Ming-liang Tsai – Bu san AKA Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003)
Quote:
Excerpt from “Slow Time, Visible Cinema: Duration, Experience, and Spectatorship” by Tiago de Luca, originally published in Cinema Journal Vol. 56, No. 1 (Fall, 2016)
A limping woman (Chen Shiang-chyi), with a broom in hand, walks into an empty cinema auditorium framed in a static long shot. She enters the frame from the right, walks up the stairs while slowly sweeping the floor, crosses the upper part of the auditorium, and then climbs down the stairs on the other side and leaves the frame from the left, an action that lasts nearly three minutes. The clicking sound of her leg brace, acoustically enhanced against the silent emptiness of the setting she unhurriedly traverses, repetitively punctuates the slowness of her actions. As she leaves the frame, the camera continues recording the large silent auditorium, now devoid of human presence, for nearly three minutes.
From Goodbye, Dragon Inn, by Malaysia-born, Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang, this single stationary shot is charged with meaning in that it lays bare the waning of the theatrical experience as visualized in an empty movie theater. Yet beyond its obvious symbolism, this scene is also emblematic in that it makes no concession to those viewers avid for storytelling. Lasting nearly six minutes and featuring no camera movement, its audiovisual content is slowed down through the limping movements of a woman with a physical disability in its first half, and then reduced to the unchanging sight of an empty space through the remaining duration. In many ways, this shot radicalizes hallmarks of contemporary slow cinema in the sense not only that it is premised on the hyperbolic application of the long take but also that the long take is here combined with other elements that together may likely produce the experience of slowness for the spectator, namely, silence, stillness, minimalism, and an emphasis on duration itself—all of which force the audience to confront images and sounds in their material and perceptual plenitude.
At first glance, this formal idiom, steeped in unbroken takes depleted of dramatic charge, would seem to comply with Bazin’s defense of the sequence shot, which in his view implies “a more active mental attitude on the part of the spectator,” who is then “called on to exercise at least a minimum of personal choice” and from whose attention “the meaning of the image in part derives.” Although this is true in many respects, there is a crucial difference here related to the ways in which this scene extrapolates the dramaturgic dictates of Bazin’s temporal realism, which, as I have explored elsewhere, was often governed by narrative imperatives. As Tsai’s unpopulated cinema vividly indicates, what is often the case in the contemporary slow aesthetic is that it proceeds through opaque and elusive images whose temporal indeterminancy far exceeds plot demands, if a plot even exists.
Bu.san AKA.Goodbye.Dragon.Inn.2003.576p.Repack.Bluray.AC3.x264-LAA.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1h 21mn
Size: 3.39 GiB
DXVA: Compatible
Minimum settings: Met
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 1024x552
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Frame rate: 24.000 fps
Bit rate: 5 352 kb/s
Audio
#1: Chinese 5.1ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s
#2: English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 66.2 kb/s (Commentary by film critic Phoebe Chen)
#3: Chinese 2.0ch AAC LC @ 64.8 kb/s (Commentary by Professor Lin Wenchi and Chen-Ya Li)
Language(s):Mandarin
Subtitles:English
