Taiwanese cinema takes shape with Tsai Ming-liang – Francesco Boille

The Taiwanese Tsai Ming-liang is a poet of the most prosaic daily and a true experimenter without any poses. Among the most significant contemporary filmmakers, surprised since his second film, Long Live Love, Golden Lion in Venice in 1994 (ex aequo with the much more forgettable Before the rain by Milko Manchewski). And it also surprises with Days. His film, which arrives in Italy just as Chinese leader Xi Jinping is clearly claiming Taiwan’s annexation to China, was presented in competition in Berlin in 2020 just before the pandemic caused a long lockdown. But it also represents a further turning point in the path of this author with infinite facets, often subtle, and an important moment for cinema, which allows us to offer an articulated reflection and a minimum profound on the state of the medium of expression.

For him the body is a fascinating instrument of investigation, because it is intended as a seismograph of life, of aging. And the bodies are measured, it is the right term, by his shots as seismographs in turn of society, of its alienation. Frames with an impressive work on depth of field, where the wide angle, which distorts by expanding and dilating reality, and the sequence shot, where the camera follows the object shot without cuts, that is the procedure par excellence of reproduction of the reality.

With Days this is more true than ever. Conceptual and sensual film of juxtaposed climaxes, it manages to construct a story in its own linear way with alternating montage sequences about a mature man from Taipei with severe neck problems and looking for treatment, and a young Laotian who works illegally in Bangkok preparing small dishes from his country of origin. The two will then meet in person.

The tone chosen by the director for this tale of total solitude set in an Asian megalopolis conceived, like the others, as a distortion of more normal cities is sweet, quiet: expanded geometries to push the economic flows that however change human beings into molecules, like micro-lights of gigantic neon streams, destined never to meet, never to dwell on each other.

This is precisely the fixed theme of the Taiwanese filmmaker: photographing, with a lot of painful tenderness, human solitudes that do not meet or at most touch each other. They are films of silence, of the silence of the word, but at the same time with a thousand sounds, fascinating or otherwise, and with a thousand lights, those of metropolis transfigured into mysterious places with a metaphysical flavor. At the same time there is a lot of quiet. An all-oriental stillness that acts as a counterpoint to the evident inner emptiness and existential anguish, a stillness that envelops the viewer with its sweet mantle. The succession of sequences that are a sort of ambient climax, almost one for each day, with hypnotic sounds and lights, transmits lightness, delicacy, in evident contrast with the underlying themes.

But it is also an equally obvious form of oblivion, a psychedelic opium, aimed at soothing (our) soul wounds. Because they are us and vice versa. The otherness, so typical of Tsai ming-liang’s cinema, in Days it is more present than ever. And for the other, understood as our neighbor in whom we reflect, in whom we see ourselves in the mirror, the same is true.

The mature man is invariably his fetish actor Lee Kang-sheng, who has accompanied him since his debut film Rebels of the Neon God (1992), in which he follows his wanderings towards a cure for his mysterious illness (the film was born in fact from the real physical and inner suffering of the actor). The younger one is the Laotian Anong Houngheuangsy, whom the director launches as an actor and who plays here his old profession in the real world. If the cruelty of physical suffering in life is the theme, then its reverse is that spiritual empathy must go through the bodies. It is the only way to experience a form of knowledge, not just to get to know each other and get out of the depersonalizing and standardizing anonymity.

Fundamental in the staging is the dialogue with contemporary art, more precisely with installations and video-art, which becomes more evident than ever. If Far Eastern auteur cinema is largely imbued with the lesson of Michelangelo Antonioni, it is also true that he reworked it in an original and very powerful way, almost as if he were its legitimate owner, even if in truth the author from The adventure has revolutionized the entire cinema of modernity. But introducing a look that comes from the archaic.

