Category: Uncategorized (Page 733 of 1102)

 

‘If anyone knows anything about BS Johnson these days, it is that he was – cue polite sniggers – avant-garde. Or, if that is too French for you, experimental. He cut holes into the pages! He put unbound sheets into a box and invited us to read them at random! He thought he had found a way forward for fiction after the seemingly unanswerable formal advances of Joyce and Beckett! He liked Joyce and Beckett!

‘It is, I suppose, just about possible to have some sympathy with such a middlebrow assessment. Joyce and Beckett’s advances weren’t just formal; they were linguistic. Language, not typography, was what they made dance to their command. For their self-proclaimed heir to use visual trickery may seem a cop-out, or a challenge whose rewards do not make it worth accepting.

‘That’s if you’ve only heard about the work, rather than held it in your hands. Just as it is a delight to see the black page and so on in Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne, more than anyone else, is Johnson’s true literary ancestor), so it is a delight to come across the page with a hole in it in Albert Angelo. But by that stage you will have noticed other attractions.

‘”If only they realised it was funny,” was Joyce’s complaint about those who complained about Ulysses . This is something that is regularly forgotten about so many of the notionally austere modernist writers: they are a hoot. It is the precise attention to detail and significance, and the profound acknowledgment of absurdity, that makes it so. And as Beckett, in particular, is funniest when writing about death, despair and futility, so is Johnson. Albert Angelo may be a bleak story, for it is about an architect who has to make ends meet as a supply teacher (which is also how he meets his end), but it has moments of comedy as good as anything produced in the past 50 years. The section devoted to the schoolchildren’s thoughts about their teacher (“the Boy’s including me just fuk about in class and take the mike out of him”) is Nigel Molesworth with menaces.

‘Trawl, too, is remarkable – easy on the modernist trickery, but a superb mesh of autobiography and farcical sex. (These two novels, first published in 1964 and 1966, give the lie to the idea of that decade as one full of easy sex. Sex in Johnson is a very frustrating business.) House Mother Normal, about the residents of an old people’s home, does make extraordinary use of blank space, random typography and the like – but that is Johnson’s way of representing minds disintegrating into nothingness.’ — Nicholas Lezard

 

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Further

The B. S. Johnson Society
B.S. Johnson @ New Directions
No More Lying: a Primer on the Novels of B.S. Johnson
Modernism’s suicide
B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates: Revisiting the Elegy
B. S. Johnson and the Big Stuff
B.S. Johnson Archive
. . . to B.S. Johnson
Book: Re-reading B. S. Johnson
Bloody Stupid Johnson
‘The Mind Has Fuses’: Detonating B. S. Johnson
B.S . Johnson @ The Complete Review
b.s. johnson, brutalist
Gimme Nonfiction
Forgotten authors No.40: BS Johnson
I Fail To Remember: B.S. Johnson Thirty Years On
Buy ‘Trawl’

 

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Extras

B.S. Johnson on Dr. Samuel Johnson (1971)

B.S. Johnson vs. Death

Hommage à B.S. Johnson

 

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‘What Do I Know About Beckett?’: B.S. Johnson’s Beckett Notebook

‘B.S. Johnson’s Samuel Beckett notebooks perform an act of remembering. Principally, Johnson wonders what it is possible for him to know about Beckett, an epistemological problem he tries to work out through writing. The scraps of paper and notebook entries show Johnson trying to remember all he can about his onetime friend and major influence: when he read his work, who he was with, what it meant to him at the time.’ — E&DB

 

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B S Johnson: ‘Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde’
by Tim Martin

 

I shall be much more famous when I’m dead,” BS Johnson told his agent the day before he committed suicide in 1973. Four decades on, in a year that marks both the 80th anniversary of his birth and the 40th of his death, it’s still hard to tell whether history has proved him right.

Despite a revival of interest after Jonathan Coe’s superbly perceptive and compassionate biography, Like a Fiery Elephant (2004), Johnson’s work remains overshadowed by its novelty value. Beyond a loyal cult readership and a hover of interested academics, he’s likely to be known, if at all, as the man who cut holes in the pages of his novel Albert Angelo to give the reader a glimpse of a forthcoming chapter, or as the writer of The Unfortunates, a box of unbound signatures (sections of the novel) intended to be shuffled and read in any order.

