Goodbye Dragon Inn is Tsai Ming-liang’s most minimalist film. All of Tsai’s films chart heartrending emotional disconnections with beautiful, motionless or slow-moving long takes. But Goodbye Dragon Inn pushes this to something of an extreme, as if Tsai were trying to see how much could be said, and felt, out of how little.
The movie chronicles the last screening in a decrepit, soon-to-be-torn-down old-style (big) movie theater. The film being shown is Dragon Inn, a classic King Hu martial arts film from the 1960s.
It’s raining hard outside, and part of the theater is flooded: a motif that is repeated in most of Tsai’s films.
There are very few patrons, and most of them aren’t paying attention to the film. Men cruise one another, moving from seat to seat, or pissing in adjacent stalls in the bathroom, or passing one another in narrow corridors somewhere in the theater’s innards. But nobody ever connects, nobody picks anybody else up; there just doesn’t seem to be any sexual spark.
Other patrons lounge in the seats, feet up on the seats in front of them, loudly chewing nuts or other snacks.
The ticket-taker, who who has a club foot, cooks her dinner in an electric pot, walks through the theater, picks up trash, cleans up the bathrooms, and goes to visit the projectionist, who is absent from his booth. (We presume that she likes him, but that the feeling isn’t reciprocated).
There are no more than six or ten lines of dialogue in the entire 81 minutes of the film (aside from the dialogue and narration of Dragon Inn itself, which we hear in snatches). In the absence of talk, there’s an extraordinary concentration upon duration, and upon bodies.
Duration: Goodbye Dragon Inn makes us feel the passage of time, the density and weight of its moments, one added to another, while nothing happens, or what happens happens with extreme slowness. There’s one shot where the ticket-taker comes to the projection booth, and sits there waiting for him to return (which does not happen). She is motionless, and the shot is also motionless. Lots of cigarettes are heaped in an ashtray, and another cigarette, on the edge of the table, is still burning, the only sign of life. So we know that the projectionist is around somewhere, even though we don’t see him. Finally the ticket-taker gets up and leaves, and finally there’s a cut to the next shot.
There’s also the moment when Dragon Inn ends; the lights in the theater go up, and the few remaining patrons leave, except for (what looks like) one old man who remains in his seat. (I say “looks like” because it’s an extreme long shot, showing the whole theater from the stage, and it’s hard really to tell). The camera holds on this scene of near-emptiness, the movie theater emptied of cinema, for what seems like a long time, until Tsai finally cuts to some final shots of the ticket-taker and the projectionist separately cleaning up and going home.
These shots are fascinating — and not in the least boring — they are filled with a kind of tension, precisely because there is so little to see. Drained of activity and of change, the shots solicit our gaze. Instead of looking at action sequences, such as those that fill Dragon Inn, we find ourselves looking at something that is normally invisible, normally hidden by the very facts of action and movement: the passage of time itself.
But what’s truly mesmerizing and intense about Goodbye Dragon Inn is the bodies present in the theater. The men pass each other in an arrested dance, scarcely exchanging a word, making gestures that are withdrawn as soon as they have been sketched out. The club-footed ticket-taker painfully limps her way down corridors and up and down stairs; even when we cannot see her, we hear the clip-clop of her slow passage. These people scarcely seem to have any more life within them than do the celluloid figures in the film they are not watching; their only substantiality comes from the way Tsai’s camera dwells on them, projects them in turn to us. (Indeed, two old men, who seem to be the only audience members actually watching the movie, are the very actors who starred in Dragon Inn some forty-odd years previously). Tsai points up both the ghostliness of cinema, and the way that cinema nonetheless substantializes, and physicalizes, what it projects as two-dimensional shadows.
Goodbye Dragon Inn is not without humor (which comes from the incongruity of its characters’ non-connections), but mostly it expresses a discreet and poetic melancholy. Film is commonly said to preserve what otherwise dies and vanishes; but film in the classic sense is itself now in decline, as it is increasingly displaced by the new multimedia, as well as by new forms of consumption (multiplexes of small theaters instead of the old movie palaces, not to mention videos and DVDs viewed at home). Tsai seeks to memorialize this decline itself, as if what film most beautifully preserved were its own slow process of decay.
