This fall,
Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang returned to the United States for the first
time since 2009, embarking on a miniature tour of Chicago, Boston, New York,
and Washington, DC. He came on the occasion of MoMA’s recent gargantuan
retrospective of his work, Tsai Ming-Liang: In Dialogue with Time, Memory, and
Self. Titles in the series ranged from his early work to his acclaimed
international breakthrough Goodbye, Dragon Inn to his most recent feature, Days
(one of our top 10 films of last year).
Tsai is one
of the world’s most prominent practitioners of so-called “slow cinema” — quiet,
contemplative films that are short on narrative and long on takes. He’s done a
great deal to shape viewers’ appreciation and understanding of the loose genre.
He crafts sparse scenarios and then observes his characters with tremendous
patience, often in languid long takes. His Walker series of short films, for
instance, follows his longtime collaborator and muse, Lee Kang-Sheng, as he
plays a monk who moves through various settings in extreme slow motion, contrasting
the bustle and pace of modern life. Though protracted, Tsai’s style is the
opposite of boring; in demanding the viewer’s attention and readjusting
expectations around the cinematic use of time, he allows for incredible moments
of human connection and discovery.
Ahead of
the retrospective, I was able to sit down and talk with Tsai. We discussed
filmmaking as the art of waiting, moviegoing practices in Taiwan versus North
America and Europe, and more. Many thanks to Vincent Cheng for translating our
conversation. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and
clarity.
Hyperallergic:
You use duration as a tool in your films in a much more purposeful way than
many directors. When shooting, what guides how long you hold a shot, and how
you edit it all later?
Tsai
Ming-liang: During production, when the camera’s rolling, most of the time I am
in a state of waiting. I’m waiting for the sudden emergence of reality and
truth. These moments are few and far between. Maybe it happens two minutes into
a shot, and then it will happen again at four minutes. I will want both of
those instances in the film. But before we hit those two-minute and four-minute
moments, the in-between process that seems meaningless and boring, that’s just
as important. Without that time, you won’t be able to observe those two
instances of sudden truth and reality. That’s the reason I need to show it all.
I tend not
to give my actors a lot of information or instruction before any scene. I will
give them something very simple: “This is what you want to do, this is the
environment you are in, and this is the scenario.” They’ll go with their own
interpretations of the scene, and then I will not even say “Cut.” I’ll keep the
camera rolling to see what they do after they think they have executed the
scene. I want them to remain in the scenario. Sometimes I find a lot more truth
and reality in what they do during what they consider the post-execution part.
Those are things I’m waiting for as well, with those long shots.
During
editing, I also intentionally try to avoid precision in the rhythm or tempo,
because doing so creates effects that I don’t want in my film. I want to tease
out a certain rhythm and tempo without being precise. That’s the reason the
duration tends to be much longer than expected.
H: A
retrospective this comprehensive provides a good opportunity to look back on
your career. If filmmaking is a process of waiting, do you think you’ve found
ways to “wait better” over the years? Or to “wait differently,” perhaps?
TM-L: I’m
one of those directors that will readily accept and have positive reactions to
my old work. But I do think it depends on where I am at the moment. At my age,
I don’t think I could make the films I did when I was in my 30s, and I don’t
think when I was in my 30s I could make the films that I did later, when I was
in my 40s. I am constantly changing. I’m aging, and I’m not the same person
when making each film. Each time, there’s always some way I want to push the
envelope, and each time I motivate myself to push a little further. I’m
surprised when I look at my previous films and find I’ve forgotten what I was
feeling when I made some choices. Rather than look back too much, it’s better
to think about what I can do now. It has a lot to do with my strength and energy.
I’m just not as energetic as when I was in my 30s, so my work will be very
different. You don’t know what you’ll make until you reach that age and you’re
in the moment of shooting.
H: What’s
something specific that stood out to you about one of your older films,
re-viewing it recently?
TM-L: Right
now, we are in the process of restoring The Wayward Cloud, and looking at some
choices I made, I wouldn’t let them pass now. It’s in the narrative. At one
point, the actress at a porn shoot faints, and Shiang-chyi [the female lead]
takes her back to her place. But then the producer takes the actress out,
without any details of why he was there or how he found her. I don’t think that
makes sense anymore. Now I would probably give a little more detail, maybe add
one more scene or some explanation so that it will make sense.
Obviously,
at the time I had a reason for letting this pass, although now I don’t remember
what it was. And I have never been asked by any audience about this particular
missing plot detail. But I also tell myself not to take this so seriously:
“This is just a film, and it’s a film you made when you were young.” When I was
younger, there are a lot of impulses that I would just follow without really
second guessing them.
H: In more
recent years, your work has been less concerned with plot anyway, and more with
being with its characters in their spaces.
TM-L: I
grew tired of the supposed necessity of having these narrative elements. I
think that showing in museums as a practice has a huge impact on me. I am a
lover of painting, and I paint myself. So my later works are very much about
using filmic language in its purest form. The focus for me is more about
composition and light. Those are more important than a plotline, or any
dialogue.
In Taiwan
right now, I’m showing films such as Your Face or the Walker series in movie
theaters, and the purpose is for the audience to have a completely different
experience than what they’re so used to. I want people to know this can be
done, even though it might not be very profitable. It’s to expand your frame of
reference, to make your idea of what art means more inclusive.
H: Has
collaborating with art institutions driven this shift, or did your interest in
it lead you to those institutions? Or is it a mixture of both?
TM-L: I’ve
always had a problem with such boundaries or categories. My films tend to be
called “arthouse films.” To me, that means a film that’s been marginalized by
the market, by the industry. That’s not a compliment. It doesn’t mean I have a
higher artistic value. When I go to Europe, I will see people of all different
ages lining up to see Flowers of Shanghai or Yi Yi. You don’t see that in
Taiwan or most of Asia. I think that it has a lot to do with the idea of the
art museum, that Western audiences will go to arthouse cinemas because they are
used to that concept. It’s not very common in Asia, the art museum as a
practice. I’m trying to change that. I’m trying to cultivate this new
generation of filmgoers, exposing them to the art museum idea through my films.
I got so
many new opportunities after Goodbye, Dragon Inn. The art circles in Taiwan
actually came to me wanting to collaborate. That was unprecedented; in the past
there was a very deep divide — again, this idea that somehow films are separate
from the contemporary art scene. This was the beginning many productive
collaborations. I went to the Venice Biennale in 2007 with It’s a Dream. In
2009, the Louvre commissioned me to make Face. In 2014, my film Stray Dogs was
released in Taiwan in a museum, not in a conventional cinema. The Walker series
has a home in an exhibition space in Taiwan. Next month, I’m going to the
Pompidou to show The Night, and the all the films in the Walker series will be
shown simultaneously in the same installation. The audience can pick what they
want to watch. I hope that one day we can do the same in the United States.
Tsai
Ming-liang’s “Slow Cinema” Contrasts the Bustle of Modern Life. By Dan
Schindel. Hyperallergic, November 24, 2022.