These and other techniques have led Johnson to be tagged as an “experimental” novelist, one of a group of Sixties authors providing a British riposte to the nouveau roman that Duras and Robbe-Grillet were exploring across the Channel. But though he admired the spirit of the British experimentalists, he considered himself to be from a more exalted tradition: as far as he was concerned, he was carrying the baton of Modernist technique that passed from Joyce, “the Einstein of English fiction”, onwards to Beckett. Critics who called him an experimentalist received stinging replies. “Certainly I make experiments,” he once wrote, “but the unsuccessful ones are quietly hidden away and what I choose to publish is in my terms successful… Where I depart from convention, it is because the convention has failed, is inadequate for conveying what I have to say.”

So what did B S Johnson have to say, and what have we been missing? This month is a good time to find out, as five of Johnson’s seven novels are being reprinted by Picador alongside a collection of journalism, plays and short stories. Meanwhile, the BFI is releasing You’re Human Like the Rest of Them, a disc collecting his several contributions to film and TV.

It adds up to the fullest picture in years of a man who at the peak of his career was, as Coe put it, “Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde”: a vigorously public poet, novelist, film-maker, playwright, sportswriter, editor and critic who turned out formally daring work at a remarkable rate and backed it with fanfares of unselfconscious boasting. It also reveals that the strengths of Johnson’s writing exist beyond – and often quite apart from – the technical gimmickry that has become his legacy.

In principle, at least, Johnson’s declared mission echoed the great Modernist cry to make it new. Politically socialist and from a working-class London background, he cultivated pithy distrust for the complacency of his novelist peers, “neo-Dickensian” writers, as he called them, who were using a 19th-century form to gratify the “primitive, vulgar and idle curiosity of the reader to know ‘what happens next’”. A truly modern novel would seek, in Beckett’s phrase, a form to accommodate the mess, stripping readers of their escapist illusions while remaining ruthlessly true to the writer’s experience.

This obsession with so-called narrative truth runs through Johnson’s work, accounting for its most unorthodox experiments as well as its greatest flaws. It fuelled the iconoclastic explosion near the end of his second novel, Albert Angelo, when in the middle of a paragraph Johnson hijacks his own narrative with an all-caps howl of “F— ALL THIS LYING!”, shelving the rest of the book in favour of an extended homily on the idea that “telling stories is telling lies”. It is everywhere in Trawl (1966), the third novel, which represented a quixotically dedicated attempt to “shoot the narrow trawl of my mind into the vasty sea of my past” by booking passage on a fishing boat to work and reflect (and, as it turned out, suffer ghastly seasickness) in elemental peace. This was the book that prompted Johnson’s publisher to ask him: “Aren’t you rather young to be writing your memoirs?” – a title he scathingly adopted for a later collection of stories.

In an age where postmodernism is a buzzword, it may already be hard to feel the full force of this furious conviction that we need our ideas on novelistic truth exploded. What makes it even harder is the suspicion that Johnson’s heart wasn’t always in it. “I hate the partial livers. I’m an allornothinger,” says the narrator in Albert Angelo, and Johnson’s mid-Sixties work can often resemble a man cornered in the blind alley of his own principles. The obsession with so-called literal truth, and the conviction that a text could convey it – “To the extent that a reader can impose his own imagination on my words, then that piece of writing is a failure,” he wrote – stand in stark contrast to the work of Derrida and Barthes, who by 1967 were both well advanced in undermining assumptions behind truth and textuality.

All this, combined with the corrosive line Johnson took against critics, has led to a school of thought that sees him merely as a self-promoting aesthetic conservative: there to wag his dogma and damn the consequences. As Coe showed in his biography, though, this position takes no account of the strange contradictions in Johnson’s nature. He was, after all, a deeply superstitious writer, whose professed belief in the inflexibility of truth was ensnared with the kind of personal peculiarities – a troubled credence for supernatural experience, an obsession with Graves’s The White Goddess, a conviction that he’d die young – that hardly accord with the functional rigour of his propositions. Little of this shows up in the books, and his readers might have been amused to learn that the BS Johnson who so stoutly maintained that “I don’t like writing fiction, I like writing truth” did so at a desk with a candle burning in a special holder and a Byronic cup made from a skull.

