Abstract
Çağlayan explores the films of Tsai Ming-liang and their relationship to Taiwan New Cinema. Tsai garnered critical praise at international film festivals due to an increasing critical interest in East Asian national waves. But his films display an incongruous mix of conflicting genre conventions, which are detailed in reference to minimalist aesthetics and camp sensibility. Tsai’s main narrational strategy preserves the rudimentary causal links between story actions but uses dead time, stillness and ambiguity in delaying narrative comprehension, resulting in a type of humour that recalls the Theatre of the Absurd. This art-historical genealogy is explored through Tsai’s use of sound, with an emphasis on incongruity as the defining element of absurdism. The analysis concentrates on Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), a film that takes cinema-going as its subject matter and the discussion concludes with the nostalgic overtones of cinephilic practice and how these debates find their critical currency in slow cinema.
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Notes
- 1.
Clearly there are exceptions to this and many European filmmakers did continue their work throughout the 1980s, such as Jacques Rivette, Theo Angelopoulos, Agnès Varda, Maurice Pialat, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Werner Schroeter and Eric Rohmer. However, their work remained in the margins and was in no way as impactful compared with the work of those mentioned here. Conversely, following the East Asian waves, the late 1980s also saw the emergence of new European talent such as Michael Haneke, Kryzystof Kieslowski, Béla Tarr and Pedro Almodóvar.
- 2.
The short film The Skywalk is Gone (Tian qiao bu jian le, 2002) functions as a narrative bridge between What Time is it There? and The Wayward Cloud by showing how Hsiao-kang ended up as a pornographic actor following the destruction of the skywalk on which he used to sell watches.
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Çağlayan, E. (2018). Tsai Ming-Liang: Less Is Absurd. In: Poetics of Slow Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96872-8_3
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