Nearly a
decade since his tenth feature film Stray Dogs was declared by its director to
be his swan song, Malaysian-Taiwanese artist and filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang has
gone on to create a varied, exploratory, and unexpectedly prolific new chapter
of his oeuvre. From short films to mid-lengths to art installations and
exhibitions to theatre to virtual reality, and, recently, an (unintended) new
feature, Days (which I wrote on here), in 2020, Tsai has discovered newfound
inspiration and freedom working in smaller and more spontaneous modes of
production spurred by commissions and the artist’s own impulses. Now removed
from the intricate narrative works that earned him renown as one of the world’s
most beloved and original art filmmakers, appreciation and attention have
continued to grow for Tsai as the themes of loneliness and disconnection—and
the uncanny recurrence of pandemic-like elements—resonate even more strongly in
our present day. On the heels of a successful theatrical release of Days,
amidst newly restored versions of his previous films, and the quiet 2021
premieres of three new short films that exemplify his current working method,
Tsai Ming-liang joined me from his home via zoom to discuss his latest work.
Adam Cook:
I have this memory from when we first met in 2014. We were walking the streets
of Lisbon when you saw these birds and stopped to film them on your phone. You
stood there for several minutes. I know that your recent work is partly made
from footage you shoot at different times so I am wondering how often you film
things like this? Is it an instinctual thing?
Tsai
Ming-liang: I don't really shoot something or take pictures that often. It is
so convenient to use smartphones and I rarely actually bring a camera with me.
I also don't think that I'm that great at it. Someone who can operate a camera
will use the cell phone as I am shooting those images. I'm not that great as a
cinematographer or photographer. Sometimes, I have that impulse when I see
something that's so beautiful and I really want to capture that image. Then, I
will use my cell phone that I have, or very rarely, the cameras that I have.
Even if I take those pictures and videos, I don't really look at them. It's
just something that I do out of instinctual impulse when I see something that
is beautiful and worth capturing.
But I do
capture quite a lot of images of Lee Kang-sheng. We travel a lot and we are
opposites when we travel: he is always sleeping, whether or not this is in a
car, an airplane or train, he doesn't even pay attention to the landscape
outside to enjoy the views. For him, it's just about sleeping. And for me, it's
the opposite. I don't sleep when I'm traveling. So what I do other than
enjoying the views is I take a lot of time to observe him as he sleeps. During
these trips to different film festivals to promote films, I have a lot of
opportunities to capture him, whether with a video or picture. Frequently, I
actually draw him as he's sleeping.
As I said,
I don't think that I'm that great a photographer and recently I tried to help
him with some casting shots of him in costumes and I was blamed for them not
being good enough because I made his leg so short because the angle wasn't
quite right, and he had to tell me that it has to be from this low angle shot
and all that. So, I'm lucky, that for me, I love images, I do have a sense of
knowing what kind of images and compositions that are beautiful to me and I can
rely on the cinematographer to execute those shots for me. When I look at the
viewfinder, I can decipher what images I want, but personally I’m not great
with a camera.
Cook: You
released three new short films last year. Maybe we could talk first about
Wandering. I'm curious about this idea of turning an exhibition of your work
into a film.
Tsai: This
particular short film came out of the exhibitions that I have been doing for
the past three years along the seaside of Northern Taiwan. It shows the Walker
series I have been working on for the past 10 years and it is very much about
this particular space and this particular series that I want to showcase. I
don't really have a specific reason or purpose for making it. At one point, I
thought maybe it can be promotional footage for the exhibition, but then I
didn't really use it for that. Recently, the way I think about filming is that
I really want to become freer. As an artist I don't want to limit myself in
terms of what kind of purpose I have to make films. Also, I am not inclined to
do narrative films anymore. And the reason for that is because I do think that
freeing myself from that kind of format and framework is where I am right now
with my work. I would rather film something that doesn't have a beginning or
ending and is just for the for the sake of it that without any specific reason
to do so.
So, I just
talked to an actress friend of mine, Yin Shin, and told her that she will be
going to the Dune Art Museum and will be a spectator and I'm going to film the
way she goes through the exhibition. In a way, I wanted to capture that moment
in time and space through this particular short film. I wanted to keep it very
simple. This particular exhibition might no longer be there and I just felt
that there should be some kind of visual record of that moment in time and
space.
Cook: Like
Wandering, many of your films juxtapose your characters with the space that
surrounds them, but in The Night, there are no characters whatsoever. It brings
attention to different qualities of your work like light, colour and movement.
Can you talk about the significance of the footage that you used and what
compelled you to put it together as a film?
Tsai: The
film came about around the end of 2019 when I was in Hong Kong at the height of
the protests with university students protesting regulations and the changes in
Hong Kong. I was invited for an art event and it was very chaotic, what was
going on there. Personally, I have an affinity with the people there and with
Hong Kong as a city as someone who consumed culture from Hong Kong growing up.
And, as someone who is Malaysian living in Taiwan, because of that kind of
diasporic experience, I have a very close connection emotionally with Hong
Kong. I think that is the major reason why I wanted to capture these images not
during the protests but of the remnants or the trace after the protests had
happened. Also because there's also an element of danger if I got too close. I
did feel a little bit conflicted as I was filming.
Luckily,
the hotel where we were staying was very close to the main protest march route,
which is in Causeway Bay and I just happened to have a camera with me. I took
it out and started to film those traces of the marches from earlier on during
the day. It’s nothing I planned, it just so happened that I thought that this
will be something I can do outside of the event I was invited for. I didn't
have any purpose in mind in terms of making it into a documentary or short
film. All I wanted to do at that time was just to capture those images as as a
way for me to show my care and my feelings towards Hong Kong, and also my sense
of the sense of uncertainty I feel about the future of Hong Kong. I just wanted
to use this particular experience of filming the footage that I captured to
express that. You can see from the film that I do have a very strong feeling
about the city through the images I captured.
Cook: With
The Moon and the Tree, you follow two different people: Lee Pei-jing, who is
disabled, and Chang Fang, who is elderly. Your work has always been sensitive
to and interested in bodies but I wonder how you consider bodies has changed in
light of aging and health?
Tsai:
Indeed The Moon and the Tree has everything to do with how aging and illness
have an impact on the human body. It was a commissioned piece from a foundation
whose mission is to bring attention and awareness to performers after
retirement.
One of the
board members is actually Yang Kuei-mei from many of my films. So, I was
commissioned to create a film for this purpose and I have a wealth of actors
and actresses that I can choose from. I was especially drawn to Lee Pei-jing.
She was my idol growing up and when she was young, she became ill and has been
wheelchair bound for the past 40 years. That really creates an interesting
subject for me to approach. The other person is Chang Feng who is a very
well-known actor and is almost 100 years old. You can see how aging has changed
his body. The corporeal reality is completely different from the images we
remember from when he was young. I do think that this type of connection
between the body with aging and illness is the motif of many of my films,
including The River and Days. It's very much about how the body changes and
evolves and morphs into something different as a result of aging and illness.
The way I
approached this with Lee Pei-jing was to keep it simple. I just wanted to
capture her daily life after retirement. We shot this in one morning. I
approached her and asked when can film you? And she said she needed to put on
her makeup and go through a process before being filmed. So I thought that why
don't we just film you putting on your makeup. And not only having that part in
the film, but also the way she brushes her teeth, washes her face, doing her
exercises, and at the end, she sings a song. As an observer, I want to see how
she deals with having these kinds of disability issues and how she performs
those simple daily tasks in retirement away from the spotlight.
For Chang
Feng I took a different approach. I just wanted to capture the state he's in
right now as someone who, from his exterior, you can see the traces of aging
very dramatically. I wanted to know how his body naturally moves in space. I
directed him to walk towards this tree and then he stood there and you really
see how aging has changed the way he moves and looks. I only wanted images
without any type of interviews like how other documentaries might approach
this, I just want to observe and see visually how aging and illness impact
someone’s body.