Seen against this backdrop, Johnson’s pronouncements on realism acquire an edge of concern, as though a sufficiently austere focus on principle, on nailing truth to the wall, might work as a defence against the unknown. Despite repeated assertions throughout the novels that “all is chaos”, their secret impulse was always towards order: even in The Unfortunates, whose unbound structure clearly aims to reflect some of the violent disorder of Johnson’s grief at the death of a friend, is carefully designed to make sense in any arrangement.

Certainly Johnson’s finest novels sprang from a temporary relaxation in his principles. House Mother Normal (1971) channelled his formal ingenuity into creating a superb textual illusion: it consists of eight 21-page monologues, describing a single evening from the viewpoint of the escalatingly decrepit inhabitants of a nursing home and bracketed by the testimony of their vicious and abusive House Mother. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, meanwhile, is a book-long streak of brilliant comic contempt, following an accounts clerk who develops his own system of moral debit and credit. It’s Johnson’s funniest and most bitterly satirical work, as Christie pays off the vast debts accrued by Society (“general educational trauma”, “Socialism not given a chance”) with a cheery campaign of slaughter and public bombing.

What prompted this fictional interregnum is unclear, but these two novels succeed because of their broad-mindedness, their anarchic willingness to hold conflicting ideas in suspension. Here, satirical pronouncements on the deceptiveness of the text (“It is a diagram of certain aspects of the inside of his skull! What a laugh!” observes House Mother) alternate with an infectious joy in the possibilities of form.

 

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Book

B S Johnson Trawl
Picador

‘The novel describes, in the first-person, a three-week voyage aboard a deep-sea fishing trawler in the Barents Sea, not unlike the one Johnson undertook in preparation to write the book. Isolating himself from the world he knows, as well as from the ship’s crew, the narrator reflects on past events and relationships, hoping for some kind of redemption. This convincingly authentic and harrowing attempt to get to the heart of the human condition is one of Johnson’s finest novels.

‘In his heyday, during the 1960s and early 1970s, B S Johnson was one of the best-known novelists in Britain. A passionate advocate for the avant-garde, he became famous for his forthright views on the future of the novel and for his unique ways of putting them into practice. Convinced that ‘telling stories is telling lies’ and that he should write about ‘nothing else but what happens to me’, Johnson produced Trawl.’ — Picador

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Excerpt

 

