Taiwan Today

In his new book, Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness, Song Hwee Lim (林松輝) offers a fresh assessment of the work of Taiwan-based film director Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮). Lim uses Tsai’s distinctive contributions to cinema as a lens to understand the potency of an ideology of “slowness.” As Lim shows, Tsai’s signature style contrasts with that of most contemporary film directors, particularly given the relative silence and slowness of his films, and offers a strong rejoinder to the culture of consumption and speed prevalent in contemporary society.

Born in Malaysia in 1957, Tsai studied film and drama at Chinese Culture University in Taipei, graduating in 1982. He has remained active since his first movie, Rebels of the Neon God, appeared in 1992. His other feature length films include Vive l’amour (1994), The River (1997), The Hole (1998), What Time Is It There? (2001), Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), The Wayward Cloud (2005), I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006), Visage (2009) and Stray Dogs (2013). He also directed the short films The Skywalk is Gone (2002) and Journey to the West (2014). Lim treats Tsai’s movies as a single body of work, noting his use of the same core actors and actresses—most notably actor Lee Kang-sheng (李康生), who has appeared in all of the director’s movies—as well as the recurring themes, locations and incremental developments within his films.

Lim lists Tsai alongside other Second New Wave directors Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢), Ang Lee (李安) and Edward Yang (楊德昌, 1947–2007) as having garnered most of Taiwan’s international film recognition over the past few decades. Named one of the world’s top 20 directors by the Guardian in 2003, Tsai has won a long list of international awards including a Golden Lion (Best Picture) for Vive l’amour at the Venice Film Festival (1994), Silver Bear Special Jury Prize for The River at the Berlin International Film Festival (1997), International Federation of Film Critics Award for The Hole at the Cannes Film Festival (1998), and Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Achievement for The Wayward Cloud at the Berlin International Film Festival (2005).

Lim, an associate professor at the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, admits to “a half-a-life-long obsession” with the director and to being known by colleagues as “the Tsai Ming-liang guy.” Lim’s Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness grew out of a Master of Arts course with the same name that Lim began offering at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom in 2006. His new work provides fresh insight into the films of this internationally renowned director, while making a potent case for the qualities of minimalist cinema.

In his introduction, “Going Slow,” Lim introduces the history and theory behind the Slow Movement. Started in 1986 in protest over the planned opening of a McDonald’s fast food restaurant in the renowned Piazza di Spagna square at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome, Italy, the Slow Movement began as the Slow Food Movement, which gave birth to a range of ideas, activities and organizations that celebrate the concept of slow living. Slow Movement theory places emphasis on local and artisanal products and has become manifest in the environmental and anti-globalization movements. According to this assessment of modern life, speed is so ubiquitous and dominant that its influence must be revealed and countered. Rather than just adding to the critique of the cult of speed, Lim proposes finding places where the “ideology of slowness” has survived and flourished—the films of Tsai Ming-liang being a coherent body of work from which to draw examples. By Lim’s account, Tsai has created “a unique vision that has become paradigmatic of a cinema of slowness.”

The French concept of auteur is central to Lim’s analysis of Tsai’s films. Developed in the postwar era by noted director and film critic François Truffaut (1932–1984), auteur theory claims that the director is the author and master of his films, and that an auteur’s work is a personalized creation meant to be recognized as art. In fact, Tsai includes his handwritten signature at the end of his movies as an indicator of his auteur status and of the highly idiosyncratic nature of his work. By Lim’s estimation, the quartet of directors listed above—Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ang Lee, Tsai Ming-liang and Edward Yang—have reached undisputed auteur status.

Key to Lim’s understanding of Tsai’s movies, and slow cinema generally, is the measurement of average shot length (ASL), an index for which Hollywood action flicks and Tsai’s films represent opposite ends of the spectrum. At one extreme is a car chase sequence in The Bourne Supremacy (2004) that contains approximately 250 shots in five minutes, making for an ASL of barely one second. In contrast, Tsai’s Visage has an ASL of 90.11 seconds. Lim uses slowness in Tsai’s oeuvre of film—expressed in extremely long ASLs, but also a lack of action, minimal plot and sparse dialogue—as a measure of the vitality of slowness in contemporary cinema.

While Tsai is well-known in Taiwan, his films have achieved limited domestic commercial success, often finding larger audiences overseas. Though critical of the impact of a globalized culture of production and consumption, the director’s movies have benefited from international inspiration and sponsorship. Given his penchant for finding foreign financing and the international appeal of his movies, Lim writes that Tsai’s films “now travel globally and seemingly have no particular home.” This is especially true given Tsai’s European network of associates.

The Art of an Auteur

Lim notes the international sources of the funding for Tsai’s movies. His first three feature films, Rebels of the Neon God, Vive l’amour and The River, were all supported by Taiwan’s Central Pictures Corporation as part of a program to promote up-and-coming film directors in the wake of the decline of the nation’s domestic filmmaking industry. His subsequent works, however, with the exception of Goodbye Dragon Inn, have all received European funding.

Lim’s section on “The French Connection” in Tsai’s work tells of the inspiration that European postwar modernist cinema has had on Tsai’s films since his days as a university student. As Lim explains, the work of French New Wave director Truffaut has been a “lifelong obsession” of Tsai’s, with the filmmaker even including illusions to Truffant’s movies, particularly Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959), within his own. In France, where Tsai’s role as an auteur and obsession with Truffaut make his films marketable, he has found both a larger audience for his films than in Taiwan and also funding for most of his recent projects. Tsai’s Visage, commissioned by the Musée du Louvre, tells of a Taiwanese director making a movie in the Paris museum.

