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English version
Tsai-Fi
Solitude I name this closed system where all things are alive.
Paul Valery
Everything I use in my films is there because I like it.
Tsai Ming-liang
In his droll 1989 book Making Meaning, the American scholar David Bordwell makes fun of a standard procedure in discussing film. Let us take shot/reverse shot cutting, proposes Bordwell. Critics like to say: if we see, as part of the same scene, one person alone in a shot, and then another person alone in another shot, it means that the film intends us to see them as emotionally far apart, separated, disconnected. But (Bordwell continues) it can also be taken to mean the exact opposite: the rhythm of the cutting, the similarity of the positioning of the figures in the frame – all that signals a union, a oneness, a deep connection between these two people! Bordwell repeats the same mock-demonstration with camera movement: if a panning or tracking shot takes us from one character, past an expanse of space, to another character, critics will unfailingly say either that this means they are secretly connected, or (on the contrary) that there is a gulf between them.
It is not hard, like Bordwell, to find this two-headed rhetorical figure everywhere, in the best as in the most mediocre writing about film: in just a matter of days, I recently encountered three very different accounts, written within the past year, of a similar mise en scène from the 1950s. First, Fred Camper on Douglas Sirk: “Throughout Sirk´s films, compositions fall into fragments. Cuts seem to split the space; camera movements alienate rather than connect”. And then, Andrew Klevan on Vincente Minnelli: “The relationships between performer, furniture and the room are maintained and the film refuses to separate, or isolate, the elements by cutting.” Finally, a newspaper journalist in Australia on a Visconti retrospective: “The camera joins and separates the characters, tracking from one to another, or zooming in on facial expressions to suggest a world fractured by incompatible points of view”. In the first case, the continuous, expansive space of the scene fragments, alienates and disconnects; in the second case, it eschews fragmentation and insists on unity; while in the third, the camera joins characters by tracking and separates them by zooming! Who’s right, who’s wrong?
Maybe we are not asking the right question. It might be enough to answer Bordwell by pointing out that such meanings, of interconnectedness or disconnectedness, are not just the handy hallucination of the critic; and that each film, in creating its own dramatic context, will subtly or unsubtly instruct us on how to read the emotional and thematic significance of its stylistic devices. OK, argument settled – at least within the framework of an essentially classical, organic aesthetic. But there is another way to attack this matter, and it is more philosophical. Let us turn to Gilles Deleuze’s meditation on the films of Kenji Mizoguchi in his Cinema 1: The Movement-Image: " … this seems to us to be the essential element in what have been called the extravagant camera-movements in Mizoguchi: the sequence-shot ensures a sort of parallelism of vectors with different orientations and thus constitutes a connexion of heterogeneous fragments of space, thus giving a very special homogeneity to the space thus constituted. (…) It is not the line which unites into a whole, but the one which connects or links up the heterogenous elements, while keeping them heterogeneous. (…) Lines of the universe have both a physics – which reaches its peak in the sequence-shot and the tracking-shot – and a metaphysics, constituted by Mizoguchi’s themes".
What a concept to boggle Bordwell’s mind: the camera movement which is (to paraphrase Deleuze) a line which connects what is disconnected, while keeping it disconnected! Yet this is precisely the complexity of what we are given to see, as spectators, in a film by Mizoguchi or so many other filmmakers: this ambiguous or ambivalent interplay of what connects or disconnects, links or unlinks, the people and objects and elements of the world.
Another example: look at all the hesitation, the yearning, the maybe-it-will-happen-maybe-it-won’t tension that fills up the immortal seconds near the end of Jean Renoir’s masterpiece Partie de campagne (1936) - itself a poignantly uncompleted work, and yet such a perfectly formed piece of crystal: there is the camera-movement that tracks with Henri (Georges St Saens), that can hardly frame him or keep him in its path as he rushes, slows, stops, as if to take refuge behind a small, hanging tree branch; then there is the whip-movement that finds, with his gaze and yet not in it, his former lover of a single day, Henriette (Sylvia Bataille), who then turns and sees him and tentatively moves forward, the camera now accompanying her; and finally the shot/reverse cutting from his face to hers, first in close-up (the background out-of-focus) then, in quick succession, over-the-shoulder framings, ending with exits from the frame, the solitary gesture of smoking and lighting a cigarette, a heavily blurred background … Can we unambiguously say that this a case of either connection (harmony, union) or disconnection (discord, separation)? So much happens in this rich fragment, so many steps, revisions, erasures, projected possibilities, dreams suddenly come true or just as suddenly extinguished, all in the successive interplay of bodies, movements, looks; as well as in the respective analytical positions taken by the camera, whether it is static or moving, anticipating the cut or suspending it. This scene is more than what simply unfolds as a spectacle before our eyes; it is also the sum of everything that could have happened, might have happened, will never happen, from one frame to the next, between these two people and their surroundings … the sum, in other words, of everything that is both real and virtual in the deep structure of the story and the situation. Within this sort of structure, cuts or camera-movements can indeed function as philosophical, as well as personal and socio-cultural mysteries: we cannot easily say what will bring us together, or tear us apart, at what precise moment, how or why.
