Considering the breadth and consistency of Tsai Ming-liang’s filmography, it’s initially hard to regard the short Madame Butterfly as much more than a curious aberration.…
Judd Apatow has built and padded his filmography on a basic principle: construct vehicles for comic actors in the early days of their ascending stardom…
Spike Lee’s newest joint, Da 5 Bloods, makes perfectly clear its influences when, within the first five minutes, the camera pans out from a giant…
Given his relative renown amongst a certain type of adventurous, festival-savvy cinephile, interviews with Tsai Ming-liang tend to focus on either the ‘slowness’ of his…
Speaking in 2008 of what was then his most recent feature, 2006’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Tsai Ming-liang said: “I did not want…
Tsai Ming-liang’s cinema is primarily concerned with naifs and innocents, usually confronted with complex existential conditions, and with The Wayward Cloud (and arguably 2009’s Face,…
There’s something of a double bind that living with a disability provides in terms of individual identity and personal autonomy: that of either a desire…
In 2003’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Tsai Ming-liang’s gentle ode to cinema, the Taiwanese director’s famously steady camera trains on a handful of moviegoers catching a…
Inspired by the mournful reverie found in observations of Lee Kang-Sheng, inundated by grief at the loss of his father , Tsai Ming-liang crafted an…
In his essential Jerry Lewis essay “The Jerriad: A Clown Painting,” film critic B. Kite discusses the lineage of classic clowns like Chaplin, Keaton, and…
Released in 1997, Tsai Ming-liang’s The River extended what would become a de facto family trilogy in which the same actors reprise identical roles within…
In many ways, Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’amour follows (or establishes, given its chronological situation within his filmography) many of the director’s most characteristic tendencies. From…
Describing Sofia Behrs Tolstaya, a diarist and photographer who remains better known as the wife of Leo Tolstoy, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote: “With her mangled intelligence,…
Typically regarded as a key director of the Taiwanese Second New Wave, Tsai Ming-liang and his debut theatrical feature Rebels of the Neon God exhibit,…
It may surprise you that Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-Liang’s first feature-length film, Boys, has a quite significant relationship to British social realism. Made in 1991,…
For a world-renowned auteur, it’s surprisingly difficult to find information about Tsai Ming-liang’s early television work. It’s not clear if this is due to general…
Prior to the solidification of Tsai Ming-liang’s career, which is arguably realized with his first Lee Kang-Sheng collaboration (in the television commissioned project Boys), there…
In 1989, following the success of a prime-time Chinese Television System soap called Endless Love, which he worked on as a writer, Tsai Ming-liang directed…
In 1954, a 19-year-old girl named Sylvette David sauntered past Pablo Picasso’s window. The aging artist was instantly beguiled. A few weeks later, he revealed…
Liberté is gorgeous and confounding, a Brechtian presentation of passion, tedium and perversion. Albert Serra’s Liberté continues the director’s penchant for placing human rot, literal and metaphorical,…