The Crusing Grounds of Tsai Ming-liang's Slow Cinema

(2024)

Although I’ve written about him before, I was happy to have the chance to pen yet another devotional essay to Taiwan’s greatest living filmmaker, this time for a special issue of Queer Majority guest edited by my pal (and another living legend) Bruce Labruce. And, in case you didn’t get to see it, yet another brilliant filmmaker, Matthew Wilder, has also penned a witty and evocative homage at Artforum, in anticipation of Tsai’s upcoming retrospective at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles.

Tsai Ming-liang is something of a curiosity to Western audiences. Born in Malaysia, Tsai has become one of the most celebrated film directors in Taiwan and numbers among the foremost progenitors of “slow cinema”, a style of filmmaking defined by extended takes, subdued action, and minimalist storylines that unfurl over durations that can be uncomfortably long for some viewers. He’s been thrice nominated for the Cannes Palme d’Or, and taken home major awards from the Berlin International Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival. He’s also a gay man, one whose work posits a queerness rooted in Taoism and other Eastern philosophies. His is a queerness that is simultaneously aligned with and in opposition to Western conceptions — a queerness that does not exist as a separate thing adversarial to society, but that is an intrinsic part of nature and the world, something that is and always was. At first glance, it can seem difficult to know what to make of his work. The pensive rhythm of Tsai’s films and the relentlessly defiant queer perspective that resists clichés appear to clash discordantly — but in fact, they fuel each other, often in surprising and disorienting ways.