Tsai Ming-liang on DeBaser: slow cinema essentials

Tsai Ming Liang

Director

Forcinephiles into slow cinema, asian arthouse fans, festival-goers, long-take lovers.
6 Reviews 1 Definitions 2 Charts

The Profile

Malaysian-born Taiwanese film director known for slow cinema: long takes, minimal dialogue, and portraits of urban alienation. Winner of the Golden Lion at Venice (1994, Vive L’Amour). Longtime collaborator with actor Lee Kang-sheng.

Golden Lion (Venice 1994) for Vive L’Amour; Stray Dogs received the Grand Jury Prize/Silver Lion at Venice 2013. Central figure of Taiwan’s arthouse scene, noted for minimalist long takes and recurring collaboration with Lee Kang-sheng (Hsiao-Kang).

Reviews highlight Tsai Ming-liang’s austere, slow-cinema style: fixed shots, silence, and aching solitude. Vive L’Amour’s Golden Lion win and Stray Dogs’ Venetian honors recur. Writers dwell on urban alienation, bodies adrift, and cinema’s own ghosts in Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Expect raw finales, metacinema, and compassion without sentimentality.

Notable Quotes

❝ The final cry encapsulates the momentary bewilderment of the soul when one begins to sense the spurts of real life.

❝ Cinema, the old cinema is dead, and this film is the funeral march in its honor: as static as it is intriguing, as tedious as it is dispiriting.

❝ Tsai Ming Liang manages to create cinema with nothingness. Beauty with emptiness.

❝ As we reach the end of the film, we can do nothing but sink into the most astonished and somber silence, just as Tsai Ming-Liang himself suggests, without any compromise with the terrifying finale, bordering on metacinema.