Cook: How
do you see the body in relation to the mind and the soul? Is it just a cage or
are these things entwined in a more complex way?
Tsai: If I
can borrow Buddhist philosophy, we as human beings are very limited. I do
believe that we are predestined for the amount of food that we can consume
throughout our lifetime or the amount of money that we can accumulate
throughout our lifetime…I have this very fatalistic view on what we are given
during our limited lifetime. So, for me, not only thinking about how we will
all age and die eventually, very early on, I already thought that when I was
shooting Rebels of the Neon God, I already told myself that it is so exhausting
to make films, I think I'm predestined to make 10 films during my lifetime. So
that's what I was aiming for.
That was the quota I thought I would be allotted as a human being on Earth during this life. And when I made Stray Dogs, that was pretty much my tenth film and I thought anything that I make after Stray Dogs will be like a bonus. So, I didn't feel as motivated to make films because anything from then on will just be a bonus. Also because I have this new journey and adventures with art museums, that completely changes the conditions of how I can do my artwork and be creative. I do feel very different about my body and I'm very sensitive to the issues and the process and the concept of aging, because I am living it. Right now with the 4K restorations they are doing of my previous films, I looked at what I made when I was younger, and I was astonished about full of energy I was and how imaginative I was, and the ways I was able to execute a lot of things I planned to do. I just no longer feel the same way about making films.
My latest
narrative feature, Days was not intended, it wasn’t something I wanted to make,
it just happened. I think it's a blessing or a gift from above for me to actually
make this film. I do believe that for a filmmaker, when you're in your 30s you
make films that will somehow reflect that reality, and when you're in your 40s
you make films that will be suitable for someone who's in his or her 40s and
similarly when you reach your 50s. I do think that that kind of aging process
certainly changes the way you make films and what kind of films. If you're in
your 50s, I don't think that you will be able to have that kind of sensibility
to make films that that are designed for someone who is in their 30s. If I
still make films in my 60s in my 70s I will make films with that particular
perspective and make the films that can only be made by a director in their 60s
and 70s, as a result of aging processes, and maybe as a result of
illness—something that I think is inevitable.
Cook:
Speaking of Days, it might be your purest and your gentlest film. For example,
sex is not always something that's simple or pleasant in your films. But in
Days, the massage sequence is very beautiful. I know you've spoken about this
before and I'd actually like to contrast it with one of the most talked about
scenes in all of your films, the scene of incest between the father and son in
the bathhouse in The River. I realize how different these scenes are overall
but I think it's interesting to consider that the scene in The River is also
beautiful and sensual up until the revelation of who these two characters are.
Because bodily sense is something foregrounded in your films, the viewer really
relates to the experience of these sensations before we feel shocked or
alarmed. Could you talk about your approach to that scene and the strategy of
how we experienced the bodily sensations along with the characters and the
effect that that creates?
Tsai: In
both of these scenes, I'm very lucky to have the actors that I work with. They
are so open minded and so committed to the performance. They freed themselves
from the baggage that may be associated with sex because of the trust that they
have with the scene and with me as a director. They know that they are not
doing this to pander to the audience, they are doing this because it is an
artistic performance that they are a part of. For The River, Miao Tien, who was
a well-known actor in martial arts films, there was nothing sexual about his
characters in the past, these asexual warrior characters, so sex was never a
subject he was asked to perform. And I paired him with Lee Kang-sheng, a young
and new actor at the time, and they have to somehow perform this very intimate,
very sexual, interaction in a juxtaposition of someone who is much older and
someone much younger. They trusted the scene, the storyline, the director to a
point that they just went for it. And that created a kind of very beautiful,
sensual moment that eventually has this incest connotation to it at the end.
I do think
that can be also be seen in Days, that again, now, Lee Kang-sheng himself is
that older person with the young actor, Anong Houngheuangsy who is a Laotian
migrant worker in Thailand. He had many jobs before I met him, including as a
massage therapist and as a sex worker to make a living. He was trained to
perform the movements and techniques I filmed in Days. So I was very lucky that
also in this case, the performers, while they know that this is a performance,
they also know that the most important thing is to keep it as authentic, as
natural, as realistic as possible. And both of them accomplish that, especially
Anong because of his training, he really had the skills with these kinds of
movements and gestures that are so beautiful, so well choreographed, that it
actually transcends this sexual transaction into something that is a moment of
pleasure, a moment of joy between these two human beings, these two human
bodies. As I was filming this particular scene, I was very, very confident
because of the energy I had observed and the connections that I had seen
between them. And I wanted to keep this scene going for as long as possible. It
ended up being 20 minutes. I know that it will move the audience not only
visually, but the viewer can also feel the kind of touch of the movements, of
the massage being performed on them as they watch the film.
In terms of
the sex scenes I have in all my films, I do think that the best way I can
describe it is that because there is this balance of the actors knowing that
they are performing but wanting to keep it as authentic as possible.
Cook: I
think in talking about the body, it naturally leads us to talk about time, not
just because time is used in your work in such a powerful way but because the
body itself has a subjective relationship to time. I think of scenes like in
Stray Dogs when Lee Kang-sheng is holding the real estate sign and battling the
wind which you can feel against his poncho, or the last scene of Vive l’amour
with Yang Kuei-mei crying for several minutes. In Stray Dogs, if it was a short
take, we would learn that this character does this thing but because it's a
long take, we experience it and it embodies us maybe even in, say, his class
position, and we come to know him in this different way. Or in Vive l’amour,
it's not about recognizing that a character is sad, but eventually the physical
act of crying, the exhaustion of it. I'm wondering if you can talk about the
way you like to use the cinematic experience of time in conjunction with this
foregrounding of the body.
Tsai: A lot
of those things happen sort of by accident during the filming process. I can
give you an example when we were shooting The River. For one shot, Miao Tien,
the father character, actually woke up in the middle of the night and went to
the bathroom, and we shot from the back so that we'll hear and see from the
back that he's going to the bathroom. And that particular scene was so long, so
unusually long, because of the long stream of pee coming out of Miao Tien.
After we said “cut”, the crew just started laughed because it was so long. Miao
Tien actually thought that maybe it was too long to be kept in the film. So, he
was actually peeing and wasn't “acting”.
He couldn't control how long it took to pee. So, when I’m trying to
decide how much will be kept in the film, the most important thing is to keep
it as realistic and as authentic as natural as possible, as I mentioned before.
So in terms of this particular scene, this is someone's true bodily,
physiological state that I just captured. In order for me to be true to it to
be authentic, I need to let it play out in real time.
During screenings of this scene, a lot of people actually laugh. I don't know whether or not they laugh because they can relate to this type of bodily function or because they find it absurd. But to me, the only way I can approach the filming process as well as the editing process is to think about, if my priority is naturalism, how can I use the temporal component as an element to make this particular scene as real, as natural, as authentic as possible? A lot of time when I edit or shoot something, I think about that extra time that some people and directors might consider meaningless but to me, that is where you can get all the contextual information and a lot of the authenticity that can be manifested through the use of that extra time.
Cook: I
wonder if it's different in the context of the Walker films where you're
directing Lee Kang-sheng in such a deliberate way. You're kind of imposing a
slowness, an invented slowness. I'm wondering if this is a different kind of
idea, because for me the Walker films almost visualize time.