Hou hsiao-hsien, Taiwanese like the Malaysian-born Tsai Ming-liang, well ahead of the latter in years and leader of the new wave of Taiwanese cinema of the eighties, is one of the greatest authors of contemporary cinema, even if in Italy almost unknown. To the French newspaper Libération, Hou hsiao-hsien confessed the great impression he had from the vision of Blow-Up (1966) by Antonioni, for the sequence of the ping pong game with the ball that is not seen, that is not there, but is there. The invisible, the abstraction. Instead of exhibiting what is evident, daring to exhibit what is not evident: an idea so Zen that it could not leave Far Eastern filmmakers indifferent. And it is the opposite of the underlying ideology of so much contemporary auteur pseudocinema, which we could define as a cinema of the obvious, the obvious, the metaphor of the telephone call, including much of today’s Hollywood, if compared in the first place to cinema. Hollywood yesterday.

And Antonioni’s cinema itself began the dialogue with the innovations and experiments practiced in those years in the avant-garde visual arts, reworking them with unique wisdom as a tool to talk about the alienation of contemporary man, his loss of identity, the now famous, and perhaps somewhat abused, Antonionian problematic of incommunicability, but starting from the intimate to go towards the social, the collective, the universal.

Abused, but the problem still exists more than ever, because it has never been resolved and indeed often quintupled in Asia, where liberal (post) modernity has violently reached often archaic social fabrics. Hou hsiao-hsien, the Chinese Jia Zhang-ke, the Thai Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2010 with Uncle Boonmee who remembers past lives, also the Hongkongese Wong Kar-wai in the first part of his filmography, are all filmmakers sons of Antonioni and all have a strong dialogue with the visual arts and installations, video and otherwise. Some are currently practicing them outside the more strictly cinematic work, such as Apichatpong. And like Tsai Ming-liang.

Thrills of the soul
If perhaps others hybridize the forms more (Apichatpong, Jia), among these, Tsai Ming-liang is however the director who has followed the most radical path: less and less narrative, more and more interested in recording the slightest quivers of the soul by spreading the camera on bodies, of an extreme sensuality as much as urban environments. If we really know how to look, in physicality there is the expression of interiority, there is the flow of life and the signs of time, and this is what the filmmaker proposes us to do with his film-flow, which basically it is also relaxing.

As a child, Tsai Ming-liang in addition to the Hollywood one was very fond of the popular cinema of the past coming from Hong Kong, such as the epic stories of flying swordsmen, thewuxiapian, and in particular those of King Hu, because they are full of art and philosophy, even if they had the clear intention of amusing the general public. Now the cinema is for him a private Trojan horse inside the art soldiers. And in the halls the community met, they also met spiritually. Today people are locked up in horrible shopping centers, homologating, dehumanizing and aseptic. For this he honored that cinema in the sublime Goodbye Dragon Inn, set in a room about to close, and now used for sexual encounters between men, but where one of the great hits of King Hu was projected, Dragon Inn precisely.

And for this he expresses his preference to make films for museums, because they fully respect the work and the duration of its visibility. Like, among other things, the Louvre museum which produced his film in 2008 Face (unreleased in Italy but available on DVD). And what if this, amidst the talk of the death of cinema, represented instead the possible meeting point between museum and theater, marking a turning point in the history of cinema, of its use? Why not imagine films produced or co-produced with museums, which come out in a few selected rooms, perhaps in one room only, and then continue or overlap in a museum?

We believe it is a hypothesis on which to reflect concretely. The great beauty of his previous feature film, Stray dogs, centered on the new suburban proletariat, a container of four-sequences of a rare power that makes it almost a Renaissance film, could be its emblem because, contrary to what is said, it finds its full meaning precisely with the vision of the great screen. Confirming in a new way the thinking of André Bazin, the great critic-theorist co-founder of the Cahiers du Cinéma, who saw cinema as the continuer of what the figurative arts had long represented. There is a lot of talk about the death of cinema, but a book just released in France for Gallimard, The story-camera. Cinema is dead, long live cinema, by historian and former director of Cahiers du Cinéma Antoine de Baecque, highly rated by both Cahiers and Positif, lists the reasons for being skeptical of this dire prediction.

Even the relatively more minimal Days it’s a very big screen movie, maybe a giant one. In Rome, for example, it will be shown in a room like the Troisi cinema. A courageous and intelligent choice to better grasp the uniqueness of cinema, its cruelty full of human sorrow, full of love and poetry, towards humanity, towards life.