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11 The Cinema of Tsai Ming-liang: A Modernist Genealogy Mark Betz The cinema ofthe Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang arguably has been neglected by Western scholars in favor of work by other East Asian filmmakers, including those working within the context of the New Taiwanese cinema ofwhich Tsai might be considered tangentially a part. This chapter seeks to go some way in redressing the balance and aims to stimulate further interest in Tsai within the Western academic arena ofwork on East Asian cinema.! My approach to Tsai's films derives from a position ofexpertise in postwar European art cinema. For me, what is striking about his visual style and narrative approach is that they evince a contemporary, East Asian filmmaker working explicitly within, and in many ways extending, the modernist project of postwar European cinema's various new waves. Such a recognition has not been lost on others, and when I began working through the English-language criticism on Tsai Ming-liang, I thoroughly expected to find comparisons to other European art filmmakers. I was surprised, however, by the sheer volume of and insistence on such comparisons, which have served many as a sort of shorthand to evoke for Western viewers unfamiliar with his work the particular rigor ofhis narrative style and the likely experience ofviewing it. But the comparisons rarely depart from shorthand. One unauthored online article situates Tsai among his predecessors ofthe so-called first wave ofTaiwan's New Cinema, Hou HsiaoHsien and Edward Yang, when it claims thatjust "as Hou was often compared to Ozu and Yang to Antonioni, Tsai has been labelled 'the Fassbinder of Taiwan'" ("Love, Life and Lies"). Chuck Stephens finds in Tsai's second 162 Mark Betz feature, Vive L'Amour (1994), an "oppressive, Antonioni-derived sense of urban, architectural nausea," and in the ways the film's three main characters "manage to skirt and dodge and eventually collide or nearly miss each other ... an almost Tati-esque choreographic grace" (21). But Toh Hai Leong has gone the furthest in this exercise, referencing Tsai's "austere Bressonian images" (48), his sparse dialogue "(more sparse than in Bresson's L'Argent)" (50), his real time and slow pacing that are "nevertheless involving and hypnotic, especially to those familiar with the work ofAntonioni or Chantal Akerman" (50), and with complete aplomb he even asks Tsai himself"ifthe master of displacement of emotion and narrative, Michelangelo Antonioni, was his greatest influence" (48). Despite getting a few noncommittal words from the director on the matter, Leong has no qualms subtitling his piece "The Taiwanese Antonioni." Moving from shorthand to longhand, one can script a much fuller and, I think, generative portrait ofTsai's relations to European art cinema ofthe 1960s and 1970s. In casting and approach to character, theme and tonal quality, formalist rigor and visual style, and reflexivity with respect to specific postwar European art films and to the medium itself, Tsai's films construct many roads of inquiry that lead, at least to this scholar's admittedly oversaturated eye, to modernism. Like Ingmar Bergman, Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and several ofthe young directors ofthe French New Wave (especially Jean-Luc Godard and Franc,:ois Truffaut), Tsai favours an artisanal or theatrical troupe approach to casting: his features contain very few characters, and they are played by an only slightly larger stable ofactors, creating the sense ofan ongoing and consistent creative project immediately recognizable to auteurist critics. While his third feature film, The River (1996), was in production, Stephens was already reporting that Tsai's small filmography constituted "a trilogy ... concerned with alienated longing ... in contemporary Taipei" (22); Tony Rayns seconded the assessment (15), but hindsight shows they were jumping the gun. For all five ofTsai's films fit this description, with Shiangchyi Chen as a female love interest in two, Kuei-Mei Yang an independent though lonely young woman in two, Hsiao-Ling Lu a mother in two, Tien Miao a father in three (and a salesman in a fourth), Chao-jung Chen a handsome boy ofthe streets in three, and Kang-sheng Lee the young antihero (and usually son) of all five. Not even Bergman's use of Max von Sydow, Fellini's ofMarcello Mastroianni, Antonioni's ofMonica Vitti, or Truffaut's ofJean-Pierre Leaud (who makes a cameo appearance in Tsai's What Time Is It Over There? [2001)),2 can approach the single-mindedness and rigor with which Tsai has cast Kang-sheng Lee as his cinematic alter-ego, and has returned...

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