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Well, that’s a very different kind of bloody. Good bloody, though. The most I can imagine is kind of flipping through ‘Dhalgren’ to get a feel for how the prose works, which is what I do with novels that aren’t my thing a lot anyway. Gonna try to find a way to rewatch ‘Hallelujah the Hills’. It’s been forever enough that it’s mostly a blank. ** Tosh Berman, Yes, rarefilmm.com is a total treasure trove. Let me alert the others. Everyone, if you’re not already hooked up to rarefilmm.com, Tosh very wisely recommends it. It’s full of super interesting films from classic vintage stuff to obscure gems to charming artsy stuff, and it’ll help you with your lock-in, pretty much guaranteed. And it’s free! ** Dominik, Hi, Dominik!! Cool. You had a good day, it sure sounds like. I’m excited about it from over here at least. Yeah, do fight through the uncertainty with your drawings just as I’m doing with my GIF try-outs. Some of the best things start out rusty. My yesterday was odd. This is weird: Someone alerted me to these super far right, paranoid conspiracy people associated with that QAnon cult that have discovered my blog and are losing their shit and seem to think my blog is a just a cover for a child sex trafficking ring and other evil things, etc. So there was this whole thread on their Twitter going off about the evil of this place and that the deep state Illuminati are behind it and so on. Hilarious but very disturbing. I hadn’t investigated those types before, and, wow, they are seriously insane. Like they think the coronavirus is a hoax and conspiracy to cover for a massive child sex trafficking ring. They were going off about some tweet that Oprah Winfrey sent to a friend where OW told her friend she was sorry she didn’t send flowers on her friends birthday because the florists were closed, and the conspiracy freaks think ‘flowers’ was a code word for children and ‘florist’ was a code word for some organisation that sells children. It took a few hours to shake off the creeps those people gave me. So that happened. Took a walk. Macron extended our quarantine until May 11, fuck, so another month, and he says that on May 11 only schools and few businesses will open but that cafes, restaurants, museums, stores, etc. won’t open until mid-July! People are very pissed off, so I think/hope there’ll be enough pressure on the government that cafes, etc. will be allowed open a whole lot sooner. Ugh. And other than that I just fucked around with things, mostly. So not a hugely productive day, sadly. The very best of luck with maxing out all that yours has to offer. Ha ha. Love that is a secretly a code word for a vast conspiracy of feeling, Dennis. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. I agree about the obviousness of Serrano’s photos. Never been into his stuff much. I included them in the post just because they looked kind of technically gross/dreamy in the post’s context. ** Bill, Ha ha, yeah, I was seriously chuffed when I found that splatter class thing. Kind of put the nail in the post’s coffin, that entry. I have in fact seen ‘Violet’. You finally didn’t stump me. I really liked it too. Nice streamed events. We aren’t having anywhere near as many here in France as you would think, or I mean of that kind of music event, I don’t know why. Just lots of old French actors and singers reading poems and blah blah. ** Misanthrope, I do believe I’ve had solid sex where no blood was involved. Yeah, like I told Dominick, or as you might have heard, our lockdown will only slightly start ending on May 11, basically re: schools, with the reopening of things that actually count and make life feel like life not until July. But, as I also said to D., I don’t think the French are going to stand for it taking that long, so we will see. Total fucking misery. Sleep is definitely weird these days. Mine too. For pretty much everyone I know. ** Steve Erickson, I’m guessing ‘Afternoon’ will have to be an online hunt down thing, which is fine. Wow, ‘The Spook Who Sat By the Door’. It’s been so long since I saw it that I don’t remember a damned thing. Huh, maybe I’ll chase it down. Thanks. We’re having unseasonably warm weather here, which is making being indoors harder, of course. ** Right. Do you know the UK writer B S Johnson? Well, you’ve started to now, if you don’t already. Very interesting writer and guy. Rather overlooked outside of the UK. ‘Trawl’ might be my favourite of his novels. Have a look, won’t you? See you tomorrow.

[Collaged from: https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5204, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsai_Ming-liang]

In the nearly three decades since his debut feature, Rebels of the Neon God (1992), Tsai Ming-Liang (b. 1957) has built a contemplative body of work that ruminates on fundamental experiences of existence. His focus on themes of solitude, alienation, and desire early in his career eventually expanded to explorations of the passage of time, memory, and spirituality later on; Tsai aspires to observe life and, consequently, has put his inner self on display. A maverick whose long takes have stretched the limits of filmic minimalism and stillness, Tsai has also reconsidered the very concept of cinema by borrowing elements from performance and Conceptual art. Nothing encapsulates this evolving exploration like his Walker series (2012-18), a set of short films or, rather, recordings of live performances, depicting his muse/alter ego Lee Kang-Sheng as an ancient Buddhist monk moving through contemporary settings at an impossibly slow pace, pushing against currents in time and space.

Tsai, a Malaysia-born Chinese, moved to Taiwan from Kuching, Sarawak, to study theater at the age of 20. This, he said, had “a huge impact on [his] mind and psyche,” perhaps later mirrored in his films. “Even today,” said Tsai, “I feel I belong neither to Taiwan nor to Malaysia. In a sense, I can go anywhere I want and fit in, but I never feel that sense of belonging.” He found himself immersed in a Taiwan gradually opening up after a long period of martial law, which ended in 1987. It was in this new political climate that Tsai established himself with films dealing with queer themes, personal space, social taboos, and unspoken desires.

Tsai’s honours include a Golden Lion (best picture) for Vive L’Amour at the 51st Venice International Film Festival; the Silver Bear “Special Jury Prize” for The River at the 47th Berlin International Film Festival; the FIPRESCI award for The Hole at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival; the Alfred Bauer Prize and Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Achievement for The Wayward Cloud at the 55th Berlin International Film Festival; the Grand Jury Prize at the 70th Venice International Film Festival for Stray Dogs.