Tsai: For
the Walker series, I do think that it really has something to do with how it
started. It started as a solo theatrical performance for the stage we were
invited to perform in 2011 where Lee Kang-sheng played a character that would
eventually morph or transform into my father. I wanted this process to be very,
very long and also very, very difficult. Lee Kang-sheng found a way to really
use movement to showcase and to highlight how long the transformation will take
and how difficult. His idea was using body movements in such a slow fashion
that it would look like someone is walking, but it's not how people will walk.
It is using movement to somehow capture the essence of time as he moves across
space from one point to the other. So for me, I think that is such a beautiful
way of expressing this concept. The beauty of the body movements he produced
was something I didn’t want to disappear at the end of this performance. I
really wanted this to be something that can be seen not only in that particular
time and space but also around the world against the context of different
locations, to see Lee Kang-sheng walk with different backdrops in different
cities and for you to see visually how time played out in these different
contexts.
Cook: Okay,
one last question: what makes you happiest in life?
Tsai:
[smiles then laughs] To be with people I like.
Blessings: An Interview with Tsai Ming-liang. By Adam Cook. Long Voyage Home, March 21, 2022
The filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang moved to his current home, on the verdant mountainsides that ring Taipei, seven years ago, after he became afflicted with a mysterious ailment resembling panic attacks. Around the same time, Lee Kang-sheng, his longtime collaborator and muse, suffered a relapse of a neck problem that had long troubled him. Looking for a place to convalesce outside the city center, the two came across a block of abandoned, half-constructed apartments, stretching the length of a deserted street. They moved in and began rehabilitating the buildings alongside their own bodies.
“I never
knew where I would die until I moved here,” Tsai told me when I visited him one
afternoon in the middle of July. “I thought this place was maybe where I
finally belonged.” Tsai, now sixty-three, was waiting for me at his dining table,
wearing a gray T-shirt and flip-flops. Two large bunches of green bananas that
Lee had picked, complete with their blossoms, rested on the kitchen counter.
Tsai has a shaved head and bushy eyebrows that, along with his spontaneous
laughter, give him the demeanor of a mischievous monk. A tower of film
cannisters lined the wall alongside life-size Buddhist statues, and scattered
awards, from Taipei’s Golden Horse to Berlin’s Silver Bear, were shelved
haphazardly under a staircase.
Tsai and
Lee are the only residents on their road, inhabiting a tastefully renovated
rowhouse, which doubles as their studio, sectioned between raw concrete units
left in their unfinished condition and overgrown with tropical plants that peek
through the gaping windows. The labyrinthine, hollowed-out frame and its
surroundings have become settings for most of his recent projects. “I realized
that I could shoot all of my films from this mountain,” he told me.
Over the
past thirty years, Tsai and Lee have created a body of work unlike any other in
world cinema, capturing urban ennui and desire amid the ethereal, neon-lit
dreamscapes of Taipei and other Asian metropolises. Though their work has been
lumped by some critics into the umbrella category “slow cinema”—a loose
coalition of film-festival regulars like Béla Tarr and Apichatpong
Weerasethakul, identifiable by their long takes, minimal plot, and predilection
for stationary cameras—the pair have followed their own path, constructing a
symbolic universe in which loneliness and longing become material, manifesting
in floods, leaks, and droughts, as well as diseases both existential and
corporeal.
When I met
Tsai, Taiwan was just emerging from a soft lockdown, ordered after the island
saw its worst outbreak of covid-19 following a year with little to no community
transmission. Under normal circumstances, he and Lee would be travelling around
the world, attending film festivals and premières for “Days,” which after
delays eventually came out in the U.S. this August. Instead, as on every
morning for the past year, Tsai began his day by sweeping the floor, brewing
coffee, and making a simple lunch for himself and Lee. “Lee Kang-sheng sleeps
until very late,” Tsai said. As if on cue, a groggy-looking Lee—now fifty-two,
but carrying an ageless insouciance that has graced his entire career—ventured
shirtless downstairs to investigate the commotion before promptly returning to
his bedroom. Despite much speculation about the nature of their relationship in
the course of their collaboration, the two describe it most often in familial
terms: Tsai the parent and Lee the wayward teen-ager. (After many years of
ambiguity, Tsai announced in 2018, during a referendum on same-sex marriage,
that, while he was gay, Lee was not.)
Tsai has
filled the rest of his time painting, a practice he picked up in recent years.
We went upstairs to his studio to look at canvases he had been working on
during the pandemic, a series of oil paintings drawn from set photographs of
“Days.” One showed a young man resting on a floral futon, playing with his cell
phone, while covered by a damask blanket; in another, two men sprawled naked on
a hotel bed, swathed in earthy reds reminiscent of a Francis Bacon. Tsai’s own
mattress was visible on the floor behind him, and his laundry hung out to dry
on the balcony.
“We were
lucky to move here,” Tsai said. “If we had gotten sick in Taipei, we might have
been very uncomfortable. There’s another kind of life here, slower. You have to
take care of your surroundings. You need to cut the grass, tend to the trees.”
Tsai pointed proudly to his hand-held mower resting outside. “This is a place
to recuperate,” he said. “Before, I always had a feeling like I wanted to come
back here. Now, I have the feeling that I want to go out, although with a
different mind-set. It makes me feel like the world is something that can be
truly appreciated.”
The
director of eleven feature films and several shorts, Tsai was born in Kuching,
Malaysia, in 1957, to Hakka Chinese farmers. Raised partly by his maternal
grandparents in the city, Tsai would accompany them to the cinema every
evening, often watching movies back to back as his grandparents traded off
shifts at their nearby noodle stand. In his twenties, he moved to Taipei to
study theatre, working as a scriptwriter and director for television before
making his first feature, “Rebels of the Neon God” (1992), which electrified
audiences with its unvarnished depictions of urban Taiwanese youth. He had
asked Lee, then a recent high-school graduate with an uncanny resemblance to
James Dean, to act for him after seeing him propped on a motorbike outside an
arcade, serving as a lookout for police raids on illegal gambling. Lee has
since appeared in every major Tsai project.
Tsai is
part of the second generation of the Taiwanese New Cinema, a movement of
filmmakers who developed a style of dreamlike tranquillity and an attentiveness
to everyday life at the end of Taiwan’s long period of martial law. His films
departed, however, from those of peers like Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien,
which had dealt explicitly with the White Terror, Chiang Kai-shek and the
Kuomintang party’s reign over the island. Tsai’s films instead take place after
1987, when Chiang’s son, Ching-kuo, ceded one-party rule to the current
multiparty democracy. The milieu they portray—urban youth coming of age during
Taiwan’s economic boom—is drawn more to American pop culture than to the
Chinese mainland. Although his early films revelled in the newfound sexual and
political freedoms of the period, they also hinted at the darker underpinnings
of Taiwan’s assimilation into the global market, focussing on drifters, idlers,
and insomniacs on the fringes of the world’s supply chain.
With
“Rebels,” Tsai also introduced a queer sensibility into Taiwanese cinema,
débuting Lee’s alter ego, Hsiao Kang—the Chinese characters can mean “Little
Health” or “Little Wealth”—an aimless cram-school dropout who becomes fixated
on a handsome, small-time hoodlum. Their follow-up, “Vive L’Amour” (1994),
which depicts a trio of solitary Taipei residents passing through the same
staged real-estate agent’s apartment, garnered international acclaim and
further cemented the hallmarks of Tsai’s aesthetic: the use of parallel
narratives, themes of repressed longings and missed connections, and Lee’s
unique dramatic presence, marked by his androgynous impassivity. Around this
time, Tsai observed that Lee had begun suffering from a painful stiffness in
his neck, and made it the plotline of his next film, “The River” (1997), in
which Hsiao Kang finds himself paralyzed after floating in a polluted stream.