In the cinema of the great Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, we once again encounter both a physics and a metaphysics – and here, at least, our hesitation over whether he means to connect or disconnect the pieces of the world can hardly be incidental, since it is the central subject of all his work. Here, too, the realms of the actual and the virtual are closely imbricated, often hard to prise apart, always nestled within each other. Even when Tsai uses (like Chantal Akerman) the most typically modernist, Michelangelo Antonioni-like composition – a person alone in an urban, architectural frame, moving doggedly along one single line or vector such as riding an escalator, following a street, or walking down a train platform – there is a feeling less of atomisation, the lonely individual pulverised within the arches of concrete and glass, than of some possible, as yet invisible or impossible meeting/collision of bodies and lines which is held out, projected into our minds, creating a delicate suspense. Each image throbs with a latent connection that could at any moment be made manifest – and this feeling is what raises Tsai’s cinema above the more determinist prison-structures of a Michael Haneke or a Peter Greenaway, where the isolated vectors hold tight, and the fiction only confirms their crushing, indomitable weight.
Tsai uses what Manny Farber called negative space: the dynamic potential in a picture-frame that can be suggested, circled, blocked, released. Except when he goes in completely the other direction, into what Alain Bergala baptised the aquarium shot, in which there is no longer any empty space left in the frame or even outside it; when everything is crowded in, cramped, and the picture is fully filled, whether for comic-nightmarish effect (the heroine trapped on a crowded Paris train in What Time Is It There? [2001]), or to deliver the clinch of an excruciating, not-quite or not-yet reciprocated intimacy (the lesbian bedtime encounter in What Time?, a man kissing his sleeping object of gay desire in Vive l’amour [1994]). But even these tight squeezes with nothing left over create a terrific tension that can be exploited and exploded at some other moment of the film.
Whether negative space or aquarium shot, we have the continuation of a very modern aesthetic in Tsai. It was first contemplated cinematically, intuitively, by Rivette in the early ‘60s Cahiers (based on the ‘new music’ systems of Pierre Boulez and others of that era) in relation (surprisingly) to the films of Elia Kazan; and then passes through the late ‘60s and ‘70s era of radical montage (Vera Chytilová, Dusan Makavejev, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Jean-Daniel Pollet); formalised into parameters within the living laboratory of Noël Burch’s Theory of Film Practice; in order to arrive finally at Deleuze’s conceptions of the time-image and crystal-image, or (more philosophically) the fold and the rhizome. In all these models and experiments, the shot in cinema becomes less a quantifiable unit, with fixed functions in a linear chain, than a cell whose elements, levels and layers are multiple, free-floating and easily dispersed to form vital, complex relations across an entire film – and the same goes for all the hallowed units of cinematic narrative: gesture, shot, scene, sequence, act, part, half, whole …
To think of cinema atomically, in terms of the dynamic functioning of a cell or nucleus, offers a way to free oneself from the prison of mise en scène as only filmed theatre, as ‘depth staging’ (as Bordwell calls it) within a singular, co-extensive and coherent scene – which, as a critical practice, performed richly for the likes of Max Ophuls and F.W. Murnau, but tends to shrivel up at the threshold of about 1960, in the face of Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard and all who are to follow them. The modern cinema of the fold belongs to artists like Theo Angelopoulos, Sergei Paradjanov and Béla Tarr who, as they cross vast tracts of space and collapse great chunks of time within the shot-tableau, create waves of movement, transcending any one shot, that link up diverse plateaux inhabiting many parts of a film, forming both compacted times and multiple times, what Rosenbaum calls the nonnarrative (but not anti-narrative) of works like Resnais’ Mélo (1986) – which is very close, as a concept, to Deleuze’s crystal time-image. And this is very different from the literary-derived aesthetic model of rhymes or motifs in a film adding up, through careful repetition and variation, to a magma of thematic meanings (an approach which too often abstracts cinema into a kind of synopsis of profound moral lessons, leaving the pleasure and materiality of the actual images and sounds behind in its wake). In the modern cinema of Tsai, Abel Ferrara and others, we enter a heady figural economy of elements that are constantly being transformed, extended, reversed, doubled or shrunk in intensity, a dynamic economy that can find its inspiration (if not its ultimate interpretation) in psychic processes of condensation, displacement, investment, denial, fantasy projection …
