Tsai Ming-Liang Retrospective

Over a mild weekend in the middle of August, the Austin Film Society hosted a four-day retrospective on the globally renowned art cinema director Tsai Ming-liang. His muse and acting collaborator Lee Kang-sheng, having starred in every film Tsai has produced, accompanied him to the retrospective’s events and Q&As. Their films together are characterized by notably long takes and very little use of cinematic narrative devices like plot-driven action and dialogue, instead presenting quiet, emotionally-charged images that Tsai describes as “more like dreams than movies.”

Tsai avoids the structures of Western cinema, finding the idea of enhanced drama to be distracting to his mission as a filmmaker. His intimate collaboration with Lee has led to their abandonment of traditional film production altogether and an endless and consistent output of work. From feature films to documentaries to art films like the Walker series, which more closely resemble experimental museum pieces than movies, Tsai and Lee have created an award-winning, critically acclaimed cinematic world with zero boundaries of genre and theme. When discussing where such a wide variety of ideas come from, Tsai always returns to one answer: looking at Lee Kang-sheng.

During my interview with him, Tsai described watching Lee as a “project” in-and-of itself. “We live close together, so it seems like everyday I am watching [him], so I get a lot of inspiration from [him],” he said. Tsai and Lee, who is 11 years his junior, collaborated on their first project together in 1991, a television film called Boys. Since then, Lee, in both body and perspective, has been the foundation for the cinematic ideas and images that form Tsai’s filmography. Tsai centers most of his work on the characters played by Lee, whether they are the lead or the object of desire for another character, and he gives Lee space and plenty of time—without the conventional film coverage of multiple angles—to perform in front of the camera, eventually forming a director-actor relationship where Tsai no longer calls “cut” to end a take. “It’s mostly an accumulation of experiences,” Lee said, “we are exploring a lot of topics of freedom and liberty.”

Tsai’s films explore the body and life of Lee’s characters from a variety of different perspectives, as varied as the genres of work Tsai operates in. In their earlier narrative features like Vive L’Amour and What Time Is It There?, stories of loneliness and longing emerge from loose narratives surrounding a man named Hsiao Kang, always played by Lee Kang-sheng, as he falls in unrequited love, loses family members and jobs, and hides in plain sight from a world changing around him. While recognizably classic in their structure, audiences experience longer and longer shot lengths in these stories and Lee, along with other Tsai Ming-liang mainstays like Chen Shiang-chyi, carry many major emotional moments in the film with just their movement and almost no dialogue. In the later films of the retrospective, as Tsai abandons story-driven cinema for films driven purely by emotion and images, the shots get longer and Lee’s face and body, now noticeably older, moves slower and reacts more subtly. Abiding Nowhere, from the Walker series, shows Lee moving across the screen at an excruciatingly slow pace—an act and an image Tsai regarded as “so beautiful” that he has filmed 11 entries in the series with no plans to stop. These films bring audiences in through their extremes, inviting viewers to explore the scene and find all that is fascinating in the image.

The retrospective closed out with Tsai’s latest feature, 2020’s Days, a work that distills Tsai and Lee’s mission to its barest components. Few shots last shorter than 3 minutes and one of the film’s most intense moments lasts twenty minutes in a single take. The film’s entire narrative can be flippantly summarised as “Hsiao Kang has neck pain, so he receives a massage and makes a connection with the massage therapist,” but the runtime spans over two hours. How does the film spend this time? Tsai points the longing gaze of his camera at Lee Kang-sheng and Anong Houngheuangsy, who plays the therapist, in minimalist, slice-of-life vignettes, emphasizing the loneliness of contemporary life as these two characters experience a special evening together and spend the rest of the movie reflecting silently about it. The lack of any narrative angle or visual hook in Days leads to an abandonment of wishing for these structures and instead encourages the audiences to experience the images as they are, which I believe has been the purpose of Tsai and Lee’s work since the beginning.

With a body of work so resistant to traditional narrative devices, there are many ways for audiences to interpret the work of Tsai Ming-liang, but how exactly do viewers go about understanding such image-heavy work? Without a score, plot-driven dialogue or dramatic action, scene-to-scene connections feel like dream-like interpolations where the segue comes from a subconscious place. The audience’s experience of watching the work of Tsai is thus similar to the experience he describes in creating his work: “looking at Lee Kang-sheng and developing the film idea.” 

Tsai and Lee’s working relationship comes from a place of trust, where, as Lee puts it, they “explore the possibilities… of film language and grammar” with the least amount of interference on-set and in post-production. The audience witnesses the results of this intimate approach without any artifice: no cuts to better takes, no soundtrack or score to manipulate emotion or tone, and no artificial explanation of how Lee is feeling on screen. Tsai breaks down the toolkit of cinema to its most basic pieces, a place the medium was at when Charlie Chaplin, one of their favorite filmmakers whose film Limelight is referenced in Days, made his most influential work: one stationary camera and the human body in action.

And there’s something even deeper that happens when watching these films. When speaking with Tsai, I asked him about his belief in ghosts and spiritual entities, of which there are plenty in his work, especially Goodbye Dragon Inn. After explaining that he believes in actual ghosts and not just in the idea of spirits, he said that “there is always something there where you cannot explain what is happening.” I believe this idea, along with his love of looking at and filming Lee, is the foundation for understanding his work. Audiences see a Lee on-screen who, through his usual role as a societal outcast, appears to be alone, but over the course of each long take, the audience bears witness to a presence, things that are not being communicated verbally or physically. We join Tsai Ming-liang’s gaze from behind the camera as we all engage in a spiritual relationship with cinema and the stories it can tell. By letting go of the need for explanations and dramatic manipulation, we open ourselves to what we can learn about life by just watching Lee Kang-sheng.

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