As he seeks various remedies, we also peer into the lives of his father, a
closeted retiree who frequents Taipei’s gay saunas, and his mother, an elevator
attendant conducting an affair with a pornography distributor. A leak that
begins as a trickle in their apartment grows gradually into a torrential
current, suggesting how the unspoken can come spilling out in unanticipated
forms.
In 1998,
Tsai was invited to contribute to an anthology envisioning the year 2000. “By
then, a lot of problems had already appeared,” Tsai remembered. “The earth had
been damaged for a long time. In Taiwan, I thought it might be raining without
end.” For what would become his film “The Hole,” Tsai landed on the idea of an
epidemic of “Taiwan Fever,” a virus suspected to originate from cockroaches
that induces people to crawl on all fours and shun the light. Two neighbors,
played by Lee and Yang Kuei-mei, remain in their apartment building despite its
being condemned as a virus hotspot, and begin to interact through a strange gap
that appears in the floor between them. Interspersed among scenes of their
increasingly desperate existences are fantastical, gloriously campy musical
interludes, set to the songs of Grace Chang, a mid-century pop star. They
infuse a dreamy quality to the film’s atmosphere of isolation, providing an
outlet for emotional overflow in a gesture that seems jarringly prescient.
Although
his international profile continued to grow, Tsai found it difficult to find
commercial traction at home. While some critics accused his films of
inaccessibility, domestic productions were also finding themselves crowded out
by Hollywood exports. Tsai and Lee set up their own production company in 2000,
and devised a direct-to-consumer promotional strategy: Tsai would arrive
unannounced at offices, and visit college cafeterias during lunchtime to sell
tickets to his own movies. “In half an hour, I could sell one to two rows,” he
said, not without pride. It’s hard to imagine many other filmmakers of Tsai’s
stature in the same position, and he began to feel a mounting frustration with
the demands of commercial cinema.
“Goodbye,
Dragon Inn” (2003) takes place in a derelict movie theatre on the night of its
last screening, as it shows King Hu’s 1967 martial-arts classic “Dragon Inn.”
Tsai’s film has the air of a vigil, as ghostly apparitions walk the aisles of
the sparsely attended theatre, alongside the workers who had barely managed to
keep it afloat before its closure. The demise of communal spaces forms a
recurring theme in Tsai’s work, even as it has progressed from tales of
youthful alienation to portrayals of the precarity of migrant workers in films
like “I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone” (2006). His films trace an arc resembling
that of the region, as decades of unfettered economic expansion gave way from
initial exuberance to the reality of shrinking outlets for community and
consolation.
In “Stray
Dogs” (2013), his last feature film before “Days,” Lee plays a “sandwich man,”
a human signpost advertising luxury apartments. Tsai’s camera remains
unsparingly fixed on Lee as he is brutally lashed by wind and rain during his
shifts. Meanwhile, his two children squat in a vacant building and roam around
Taipei’s grocery stores for free samples. Although some audiences might find
Tsai’s approach exhausting—when Lee grasps a chicken leg, we know we’ll watch
him gnaw it to the bone—his durational demands also defy the carelessness by
which we so quickly overlook things and people. “Stray Dogs” ends with a
twenty-minute scene of two characters gazing intently at a faded mural on the
side of an abandoned building; watching them, it’s hard not to imagine that
they are watching a movie.
When “Stray
Dogs” premièred, at Venice, where it received the Grand Jury Prize, Tsai began
to float the possibility of his retiring from commercial filmmaking. The labor
involved in big productions was straining his health, and slowly, over the
years, he had begun to come up with fewer ideas for narratives. “I wanted to
get rid of screenplays, stories, things that audiences expect, and look for a
substitute,” he told me.
Tsai began
to stage and film a series of vignettes starring Lee, dressed in the saffron
robes of a Buddhist monk, performing a version of walking meditation throughout
various global cities, such as Marseilles, Tokyo, and Kuching. Inspired by
Xuanzang, the Tang-dynasty monk who made a years-long journey to India, the
“Walker” films function like moving paintings, meticulously framed compositions
that allow the eye to linger on every detail as Lee proceeds, pace by pace.
“Why can’t cinemas be a museum?” Tsai asked me. By paring back narrative, Tsai
hopes that his films can counteract the expectation that audiences be led by
the filmmaker, allowing them instead to exercise their own faculties of
attention.
During this
period, Lee began to fall ill again. He suffered a minor stroke while the pair
were visiting Vienna for a festival in 2014, and his neck problem also
returned. While taking Lee to his treatments, Tsai asked to record him. On a
trip to Hong Kong, Tsai filmed Lee as embers of burning mugwort leaves fell
painfully onto his back and shoulders during moxibustion, a traditional Chinese
therapy. Tsai found the footage compelling but wasn’t sure exactly how to use
it.
In 2017, Tsai ordered a bowl of noodles from a young Laotian immigrant named Anong Houngheuangsy, at a food court in Thailand, and began chatting with him on his break. The two stayed in touch after Tsai returned to Taiwan. “Anong would invite friends over to drink beer at his place and call me,” Tsai said. “I became very interested in his life.” Finding himself increasingly drawn into Houngheuangsy’s daily rhythms and routines—the two would video-chat as the younger man washed vegetables in his bathroom, steamed sticky rice in a bamboo basket, prayed at a makeshift shrine—Tsai brought a small team to Thailand to film him.
He decided
to pair the two sections into what would become “Days.” Composed primarily of
documentary footage, the film shows Lee and Houngheuangsy leading their
separate lives: Lee, his face contorted in pain, receiving treatment for his
neck, and Houngheuangsy, toiling alone in his shared apartment or browsing a
night market. Tsai brings them together for only one sequence, in which Lee
pays for an erotic massage. (Tsai shot the scene in one day, in his hotel room
in Thailand.) For nineteen minutes, the camera basks in Lee and Houngheuangsy’s
presence, their bodies bathed in the hotel’s curtained glow. Houngheuangsy,
kneeling astride Lee, works his way from the soles of Lee’s feet to the palms
of his hands. Lee’s face, pressed into a pillow, purples from pain and
pleasure. Afterward, the two men shower, eat together at a restaurant, and go
their own ways. “Days” is unsentimental about the transactional nature of their
exchange, yet it also affirms the healing potential of physical connection.
Filmed before the pandemic, the scene offers, through its tactility and the
care and attention given and received in it, a salve for viewers who might
require convalescing from their own ills.
Tsai’s
films never tell the viewer what to look at, instead simply providing an
opportunity to carefully observe each surrounding environment. “Days” begins
with a long take of Lee, sitting in an armchair in their living room, gazing
through a window as a typhoon rages outside. Reflected on the glass, tree
branches and raindrops appear dappled over Lee’s visage. Through the course of
their three-decade collaboration, Tsai has continued to shoot Lee just as
carefully and enthrallingly. “I never thought I would spend my entire life
filming the same person,” Tsai said. “But Lee is always changing. From young to
a little older, to getting a little heavier. His face and expression are always
changing, too. These are interests I’ll never lose.”