This cellular conception of cinema is a poetic construction, no doubt – but one in which poetry (or ‘the poetic’) no longer signifies a vague, ambient moodiness (as it so often does in a hyper-decorative, overly designed contemporary cinema), a merely poetic effect; but rather a solid structure – material and virtual at the same time, conscious and unconscious in its apprehension by the spectator – which depends upon what Gaston Bachelard called the “vertical instant” of poetic superimposition and interrelation. And, just as Bachelard defined this superimposed instant as one in which “ambivalent sentiments could co-exist without being reduced to antithesis, simultaneity or succession”, we must come to Tsai with an effort to clear out the thematic and (worse) moralistic clutter that arrives with interpreting the ‘chains of events’ in his films as matters of cause-and-effect, or semantic opposition, or an implacable modern destiny … After all, even in Mizoguchi – who for Deleuze “reaches an extreme limit of the action-image: when a world of misery undoes all the lines of the universe, allowing a reality to surge forth which is no longer anything but disoriented, disconnected” – we have to account for the exhilaration that accompanies even the bitterest end, even the most crushingly tragic insight, this transcendent and very full reward (but achieved so materially) for the viewer, if not the filmic characters. This undoubtedly has much to do with the spiritual aspect of Tsai’s work as a devout Buddhist, but also an inquisitive believer who sizes up life within Asian and European modernity: Bérénice Reynaud comments of the digital short A Conversation with God (aka Underground, 2001) that he "revisits his own belief system, his own emotional attachment to Chinese tradition, and wonders aloud how, in a hyper-industrialised country where pollution kills fish, a Malaysian expatriate can still turn to a [psychic] medium for comfort, while finding God’s footprints in the tired smile of a stripper, or the pale glitter of a traffic light at night".
More apparently (and provocatively) with each new work, Tsai’s films can in fact be thought of as comedies; Tsai, like Raúl Ruiz, is a director who makes profoundly funny films that are sometimes absolutely not recognised as such. Some spectators can only see the despair, the ennui, the tears! But such pathos only befits fully fleshed-out psychological characters, not the kind of performing figures that Tsai so lovingly sketches, attenuates and circulates (this misplaced, oh-so-humanist pathos – talking about half-formed, alienated egos and so forth – is what is wrong with much writing on Tsai). For what are human tears in a Tsai Ming-liang film? Both Vive l’amour and The Wayward Cloud (2005) end with a flood of tears, or a single tear, rolling down a woman’s face. And we must take the director entirely at his word when he says that he regards his characters less as three-dimensional people in a conventional drama than as plants in need of water. To cry is, first and foremost, a liberation, a release of water from the human body – a release for these bodies, in every Tsai film, who endlessly drink from water bottles whether it is swelteringly hot or pouring down rain, and who, in a perfect corporeal cycle, pass this water out of the lower half of their system when they piss into the toilet or into various containers. At least a hundred commentators all over the film-globe have already speculated about the role of water in Tsai: it contains and expresses everything, both indifferently and dynamically, or rather it is the perfect, fluid way of connecting everything (it is the perfect abstract machine as Deleuze and Guattari would say), because it is at once natural (of, from, in the world), social (bottled, rationed, channelled, polluted) and bodily (ingested and expelled, and in fact so much of the human body is constitutively water … ). The absence or blockage of water can lead to absolute catastrophe (The Hole, 1998) or an entire regime of perversion-by-watermelon (The Wayward Cloud). And finally, all these categories and functions of water are so completely confused: a gay steam-bath house, what is that, ancient tradition, modern perversion, or simple human need and expression? Tsai is matter-of-fact about all this water and its symbolism, simply declaring to his exegetical interviewer-interrogators: I like to take long, hot baths …
The streams of water (torrential streams, love streams, disease streams) lead us directly to the deepest poetic mysteries of these films. The tear on the cheek of Chen Shiang-chyi at the end of The Wayward Cloud is no different from – and in fact finds its perfect, lyrical, vertical-poetic complement in – the sweat on the buttocks of the man (Lee Kang-sheng) who has his cock in her mouth at that very moment. Tsai says that he tells his crew always to film sex scenes as if they were porno scenes, rather low-class and dirty, or perhaps just brutally matter-of-fact: that’s because the body in his films is a machine-organism, water going in and water going out, tension and release, anxiety and relaxation – and thus the base sexuality of porno is not an alienated-spectacular condition separate from ourselves or brutally forced upon us by society, but rather, as Tsai says, “also a part of reality”. In this waterworld which is the cinema of Tsai Ming-liang, sex and toiletry are never far away from each other: a breathtaking, foundational cut in The River (1997) takes us from the request of a woman to her male friend (Lee as always) that the hotel lights be turned off and the curtain drawn so that she can pee in private in the dark, to this couple frantically fucking in the same, sequestered darkness. They kiss, too, which is unusual for porno but characteristic of Tsai: kissing is like crying, the excess of intimacy in the everyday body-machine doing the rounds of its functions.
