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Tsai
Ming-liang by Darren Hughes Darren Hughes is a doctoral candidate in American literature at the University of Tennessee and author of the website, Long Pauses. |
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| The River (1997), Tsai Ming-liang's third feature-length film,
opens with a static shot of a vacant, two-way escalator. After twenty seconds
or so of silence—the diegetic drone of the escalators is the only sound
we hear—a young woman begins her descent down the left side as a young
man climbs to the right. They share an unexpected glimpse of recognition
in passing, then turn toward each other, their bodies still being pushed
in opposite directions. It's a paradigmatic instance of Tsai's storytelling:
a nearly wordless exchange between two souls who are, paradoxically, isolated
among Taipei's six million inhabitants and drawn together/pulled apart by
its contemporary, technological landscape. That the woman, upon reaching
the lower level, immediately turns and ascends back to where her old friend
awaits, suggests the possibility of grace—even if fleeting—that
bleeds through so much of Tsai's otherwise bleak and alienating vision.
In his world of water-soaked apartments, anonymous sexual encounters, mysterious
and catastrophic disease, and desperate loneliness, Tsai clutches tightly
to a strange and joyful faith in the potential for genuine human communion,
a communion that is rare indeed but occasionally worthy of the effort. Born and raised in Kuching, Malaysia, Tsai Ming-liang was introduced to movies by his grandparents, who often took him to screenings of popular films from China, Taiwan, India, Hong Kong, America, and the Philippines at any of the dozen or so cinemas that populated their small, quiet town. The son of a farmer who also operated a stall in the city center, Tsai speaks fondly of his relatively carefree childhood. “The main benefit I got from having lived there, in Kuching, for that period” he has said, “was the very slow pace of life, giving me time to develop my interests and enjoy myself.” (1) The analogies here to Tsai's distinctive film style and narrative concerns are too rich to ignore. Even by the standards of his New Taiwanese Cinema contemporaries, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, Tsai's films are, as some would say, deliberately paced. Cutting together long takes, often of static medium and long shots, he unabashedly requires each viewer to slow down and patiently experience another's life, thereby avoiding the dictatorial imposition of classical continuity editing that would lead inevitably, in the words of Andrei Tarkovsky, to “a facile interpretation of life's complexities.” (2) Instead, Tsai's camera lingers near his subjects in an almost documentary fashion, observing their behavior with relative objectivity, just as the director himself came of age freely observing and admiring the slow movements of Malaysian life.
Tsai graduated from the university in 1982, an interesting moment in Taiwan's recent history. Three years after America first enacted the Taiwan Relations Act—which formally recognized the People's Republic of China and severed official diplomatic ties with Taiwan—but five years before the decades of marshal law were finally brought to an end, Taiwan was in a state of flux, moving slowly but progressively toward democratization (which it would finally achieve fully in 1996 with the election of President Lee Teng-hui). For Taiwan's emerging generation of artists and filmmakers, that social and political flux resulted in greater access to alternate sources of financing and a renaissance of independent filmmaking. Tsai immediately began work in the theater, where he staged four original plays, including A Wardrobe in the Room (1983), a one-person show in which Tsai himself starred. The drama concerns a young man who voluntarily isolates himself from the city that surrounds him, a motif that would later come to dominate Tsai's films. He also busied himself by writing screenplays for film and television, work that led to his first significant experiences behind the camera. Between 1989 and 1991, Tsai wrote ten teleplays, eight of which he also directed, either in whole or in part (this according to the appendix of Tsai Ming-liang, published by Editions Dis Voir in 1999, the only existing book-length study of the director). Tsai now views that period as a fundamental apprenticeship during which he found his voice as a director. There, for instance, he first discovered the remarkable tensions created by mixing professional actors with amateurs, and there he also first explored the use of documentary technique in narrative films. Unfortunately, Western audiences have had precious few opportunities to see Tsai's early work. Only two of the television films were included in a recent touring retrospective (2002). Chris Fujiwara has described the first, All the Corners of the World (1989), as “a study of a family of movie-ticket scalpers [that] provides early drafts of images and situations that will recur in Tsai's films, including a roller-rink scene, motorbike vandalism, an elevator ride in a love hotel, and a mannequin floating in water.” (5) The other, Boys (1991), is most notable for introducing the talents of Lee Kang-sheng (aka Hsiao-kang), who has gone on to star in each of Tsai's features.
Rebels also exemplifies Tsai's distinctive approach to narrative, which deliberately exploits and subverts traditional notions of dramatic tension. In one sequence, for instance, Lee trails Chen and his partner-in-crime into an arcade, where the two young thieves force open video games to steal their motherboards. When the boys complete their job and escape from the arcade, Lee is left alone, locked in for the night, waiting to be discovered. Tsai employs standard continuity editing here—cross-cutting from a shot of Lee asleep on the arcade floor to another of a security guard arriving for duty—but he then elides the expected confrontation and deflates the scene's tension by cutting to a shot of Lee walking safely down a Taipei street. Later, we see Lee alone in his bedroom, posed with a handgun in his outstretched arms. But, again, the expected violence never materializes, or at least not as Tsai had led us to imagine it. Instead, like Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, his films turn viewers into self-conscious observers of strange, complex behavior—less stereotypically cinematic, more unpredictably human.
