This retrospective finished in 2020, before the rest of the tour was postponed by COVID.

January 10 – March 15, 2020

Doc Films Retrospective

A leading filmmaker of contemporary Chinese-language cinema, Tsai Ming-Liang has produced one of the most striking cinematic oeuvres of the past quarter-century. Malaysian by birth, Taiwanese by residence, internationally funded but belonging to nowhere in particular, Tsai’s moody, pensive, deadpan films are haunted by loss, failure, and broken attachments. But these films are not mere exercises in nostalgia: collaging the fragments of contemporary life into a cinema of alienation, precarity, and queerness, Tsai’s slow style and serial characters iterate and interrogate all the ways attachment falls short amid the austerity, inequality, and increasing uncertainty rapidly proliferating in the margins of modernity. 

Tsai’s muse, Lee Kang-Sheng, stars in every film as Tsai’s alter ego, Hsiao-Kang (“Little Wealth”), a transient protagonist working job after unstable job on the abject underside of the fast and flashy global economy. Wayward encounters, unorthodox intimacies, and inarticulate desires give way to austere, surreal tableaus: shots and scenes extend for many minutes, producing a cinema as intense and precise as it is diffuse and disorganized. Individually, the films flirt with formlessness, but are threaded together by recurrent motifs—phone booths, flooded apartments, mysterious ailments, glowing screens, cockroaches, mumbled meals, lost keys, spiritual possession, and watermelons. As the series progresses, the films amplify, reinforce, and refract one another, exploring the incoherence structuring our attachments to objects and others.

For his first full retrospective in Chicago, it is a pleasure to watch this important auteur reckoning with globalization and its discontents. 

Screenings are $7. A pass for the quarter is $40.

Essay by Ethan Weinstein and J. Michael Eugenio. Banner image by Finn Jubak.

1212 E 59th St., Chicago, IL

Google calendar with retrospective screenings and Tsai Ming-Liang’s April 2020 visit.
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January 10, 2020, 7pm
January 12, 2020, 1:30pm

Introduction on January 10 by J. Michael Eugenio.

Tsai Ming-Liang’s debut follows a love triangle of aimless teenage dropouts as they roam the malls, video arcades, and hourly hotels of Taipei’s claustrophobic entertainment district. Hsiao-Kang, debuting here as a struggling and lonely student alienated by his religious mother and impatient father, obsessively follows the perpetually frustrated throuple. Several of the motifs and themes of Tsai’s cinematic mythology—incessant flooding, background porn, triangulated desire—first appear in this masterful account of urban alienation and ambivalent desire.

Winner of Best Film at the Torino Film Festival.

January 17, 2020, 7pm (Opening reception, 6pm)
January 19, 2020, 1:30pm

Introduction on January 17 by Deborah Stratman.

Three exhausted salespeople struggle in a rapidly developing Taipei—vacant high-rises sprout beside crumbling offices. Hsiao-Kang, a suicidal vendor of columbarium niches (spaces for urns), begins squatting in an unsold luxury condo. A James Dean–impersonating street vendor also begins squatting there after an evening of meaningless sex with the condo’s ambitious realtor. A thoroughly modern melancholic slapstick—all three unwittingly share a condo that none of them own—Vive L’Amour is a masterpiece of queer frustration. 

Winner of the Golden Lion Prize at the Venice Film Festival.

OPENING RECEPTION
JANUARY 17, 2020, 6PM

Opening remarks, 6:45pm
Susan L. Burns, Director, Center for East Asian Studies and Professor of History, University of Chicago; Director General Eric Huang, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago; Alex Kong, Doc Films

Doc Films Screening of VIVE L’AMOUR, 7pm
following an introduction by artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman. Her films and artworks investigate power, control, and belief, and consider how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. She teaches at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

January 24, 2020, 7pm
January 26, 2020, 1pm

Introduction on January 24 by Melika Bass.

A deep exploration of “the relationship between human psychology and illness,” The River finds Hsiao-Kang afflicted with a mysterious, intractable crick in his neck. The family, while committed to alleviating Hsiao-Kang’s pain, is as repressed and estranged as ever—Hsiao-Kang’s mother has a passionless affair with a pornographer, while his bathhouse-cruising father comically tries to stave off inexorable leaks. This bleak comedy of uncertain convalescence makes a fascinating study of seduction, faith, and longing.

Winner of the Grand Prize of the Jury at the Berlin Film Festival.

My New Friends, Tsai Ming-Liang’s contribution to Taiwan’s AIDS-awareness campaign for which he interrupted The River’s pre-production, is a documentary centered around intimate conversations with two HIV+ men. It offers a glimpse into the lives of young gay men in Taiwan and directly addresses many of the themes of intimacy, illness, and HIV/AIDS that Tsai Ming-Liang’s feature films more obliquely touch on.  

January 31, 2020, 7pm
february 2, 2020, 1:30pm

Introduction on January 31 by Jennifer Reeder.
Introduction on February 2 by Alex Wen of subtitle magazine.