These body-machines – what sort of characters are they attached to? I do not mean: what sort of personality types (depressive, obsessive, melancholy, paranoid, etc), but rather, what very conception of the human creature is being offered to us here, what combination of elements (behavioural traits, physical experiences, drives and habits, conscious and unconscious mental processes, a spirit or soul, incarnated or reincarnated, the imprinting of socio-historical traces, etc) pulled apart and recombined to form a speculative model – unique to this film or this œuvre – of a fictional person? This is not a matter of choosing to be either (woundedly) humanist or (modishly) anti-humanist in one’s intellectual or political approach to cinema, but rather of putting the very category of the human itself precisely into question. Film criticism (this is its great fault, its original sin) always takes for granted, too easily and too quickly, that characters in a movie should be regarded, described, identified with and judged just as we would with our friends and family members and lovers or indeed anybody simply encountered on the street two minutes ago – as full (or lacking) egos, as happy (or sad) people, with fulfilled (or unfulfilled) destinies, winning (or losing) their moral values, etc, etc. But if the cinema has any role as a philosophy-in-action, it should be to make us ask, for a change, just what truly constitutes those human beings we encounter in ‘real life’ – a reflection made possible by the detour through all the artifices and assemblages of fiction.
Tsai-fi (if I may so call it) crystallises the nub of this mystery (or laboratory) of the human being in the opening plot premise of The River: this guy, floating face-down in a dirty urban river (for a film crew, simply because some old girlfriend and her director asked him to, and he idly agreed to do it, maybe for a few bucks or a free lunch or for fun) – is he the figure of the already-living-dead, the victim-to-come of a sick society, or just another guy wandering as usual from situation to situation? Narrative cause and effect are irreparably severed in this film; nothing is clear in its connections, only the individual, isolated gestures and situations are conveyed with absolute clarity and limpidity – all the way to where we at last confront the unthinkable totem and taboo of father-son incest. Exactly what, where, is the river in this film? Is it the river he floats in at the beginning? Maybe, but can we so certainly say, Hollywood melo-style, that ‘the trouble all started there’? Is it the rain that forever falls and gathers and empties in the family home – or the more cultural water-flow (water sport) organised at the gay bathhouse? It is hard not to feel, by the end of this frightening and majestic film (one of the few, alongside Todd Haynes’ Safe [1995], to really look into the inexplicable condition of scary, psychosomatic modern illness – which itself reposes, even more urgently, all those philosophical questions about what a human being truly is and how it truly works), that the river in question is a more abstract kind of wave, Tarkovskyean in its gravity and force. A force that, quite literally, seems to impel the camera to at last move forward, slowly and surely, in the ultimate or penultimate scenes of The River and The Wayward Cloud, beyond the strict, linear, realistic logic (if there’s any of that left here) of plot or character. (Tsai, like Carl Dreyer or Ritwik Ghatak or Manoel de Oliveria or Michael Mann, is a master at engineering these mysteriously fated moments, generated from within the deepest recesses of the film-text, where the camera just has to move in or around or along as part of a revelatory or epiphanic climax, in a kind of ceremonial rightness which also occasions a tremendous – and oft-times obscure – emotional release in us.)
At the start of Vive l’amour, a man (Lee Kang-sheng) repeatedly tries to slash his wrists with a pocket knife; at the end of the film, a woman (Yang Kuei-mei) sits down on a park bench and cries for five full minutes. Why does either person perform these acts? Tsai’s films give us no answers and offer no clues. There is no inner pathology or neurosis in his characters; no history of trauma or loss. What has happened before the film is irrelevant, and what happens after is unknowable. Of course, as viewers, we can invoke the sadness and desperation of modern life, the alienation and soullessness of a big city like Taipei. But there is, finally, little or no social analysis in Tsai’s work. The world is simply what it is in his films: a weight, minutely oppressive and grindingly boring. But also a maze, a labyrinth for the staging of a certain kind of amorphous, ever-present desire: unrequited desire, a desire of thwarted gazes, furtive gestures and misdirected stratagems, fixed on a someone who is either absent, out-of-synch or otherwise occupied. All eroticism, whether gay or straight or something straddling the standard options, takes the form of cruising: people stalk each other, strike casually exhibitionistic poses, say nothing. Ten, twenty minutes of such games roll on before a single word is spoken in several of his films (and conventional soundtrack music, beyond the segregated eruption of song-and-dance fantasies, will remain absent at all times).
