridge between Tsai’s early and later films. The film follows a family struggling to make ends meet in a vastly barren city. We slowly breathe in the cold and voided city. We are jailed in indifference towards a calm and timely decay. The only reminders of being alive are desperation and hunger. Tsai’s exploration into family disintegration is no stranger to us. In his films, family is held together through detachment. Conversations are mechanical, and bare.
We also notice Tsai’s films becoming quieter. Silence becomes easier to bear. Words have no energy, quite like the characters. Life is rotting.

Week 7

The Walker Series is arguably Tsai’s most ‘slowest’ of all his films. We follow a Buddhist monk practicing kinhin (a form of walking meditation). The monk walks against a busy, vibrant and sparkling city (set in various cities all around the world, as though to indicate the universal desertification of life). Tsai juxtaposes his treatment of chronological time against perceived time quite elegantly. It appears to be a strange tug war between the monk and the city. While the city forces itself and its inhabitants to be expeditious, the monk forces time to slow down. Time is diluted, felt, held, and let to fade away. The deafening noise of the city becomes inaudible. The walk - cathartic!
In No No Sleep, a sterile Tokyo is languidly traveled in the night. A panoramic drawing of a concrete desert waiting to be garishly loud again.

Week 8

This director’s retrospective is made into a journey. A voyage not only of Tsai’s films, but also about him. In Afternoon and Where Do You Stand, Tsai Ming-Liang?, we sit with Tsai Ming-liang, and his long time collaborator, actor, and muse Lee Kang-sheng as they talk about their lives, their pain, their fears, their complaints, and their love for each other. They discuss their films, the making, their histories, in their serendipitous refuge in the mountains. Life has aged them. It is less uncertain now. We bid adieu to a long and tortuous journey.

Week 9

Our final installment of Tsai Ming-liang’s retrospective is his final film - Days (2020). Kang lives alone. As does Non. Life is extinct. We see a city filled with corpses engaging in their daily lives in the cemetery they call a “city”. Pain is not felt, it is only sensed. People are not touched, they are circumvented. Intimacy is simply ejaculation, and love is only a currency.
Time is irrelevant, and death is awaited.

Tsai Ming-liang is a filmmaker like no other. He has made ‘hyper-realism’ his abode, and dimensionalised and denuded his characters to live in it. His vacant architecture of the city fluidically and intentionally blends in with the interiors of the characters, their remnant superstitions, their consumerism, and their spiritual vacuity. Unlike his Asian or Western predecessors like Yang or Godard, Tsai’s silence in his films are neither inviting nor blissful, to be filled by the plentitude of conversation. In his films, silence is plain, inevitable and inescapable. It resembles the inertia of his landscape.
Water seems to be another common element in his films. It takes on different roles, and is dispersed in different environments. It takes on a spectrum of symbolic meanings from scarcity to temporality to general poignancy. He says not much, but that water is essential to life, thereby in no way comforting us with his own interpretation.
Tsai has stripped away conventional support structures for a film: like background music, the subtle art of exposition, and even dialogues. His dystopia is tastelessness, blandness, barrenness, and infertility. Instead we find a strange operatic absurdism in his humor, his dramatics, and his narratives. Author and film scholar Rehm, in his book, talks about the difficulty of categorisation of Tsai’s films within modern film history and philosophy. He argues, “if the goal is to show instead of tell, ‘to lay waste to the previous precision of description, of time, of inner life’ in order to ‘obtain a new objectivity’, then it's true ambition is focused ‘above all on a new imprecision powerful enough to destroy the traditional precision’. Rehm uses this notion of imprecision to discuss the inability to categorize or recognize Tsai's works within modernist film history and philosophy. For example, in terms of methods and style, Tsai's anti-narrative technique allows him to avoid imitating Godard and Straub, and for the characters to ‘become puppets graced with inner life’”.
However, looking at the nuance in his musicals, The Hole, and Wayward Cloud, we can notice Tsai utilizing music as a tool to extend his characters’ aspirations for ‘innocence’ and ‘comfort in pain’.
His early films can be seen more as a ‘revolt against the banalities of life’, as Camus suggests in ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’. However, in his later films, we, he, and the characters are old. The fire has died, and revolt against an immortal loneliness has become futile.

Tsai’s films are not just to be studied, they are to be experienced. By fixing the camera, he has unified the on-frame and off-frame drama; by dilating time, his characters are more visible; and by resorting to diegetic sound, experiences become fellowships.
There is not much that is conversed, but a lot is communicated. There is not much shown, but a lot is perceived. There is not much expressed, but a lot is tolerated.