A mysterious Y2K bug has hit Taiwan. Those infected scuttle and scatter in the shadows like cockroaches. Hsiao-Kang, a clueless, customerless shopkeeper in a quarantine zone, begins picking at a hole left by a plumber in his floor, interfering with his downstairs neighbor’s plans to keep her flooding home intact and the bug at bay. Alienated, frustrated, and days away from a water shutoff, she fantasizes about connecting with Hsiao-Kang—through nostalgic technicolor musical interludes imitating 50s Hong Kong chanteuse Grace Chang. 

Winner of the FIPRESCI award at Cannes and the Gold Hugo award at the Chicago International Film Festival.

February 7, 2020, 7pm

Introduction by Kat Sachs.

In this meditation on queer time and compromised comforts, Hsiao-Kang, now a black-market watch salesman, laconically mourns his father—whom his mother inconsolably tries to conjure. Meanwhile Shiang-Chyi, who insisted on buying Hsiao-Kang’s personal dual-time watch, aimlessly vacations in Paris. Lonely and purposeless, she repeatedly tries to call Hsiao-Kang, who now impulsively changes every clock in Taipei to Paris time. The nuclear family reprised from Rebels of the Neon God and The River, is now, finally, queered and atomized. 

The Skywalk Is Gone finds Shiang-chyi back in Taipei, searching for Hsiao-Kang only to find the skywalk where he sells watches is now gone.

February 14, 2020, 7pM
february 16, 2020, 1:30pm

Introduction on February 14 by Cameron Worden.
Introduction on February 16 by Jennifer Dorothy Lee.

CW: a very extended rape scene

Tsai’s most divisive film, this musical porn parody of a water-short but watermelon-plenty Taipei charts the attempted relationship between a water-hoarding Shiang-Chyi, desperate to explore her sexuality, and an alienated Hsiao-Kang, a porn star incapable of romantic intimacy. The surreal, saturated musical numbers—including a glimmering merman crooning in a water tower and a cross-dressing, partner-swapping date in a park—delight just as much as the increasingly hardcore porn scenes strain, yielding a scathing critique of porn’s violence and exploitation.

Winner of the Alfred Bauer Prize and Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Achievement at the Berlin Film Festival.

February 21, 2020, 7pM
february 23, 2020, 1:30pm

Introduction on February 21 by Jonathan Rosenbaum.
Introduction on February 23 by KyungMook Kim.

A cinematic 4’33”, Goodbye, Dragon Inn shows us the atmospheric corners of a decaying cinema’s final screening—the manager’s dragging limp mixes with the flickering projection glow, a chorus of cruisers flushing urinals, and echoes of King Hu’s Dragon Inn. Hsaio-kang, the projectionist, is nearly absent, much to the dismay of the doting manager, while the theater is populated by ghosts (including two of the actors from Dragon Inn). Seeing this haunted elegy to cinema in a theater must not be missed.

“Arguably the greatest film ever made about moviegoing” — The New York Times

Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice Film Festival and the Best Feature Gold Plaque at the Chicago International Film Festival.

February 28, 2020, 7pM
March 1, 2020, 1:30pm

Introduction on February 28 by Thorsten Trimpop.
Introduction on March 1 by Liang Luscombe.

Tsai’s first film set in the smoggy moist streets and derelict edifices of his native Malaysia is one of his most intimate and political. Mutable mute Hsiao-Kang—ever shifting, objectified, and alienated—is finally shorn into two characters: a dependent paraplegic attended to by Shiang-Chyi, a waitress, as well as a badly injured Taiwanese immigrant taken in and cared for by Rawang, a migrant worker. This tender exploration of unrequited love, erotic solicitude, and frustrated charity, is a welcome dream.

March 6, 2020, 7pM
March 8, 2020, 1:30pm

Introduction on March 6 by Leah Li.

Commissioned by and largely shot within the Louvre, Face is Tsai’s mediation on the post-colonial cinematic process and an ode to Truffaut. Here Hsiao-Kang directs a filmic retelling of Strauss’s operatic retelling of Wilde’s theatrical retelling of the biblical Salome—starring none other than Jean-Pierre Léaud (Truffaut’s own Lee Kang-Sheng)—all the while struggling with the loss of his mother. Full of fantastical, gorgeous images responding to the Louvre’s collection, Face highlights Tsai’s painterly stylized compositions.

March 13, 2020, 7pM
March 15, 2020, 1:30pm

Introduction on March 13 by Ben Sachs.

Stray Dogs, intended to be his farewell to feature filmmaking, is Tsai Ming-Liang at his most deliberate and dilated. Hsaio-kang, an alcoholic father and human signpost for luxury condos,  shepherds his two children from squat to market to skyway, occasionally leaving them in the care of a maternal woman, played by a triad of Tsai Ming-Liang regulars. Fully forgoing continuity editing, Tsai juxtaposes social realist depictions of life on the margins with dreamlike sequences of familial longing. 

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.