The signature image-sound of every Tsai film since Vive l’amour – that highly personal career breakthrough, where form perfectly matches content, achieved after his apprenticeship in scriptwriting, television and the still tentative and somewhat compromised Rebels of the Neon God (1992) – is borrowed from Robert Bresson. We see an empty public space – some emblem of modern architecture that exists only to be traversed by all, yet not inhabited by any one person, like the endless stairs of a high-rise apartment block stairs, a train station passageway, or the steps that connect the split levels of a pad. We begin to hear, crystal-clear, from off-screen, the sound of footsteps, shoes on concrete or wood: just like Bresson, Tsai records or re-records every clack-clack of this soundtrack with infinite care. It’s a small, mini-spectacle of Hitchcockian suspense, translated purely into the formal terms of the shot, the space, the sound: who is going to enter, and from where? Every empty space in Tsai is a space waiting to be filled; and when it is not filled, or only half-filled, we register the absence and the longing, seeping into every image and situation. (Among the most beautiful and understated images of this type in his work: Yang Kuei-mei lying back on the mattress in Vive l’amour, she looking at the empty space next to her – the space where her lover Chen Chao-jung previously was – which the frame defines for us as an aching absence, a missing half of the composition.)
But finally, in this signature shot, the sound gets louder, and a body enters; it makes its way through the space, into and out of the shot, and we keep listening to the clack-clack, now with the wistfulness of a pop song fading out on the radio. Tsai marks time and energises space (with a very special minimalist tension that Chantal Akerman, too, has mastered) in this shot, and he also creates the condition for a certain circulation: the space, the place, will always exist in this form that it has been carved into the screen, monumentalised by the static camera and its angle. But the bodies will change: man, woman, young, old, parent, child – and in this circulation, everybody is different and everybody is the same, since one person can so easily metamorphose into any other … (This endless circulation of metamorphosing people and objects – objects as people, people as objects – contributes to the curious pan-sexuality, which is also an asexuality, of Tsai’s cinema: while the open secret of its deepest desiring-engine is certainly the centrality of Lee Lang-shang as less Tsai’s Jean-Pierre Léaud than his Anna Karina, the films themselves cover all sexual bases and possibilities, and also seem to erase them all… )
The circulation of phantom-like bodies through these etched-in places also creates another kind of suspense on a larger-scale form: a very peculiar kind of narrative suspense. Tsai’s scenarios are constructed as architectures, architectonic forms, diagrams that are traced as various movements around a city-grid defined by particular points (apartment, home, pinball parlour, skywalk, bathhouse … ). Narrative plot becomes, first and foremost, the plotting of points and movements on a map – something we know from the most formalist kind of multi-character/multi-story thread films set in single cities. Tsai enhances a key possibility in this plot structure: through the repetition and circulation of the characters’ passages – through the unfolding force of this combinatory logic – these sites become highly charged spaces of not simply potential intersection, but more powerfully a full-blown encounter. The particular tension of his films comes from the way in which we anticipate and watch for these encounters, some of which we desire, and others we may dread: all three characters of the daisy-chain on or under the bed in Vive l’amour, father and son at the bathhouse in The River, the man and woman in the porno section of the video-shop in The Wayward Cloud … From this angle, the core of Tsai’s career is the short The Skywalk is Gone (2002) which, over twenty elegant minutes, continues to chart the twin, separate courses of the characters from What Time Is It There?. Except now, these characters are back in the same city of Taipei (a city that, as we see, is forever changing around them, in perpetual and brutal re-development) – but the whole point of the piece will be to show them, in the central cell-shot, passing each other (clack-clack up and down a wide flight of public stairs … ) without really recognising each other, and then shooting off in opposite directions after this instant of intersection, away again to their separate plots.
Insofar as Tsai’s films show people (frequently alone) in the midst of everyday tasks and situations (although it is never really an agonising temps mort: even smoking a cigarette is a thoroughly absorbing activity, for us and for the doer), and insofar as they evoke a kind of real-time in their concentrated duration, they seem to some viewers and critics to be the acme of a certain realist, even hyper-realist cinema. But the intense, rigorous stylisation of Tsai’s work – the effortless way they announce to us, at the start of each new film, that we are stepping into his world, his poetic universe, not the real world – suggests another way of looking into his psyche-less characters. Whether intentionally or not (perhaps more pointedly so as his career has diversified into theatre and the art gallery), Tsai’s films owe a lot to a great tradition of performance art that has existed since at least the 1960s: the kind that involves simply the methodical carrying out of actions, whether banal, surreal, or ultra-rational, like emptying the contents of one sand bucket into another, or (as in Godard’s La Chinoise [1967], an earlier film influenced by performance ‘happenings’) repainting an entire wall in a single, primary colour. One of the most extreme sequences of this sort in Tsai is the solitary game in The Wayward Cloud in which Chen walks about with a large watermelon, as if pretending to be pregnant.
