Goodbye Dragon Inn + Diamond Sutra

Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003)
Dir. Tsai-ming Liang
82min, DCP
With Lee Kang-sheng, Chen Shiang-Chyi, Kiyonobu Mitamura, Miao Tian, Shih Chun, Chen Chao-jung, Yang Kuei-mei
In Chinese with English subtitles

The subject of Tsai Ming-liang’s wondrous cinema is time—how it passes, how we perceive it, and how one can capture it through the medium of film. Rice cookers abound in his movies for a reason; they, too, are durational devices, or self-contained pockets of time. In Goodbye, Dragon Inn, about the final screening at a repertory cinema in Taiwan that is about to close, a rice cooker punctuates a beautiful elegy to moviegoing as a communal experience of shared time and space. As King Hu’s 1967 wuxia epic Dragon Inn plays on the screen, the theater becomes a darkened haven for embodied desires: a woman brings a steamed bun in a cooker; spectators take off their shoes; a man cruises for sex in the back of the cinema; the theater manager, a woman with an iron brace on her leg, embarks on a torturous odyssey to deliver food to the projectionist, played by Tsai’s constant muse, Lee Kang-sheng. By the time the possibility arises that the theater is haunted, we’ve already identified it as a space outside of time—indeed, two stars of Hu’s original opus, Miao Tien and Shih Chun, watch their younger selves with tears in their eyes. 4K Restoration by CINEMATEK, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium.

Preceded by
Diamond Sutra (2012)
Dir. Tsai Ming-liang
20min, DCP

Since 2012, Tsai Ming-liang has created a body of films titled the Walker series, inspired by Xuanzang, the seventh-century Chinese monk known for his epic overland journeys and the travelogues he recorded. In Tsai’s abstract rendering of this concept, Lee Kang-Sheng traverses various urban environments in monk’s robes—a patient, itinerant incongruity in a world that insists on moving relentlessly fast. Diamond Sutra is the third film in the Walker series, created for the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012 and later chosen as the opening short film for the Venice Film Festival; here, Lee continues his peregrinations as a rice cooker lets off steam in the background. Tsai said that gazing at the steam rising from a rice cooker reminded him of his mother's face as she lay dying, exhaling her final breath.