Tribute: Tsai Ming-liang

Word gets out that someone has awakened God, so Tsai heads to the temple with a digital camera to film it. But along the way, all he sees are bloody rituals, celebrations of the body and shamanic ceremonies until he discovers a gateway to the underworld. Subways, passageways, sewers, blowing wind, the harsh light of fluorescent lamps and emptiness. Perhaps there he'll find the voice of God, which is reminiscent of the silence of dead fish.

A cinephilic farewell letter, which received the Critics' Choice Award at Venice, invites you to the last screening before the final closing of a cinema in Taipei. The building was already featured in Tsai's What Time Is It There?, but this time it plays the lead role. However, its visitors didn't come for Kim Hu's 1967 wuxia film Dragon Inn, a reminder of the golden era of Taiwanese cinema. The darkened room is a shelter from the rain, a haven of memories and a place of amorous encounters and courtship. The homoerotic stuffiness, the stony, far-away faces, the food warmer and the ashtray full of cigarettes remind us of the world between the living and the dead. A nostalgic sigh for the end of the era of single-screen cinemas speaks of barriers, loneliness, alienation and loss.“Happiness and sadness are really parts of the same thing, so often the absurdity of a situation makes it seem funny, but the core of the moment is really quite sad.”Source: Reverse Shot

The iconic Zhongshan Hall in downtown Taipei was designed by architect Ide Kaoru as a public auditorium during Japanese colonial rule. The body of the aged 1936 building is now lyrically enveloped by the rays of the morning sun, giving life to static surfaces, reliefs, curves and memory preserved in matter.

The heroine of Puccini's tragic opera, set in contemporary Kuala Lumpur, is a woman in distress. Brought there by a con man who pretended to be in love, she now has no money to go home. An observational social romance about being alone in the middle of a crowd, Tsai's first film shot on digital camera appeared in the 2009 Ji.hlava IDFF programme.

The lyrical farewell letter was addressed by Tsai to Simon Field, who had just stepped down as director of the Rotterdam Film Festival after eight years. The Tamsui watercourse, where Tsai shot his film The River (1997), which was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Berlinale, had dried up. All that remains is an impression, a wasteland and a stray dog as a nostalgic shadow of old feelings.

The first of Tsai's series of films about a walking monk is based on the contrast of extremely slow movement and the hustle and bustle of the modern city. A Buddhist meditation with a plastic bag, neon signs, paint and advertisements, it provides a fascinating and hilarious reflection on a day as a monk in the middle of Hong Kong and his journey to his first bite to eat.

The slow-walking monk, played by Tsai's life partner and muse Lee Kang-sheng, who stars in all of his films, is part of the director's series of gallery “walker” films, which also include Journey to the West (2014) and Abiding Nowhere (2024). The Buddhist meditation, filmed at the Centre Pompidou in Paris as part of Tsai's retrospective, places a man in monk's robes in an art gallery or on a busy street. The spiritual is transformed into the performative, imposing new roles and meanings on the meditating figure. It transforms the monk into a living image, an exhibit, an attraction and an object of cultural encounter and passing.“The body is the most beautiful thing we have, or you could say it’s the ugliest thing we have. We can sell bodies, we can adore or worship bodies.” Source: Mubi