Such performance art routinely suspends all psychology and character history, just as Tsai’s films do: there is nothing but a body before us, a space they inhabit, and an activity they perform. Part of the inventiveness and inspiration of Tsai’s cinema lies in the way that, film after film, he finds ever finer, more unusual rituals of action within everyday settings. This reaches a zenith in Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), where the woman in the cinema searches among the seats for her fallen shoe. The given reality, the everydayness of situations seems to slowly bend right out of shape as his characters doggedly go about pursuing one or other of these strange actions, just as it did for Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati in their created worlds: rolling a watermelon like a bowling ball in Vive l’amour, scooping up crabs off the shiny kitchen floor in The Wayward Cloud, lovingly preparing and depositing the bun in the projectionist’s booth in Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Sometimes there are even outright burlesque or slapstick gags, like the two fleeing guys, both daintily holding up their shoes, inadvertently meeting on the landing in Vive l’amour.
In much performance art, since it is a particularly attenuated, purified form of theatre, the singular space or décor (which is never switched for another – if not left intact, it is either grandly transformed or even destroyed, as we often see in Michael Snow’s work) assumes an especially hermetic, shut-in aspect. It becomes a place imprinted by time, by the time it takes for the ritual gestures within it to be carried out. The kinship of this artistic mode with Tsai’s cinema should already be obvious. But there is a further intensification of the theatre-cinema interchange in the way that Tsai turns his singular spaces into what Valery called closed systems: apartments (in particular) that buzz with an intense life, criss-crossed by the mini-trajectories of each character (as in The River), divided into zones, permeated at its very edges by incoming and outgoing openings (the rain that comes in, the plumbing that goes out). For all intents and purposes, these are rooms cut off from the outside world – so accordingly, within them, characters develop zany, obsessive rituals (such as the way Lee in What Time? Watches François Truffaut’s classic The 400 Blows [1959], complete with realignments of his own body to match the movement of young Léaud on the spinning fairground attraction). It is easy to think of these spaces, metaphorically, as sound-proof prisons – Thierry Jousse was inspired by Tsai to portray the central musician in Les Invisibles (2005) in precisely this way – and hence one logical reflex is to start slowly chipping one’s way out, Lee in The Hole resembling in this respect the Resistance hero of Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956). But must we therefore settle, as many commentators do, on the easy-to-hand symbolism of urban, high-rise alienation? On another level, these spaces are indeed very much like aquariums – and actual aquariums sometimes feature in them, with their indomitable fish circulating, eating, living out some kind of mysterious existence at which humans can only gaze and wonder … Moreover, separate apartments can also be – this is the premise of The Hole, and also to an extent The Wayward Cloud – what the Surrealists called communicating vessels: distinct realms that resonate with each other, that enter into some kind of correspondence or exchange, while maintaining their individual identity. The ending of The Hole, with its improbable vision of the transportation of a human body through a previously pesky, recalcitrant and unrelenting gap (in what is one person’s roof and another person’s floor), is the very image of this much longed-for communication between vessels.
What do Tsai’s films say to us, propose to us, finally? Mystery reigns over their intent as much as their content. For instance, What Time is It There? is, from one angle, a haunting, even cautionary tale (like Haneke’s Code Unknown, 2000) for an age and a culture obsessed with the supposed cosmopolitan freedoms and privileges of an instantly globalised, omni-connected world (this is what I argued at the end of the Movie Mutations book – and that was before the truly dazed and confused ‘foreign’ figures, the Japanese characters in Goodbye, Dragon Inn and The Wayward Cloud started appearing in force in Tsai’s work). But we are far here from the slick fantasies of a Les poupées russes (Russian Dolls, Cédric Klapisch, 2005). What Time? sets in motion a haunting, parallel story: a young woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) travels to Paris, but before she does so she buys a watch from a man (Lee Kang-sheng) at a street stall in Taipei. For the rest of the film, this odd couple – who will never be together in the same space again – are viewed along their mutually bleak trajectories. Where the woman is reminded at every turn of her own foreignness in Paris, suffering the loneliness and misery that come from being disconnected from French language, culture and customs, the man enters into a twilight Francophile obsession – changing every clock he sees (even a giant, public one on a tower) to Paris time, and obsessively watching The 400 Blues, the star of which pops up in Paris, forty-two years older, sitting next to our lost heroine at a cemetery.
