Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness

Chapter 3: Stillness

77 ———— C H a p T e r 3 ———— Stillness in the empty meanwhile nothing happens or moves in the present and this “nothing happens in the present” could be a way to (re) think stillness. —yve Lomax, “Thinking Stillness” The relationship between photography and film has obsessed theorists and practitioners alike since the invention of cinema, with many recent publications reconsidering the relationship in light of new digital technologies (Beckman and Ma 2008b; Campany 2008; Green and Lowry 2006; Mulvey 2006; Sutton 2009). At the center of this obsession is the dialectic between stillness and movement—indeed, the question of time—for photography has commonly been regarded as a medium that stops and freezes time, a “serious project of stilling things” (Campany 2008, 22), whereas film’s forte lies in its ability to depict the flow of time and (the usually bodily) movement within it. However, the relationship between the two forms is much more complex, not least because still photography often reveals itself as fascinated with arresting movement (think Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous photograph of a man jumping over a puddle) and because some filmmakers have chosen to film still objects at length, during which practically nothing happens (one of the most notorious examples being Andy Warhol’s 1964 film, Empire). To discuss stillness is, therefore, to cut to the core of this relationship, to rethink the boundary between the two, and, most of all, to examine its functions vis-à-vis time. My aim in this 78 Stillness chapter is not so much to explore the role of stillness in the relationship between photography and film but rather to draw upon some of the scholarship on this subject in order to explore the notion of slowness in cinema through the staging of stillness in the films of Tsai Ming-liang. To discuss stillness in cinema is also to revisit an old debate about two kinds of films that deploy different cinematic techniques: montage cinema versus long-take cinema. According to David Campany, the history of avant-garde cinema is a history of gravitation to two extremes: at one end films built up from rapid cuts and at the other, the long single take (2008, 36).1 While the art and films of the interwar avant-gardes were “characterized by their engagement with speed and montage,” by the 1950s “speed had lost much of its artistic appeal and almost all of its critical potential, particularly in Europe,” to the extent that “slowness, the deliberate refusal of speed, became central in vanguard art and culture and we can see this change of pace both in photography and film” (36, emphasis in original). In this context, Campany identifies a host of filmmakers who have “exploited the long take, the locked-off camera and the extended tracking shot,” including (among others) Robert Bresson, Yasujirō Ozu, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky, Chantal Akerman, Terence Davies, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Béla Tarr, and, unsurprisingly, Tsai (2008, 37). For Campany, the “often glacial tempo of their films seeks a distance from the spectacle of Hollywood and the cut and thrust of television,” and the “embrace of the slow” is a sign of “increasing uncertainty about the recorded image in general” so that, in the case of Antonioni’s films of the early 1960s, for example, the “almost-nothing of the image drained of narrative urgency and quick cuts flirts with the audience’s everyday experience of doubt about the world and its future” (37). A cinema of slowness, hence, opens up “a space for philosophical and aesthetic reflection within the film” (Campany 2008, 37; emphasis in original). Campany’s account historicizes the relation of speed to film, but how exactly is speed/slowness defined or measured? One approach to the concept of speed or slowness in film is to analyze the ASL of a film and the duration of selected long takes, a method favored by David Bordwell (1988; 2005), following Barry Salt (1983).2 This approach is, of course, by no means scientific or foolproof. For example, Tsai’s Goodbye , is 4,685 seconds long and contains 86 shots, making the ASL 54.48 Stillness 79 seconds. However, while the film is famed for a long take of an empty theater that lasts 5 minutes and 20 seconds, elsewhere in the film there is a rapid shot/reverse shot sequence—totally uncharacteristic of Tsai’s films—during which the female theater assistant...