Lifelong
commitments like these are rare in today’s cinema, where most actors and
directors cycle through projects as quickly as their contracts expire. Tsai’s
output instead resembles an extended family, peopled by reincarnations of the
same characters, played by a rotating cast of nonprofessional actors. That
sense of kinship leads to a porousness between fiction and nonfiction in his
films. The tenderness of “Days” hinges on a real gift. A few years ago, Tsai’s
producer brought him a music box that played the theme song from Charlie
Chaplin’s “Limelight” (1952), a tune that had become a popular standard for
Mandarin singers during Tsai’s childhood. In “Days,” Lee hands Anong the gift
after their massage, in a gesture of gratitude; its final scene shows Anong
listening to its soft, twinkling melody at a bus stop, before departing.
Over time,
Tsai’s films have become quieter and more meditative, with longer takes, fewer
cuts, and less camera movement, as if whittling away all excess. That
development might belie a diminishing faith in cinema’s capabilities, if not
for the intimacy and concentration of “Days.” When I asked Tsai about the
direction in his work, he glanced outside. “The path of my films is like
planting a tree,” he answered. “After being planted, it grows by itself. I know
what kind of tree it is, but not what shape it will grow into.”
After our
conversation, Tsai excused himself to rest upstairs while I strolled around his
back yard, taking in various locations that appear in “Days.” Tsai had
mentioned that the look of the area changed continuously, from clear to rainy
days, morning to night. The fish tank was full of mottled koi, and tufts of
grass had sprouted through patches of dirt. A tree that, in Tsai’s film, is
enveloped by billowing clouds was now standing resolutely in the glaring sun.
I had
wondered aloud to Tsai if we might learn any lessons from the past year of
sickness, and how our world might begin to heal. Tsai said that the question
was difficult to answer. “You can’t just get better, without expecting ever to
get sick again,” he said, after a pause. “But you can start to cherish the
things present, knowing that nothing is certain.”
In Taiwan’s
Mountains, a Director Works to Slow Life Down. By Dennis Zhou. The New Yorker,
August 28, 2021.
Since first
watching Days over a year ago, I’ve carried the film within me like an ache—a
visceral memory both painful and sweet. Tsai Ming-liang’s new feature was one
of the last films I saw in a packed theater before the pandemic, at the last
festival I attended in person. But it’s not just the since-elusive thrill of
physical togetherness that made Days imprint itself on me with such somatic
force. The film itself, composed of an almost dialogue-free series of long, isolating
takes, is a kind of corporeal caress: an awakening to our bodies’ abilities to
grow and fail and ache and yearn, often despite ourselves.
And what
better canvas for this reflection than Lee Kang-sheng, Tsai’s muse for more
than 30 years? Like tree rings, Tsai’s films preserve the evolution of Lee’s
face and body across time. For those of us who’ve followed their collaboration
over the decades, those past images might flicker beneath the inaugural,
five-minute shot of Days: Lee sitting at a window, his face wrinkled with age
and strained by pain, while winds and rain swirl outside. The neck and back
ailments that afflicted Lee’s 20-something character in 1997’s The River have
become real with time. In close, extended shots, Tsai follows the actor as he deals
with the illness and its treatments, which involve long baths, acupuncture, and
a neck brace.
These
scenes intertwine with those of a new entrant in Tsai’s recursive filmography:
Anong Houngheuangsy, a youthful Laotian migrant worker whom Tsai met serendipitously
in Bangkok. Tsai extends the same patient attention to the material conditions
of Anong’s threadbare life—his dingy apartment; his solitary routines of
sleeping, showering, eating, cooking, and working—that he accords to Lee’s
bodily existence. The film reaches its climax in the scene that brings the two
characters together: Lee receives a sexual massage in a hotel room from Anong,
which Tsai films in full, in real-time, with barely any cuts. Their communion
is entirely anonymous, devoid of any sentiment or psychological insight, but it
trembles with the simple pleasure and release of human touch. Days is
“superficial” in the best sense of the word: a film concerned with the richness
of surfaces and the aliveness of skin.
Tsai had
announced a retirement from cinema after 2013’s Stray Dogs, but Days seems to
signal a new direction for the auteur, with the subject of mortality itself
providing a fresh impetus. In July, I talked with the Taiwanese auteur over
Zoom about bodies, time, age, love, sex, and more.
Many of
your films explore themes of isolation and urban loneliness, some even in the
context of a pandemic or environmental disaster. How did the experience of the
real pandemic inspire or affect you creatively?
The impact of this pandemic is that I started to feel very trapped. Things I used to take for granted, like traveling abroad and going out, I really cherish and miss quite a bit now. I wish I had enjoyed it more when I had the freedom to travel.
Something
that has affected me aside from the pandemic, as an individual, as a person, is
aging—and that is something that never changes, with or without the pandemic.
Aging has changed how I see things in life, and how I interpret or feel about
this sense of loneliness now that I’m older. The longing for love changes as
the result of the aging process. Now there’s not so much of the yearning. Now
there’s the fear that I might lose the ability to love with age.
You’ve said
that all your films are “are a development of the way I look at Lee
Kang-sheng.” How are you looking at him in Days, and how is it different from
the ways you’ve looked at him before?
In Days, I
focused on the physical body of Lee Kang-sheng—his exterior. I suddenly
realized that because of the aging process, the body is ever-evolving. I can
see that inevitable evolution in Lee’s exterior, and that also prompted me to
see myself as part of this aging process, since we’re 10 years apart. He almost
served as a mirror. We are more and more alike the more I look at him. I think
that’s a little bit different from when I was observing him in the past. I was
observing how he lived and grew as a human being, and his life experiences.
Now, I focus on the exterior, the physical body, how it morphs, and how it
evolves as time passes.
As I
understand it, you began filming Lee as he was dealing with health problems and
seeking treatments without the agenda of making a film. You’ve said that you
just wanted to “save images” of him. What precisely did you want to preserve
with the camera?
This idea
of “depositing images” is the result of the change in my concept of what it
means to be a director. Since I worked with art museums for many of my recent
works, I started to think that the way to make a film is not unlike painting.
To paint something that you’re moved by, that’s your creative outlet. When you
finish that painting, you don’t feel like you need to show it to everybody
right away. I think by capturing images in the same way, you can capture
reality. I just want to record the images first and archive them. I’ll worry
about what I’m going to do with them later.
I have also
been working on a lot of non-narrative films with art museums. During this
time, because of Lee Kang-sheng’s illness, I got to really observe him. At
times it was hard to watch, but I felt compelled to capture the state of his
body, the progression of his illness, and the treatment as well. I have made a
narrative film about something similar, The River, and there’s no reason for me
to make another one. For now, what I want to do is capture the actual state of
the body—the decay, the deterioration, the realness of what it’s like to be ill
and to recover—and to save those images for later use.
Are you
then using cinema as a way to counter the process of aging or decay—as a weapon
against mortality?
Well, it’s
hard to fight aging. [Laughs] Looking back at a lot of the films I’ve made in
the past, I think I was full of energy. I was very, very young, very, very
motivated. As I’ve aged, I’ve realized that I just don’t want to be bothered by
the complexities and details of the conventional ways in which I used to make
films. Taking care of every single detail of the production, having very
structured scripts and films… that’s just not something I want to do now. So
now I tend to gravitate toward things that are looser in terms of structure and
narrative. I just want to make films that are not as complicated.
Well, Days
is remarkably rich because of its minimalism and looseness, so I think your approach
worked out well. I wanted to ask you about casting Anong. I read that you met
him on the streets in Thailand, similar to how you first met Lee Kang-sheng—you
just ran into him. What was it that struck you immediately about Anong that
made you want to develop that relationship?