In 2014, Tsai was named an officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the government of France.

 

 

Interview
excerpt (from http://tylercoburn.com/tsai.html)

How did you first become involved in cinema? What about the cinematic form was particularly appealing to you?

My childhood really was a golden age for movies, in the ’60s and ’70s there was no other entertainment, all we had was movies. My grandparents were such fans they had to watch one movie a day. They lived in a small city in Malaysia where there were seven or eight huge theatres. [My grandparents] would sell noodles on the side of the street, and take turns to see movies; sometimes I double-shifted and saw the movie with each of them. Later I had to go back to my hometown, because my father found out I was just watching movies everyday.

[In college] I chose theatre without really knowing what difference there was between theatre and film. After graduation, I did theatre, experimental theatre, TV, but never thought would turn into film director. I didn’t know I would be here today.

Film really chose me, this type of film chose me. Unfortunately I don’t have a swimming pool, my films are more abstruse. (laughs)

As your films use verbal dialogue sparingly, it puts an even greater emphasis is put on the relationship between your characters and the urban spaces of Taipei. What is the place of this dynamic in your films?

The themes I am dealing with are small, localized. They are all about my feelings and understanding of life. The urban space is only a background for me. I throw my character into a space and isolate them. That space could be very populated or very empty. I believe that humans are not different in nature whether they are in a crowd or on a toilet. Their isolation or sense of loneliness is for me an effective way of representing human nature.

I’m very careful with the quality of a setting, including its colors and sense of age, because the character is in a state of isolation. He has no chance to talk – therefore I often have to rely on the setting and the elements of the setting to convey these feelings in the viewer. I spend much of my time looking for sites. When I find a great site, it will alter my feelings. I will start to feel like the sites have their own characters.

Your body of work seems to question the status of the erotic in the modern city. The sense of alienation that inhabits your characters is frequently augmented by libidinal repression. Certain of your films – Vive L’Amour, The River, What Time is it There? – conclude with failed or distorted realizations of sexual desire. How do you view the role of the erotic in these works?

I want to express the failure of erotic desire to be realized in contemporary urban space. I would like to make my films about disappearing, like The Skywalk is Gone [2002] and Goodbye Dragon Inn. The whole theatre is disappearing in that film! This subject is important to me because society changes so fast and everything disappears so fast – historical sites, culture. One day I walked to the area where Lee Kang-Sheng was selling watches [in What Time is it There?], and I realized that ‘the skywalk is gone.’ It happens in Asia like that, things just disappear. People in their forties have no way of finding traces of their childhood. Modern people are afraid of disappearance. Living in Taipei, for example, we constantly have to deal with compelling visual change. We ask the question: what do you love the most? Who do you love the most? You will lose them – it will happen in modern society. My films ask the question: how we can face the disappearance? The loss?

Illness is a pervasive theme in your work, be it the mysterious sickness in The River or the apocalyptic disease in The Hole.. You also made My New Friends, a 1997 documentary about AIDS. What is the significance of this theme to you?

To answer, I need to return to the issue of the human body. The body of course has its interior as well as its exterior properties. I feel that the cause of sickness nowadays is people not exploring their internal realities. The reason why I decided to incorporate sickness into The River was because I witnessed this episode when Lee Kang-Sheng became sick. It lasted for nine months. That was the first time that I began to understand the relationship between human psychology and illness. I realized that he probably got sick because he wasn’t able to adapt to the changes in his life, such as becoming involved in a filmmaking circle. I think it’s true for everyone that we have a hard time confronting and recognizing the dark corners of the mind.

How do you approach writing your scripts? Do you provide much space for improvisation and spontaneity when shooting?

My scripts are very small. They’re like poetry, only containing instructions on how to make my films. When I write my scripts, there is no dialogue for the actors, but I communicate a lot with them so that when they are in settings, they have an idea of how to communicate their characters. This style lets actors experience life and act in the film. My actors are not like Hollywood actors-they are not taught how to act or speak. My actors seem like real people. You don’t think of them as performing. I always give the actors a lot of time within the shot. I wait and then they act naturally. This is the best technique.

