Week 25/2023

EN

“Mr. Tsai is the most Euclidean of directors, a master of geometry whose films are both oblique and acute. He captures some of the essential texures of contemporary urban life -- the loneliness and boredom, the longing that permeates even the most routine encounters, the collisions and coincidences -- with a deadpan dexterity that may remind you of Buster Keaton or Samuel Beckett.”

A. O. Scott1

“Goodbye Dragon Inn is the best film I’ve ever seen. I think I saw it a year or two after it came out, after I finished Tropical Malady. It really is the ultimate film. Tsai Ming-liang and I share many aspects: the big cinema and the characters there, like the woman who eats watermelon seeds… I really love that.”

Apichatpong Weerasethakul in conversation with Bjorn Gabriels2

“The title of Tsai’s new film might suggest that the chronicler of morosely funny Taipei anomie has decided to veer into Jin Dynasty costume epics, but rest assured that Tsai has nothing so Ang Lee in store. I imagine that the nearest he’ll come to King Hu–copping melodramatics is this, a film that entirely takes place in a movie theater during a funerary late-night showing of Dragon Inn, Hu’s light-as-a-silk-slipper 1966 kung-fu adventure flick. It’s a gimmicky sounding premise that should raise copious red flags, were it not for the fact that Liang may be the lone contemporary filmmaker who can be trusted to build something around the superficially acinematic act of watching a movie that will neither smirk with meta coyness nor wallow in awed hommage.”

Nick Pinkerton3

“Most of the dialogue and music in Goodbye, Dragon Inn emanates from Dragon Inn. And the movie within the movie is glimpsed at from a variety of angles, its shifting light patterns cast on the faces of spectators. (At one point, Tsai creates a montage in which the theater manager and the Dragon Inn star Hsu Feng appear to exchange glances.) ‘Did you know this theater is haunted?’ an audience member asks another halfway through. The theater is haunted, both by the specters on the screen and the spectators in the seats, some of whom turn out to be in both movies.”

J. Hoberman4

"And this is, above all, a film about going to the movies; returning to Truffaut, one might call Goodbye, Dragon Inn Tsai's Day for Night, though the more aquatically inclined Taiwanese director, whose oeuvre is so thoroughly drenched in metaphorical waterlogging, imagines films not as trains passing in the night, but as monstrous frigates, unmoored and adrift, which carry their human cargo on a dark free-float. The stowaway-haunted interior of the Fu-Ho, where boys float and brush past each other like buoys, is a ramble of aimless corridors and storage rooms crowded by sagging, soggy cardboard. All of the walls here seem to be the same aquamarine shade of abandoned swimming pools, every corner is stained with dark tendrils of water damage, and everything contributes to the overall appearance of some great vessel's hull, where the all-pervading, echoing soundtrack of Dragon Inn approximates the moans of a pressurized below-deck. This ship's off on an under-booked farewell cruise, and the desolate few spread across this space made for the accommodation of thousands, clustering together then ricocheting apart, are fine material for Tsai's delicately orchestrated tableaux of touch-and-go souls. But so much negative space is also bound to take on a palpable presence of its own, and when one of the Fu-Ho's occupants finally speaks, almost halfway through the film's running time, it's no surprise that it's to inquire, ‘Did you know this theater is haunted?’”

Nick Pinkerton5

“Other ways of watching movies—on a computer and even on a phone—have come to the fore, and, as a result, new ways of living with movies have emerged. They’re no less valid and no less important (the movie lover’s life is greatly enriched by the video essay and the Twitter discussion), but they’re different, practically and psychologically. The corridors, the projection booth, the box office, and even the bathrooms are, in a strange but ineluctable way, a part of the cinema. So is the screen. I like to sit in or near the front row, because my relationship to movie images isn't solely visual or psychological but also physical. Tsai’s film gets at that feeling better than any other movie I’ve seen.”

Richard Brody6

• 1A. O. Scott, "THE FESTIVAL REVIEWS; Last Picture Show: Lives Pass in the Darkness of a Taipei Theater", New York Times, 15 October 2003.
• 2Bjorn Gabriels, "Longing for Change: The Shifting Shapes of Apichatpong Weerasethakul", Sabzian, 2016.
• 3Nick Pinkerton, "Goodbye, Dragon Inn", Reverse Shot, 11 December 2004
• 4 J. Hoberman, "'Goodbye, Dragon Inn’: The Last Picture Show in Taipei", New York Times, 16 December 2020.
• 5Nick Pinkerton, "Goodbye, Dragon Inn", Reverse Shot, 11 December 2004
• 6Richard Brody, “Movie of the Week: 'Goodbye, Dragon Inn',” The New Yorker, 30 September 2014.

EN

“Typical of all of Visconti’s films beginning with Senso, The Damned and Ludwig were, along with Death in Venice, comprised of international casts for the possibilities of dubbing in various European and North American markets. All of these more recent features, though, were filmed primarily in English. But in the earlier Visconti films, the settings and subject matter remained Italian even when the source material was not. With The Stranger, shot primarily in French and Italian, this began to change, roughly coinciding with Visconti’s increased importance as an international cultural figure. By the late 1960s he had begun to detach himself from contemporary political and social concerns in Italy and elsewhere, as well as from issues of Italian history with which younger Italian filmmakers were beginning to actively engage. Guido Aristarco would later write of the “moral crisis” Visconti began to undergo after Rocco and His Brothers, “a retreat into inwardness” in which “the threads of decadence were no longer woven within the fabric of the imperatives of a great historical/moral tapestry.” [...] With the move away from Italian subject matter this inwardness is further manifested. But Visconti was not unique among major Italian filmmakers in this regard. Pasolini, for example, engaged in a similar “retreat” through his Trilogy of Life: The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and Arabian Nights (1974). The Damned, Death in Venice, and Ludwig have likewise been seen as a trilogy, although their predetermined status as such is less clear than in the Pasolinis.

[...]

With Ludwig, the slow pacing of Death in Venice continues but, in tandem with the use of the zoom, now acquires a stateliness in a film almost four hours long. In Italy, The Damned was released under Visconti’s preferred title of La caduta degli dei, the Italian translation of Götterdämmerung, or The Twilight of the Gods, a reference to the last of Richard Wagner’s operas of The Ring of the Nibelungen. But it is in Ludwig where Wagner himself materializes as a character, although, unlike Senso, there are no opera sequences and the film’s epic scale is paradoxically tied to its intimacy. And if tragic form is central to The Damned, it is no less central here. As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has noted, the struggle over control of dynasties in Ludwig is not typically a theme of the novel but of tragedy. Borrowing a term from Eisenstein, Nowell-Smith argues that the “dominant” of Ludwig is “kingship and the destructive pairing of this with Ludwig’s homosexuality,” in which a “tragic ending is the only one possible.” [...] But neither The Damned nor Ludwig attempt to recreate the poetic forms of verse central to tragedy, although they each make use of dialogue in a different way. In The Damned, the dialogue assumes straightforward functions and often has a melodramatic explicitness. With Ludwig, Visconti returns to collaborating with Enrico Medioli and Suso Cecchi d’Amico and the script has a literary density absent from The Damned. One example of this is how it uses sleep as a motif (so central as well to Macbeth), extending the implications of Ludwig as an indecisive and withdrawn leader, so that sleeping, lethargy, and insomnia infect the entire narrative world and the bed becomes, again for Visconti, central.”

Joe McElhaney1

• 1Joe McElhaney, Luchino Visconti. and the Fabric of Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021), 138-140.