In 2000 after I made my fifth film, my kind-hearted French production partner Bruno sold me back the international copyright for one Euro. However, as my films have zero financial potential in this economy, the question for me becomes, how can I prove the value of my films? Why do I continue to make films? Who am I making them for? If box-office numbers had any correlation to the intrinsic value of one’s film, every last filmmaker in the world would give great credence to those numbers.
#Tsai ming liang movie
Tsai Ming-liang: From my point of view, cinema’s departure from the movie theater is part of a natural progression of things, just like contemporary art is escaping the gallery. What led to your feeling this way? Has anything happened to change your view? Reverse Shot: Prior to the release of Stray Dogs, you suggested it might be your last film for traditional cinematic distribution, as galleries and museums had become more amenable to the sort of work you were doing. His answers are as follows, translated from Mandarin. On the occasion of a retrospective of his films at Museum of the Moving Image, I sent Tsai several questions via email.
With Lee Kang-sheng, his muse and partner, he has now completed seven films in the Walker cycle, which feature Lee, in the garb of a Buddhist monk, inching his way through various environments, including busy cityscapes and the housing block in Kuching, Malaysia, where Tsai was raised prior to departing for Taiwan. His latest theatrically released feature, Stray Dogs (2013), is as extraordinary as any he has made, and though it was rumored to be his last, his pace of work has not slackened. Tsai still inspires a belief in the possibility of cinematic greatness, even as he’s been actively engaged in interrogating the changing identity of cinema. When I walked alone and lonely, as I often did in those days, I felt that he was with me. Tsai felt like a confidant-and was uniquely attuned to the way that movies (or the songs of Grace Chang) could serve that function. I loved all three, though Wong and Denis were intimidating-Wong had his fits of romantic abandon which life couldn’t possibly live up to (and he knew it), Denis gave me a feeling like I got from listening to the first Björk albums, a sense of this magisterial, wonderful, frightening femininity that I’d heretofore only suspected the existence of.
Like Wong Kar-wai and Claire Denis, Tsai was a contemporary, then at the height of his powers, one of those figures who made you honestly believe that the great age for movies was right then and now. I first saw them when I was eighteen or nineteen, and really discovering the “art film”: Éric Rohmer and Robert Bresson and Michelangelo Antonioni and Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Mon oncle d'Am érique, movies that were of inestimable value in providing me ways of thinking about the world, and my place in it. These films represented touchstones: Dragon Inn the quintessence of youthful moviegoing’s sheer exaltation, The 400 Blows an introduction to the art film, so-called, with its opportunities for direct emotional autobiography, formal audacity, and unresolved melancholy.Īs those films belong to Tsai’s personal experience of life and movies, his films belong to my own. The cinema of Tsai Ming-liang, at the turn of the millennium, was haunted by the director’s formative moviegoing experiences, like memories of lost love: Lee Kang-sheng watching a dupe of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows in What Time Is It There? (2001), or the very present absence of King Hu’s Dragon Inn (1967) in Tsai’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003).