Goodbye Dragon Inn
Goodbye Dragon Inn is Tsai Ming-liang’s most minimalist film. All of Tsai’s films chart heartrending emotional disconnections with beautiful, motionless or slow-moving long takes. But Goodbye Dragon Inn pushes this to something of an extreme, as if Tsai were trying to see how much could be said, and felt, out of how little.
The movie chronicles the last screening in a decrepit, soon-to-be-torn-down old-style (big) movie theater. The film being shown is Dragon Inn, a classic King Hu martial arts film from the 1960s.
It’s raining hard outside, and part of the theater is flooded: a motif that is repeated in most of Tsai’s films.
There are very few patrons, and most of them aren’t paying attention to the film. Men cruise one another, moving from seat to seat, or pissing in adjacent stalls in the bathroom, or passing one another in narrow corridors somewhere in the theater’s innards. But nobody ever connects, nobody picks anybody else up; there just doesn’t seem to be any sexual spark.
Other patrons lounge in the seats, feet up on the seats in front of them, loudly chewing nuts or other snacks.
The ticket-taker, who who has a club foot, cooks her dinner in an electric pot, walks through the theater, picks up trash, cleans up the bathrooms, and goes to visit the projectionist, who is absent from his booth. (We presume that she likes him, but that the feeling isn’t reciprocated).
There are no more than six or ten lines of dialogue in the entire 81 minutes of the film (aside from the dialogue and narration of Dragon Inn itself, which we hear in snatches). In the absence of talk, there’s an extraordinary concentration upon duration, and upon bodies.
Duration: Goodbye Dragon Inn makes us feel the passage of time, the density and weight of its moments, one added to another, while nothing happens, or what happens happens with extreme slowness. There’s one shot where the ticket-taker comes to the projection booth, and sits there waiting for him to return (which does not happen). She is motionless, and the shot is also motionless. Lots of cigarettes are heaped in an ashtray, and another cigarette, on the edge of the table, is still burning, the only sign of life. So we know that the projectionist is around somewhere, even though we don’t see him. Finally the ticket-taker gets up and leaves, and finally there’s a cut to the next shot.
There’s also the moment when Dragon Inn ends; the lights in the theater go up, and the few remaining patrons leave, except for (what looks like) one old man who remains in his seat. (I say “looks like” because it’s an extreme long shot, showing the whole theater from the stage, and it’s hard really to tell). The camera holds on this scene of near-emptiness, the movie theater emptied of cinema, for what seems like a long time, until Tsai finally cuts to some final shots of the ticket-taker and the projectionist separately cleaning up and going home.
These shots are fascinating — and not in the least boring — they are filled with a kind of tension, precisely because there is so little to see. Drained of activity and of change, the shots solicit our gaze. Instead of looking at action sequences, such as those that fill Dragon Inn, we find ourselves looking at something that is normally invisible, normally hidden by the very facts of action and movement: the passage of time itself.
But what’s truly mesmerizing and intense about Goodbye Dragon Inn is the bodies present in the theater. The men pass each other in an arrested dance, scarcely exchanging a word, making gestures that are withdrawn as soon as they have been sketched out. The club-footed ticket-taker painfully limps her way down corridors and up and down stairs; even when we cannot see her, we hear the clip-clop of her slow passage. These people scarcely seem to have any more life within them than do the celluloid figures in the film they are not watching; their only substantiality comes from the way Tsai’s camera dwells on them, projects them in turn to us. (Indeed, two old men, who seem to be the only audience members actually watching the movie, are the very actors who starred in Dragon Inn some forty-odd years previously). Tsai points up both the ghostliness of cinema, and the way that cinema nonetheless substantializes, and physicalizes, what it projects as two-dimensional shadows.
Goodbye Dragon Inn is not without humor (which comes from the incongruity of its characters’ non-connections), but mostly it expresses a discreet and poetic melancholy. Film is commonly said to preserve what otherwise dies and vanishes; but film in the classic sense is itself now in decline, as it is increasingly displaced by the new multimedia, as well as by new forms of consumption (multiplexes of small theaters instead of the old movie palaces, not to mention videos and DVDs viewed at home). Tsai seeks to memorialize this decline itself, as if what film most beautifully preserved were its own slow process of decay.