CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

Diasporic Visuality and Its Modernity: The Case of Taiwan Auteur Tsai Ming-liang

Organiser: Kien Ket Lim

Betz, Mark (King's College London, United Kingdom) THE CINEMA OF TSAI MING-LIANG: A MODERNIST GENAEOLOGY
Many of the aesthetic and industrial markers that permeate the feature work of this Malaysian-born, Taiwanese-resident filmmaker are well-known touchstones for the cinematic modernisms of Europe from the 1950s through the 1970s: flat acting style and attenuated characterization; long takes and temps mort; sparse dialogue and little to no use of non-diegetic sound; alienated protagonists circulating within a modern environment. But if Tsai's films collectively espouse an aesthetic of materialism, even minimalism, as a means for registering the struggles and failures of individuals to connect with others and with their environment, they also do so within a geo-cultural context that is specific, grounded: post-industrial Taipei. In this paper I will be undertaking a two-pronged examination of modernist cinema and that of Tsai Ming-liang. On the one hand, I will consider Tsai's work within the context of a certain tradition of cinematic modernism-the degree to which his films conform to, deviate from, and extend the aesthetic programs of European cinema in its high modernist phase. On the other hand, and precisely in order to question or derail the tendency towards aesthetic/geographic stagism that such appellations as 'The Taiwanese Antonioni' imply, I wish to complicate the issue of intercultural transmission of aesthetic forms: to address, in other words, how the kinds of specificities that would seem to place Tsai's work as antecedent to and in excess of European modernist cinema may be used to re-examine the precepts upon which such definitions of modernism are based in the first place (origins in Europe, sociological/formal preoccupation rather than political/historical, etc.). In so doing, I will map some new terrains for the study of modernity in cinema across periods and cultures heretofore kept at arm's length.

Chang, Ivy I-chu (National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan ROC) IMAGINING QUEER BODIES: THE EROTIC SITE/SIGHT OF TSAI MING-LIANG'S FILMS
This paper is aimed at investigating three films, The River, Vive L’amour, and the Hole, directed by Tsai Ming-liang, a Taiwanese avant-garde director. With an emphasis on the erotic site/sight of Tsai’s films, we can explore the concept of time and space, corporeal theater, and minimalistic cinematic aesthetics in his films. Besides, this paper will utilize theories of psychoanalysis to explore the queer desire, fantasy space, the father-son incest, and the male homosexual subjectivity in his films. Tsai Ming-liang’s films are composed of alogical repetition of banality of everyday life. Furthermore, the interplay between the human bodies and the enclosed space are the crossroads and interstices which determine the meanings as well as the arrangement of the banal elements of everyday life. During the ritualistic enactment, the human bodies and the enclosed space operate like unreliable registers, repeatedly collecting, filtering and leaving out the urban nomads’ desire and memories. The strange disease and the passage and cleavage of space imbue everyday life with Kafka-styled metaphysical metamorphosis and existential meaning. Being influenced by French Nouveau Cinema, Tsai’s directing style is quite modernistic. His films are extremely visual with minimization of dialogue and diegesis. Viewing Tsai’s films seems like following the directors’ camera to peep someone’s privacy in enclosed space. The human bodies are not only the ultimate vessels which reflect the changing trivialities, but also the primal sites which fabricate fantasy and queer desire. The characters seem breaking away from the past or the future but floating at the present, a moment constituted within unreliable narrative which has been made porous with flood, spatial cleavage, mysterious disease, and a minimum of verbal codes. The slippage of signifying chain, the emphasis on visual codes and spatiality of the scenario make the erotic sites/sights seem like imaginary reminiscences, which, not without failure, repeatedly seduces both the characters and audience to return to the primal wholeness and completeness through displacement and dislocation.

Feng, Pin-chia (National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan ROC) DESIRING BODIES: IMAGES OF WOMEN IN TSAI MING-LIANG'S FILMS
This paper attempts to explore the appropriation and representation of the female body in Tsai Ming-liang's first four films, Rebels of a Neon God (1992), Vive L'amour (1994), The River (1996), and The Hole (1998), within the context of postmodern capitalist economics. Although the women in these urban films appear to be highly mobile, sexually active, and economically self-reliant, they are nevertheless always already in a state of physical and psychological lack. I will argue that Tsai does provide us with a rare insight into Taiwan's gay culture, yet he is unable to represent lesbian desire until his latest film, What Time Is It There? (2001). By contrast, despite the fact that Tsai's male characters are equally in lack, through the recurrent character "Hsiao-kang" in the first three films Tsai is able to get the gay desire out of the closet.

Lim, Kien Ket (National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan ROC) TO BUILD A HOUSE
Taiwan auteur Tsai Ming-liang has been renowned for his portrayal of the loneliness and frustration of living in Taipei. A judgment such as this tends to suggest however that Tsai's films are, after all, a representation of the modernity in a third-world island-state, inferentially a sample of Fredric Jameson's kind of "national allegory." In reality, Tsai has had difficulty in understanding this city he portrays, let alone to "represent" it, owing to his diasporic upbringing-being born in Malaysia but spending most of his adulthood in Taiwan-that always stands in his way to approach this place he seems to be most familiar with. So any familiarity he finds there would, as it were, maim him, hence the loneliness and frustration his films conveys, indicative of a new variant of modernity which is yet to find a name. In Tsai's films, this sense of being maimed finds its expression in the muteness of things: his films are essentially silent films, whose concern, as in André Bazin, is often with the tyranny of things. In Tsai, these are the things that seek to fulfill the desire for one to occupy a place, to sustain there, to live. Martin Heidegger's ontological proposition that to build is always to live may be summoned to answer Tsai's existential anguish. But it is film, whose essence is essentially silent, lying always in the thingness of things, that Tsai has employed to cope with his seeming familiarity with the men and women whose destiny has, in the last analysis, been dispersed by diaspora.