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…
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 a portrait of David, the first of 60 that he would paint that spring. She became his inspiration, his Girl with the Ponytail, his muse. The muse is one of
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Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye’s The Shadow Play is a vicious work that descends into the depths of corruption in both a private enterprise (the events…
Lou Ye’s 2014 film Blind Massage marked a transition for director, one that took him into broadly more commercial territory for the first time. Based…
Despite Lou Ye’s reputation for pushing the boundaries of Chinese censorship guidelines – due to his often frank and incisive takes on politics, gender, and…
Love and Bruises, which Lou Ye made during his five-year, government-imposed ban from filmmaking in China, is a tale of l’amour fou set, appropriately enough,…
A film built upon gay male hypersexualization overlaid with some hamfisted prose, Spring Fever turns the sadness of being gay and Chinese into a dry…
Lou Ye’s Summer Palace is an exasperating experience, full of interesting ideas and an incendiary political backdrop but falling victim to clichés of poeticized romantic longing.…
Purple Butterfly is a film of dreamy realism, sometimes insoluble and suffused with a haze that is, at once, sepulchral yet sultry — a film about…