While Tsai’s European connections are quite obvious, Lim shows that Tsai’s films, like so many of Taiwan’s cultural products, reflect a combination of the cosmopolitan and the local. Together with strong European influences, Lim explains that “the complex relationship among authorship, cinephilia, and nostalgia in Tsai’s films can also be situated in the context of Taiwan cinema and its state of production and consumption over the last few decades.”

Lim goes on to say that Tsai’s films reflect a bygone era in Taiwanese movie production and consumption, when Taiwan had “a thriving film industry and a transnational film market.” Since the 1970s, hundreds of single-screen cinemas have been replaced by multiplexes while the number of Taiwan-produced movies has shrunk from 151 in 1966 to the single digits per year today. Tsai’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn is set in the Fu Ho Theater in Yonghe, then-Taipei County, a single-screen theater which was set for demolition. In Tsai’s film, the last movie screened is legendary Hong Kong director King Hu’s (胡金銓, 1931–1997) Dragon Gate Inn (1967), a Taiwanese wuxia (martial arts) classic. In Goodbye, Dragon Inn, two of the actors from Hu’s film, Miao Tien (苗天, 1925–2005) and Shih Chun (石雋), sit in the audience, watching their former selves on screen. After the movie, the two express their disappointment about how no one goes to the movies anymore and lament that the old films have been forgotten.

In chapter 4, titled “Silence,” Lim analyzes the sounds of Tsai’s films within the context of a cinema of slowness. While the auteur’s films typically have sparse dialogue and no use of voice-overs, Lim shows that less is more, and that Tsai’s minimalist approach to sound is effective. The relative absence of dialogue, and therefore of the need for translation subtitles, adds to the appeal of his movies, giving them a universal language. Uncomfortable sounds, including long bouts of crying and the sounds of intercourse, speak volumes. In Goodbye, Dragon Inn, the sounds of old Taiwanese cinemas are skillfully highlighted by the cracking and crunching sounds of moviegoers eating watermelon seeds and chicken feet—foods as well as sounds that are nonexistent in Taiwan’s contemporary multiplexes. In Vive l’amour there are aural effects that allude to scenes in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Lim also explains that Tsai’s inclusion of Mandarin pop songs from the 1950s and 1960s is an adept attempt at parody and political critique, and not playful nostalgia, as some critics have suggested.

In Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness, Lim makes a strong case for understanding Tsai’s movies as a potent source of the ideology of slowness, an artistic means to demonstrate the complexity and alienation of contemporary life. While Tsai’s movies lack action, readers might agree with Lim that the cinema of slowness provides a vehicle for social criticism that goes well beyond the medium. Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness also serves as a reminder of European inspirations on Taiwanese intellectual life, apart from the more recognizable East Asian and American influences.

While Lim’s work, with its thorough discussion of academic theories of cinema, will attract many film scholars and dedicated cinephiles, Lim’s prose is accessible to general readers. The filmography of Tsai’s movies, added as an appendix, is helpful for understanding the remarkable continuities within Tsai’s oeuvre of films.

Controversy and Convenience

One hopes that Lim’s book might help to renew interest in Tsai’s movies in Taiwan. Although he is renowned abroad, his features have struggled to attract the attention of Taiwanese audiences. In 2000, together with his constant collaborator, the venerable actor Lee Kang-sheng, and two producers, Tsai created the movie production company Homegreen Films in Taiwan in order to control the production and distribution of his films. Still, domestic success has been limited.

Lim notes controversies concerning Tsai’s relationship with Taiwan’s motion picture industry—questions about his Malaysian citizenship and government funding for his early films; his withdrawal from the Golden Horse Awards (Taiwan’s equivalent to Hollywood’s Oscars) in 2006; and his inclusion of themes such as homosexuality and incest within his films.

Lost within popular understanding of Tsai’s films is the very component that Lim has isolated, a trait that has undeniable relevance to Taiwan—the theme of slowness. In so many aspects, Taiwan provides extreme examples of the cult of speed, as is apparent with the nation’s incredible density of convenience stores and carry-out and fast food establishments. The widespread use of cellular phones, instant messaging, social networking and rapid transit is a prominent feature of Taiwanese society. Perhaps the paramount compliment within daily life in Taiwan is when a store or service is said to be convenient.

Tsai and other long ASL directors provide a challenge to modern societies, especially that of Taiwan given this predilection for expediency and speed. In his epilogue to Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness, Lim analyzes the opening shot from Tsai’s short film The Skywalk is Gone, which is set near Taipei Main Station. The minute-and-a-half-long scene shows an LED screen with bright advertising high up on the side of the Shin Kong Mitsukoshi department store, and the film’s primary actress, Chen Shiang-chyi (陳湘琪), looking up at the screen with a perplexed gaze. Lim adroitly describes how Tsai is able to capture the banalities of modern cities, the “proliferation of images with no auteurs, a proliferation that paradoxically undermines rather than enhances visual literacy.” On the surface, it seems that not much is happening in this scene, as is common with most of the scenes in Tsai’s movies. In fact, Tsai illustrates the very opposite, the emptiness of what is ordinarily considered to be exciting.

Tsai has recently talked about retiring from making feature films, an event that would be a loss to the silver screen. As Tsai’s movies inform the viewer, and Lim’s book reminds the reader, speed does not necessarily bring quality. Contemporary society has evoked complexities within personal relations that modern efficiencies are incapable of resolving. It is the true auteurs like Tsai who are often best at helping people recognize and understand these quandaries of everyday existence.

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Joseph Eaton is an associate professor of history at National Chengchi University in Taipei.

Copyright © 2014 By Joseph Eaton