Title: Walking in the city, slowly: spectacular temporal practices in Tsai Ming-liang’s ‘Slow Walk, Long March’ series
Abstract: At the 2013 Venice Film Festival, where his tenth feature film, Jiaoyou/Stray Dogs (2013), won the Grand Jury prize, the Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang declared that this would be his last film. In this he joined Béla Tarr, another master of slow cinema, who had also recently announced his retirement. Tsai’s statement came as no surprise to those who had followed his career closely, as he had for quite some time been deeply disillusioned by filmmaking as a practice. As he said in an interview at Venice: if you look back at the old films you have the feeling among all these products there were also some very good products and some very poor ones. Now we seem only to have the low quality and somehow we lost the quality of film.1 With the completion of his previous film, the Louvre-commissioned Lian/Visage (2009), Tsai had already claimed that the future of cinema lay in museums and galleries. Since then Tsai has, with increasing frequency, ventured into the realm of what has been called ‘expanded cinema’, an ‘elastic name for many sorts of film and projection event’.2 For example, in an installation entitled Shi meng/It’s a Dream, exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennale, fifty-four salvaged seats from an old cinema were displayed alongside a twenty-two-minute version of an eponymous film,3 which had its origin in Tsai’s three-minute contribution to the portmanteau film, Chacun son cinéma …/To Each His Own Cinema (2007), made to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival.
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 2
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