Ming-liang Tsai

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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. Read More »

Explores the background behind an adolescent (Lee Kang-sheng) extorting money from other adolescents.Read More »

When a young street vendor with a grim home life meets a woman on her way to Paris, they forge an instant connection. He changes all the clocks in Taipei to French time; as he watches François Truffaut’s “Les 400 Coups,” she has a strange encounter with its now-aging star, Jean-Pierre Leaud.Read More »

This short by Tsai Ming-liang, completed in 2021, was filmed at “the Dune” in Yilan, Taiwan, where the eight films in his Walker series were being shown.

A wordless performance/installation short film from Tsai.Read More »

Forest fires burn in Sumatra; a smoke covers Kuala Lumpur. Grifters beat an immigrant day laborer and leave him on the streets. Rawang, a young man, finds him, carries him home, cares for him, and sleeps next to him. In a loft above lives a waitress. She sometimes provides care and attention. More violence seems a constant possibility. They find another man abandoned on the street, paralyzed. They carry him. While no one speaks to each other, sounds dominate: coughing, cooking, coupling, opening bags; music and news reports on a radio, the rattle and buzz of a restaurant. It’s dark in the city at night. We see down hallways, through doors, down alleys. Who sleeps with whom?Read More »

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Kang lives alone in a big house, Non in a small apartment in town. They meet, and then part, their days flowing on as before.Read More »

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Filmmaker Ming-liang Tsai sits with Lee Kang-sheng in a house as they have a discussion.

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This conversation between Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang and his muse Lee Kang-sheng illuminates one of the great actor-director collaborations in cinema history.Read More »

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Hsiao-Kang, now working as a pornographic actor, meets Shiang-chyi once again. Meanwhile, the city of Taipei faces a water shortage that makes the sales of watermelons skyrocket.Read More »

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An unemployed young man named Hsiao-Kang (Lee Kang-sheng) passes idle time at a local Taipei mall when he encounters an old friend (Chen Shiang-chyi) on the opposite escalator. With time on his hands, he agrees to accompany her back to the location shoot where she is working as a production assistant for a film. At the site, the director is displeased with the unrealistic appearance of a mannequin intended to represent a dead body floating on the river, and asks the aimless Hsiao-Kang to act as a stand-in for the shot.Read More »