 

Tsai Ming-Liang on wikipedia
Tsai Ming-Liang on imdb
Tsai Ming-Liang at theyshootpictures.com
Recent interview with Tsai at filmmakermagazine.com

 

Patterns/motifs:

 

10 of Tsai’s 11 feature-length films (plus a VR project):

Rebels of the Neon God (1992)

Tsai’s first feature film is a relatively conventional tale of rebellious youth. The Chinese title translates roughly as “Youthful Nezha”; Nezha is one of the few Chinese mythical characters who personify hotheaded young people in (well-meaning) conflict with their elders. Tsai is already working with motifs that will become familiar in subsequent films: the household detritus floating in water on the apartment floor, distant and cryptic family interactions, and hilariously uncomfortable sexual encounters. The scene with Hsiao-Kang on roller-skates might be a reference to Nezha’s preferred mode of transport, a Segway monocycle-like set of “wheel of wind and fire”. We meet four actors who will work with Tsai in a number of films, usually in similar roles: Lee Kang-Sheng as a disaffected young man, Chen Chao-jung as a charismatic, more worldly youth, Lu Yi-ching as the mother figure, and Miao Tien as the father figure.

 

Vive l’Amour (1994)

One of my favorite Tsai Ming-Liang films. I remember how radical this seemed for Asian cinema in the mid-90s, with no dialog for the first 20-odd minutes, all the surreptitious voyeurism, that initial extended cruising scene, the hints of gay desire from Hsiao-kang for Ah-jung (note the character names are derived from the actors’ names), and the long static shots of tense situations, broken up by the occasional (almost slapstick-y) humorous gestures. And of course, water melon.

 

The River (1997)

By this point, we recognize Tsai’s ensemble of regulars: Lee Kang-Sheng (as the hapless protagonist), Miao Tien (as the distant, inscrutable, but supportive father), Lu Yi-Ching (the worrying and mostly helpless mother), Chen Chao-jung (oddly omitted from the imdb credits, but he plays his by now customary sex object role), and Yang Kuei-Mei, who joined the team in Vive l’Amour, and will be along for quite a few more films. Tsai created unconventional roles for them that I find totally fascinating through multiple films, even though the roles didn’t change that much.

The opening scenes are funny but deceptively conventional. There’s actually dialog! Characters with relatively clear motivations going about their business! Hsiao-kang makes a delivery, and was asked to play a drowned corpse in a polluted river, in a movie shoot. (The director in the shoot is celebrated Chinese director Ann Hui.) But then the long, static, mostly silent shots take over, and we get another extended cruising scene. Water is everywhere, from the river, to the torrential rain, to the leaky apartment, and all the scenes of characters drinking.

There’s also lots of sex, mostly of the uncomfortable variety, and several discreetly lit, painterly bathhouse scenes. The climactic darkroom scene is restrained and hypnotic. And the final resolution statement is more indirect than my faulty memories, but Tsai’s absurdist “conclusion” is quite clear.

For a detailed analysis, with many shot comparisons, Tony (tectactoe)’s review is indispensable: https://letterboxd.com/tectactoe/film/the-river-1997/

 

The Hole (1998)

From Tony (tectactoe)’s review (https://letterboxd.com/tectactoe/film/the-hole/):

I guess if you’re familiar with Tsai’s work, you could say even his themes are too often recycled — loneliness, isolation, crushing desperation — but he works with so many different canvases that the material is always exhilarating, never stale. Wasn’t at all prepared to see his recurring signifiers applied to his interpretation of a rom-com / musical. Yes, there’s romance (girl meets boy). There’s comedy (Tsai’s most laugh-out-loud work to date). There’s music (complete with choreographed interludes). Rain is still his favorite element, the enforcer of solitude : in this instance, its presence is even more ominous than usual, its heavy patter always in the background, drowning out much of the foreground sound (only emphasizing how little he relies on dialogue to make his points — something I’ll forever admire) and sequestering our protagonists from the world around them.

… As his curiousness and alienation continues to grow, so does her “condition,” and the film’s final, most touching connection is one prodded by the inevitability of mother nature and pure inconvenience. Cynical? Maybe. Touching? Strangely. Fascinating? Always.