Everything in the film harps on the fragmentation and unalignment of our modern ‘across the universe’ experiences: the time zones don’t match, the languages clash at cross-purposes and, however fervently the hero’s mother tries to contact the spirit of her recently deceased husband, he is going to pop up again, reincarnated, where he is least expected: in Paris, walking serenely away from the camera towards a giant Ferris Wheel. Dead in the cut between the film’s first shot and its second; returned in elegance at the very final shot, but of absolutely no use to the heroine whose pilfered suitcase implacably drifts across the pool behind her as she sleeps: what more extraordinary figure of existential displacement or décalage than this sublime ‘walking man’ who seems to cruise beyond even his former, paternal role?
But that is only one way – a decidedly pessimistic way – of interpreting this film. We need to account for the strange sense of elation and lightness we can get from watching Tsai’s work, just as we must account for the tremendous blast of energy or strength we can get today from the seemingly most negative, apocalyptic films (such as those of Philippe Grandrieux, David Lynch, Larry Clark or even late Bresson). Looking at the characters and their travails, toting up what happens to them and evaluating where they end up, once again takes us only so far into the true beauty of Tsai’s work. In his review of What Time?, Jonathan Rosenbaum emphasised the “intricate formal rhyme schemes” that bind the characters rather than underlining their eternal misalignment or a dark destiny that cancels any possibility of a rendezvous between them. The film operates (according to this view) on a very Eastern “mystical notion of cosmic equivalences” that has the power to bring the dead back in contact with the living, and to surmount the merely geographical or social obstacles that litter our paths.
And where does this magical convergence take place? Not for the characters, but precisely in the mind of the spectator, that vanishing point towards which the film directs all its games, its invention, its wit, its formal energy. In Tsai, as in Rivette, Sohrab Shahid Saless or Darezhan Omirbaev, we find the expression of a paradox which is peculiarly cinematic: so much loneliness (Rosenbaum ranks him among Rivette and Nicholas Ray as the medium’s “poets of loneliness”) in the midst of the ‘lonely crowd’ of the modern city, but so much aliveness (rather than alienated misery) in that solitude, “this closed system where all things are alive” as Valery said; and an intense address to the film spectator who is, himself or herself, also alone, and also connected (as a film watcher) to a community or crowd, even if only in a virtual or possible way, as a ‘fish in an aquarium’ as Thierry Jousse has recently imagined it. Rosenbaum trembles at the brink of a philosophy of connection and disconnection when he plaintively but deeply writes of Rivette’s Haut bas fragile (1995) – and one can say the same of all of Tsai’s major films – that they explore “the joys and sorrows of being alone and of being with someone else”.
Poets of loneliness tend to be fixated on fantasies of fusion, sublime moments of oneness – imagining, anticipating, contemplating, weighing up both the possibility and impossibility of such a thing ever happening in the world as we know it. I mentioned earlier the power and pull of unrequited love, with all its attendant cruising and spying, in Tsai’s work; this aspect tends to go hand in hand with the role given (since The Hole) to musical fantasy scenes based on old Asian pop songs (by Grace Chang and others) of which Tsai is very fond – songs that take the form either of melancholy soliloquies or imaginary love-stories.
In Movie Mutations I spoke of the superb logic of the song-and-dance scenes in The Hole in terms of the conventions and structures of the conventional (especially Hollywood) musical, a genre frequently devoted to the dream of a transcendent Utopia. As fantasy sequences, the songs are ambiguous: we cannot say definitely that they are being dreamt or imagined by the characters, although Tsai (here as in The Wayward Cloud) is careful to provide some playfully pensive or nodding-off transitions (but only at the start of a song, never at the end). The story’s location (an apartment block during an apocalypse of disease) remains in situ for the duration of all the songs; we never leave this physical world for another, as in many musicals. But this grim, worldly stage is dressed and prettified – in (as it happens) all the objects, such as hanging, fluttering material and rolls of fabric, that recall motifs and props from the locked-in spaces of the two apartments, his and hers: the tissues with which the woman endlessly tries to mop up her space, or the paper peeling off the walls. In the ‘70s, Richard Dyer proposed that musical utopias conjure abundance - physical, material abundance - where, elsewhere in reality, there is only scarcity. Tsai gives this convention a bitterly ironic but also utterly disarming twist (his musical staging is at once both wonderfully inventive and starkly diagrammatic – with the borders of the frames carving out fragile units of ephemeral magic). In the context of the economically pinched Taiwan shown in The Hole – in fact an exhausted, sick and dying city, thanks to the sci-fi concept of the piece – every element in these song sequences is abundant, overflowing, a fantasy of consumption: surplus, wasteful materials, plus chorus lines of adoring, interchangeable men and women … a stage-world that is very different from that other, real world in which not even one man and one woman can connect, except in the impossible image of union with which the film ends.