It has a
lot to do with the way I think about filmmaking now. As I said, it has changed
with age. Meeting Anong provided another impetus for me, another source of
inspiration, during this transitional period in my understanding of filmmaking.
When I met Lee, I had a film in mind and I thought that he would be the perfect
person to portray the role. Whereas with Anong, it was very different. I didn’t
have any agenda. I met him and then we continued our interactions by video chat
so I could see his daily life, his way of going about his business. He is a
Laotian migrant worker in Thailand. Most of the time when we talked on video,
it was after he had finished work and was back in his rented room and had
started his mundane routines. I was moved by how real it was, in terms of the
lives of migrant workers in Thailand, and I wanted to capture that. I was so
compelled that I flew to Thailand with a cinematographer and that was the first
time we shot the way Anong conducted his daily life. That started the process
of depositing images based on what I was moved by and touched by.
I think of
the introduction of Lee Kang-sheng into my films as a process of
construction—an architectural construction in which he was a major element.
Whereas for Anong, it’s pretty much a sketch. I didn’t have any final product
in mind, I just wanted to sketch him, and in this case I used cinematic images
as my sketching tool. So it felt even more real, and that realness inspired me
to think of a different way of making films.
What
interests you about the nature of informal or migrant work? It’s a theme in
nearly all of your films—many of your characters are informal laborers or have
very precarious work conditions.
When I went
back to Malaysia to shoot I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone in 2005, I immediately
gravitated toward migrant workers in Kuala Lumpur. I would follow them
everywhere. I even saw them being coerced by police officers to give them
money. It is something I feel very drawn to and also can relate to as someone
who grew up in Malaysia and now lives in Taiwan. I see myself as a sort of
migrant worker even though my situation is not as bad as those people who are
marginalized. But this idea of a cultural and national transplant is similar.
You go from one cage to another, from one country to another, trying to make a
living. That’s why I have an affinity and attraction to this marginalized group
of people, including Anong. This idea that we’re part of a diaspora—that’s a
mentality I can relate to very much.
What made
you think that the story of Anong’s life as a migrant worker would complement
Lee Kang-sheng’s experience with aging and pain?
They both
have a sense of being caged or trapped. In Lee Kang-sheng’s case, he was
trapped by his physical body, his illness, and that is something that he has no
control over. Whereas Anong as a migrant worker is also caged by the city he’s
in, the predicament of his life, and his socio-economic situation. And it’s not
just the similarity between the two, it’s also a projection—I can see myself
[in them] as well.
I have
always been interested in the idea of the life cycle—of how the physical body
goes from strong to weak—and in juxtaposing the different stages of the body to
come up with something new. For example, in the shower scene in The River, I
used Miao Tien, who is an actor from the martial arts genre. He had never
actually shown his skin or taken off his clothes in front of the camera. But I
asked him to do so for this scene and put him together with the young, fit Lee
Kang-sheng. So you have this juxtaposition that shows how the body morphs and
evolves, and it’s very similar to what happens in Days when I have Lee
Kang-sheng completely naked in bed for Anong to give him a massage. Now Lee
Kang-sheng has become the older person with an aged body, and you have this new
face on screen with a particularly fit body, and there’s a sense of catharsis
or solace in seeing how bodies evolve and change as you age.
I want to
ask about the sex or massage scene, which is so incredible and cathartic to
watch. Even though the sex is transactional, because Anong is paid for his
service, it is remarkably wholesome compared to sex scenes in your previous
work.
It has a
lot to do with Anong as an actor and as a person. He is a migrant worker and
had many jobs before I met him, including as a trained masseuse. So he does
know how to give a massage. Not only that, he has a very unique way of giving a
massage. It’s almost like a dance, and it is beautiful to watch. That’s the
reason I wanted to keep that scene very long. It’s one of the most important
scenes in the film. Because the sex is transactional, there’s no emotional
baggage involved, and that makes it pure. It’s just two people seeking a
release, or solace, from each other, and I find that incredibly pure and
pleasant, unlike the sex scenes in my past films which are always unhappy or
unpleasant. I kept it long because I wanted everyone to feel as if they were
getting a massage by watching the scene. We shot it in one day in a hotel we
checked into without telling them we were shooting a sex scene. It went very
smoothly; they worked well together.
The other
scene that has stayed with me is the opening, which is a five-minute shot of
Lee Kang-sheng just sitting and looking out the window. With a scene like that,
how do you know when to cut? How do you assess duration, since duration is
really the force of it?
I usually
shoot every scene with a very long duration. It might not all be included in
the final film, but I tend to shoot that way because you can get unexpected
changes from the actors or the surrounding space. The soundscape also changes
when you shoot for a long duration. By observing them for such a long time, you
also get to see something richer, more real. For example, the day when we shot
the opening scene of Days, there was a typhoon. As we shot this scene, the
winds, the rain—you can see the waxing and waning of it, the typhoon going in
and out. To juxtapose that with Lee Kang-sheng, this emotionless person sitting
there, static, with a sickly appearance—I mean, he was actually sick at the
time, and I remember we prepared cups of water for him, though he didn’t
actually bother to drink them—I felt that was perfect.
Some people
might think that my films are unnecessarily long, but to me it feels necessary
to have this realness and richness through the process of patiently observing
the unexpected happenings in front of the camera. It’s almost like putting a
painting in an art museum. But in the museum, [viewers] can control how long
they’ll look at a painting, while as a director, I get to choose how long they
get to look at a scene, unless they choose not to participate and close their
eyes.
Interview:
Tsai Ming-liang. By Devika Girish. Film Comment, August 16, 2021.
Speaking to
Tsai Ming-liang is itself like a Tsai scene. On the day of my interview with
the Taiwanese director, the whole of Potsdamer Platz—the main hub for the
Berlinale—feels emptied out of its inhabitants. His new film Days has premiered
in the competition late into the festival, after the industry presence has
largely packed up and flown out.
By this
point, the grand space of the Berlinale Palast in midday is like a shopping
mall in a zombie movie, abandoned to a splintered cadre of bodies shuffling
under an eternity’s worth of exhaustion and weariness. The revolving lights in
the main lobby casting their beams in rotating motions across the entire hall
swivel for an audience of no one.
As I arrive
sheepishly at a sitting area in a backroom of the Palast, I spot both Tsai and
his regular lead Lee Kang-sheng stretched out on a pair of wide couches. They
look as if they are relaxing at a massage retreat. Indeed, they look like the
protagonists of Days, who exist—as with all Tsai characters—as if in a dream.
They certainly do not look like they are promoting a competition film in the
beating heart of one of the world’s most bustling film festivals.
As Tsai and
I spoke, Lee sat nearby, sedately scrolling on his phone. As the interview went
on, Lee got up and wandered over to the couch opposite. Pretty soon, I could
hear the sound of his breathing as he drifted to sleep. It seemed entirely
appropriate given the languor of the film itself, which is one of Tsai’s
sleepiest and most tender movies.
Filmmaker:
Your images always have a strange depth to them. In the opening scene of Rizi,
we see Lee Kang-sheng staring forward while relaxing in a chair. Above him is
some kind of glass panel, which is reflecting the rainfall outside.
Tsai: When
we shot the first scene, a tropical storm was hitting Taiwan. That’s when Lee
was very ill. That was my living room. Through the glass, because it is
reflective, I could see the weather outside even when looking into the room. We
took a long time to get just this shot. Because I work with a photographer who
lives nearby, sometimes I will call him and ask him to come film some footage.
