Taiwanese Auteur Nostalgic for Old Times

In a crowd, few people would recognize the stout and cheerful-looking Tsai Ming Liang as one of Taiwan’s premier directors. Tsai appeared Tuesday night at the Harvard Film Archive, the second time in two years, in his signature casual style and black-rimmed glasses, initiating the screening with a warning: “Be patient with this one.”

For those familiar with Tsai, this is not a surprising statement. From his 1992 debut, Rebels of the Neon God, to later films like the Hole (1998) and What Time Is it There? (2001), Tsai’s lens focuses on the minutiae of everyday urban life, from walking to eating to urinating, with fixed shots that can last excruciatingly for minutes on a single motion.

Tsai’s 2003 film, Goodbye Dragon Inn—which opens at the Brattle Theatre on Friday, Oct. 29—returns to Tsai’s recurring delight in using water and the sound of footsteps, as we are led by a crippled maid through the hollow auditorium and the dilapidated back corridors of a theatre on the last night before its closing. As the rain pours outside, the warriors on the screen ambush and jostle, and a quiet, intricate drama unfolds among the audience.

There is a child with his grandfather, a voluptuous woman, a restless Japanese homosexual and the aged star of the very film being shown, who has returned to watch the glory of his younger days and, in one emotional moment, trembles with tears in his eyes at the closing of the cinema.

“It may be nostalgia for the old theatre, but that’s on a superficial level,” says Tsai of the scene. He suggests that it’s more nostalgia for a different era—a time when grandfathers took their grandchildren to the movies, when people went to the same theatre, when movie theatres would be packed full, as they were in the Taiwan of Tsai’s college years.

Tsai speaks of himself as a lucky member of the late ’70s generation in Taiwan, where he attended the Chinese Cultural University after growing up in Malaysia. Unlike his peers who crammed for the national scholastic exams, and to the dismay of his parents, Tsai took the idiosyncratic path of filmmaking when the art was just budding in Taiwan.

“We were lucky,” the director says seriously in the question-and-answer session following the screening. “There was no war, and there was a stable economy.” It was in the open cultural atmosphere at the time that Tsai was first exposed to the European art-films of the Nouvelle Vague and the New German Cinema, to the great auteurs Robert Bresson, Francois Truffaut and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who would heavily influence his later film-making.

Giuliana Bruno, professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard, calls Tsai an “architect of time…a meticulous and rigorous filmmaker who takes his time.”

As Bruno suggests, Tsai’s hallmark is perhaps his extreme sensitivity to time and space, from the portrayal of the city street to the interiors of the bedroom. The Skywalk Is Gone, a short film shown at the same screening, centers around the disappearance of a skywalk in a busy corner of Taipei and the hiatus in human relationships which it creates. Like in Goodbye, there are many shots of the chic female protagonist walking, only this time it is not the resonant corridors of the abandoned theatre but the clamorous streets and peopled landscape of the city.

In both films, the prodigious attention paid to mundane routines and the eloquence given to description of physical place contrast starkly and ironically with the brisk pace of modern life.

Tsai says that he was inspired to film Goodbye by the theatre itself. “It spoke to me,” Tsai says. “It said, ‘I’m closing, tell my story.’” And the crew did nothing to alter the physical space of the theatre except taking down a wall. There is a minute-long shot of the empty theatre at the end of film, when the few members of the audience had filed out, with only the endless blue rows of seats. In the absence of dialogue, speech and plot, the physical space of the theatre emerges as a desolate presence.

“The place is a character,” Tsai says. “[The audience] is clear of its presence. The actors play supporting roles.”

The brutality of the theater’s empty seats is perhaps understood only by those who had seen it in its heyday, like Tsai, and it is to get toward that spirit that he cites oldies music and films like Dragon Inn throughout his film. The original Dragon Inn was a wuxia pian (martial arts movies) 1966 bestseller in Chinese, which opened the door to a new wuxia genre with its simple melodies and lyrical setting in the old inn in contrast to the spectacular clamor of those which came before.

In Goodbye, Tsai summons back the star, Miao Tian, of the original film who was then in his twenties. Miao reappears as the nostalgic old man in the audience, the aged star, as he is in real life. Ironically, it was the star himself who bears the memory of the days when the house was full, in yet an empty theatre.

“The theatre is a special place which allowed so many things to happen,” Tsai says. “I don’t want it to go, but it has to go.”

The great artists are ultimately philosophers, and in Goodbye, Tsai speaks not only of the cinema but also about the nature of life itself—about those watching and those being watched, about the absence of big dramas and the ubiquity of smaller, intricate gestures.

At the same time Tsai acknowledges art’s inherent limits. When asked about where his films are going, he prefers not to “think too far.” Besides, “whether the cinema lives or not, people live their lives just fine,” he says.

—Staff writer Zhenzhen Lu can be reached at zlu@fas.harvard.edu.