In fact, another of the magnetic poles of Tsai’s cinema that holds the ensemble of his work tightly and perfectly in place is the poetic rightness of the missed or lost or impossible encounter – poetically right, because it allows the fantasy to keep on functioning, forever, from one film to the next, with the same actors’ bodies, even the same fictive characters circulating (as across the loose/possible trilogy of What Time?, The Skywalk is Gone and The Wayward Cloud). Why do Tsai’s missed encounters sometimes strike us as expressing a lightness – almost that sweet, pop, Hollywood romantic-comedy lightness of ‘ships passing in the night’ – rather than the heaviness of that ultimate non-encounter film directed by the protégé himself, Lee Kang-sheng’s The Missing (2003)?
Perhaps because fusion, if and when it actually occurs, is no feast in a Tsai film. The father-son encounter in The River provides a moment of blessed relief from an inexplicable nervous illness, but opens a rift in quotidian reality that can only be uneasily papered over and suppressed the next morning, in the bright sunlight. The Wayward Cloud remains sweet (Tsai’s best love story so far) as long as Chen and Lee stay alternately looking at each other sleeping on a children’s swing, or having fun making dinner together – child or adolescent play stuff. The final sexual encounter on the porno set, however – in some sense a major moment of transgression on all levels (spatial, formal, narrative, breaking down the separation of different worlds or milieu) that Tsai’s entire cinema has, in a sense, been moving towards, tempting, daring – is a thoroughly ambiguous and ambivalent ‘vertical instant’, sublime and shocking, satisfying and disquieting, all at once. Throughout the film – from the elaborate doctor-and-nurse watermelon fantasy that follows the classic, static opening shot of paths crossing (clack-clack) in a wide-angled public thoroughfare – Tsai has maintained a careful ambiguity about the level or status of many (if not all) scenes in the film: are they from am embedded film-within-the-film, in someone’s head, a virtual/possible event, or a narratively real event? All this ambiguity impacts on the final scene, with the incongruity of the airline hostess cardboard cut-out prominently in view, the surreal disappearance of the crew in the final minutes, not to mention the distressing black comedy of the comatose or dead Japanese actress (Sumomo Yozakura) ceaselessly manoeuvred and propped up as a sex doll/partner.
Is this vacillation in the final scene’s status a way for Tsai, as filmmaker, to artfully avoid the shock and horror of ‘the real’, in the Lacanian sense? A way of hedging his bets? We come back to the beguiling mixture of tact and directness, unrequited dreaminess and pornographic physicality, hopeless nostalgia (“everything was better then”, he says in the short Moonlight Over the Water [2004]) and uncompromising modernity in this cinema. There is something more profound than an evasion or a smokescreen in this combination of moves and moods. So let us return, finally, to the enigmatic figure of the father, vanished for almost the entirety of What Time Is It There? except for its bookend first and last shots. He is truly a creature of the cinema, ‘gone in the splice’ as Rivette and his comrades once said of the heroine of Dreyer’s Gertrud (1964), but riding a subterranean wave of the text that rescues him form oblivion and deposits him beyond any character’s point-of-view for his ultimate, graceful exit. Does he represent sadness and loss, or the possibility of a new beginning? Perhaps it is better avoid the blade of that negative/positive choice and say, rather, that he stands, in his own, proud, vertical instant, for the very possibility of nonnarrative as Rosenbaum conjured it: the layering of times, the multiplication of identities … which is, ultimately, a more secretive, more furtive kind of Utopia than the kind held out to us by the dreams of Hollywood (or Asian) musicals. To take this line of flight still further, another way to think of this character is as the embodiment of Giorgio Agamben’s sad, wise but not at all tragic philosophic musing: that life is always what is experienced either before the feast (too early) or after the feast (too late) but never at or in the oneness or fusion of the feast – because that fusion is not merely ephemeral or tricky or treacherous, but fundamentally an illusion. No one, Tsai and his actor-characters included, can live entirely beyond illusion; but they can perhaps better learn, or sense, how to cruise the most secret waves of their own infinite circulation.
Bibliographical note: I am indebted to – sometimes by virtue of implicitly arguing with – a number of key texts on Tsai: the book on his work published in 2000 by Dis Voir, the essays or reviews by Yvette Bíró and my editorial colleagues in Rouge, Chris Fujiwara in Undercurrent, Kent Jones in Movie Mutations, Chris Berry in Falling For You: Essays on Cinema and Performance, Robin Wood in Film International and Cineaction, and Jonathan Rosenbaum in Chicago Reader.
