On August 6, Tsai Ming-liang will be bestowed with a career-celebrating Honorary Leopard Award at the Locarno Film Festival.
Adding to the plethora of prizes he has won at nearly each and every A-list festival in a career spanning across four decades – a Golden Lion from Venice, two Silver Bears from Berlin, a Golden Hugo from Chicago and a Fipresci gong from Cannes – the Swiss accolade has cemented the 65-year-old cineaste’s standing as one of the most acclaimed Asian artists of his generation.
Tsai is renowned among festival programmers and critics for his frank and amicable demeanour, something the festival will harness in the form of an on-stage conversation between the director and film critic Kevin B. Lee after a screening of his 2020 feature Days on August 3. The talk should be useful in understanding the complexities shaping Tsai’s personal and creative trajectory across geographical and multimedia boundaries – it’s always perilous to try and brand him with reductive, sleight-of-hand descriptions.
Don’t (just) call Tsai “Taiwanese”. He may have spent most of his life in Taiwan, a country he has repeatedly thanked for hosting and supporting his work, but he arrived on the island when he was 20. Born in the city of Kuching, on the Malaysian part of Borneo Island, Tsai hails from a family with roots in southern China, an ancestry still evident in his ability to speak Cantonese in addition to Mandarin and Taiwanese. It was in Malaysia that his cinephilia began under the influence of his film-loving grandparents; it was there that he first contributed essays to the local press, organized drama clubs at school, and earned pocket money as a construction worker before he left for Taipei for university.
In an interview in a Taiwanese magazine in 1998, Tsai said he grew up in an environment that was “purely Chinese”, an experience which may have helped him integrate himself into his new life in Taipei. In the same interview, however, he recalled how his first teenage essays were all rejected by editors because they were corny facsimiles of famed Taiwanese romance novelist Chiung Yao. He only found success when he ditched that Taiwanese pretence in his first published essay about the quiet, tranquil landscapes he grew up in.
His upbringing in the tropical and comparatively sluggish setting of Sarawak left a very visible mark on the way he has envisioned space and time in his films: sweaty loners in wet places moving about very, very slowly. His kindred spirit in cinema would most probably be fellow Southeast Asian director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Both mix visual experiments with nuggets of popular culture – pop music, genre films – which fascinated them as children.
Don’t bracket Tsai as part of “Taiwanese New Cinema”, either. His trademark slow-moving camerawork and long takes might have led the uninitiated to lump him with Hou Hsiao-hsien, just as some have drawn comparisons between his reflections on the urban landscapes and psyches of fast-changing Taipei and those of Edward Yang.
Tsai, however, should never be considered as part of the movement which transformed Taiwanese cinema in the 1980s. Having graduated from university in 1982, he spent the decade writing and directing plays and TV series before finally making his first feature film, Rebels of the Neon God, in 1991.
More importantly, however, the younger, Malaysian-born Tsai had much less (if any) emotional attachment to the tragic political upheavals in mid-20th century Taiwan. By the time he arrived in Taipei, incumbent president Chiang Ching-kuo had begun to loosen the tight political and social controls put in place by his autocratic father Chiang Kai-shek. And when Tsai began to pen his first screenplays for TV and then films, Taiwan has already become a proper, functional democracy. Tsai and his contemporaries (now generally known as the “Second Wave”, with Ang Lee also among them) never really shared the traumas felt by the (older) Taiwanese New Cinema stalwarts like Hou, Yang, Wang Tong or Ko I-chen.
While his predecessors delivered period dramas or allegorical tales about Taiwanese history – films like Hou’s A City of Sadness, Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day and Wang’s Straw Man – Tsai eschewed the macro for the micro. His own “Taipei Trilogy” (Rebel of the Neon God, Vive L’Amour and The Hole) was focused more on the disintegration of well-knit communities (especially Taipei’s downtown entertainment hub of Ximending), family structures and interpersonal relationships in cities. Politics and history have never seemed to be a going concern for him; his 2021 short The Night (2021), comprising static shots of painted-over pro-democracy slogans and posters on the streets of Hong Kong, is perhaps as close to making a political statement as he would ever come.
Don’t describe Tsai as merely a filmmaker. Well, he does make films for a living – it’s just that he has been vocal about his desire not to be straitjacketed by conventional, narrative-driven fare for conventional cinemas. Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) could be seen as a watershed of sort: unfolding mostly in a soon-to-be-demolished theater in Taipei, and boasting sparse dialogue and sustained shots of an empty auditorium and corridors, the film marks Tsai’s break with mainstream film language and economics.
Having become a darling for international museums – the Louvre, for one, commissioned Tsai to make Faces (2009) – the director gradually veered into creating short films for installations. The “Walker” series, a collection of nine shorts featuring actor Lee Kang-sheng shuffling slowly along various settings in monastic attire, is perhaps the most renowned of this exhibition-geared output. Tsai proclaimed Stray Dogs (2013) would be his last-ever commercially released fictional feature, as he intended to spend more time creating work which “looks more like art”. (Tsai would eventually renege on that promise by making Days in 2020 – but not before he directed the first-ever Chinese-language VR feature, The Deserted, in 2017.)
These days, it’s common for Tsai to curate a parallel exhibition to go with his retrospectives at museums (such as the one he did for Centre Pompidou in Paris last winter). Or he arrives well- prepared to “perform” his masterclass (as a storyteller, actor and a singer), just like when he toured New York, Washington D.C. and Chicago last year. So it would hardly be a surprise if Tsai, with his Honorary Leopard in hand, chooses to belt out his favorite Mandarin ballad at the Piazza Grande on Sunday.