Filmmaker:
Is there always a clear impetus for that?
Tsai: In
this case, there was—Lee Kang-sheng, because he is sick. I want to record this
state of his sickness, I wasn’t sure exactly why. I didn’t know what I wanted
to do with this footage, with these images I was collecting. All I knew was
that I could use the materials maybe for a museum or a gallery, in an
exhibition or installation, because that’s really what I was doing at the time.
It’s not something you can stage—everything has to be natural, since after all
you cannot stage this kind of weather.
Filmmaker:
Can you pinpoint what it is about the world that draws you in—like the
reflective glass in front of the typhoon—that compels you to build a scene from
them?
Tsai: All
the details of something like this attract me on a basic level just as a
filmmaker. For me, all my frames should be like a painting, filled with these
consonant details. For example, there could be a fish intruding in the frame,
or a cat. Basically, it has to be a space alone that attracts me. Everything
else can come in and everything can go out.
Filmmaker:
These small details begin to lock together into a whole chain. Each one builds
into the next, and that extrapolates to the level of scenes.
Tsai: No
matter what, I want the frame to look good, to be beautiful. That’s first. If
they’re not beautiful enough, I would not spend the time on them. It’s really
that simple. If it does, then I can spend as much time as I need until it
arrives at the point that we can shoot it. It’s all about the idea of waiting.
Up until that point, I’m behind the camera and literally waiting for something
to happen. When it comes to editing, I have all these materials that are long
enough, making it easy for me to make choices. I can make choices between these
frames alone, of course—choose this frame before this frame, perhaps because
they echo each other. It depends on the light and sound. When it comes to
sound, well—sound is really, really important for me. In my post-production, I
want the sound to be there already. We can enhance it or whatever. But no
matter what we bring out the original element of this soundtrack.
Tsai: Yes,
there’s really no plan for this film at all. At some point I have all the
materials and then, in editing, I then think how to build a film from just
these disparate elements. Of course, if it is a dramatic scene that has direct
elements of narrative—for example the love scene in this film, when Non [Anong
Houngheuangsy] meets Kang [Lee Kang-sheng]—I wanted the lovemaking to happen
first and then the shower together. Because it has to happen in sequence so
that they can be in the mindset as performers and so that I can guide it a
little.
Filmmaker:
That love scene has its own strange and beautiful internal energy. Is that
preordained in some way or is that also spontaneous?
Tsai:
Somehow yes, it was spontaneous. I mean, we have the positions of the camera
and I make sure that the light and frame is right. Of course, also the
atmosphere for the actors had to be somehow correct. But it’s not like the
usual love scene in a film, where you have a lot of editing. I want this to
happen in real time. There were two versions of the love scene. The first we
only took two takes to finish that. Something wasn’t right. I asked if they could do it again and, yes,
the second take was perfect. Then we move onto the second version, which we
shot around four or five times. And of course, there was something not right
with the first few takes. It lacked the intensity I needed. So, we spent the
whole day and that’s how, through all this effort, we got those two versions.
Filmmaker:
And the speed on-set is, I guess, just as slow as the film?
Tsai: More
or less. [laughs] Why is it slow? Because there is no rush, no pressure. We
don’t have a team, we don’t have a large crew. Usually when you have a team you
have all these other considerations. What time is the end of this working day,
when should we have lunch and dinner? How long do we have this location? When
will we have to leave? We have the luxury of not having to think about that. We
can just take our time. When we were shooting Anong in his dormitory we had to
choose the timeslots when the other roommates would not be there. So, we had to
make sure of those things but even still, we had a lot of time. Freedom. We can
really take our time and be precise. We have one cinematographer, another
person in charge of the lights. So, it’s a very small team. We’re then able to
get these results that satisfy me.
Filmmaker;
I assume this helps with love scenes. Maybe it’s an ease of working that is
conducive to this material—
Tsai:
You’re right, but even on a bigger film it’s not so different. A lot of people
will be asked to leave the room anyway, right? [laughs] The necessary people
stick around of course. In our case, it’s always just the necessary people.
What matters most in this case is that the performers were relaxed—especially
Anong, who barely knew me before. I don’t know why but he trusted me. With that
trust we can move forward and make something satisfactory. When I’m behind a
camera, I do not give directions to my actors. I will use hand gestures. I’m
waiting for things to happen. Maybe to tell the cameraman to move the focus to
somewhere important, move a little bit here or there. What’s interesting is
that it’s a small team—we’re all very relaxed. Why? Because if you’re in a
team, you have to work with other people. You have to pull your weight. You
have to hurry. In our case, we don’t have to do that. We simply have to rely on
ourselves. We have to deal with every little thing. If there’s something wrong
with, say, the lighting then also the cameraman has to deal with that. There is
no assistant. No hair and make-up—if there’s something off about an actor’s
hair, we have to work on it. So slowly, we have to work on the details. Then
there is no pressure. In that hotel scene, for example, we didn’t have to tell
the hotel that we are shooting a film. We just closed the door [laughs]. It’s
something that really pleases me. We’re not working on a product, there’s no
commerciality here. It’s closer to painting.
Filmmaker:
The irony is that your working method is about waiting. Yet also each scene
more or less builds to a point—like a joke. As when the door closes in the
hotel and we wait for something to happen, only for the light to turn off
automatically. It’s far closer to Jerry Lewis than to other so-called “slow
cinema.”
Tsai: Well,
at the end of the day I’m a very classical person. I studied theater. I really
care about these details—they’re interesting or fun elements of the game. I
need these elements to attract the audience to make some discoveries, to find
new things inside the scene. I’m always waiting behind the camera for them to
appear. For example, with fish in a fish tank I hope and pray that they will
swim this way or that. Of course, they will not follow my directions—yet if I
wait long enough, they usually do it the way I want them to do it. It’s
waiting, all waiting. I pay attention to these details. When the light went
off, as you mentioned, it’s actually the most fun element. It reminds you that
you are actually watching this encounter in the room. It reminds you of the
traces of time.
Filmmaker:
I’m curious about bringing Anong into the process, who was a stranger you met
in a food court.
Tsai: I’m
not sure why these things—like meeting Anong—why they happen. I’m not sure.
Maybe after with Lee Kang-sheng for three decades as a collaborator I needed
something new to happen. Maybe I yearn for something new. Well, of course I
cannot just ditch Lee Kang-sheng. My camera will always be on him. But I would
say that Anong is some sort of a new stimulation.
Filmmaker:
And how did Lee’s illness change your perception of him as a performer and as
the “subject” of the film?
Tsai:
Actually, it was something magical that happened. Maybe it’s God’s will, or
God’s arrangement. Many things happened twice. Lee got sick twice—the first
time was with Miao Ten in The River (1996), and maybe I was the father in this
case because I had to ask Miao Ten to take Lee to the doctor to be treated. And
then it happened again—but now, Miao Ten is gone. And Lee is still sick. So
maybe I need a new surrogate—Anong—to come into the picture. Lee Kang-sheng is
ill again but this time he is the father figure, here for Anong. This is God’s
arrangement. Because of this my films look like reality. It’s a repetition,
again and again. It’s a reminder that tells you that this is not fresh, it’s
just something that happens again and again. Just like, well, life itself.
“There’s
Really No Plan for This Film at All”: Tsai Ming-Liang on Days. By Christopher
Small. Filmmaker Magazine, March 5, 2020.
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