The River is Tsai's bleakest film and also his most explicitly transgressive. After the escalator scene described above, Hsiao-kang accompanies the young woman to the set of a movie on which she is working, where he volunteers to float lifelessly in the Tanshui river, imitating a corpse. The remainder of the film concerns his and his family's attempts to cure him of a mysterious neck pain that becomes progressively debilitating in the weeks that follow his swim. As in The Hole (1997), in which Taipei is plagued by a millennial health epidemic, here Tsai explores the emotional and psychological resonances of an inexplicable pain that carries both symbolic and corporal weight. Lee's neck condition acts, first, as a metonymic manifestation of other ails, chief among them the collapse of the family, which in many of Tsai's films stands in as a microcosm of contemporary society. The River dissects the traditional nuclear family with brutal frankness, culminating in a complex and difficult, but undeniably brilliant scene that shocks viewers into confronting the consequences of dishonest living, failed communication, and psychic alienation. But Tsai refuses to slip completely into allegory here, denying us the safety of symbolic distance. Lee's pain, instead, is always present, always excruciatingly real. In that sense, Tsai's camera is like the Naturalist's pen—like Flaubert's and Zola's—observing (almost clinically) bodies, faces, and superficial behaviors in an attempt to explain something of the human experience. In Vive l'amour Tsai first began “researching” his characters in isolation, a conceit that he develops further in The River before taking it to extreme lengths in The Hole. “That's why I like filming bodies in these solitary situations so much,” he has said, “because I think that a person's body only really belongs to them when they are alone.” (8) Thus, Tsai's films are populated with shots of the mundane rituals of life—isolated characters eating, pissing, watching television, masturbating, smoking, working, mopping up spills, crying. At one point in The River, Lee sits alone on a hallway bench, where he is finally overcome by the burdens of pain. As in the final shot of Vive l'amour, we are left to watch helplessly as he convulses and, in exasperation, rocks his head into the wall behind him. Here and elsewhere, Lee is the ideal subject for Tsai's experiments. His slow movements and measured expressions make him something of a Tarkovskyan figure, one who is “outwardly static, but inwardly charged with energy by an overriding passion.” (9)
The Hole is also a significant departure for Tsai in that the film's simple plot—two neighbors pine away in isolation, perpetually separated by an artificial barrier—necessarily eliminates any possibility of the two leads having sex. Sex is an appropriately complicated issue in all of Tsai's other films, which prominently feature impersonal and unfulfilling sexual encounters. Dennis Lim suggests that, in comparison with the films of his more explicitly political Taiwanese contemporaries, Tsai's are more concerned with “personal fumblings—often stemming from romantic longing and sexual confusion.” That confusion becomes manifest in frequent one night stands, visits to gay saunas, extramarital affairs, the mimicking of pornography (which plays like a training video in the background of several scenes), and, at its most extreme, incest. In Tsai's fourth film, however, “the hole” itself, standing as it does between Yang and Lee, becomes that obscure object of desire (and surely it doesn't require a Freudian analyst to remark on the metaphoric implications of that hole). The film's penultimate sequence might be the most extraordinary of Tsai's career. In a static long shot, we see Yang crumpled on the floor of her apartment, exhausted and water-logged. From just beyond the top edge of the frame, Lee's arm extends down toward her. She notices and reaches for it; they make contact, and he pulls her up, presumably into his life. Such a simple, fairy tale-like image, but, especially given the context of his otherwise dystopian vision, that moment of communion breathes unexpected optimism and life into Tsai's oeuvre.
In one of the film's most touching scenes, the mother dresses formally for a private dinner, accompanied only by her husband's empty chair at the table. Like Hitchcock's "Miss Lonelyhearts", she raises a toast to her imagined companion before breaking into tears. It's another trademark Tsai moment: his camera again remains static throughout the long take, framing his subject in a medium long shot; the actress works alone in silence, her movements measured and deliberate. The tendency of most critics has been to reduce these signature scenes to simple meditations on Modernist dismay, but doing so too easily dismisses the honor and wonder of mourning. Hsiao-kang's mother is not a desperate individual adrift in an irrational, alienating world (or some such cliché); instead, she is like so many of us, one who has obviously known love and companionship and now, suddenly, must make sense of loss. Tsai's style, which is often rightfully compared to the silent cinema, frees us to experience the full brunt of attendant emotions: agony, nostalgia, despair, desire, hope. Our efforts are rewarded in full in the closing moments of the film—the most transcendent of Tsai's career, thanks in part to Benoit Delhomme's stunning photography and Miao Tien's remarkable face—when that same strange beauty returns and What Time Is It There? transforms unexpectedly into a romantic ghost story and an ode to eternal love. If Tsai's most recent work is any indication, it is safe to assume that he will continue to poke and prod into the bodies and souls of his loyal collaborators for some time. Along with his choreographic adaptation of a play by Brecht, The Good Woman of Sezuan (1998), and a short film about religious ritual, A Conversation with God (2001), Tsai has also written and directed a 25-minute film, The Skywalk Is Gone (2002), that picks up where What Time Is It There? left off. The short film's title refers to the actual location, now demolished, where Hsiao-kang and Shiang-chyi first meet. Noting that the short concludes with a long shot of bright blue skies, Chuck Stephens writes that the skywalk is “gone but not forgotten, even if, in its absence, heaven seems a little bit easier to see.” (11) Those blue skies—along with the rumors that Tsai will continue this story in his next feature—suggest that grace, once only a whisper in Tsai's world, might yet take shape and become as excruciatingly real as the pain it is meant to relieve. © Darren Hughes, March 2003 Endnotes:
Filmography Features
directed by Tsai:
My New Friends
(Wo xin renshi de pengyou) (1995) telefilm 
Bibliography Kate Chiwen Liu, “Family in the Postmodern
'Non-Places' in the Films by Atom Egoyan and Ming-liang Tsai”, Fu
Jen Studies: Literature and Linguistics, 34, 2001
Articles in Senses of Cinema Tsai
Ming-liang: Cinematic Painter by
Jared Rapfogel
Web Resources An
interview with Tsai Ming-liang, Director of The Hole
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