 

What Time is it There? (2001)

From Tony (tectactoe) (https://letterboxd.com/film/what-time-is-it-there/):

As self-assured as any of Tsai’s other work — perhaps because it was such a personal film for him — and his formal conviction is remarkably patent throughout, translating to a sincere respect for his audience : he never feels the need to coddle or pamper us, and I can’t explain how invigorating that is. A haunting parable about Time — about its irrevocability, its persistence, its unforgiving nature, and the inevitability that it will one day separate us from what we love — that thrives in the details.

 

Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003)

From Tony (tectactoe) (https://letterboxd.com/tectactoe/film/goodbye-dragon-inn/):

Denoting this as a simple parable of the Death of Cinema glosses over the much richer prying of the human desire for connection — with ourselves (the handicapped ticket ripper gawking zealously at the adept on-screen swordswoman), with our peers (the tourist relentlessly trying to spark up chance encounters), with other generations (as an old man ushers his grandson to the final showing of a film he starred in), with clandestine lovers (the endless search to share a steamed bun with the projectionist), and with the places and things that mean so much to us : that final walk alone in the rain, knowing it will be the last time she’s exiting that historic theater, is instantly heartbreaking.

 

The Wayward Cloud (2005)

Tsai again works with familiar actors and motifs, but the absurdist musical numbers come to the fore. And more water melon.

Another excerpt:

 

I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006)

Something of a departure, this is set in Malaysia instead of Taipei, and features a larger cast outside of the core team.

Tony (tectactoe) (https://letterboxd.com/tectactoe/film/i-dont-want-to-sleep-alone/):

Probably Tsai’s least overtly humorous effort, which elicits a certain helix of sincerity and compassion-values present in most of his work, but the effect is amplified here because there’s nothing even remotely lighthearted to fall back on. As others have noted, it’s maybe Tsai’s most “wholesome” film, given that each central character is, in some way, in service to another ; but ringing stronger than genuine compassion is the inescapable millstone that our physical bodies place upon their spiritual counterparts.

 

Stray Dogs (2013)

Tony (tectactoe) (https://letterboxd.com/film/stray-dogs-2013/):

…it’s obvious that Tsai is in complete control of his languid domain, every other long-take littered with spurts of visual and aural virtuosity; take e.g. the opening shot, where he captures a sort-of nonsensical foreboding from the simple image of a disappointed (?) motherly figure (?!) sitting apprehensively over her sleeping children (?!?), intensified by nothing but the sound of a comb running through thick hair (which, in the moment, may as well be booming thunder).

 

The Deserted (2017)

Tsai’s VR project. A review: https://lwlies.com/festivals/tsai-ming-liang-the-deserted-vr-taiwan-film-festival-london/

RTHK arts show with interview with Tsai in Mandarin (with occasional Cantonese interjections for the Hong Kong audience!), English subtitles:

 

Days (2020)

His latest. Hopefully on screens soon.

 

 

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p.s. RIP Bruce Baillie. ** Your big treat for the weekend is an oeuvre overview of the fine filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang as thought-through and put in place by the fine musician/visualist/artist and d.l. Bill Hsu. Please dig around in his blog-housed treasure chest, pick up a few cinematic doubloons, and spend your day(s) suitably powered up thereby, which, yes, reads like very awkward hyperbole, and is, but blame quarantine, and you’ve caught my drift. Enjoy everything and speak to Bill, if you will, thanks. ** David Ehrenstein, As is so often the case in a perfect world. I don’t even know if I still have a copy of that Little Caesar issue. Surely somewhere. ** Tosh Berman, I agree! About his lordship. The French really know how to turn them out when do. Hope you’re getting through everything effectively. ** Sypha, It’s in my top 50, so quite possibly. One of these days I need to read more Delany. I’ve only read ‘Hogg’, which is great, and ‘Madman’, which I liked fairly well, and ‘The Motion of Light in Water’, which I didn’t like at all. Interesting about reading Freud. I think I prefer to have him filtered to me through other writers for some reason. ** _Black_Acrylic, He is. The ‘Zazie’ film is pretty good, not anywhere as good as the novel, but that won’t matter to y’all. I know nothing about ‘Limmy’s Homemade Show’, of course, being over here, but that little YouTube taste was very charming. Hope the first ep. lived up. ** Dominik, Hey, hey, hey!! Oh, thanks, pal, that does my head and heart good, thank you. Yeah, the pandemic, this quarantine … the French are being well behaved so far, but the French seem to have rebelliousness in their blood, and I don’t know how much longer they’re going to tolerate this lockdown before … I don’t know what. Right, okay, I see, about the written free-styles. Have you guys tried Zoom? Maybe it would work more smoothly? Or FaceTime? Hm. I think those three films you mentioned are Norton’s three acting highlights unless I’m forgetting something. Thanks, yes, it would be really great if we get the grant. It’s specifically for the script, for us to work more on the script, and, actually, it’s kind of bullshit a bit because we’re happy with the script, so we have to try to think of what to tell them. They want 20 minutes of us in a neutral looking environment laying out what further script work we want to do, and no doubt they want to hear that we have plans to normalise it, so we’ll blah blah about that. We would rather do it together in one place rather than do a split screen thing, so I guess we’ll defy the lockdown rules and meet up and shoot it in one place, my pad or his. I or he will have to say we’re going shopping or something on our forms, and hit a supermarket on the way back home. That should work. I have yet to be stopped by police whenever I’ve gone out, but, technically, we’re not supposed to travel out of our respective areas, and he’s all the way across town, so that’s where luck has to come in. Godard is tough to start with, I mean as a recommendation, because he has so many films and they’re all quite different from one another. Maybe start with one of the early, really famous ones like ‘Breathless’ or ‘Pierrot le Fou’? I think maybe my muse is starting to vaguely wake up. I started working on a new GIF piece, and it’s not good yet, but GIF works are fun to make, so I think that’s probably the best muse alarm clock. Yesterday I did very little. Emailed back and forth a bit with the US publisher of my new novel, and I think we can finally announce the news early next week. Made a couple of blog posts. Uh, I cannot remember what else. That kind of foggy day. But now I have two full days to do something of note, as do you, before we compare our cave lives again. Let’s try to dazzle each other somehow, what do you say? Love the size of King Kong, me. ** Bill, Hey, host! Thank you ‘in person’ once again for serving up such a tasty menu for the folks who look here. Thanks about the grant. Would be good, yeah. I’ll be amazed if we’re un-locked down before the end of May at the very earliest. Supposedly there’s some treatment or test or something over here that’s ‘close’ to being ready, and its existence and success are our only hope. No, my Switch is sitting in a storage space somewhere on the outskirts of Paris being held hostage until the quarantine ends. Thanks for the URL. That is a mysterious flyer, but I like it. I’ll check what’s the what when I wake up on Monday. Thank you about the Artforum work. There’s no manipulation of the original GIFs. It’s all about coopting or revising them via juxtaposition only. Yes, the new GIF works I’m doing now are not in the scrolling groupings anymore. I feel like I went as far as I can with that structuring. My new GIF novel, which comes out very soon, is one sequence per page, and the associations are created via page turning. I’m interested in the sequences themselves being attended to and absorbed, which the older scrolling technique did not encourage. Yes, RIP Richard Teitelbaum. The arts are really getting trounced by the awful combo of elderliness and this COVID creep. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. My anxiety seems to manifest itself in frustration, which is, I guess, a little easier to cope with. The only time I ever saw the Beasties was in the late-mid-80s in Amsterdam. Amazing bill: Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, Eric B and Rakim, and the young LL Cool. That is great about that dump, and a big RIP to Obayashi. It’s just been a slaughter of excellent artists lately. Everyone, Mr, Erickson directs those of you who are interested to “a massive file drop of films by the Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi, who brought us HOUSE and passed away today.” Here. That’s a pretty fantastic gift right there, if you’re in the mood. Mmmm, no, I don’t think I’ve heard that Nnamdi. Okay, sounds good, and god knows I’m hungry. Thanks, Steve. Good luck with your weekend. ** Okay. Bill’s feast for your senses has been introduced up north, and now it’s up to you to partake or forever hold your peace. I highly recommend the former option. See you on Monday.