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Intertertextuality constitutes a form of métissage since it facilitates connections by mixing two texts, creating hybrid forms. Auteur Tsai Ming-liang, culturally, linguistically and nationally métis, as a Malaysian born, Taiwanese by adoption, has directed two films whose Sino-Frenchness results primarily from intertextuality. What Time is it There? (2001) and Face (2009) pay homage to French New Wave director François Truffaut, in innovative fashion. In the earlier work, Tsai cites Truffaut’s New Wave hit, The 400 Blows, (1959) drawing a parallel between its protagonist, Antoinel Doinel and his main character, Hsiao-kang, both played by the respective directors’ signature actors (Jean-Pierre Léaud, Lee Kang-sheng,). Léaud’s cemetery cameo in What Time? suggests that the original French movement, supposedly dead, like the protagonist Hsiao-kang’s father, lives on. Face expands to Truffaut’s later films and refers intertextually to texts in arts other than cinema, establishing the Sino-French as a cross-media as well as cross-cultural phenomenon.

Tsai Ming-liang defies easy categorization as a filmmaker. In the course of his career, he has developed a highly distinctive minimalist narrative approach distinguished by its rigorous use of the long take, often used to frame scenes that are nearly devoid of movement, dialogue, and expression. This chapter engages the notion of a queer politics of time through an analysis of Goodbye, Dragon Inn, a film frequently singled out as not only one of Tsai's most idiosyncratic but also a marker of a turning point in his body of work. With the entirety of its story taking place in a decaying 1930s movie theater, Goodbye, Dragon Inn embodies one of Tsai's most meticulous exercises in the reduction and distillation of cinematic storytelling down to the sparest and most minor units of action.

This chapter proposes that Tsai Ming-liang's films are uniquely placed to illuminate the relationship between slowness and cinephilia, and that this relationship is cast within the notion of film authorship and shot through with a dose of nostalgia. By bringing authorship into the discussion, it is noted that the auteur, a hotly debated figure in the discipline of film studies, must not be taken as a self-evidential, unproblematic category of analysis. Indeed, auteur theory should be much more than a theory about film connoisseurship and the establishment of a pantheon of directors through textual analysis. Rather, it can also be, in the case of Tsai, a source of imagination not only for the construction of one's own auteur status but also for incorporation into one's filmmaking practices and film diegesis. Tsai's cinema offers not merely a view but also slowness as a point of view.

The expansiveness of Wong Kar-wai's approach to intertextuality, citation, and borrowing, along with the dense cross-cultural, cross-medial matrix in which his films are situated suggest another angle on the director's position within the tradition of art cinema. Likewise, the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang also illustrates the reverberations of postmodernism in the arena of art cinema, a development that complicates the view of these directors as realists based on their reliance upon the long take. The idea of a cinema of time finds a further resonance in contemporary Chinese cinema beyond the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Wong Kar-wai. One notable figure who engages a similar problematic of temporal form and historicity is Jia Zhangke, one of the leading directors of the PRC's Sixth Generation. Jia's films assume a critical view of the official discourse of progress and market reform shaping China's new era.

Ghosts and spirits are conspicuous presences in city films from Taiwan, and this chapter posits the cinematic spectre and the act of haunting as a response to the destruction that accompanies the development of the global city. It suggests that the “low,” often trashy genre of the ghost film is particularly attuned to what Rem Koolhaas calls the “junkspace” left over when one model of urban life has been rendered obsolete by another. The chapter considers both the immensely popular work of Chen Kuo-fu, especially Double Vision, and the slower-paced, more experimental films of Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng. Tsai’s films return repeatedly to vanishing and crumbling spaces and to ghostly figures that transgress the boundaries between inside and outside, foreign and domestic, past and present.

This chapter explores the notion of slowness in cinema through the staging of stillness in the films of Tsai Ming-liang. It first discusses the meaning of stillness in “motion pictures” or “moving images.” It then delineates how a cinema of stillness is a conscious stylistic choice by filmmakers who eschew dramatic tendencies, narrative impulses, and spectacular effects. The main body of the chapter analyzes two aspects of stillness: stillness of the camera and stillness of diegetic action. It examines three films with the longest average shot lengths (ASLs) and the least camera movement in Tsai's oeuvre: What Time, which averages 65.09 seconds per shot and contains not a single shot with camera movement; I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, which averages 70.92 seconds per shot and has only five shots (or 5.2 percent of the 97 shots in total) with camera movement; and Visage, which averages 90.11 seconds per shot and contains nine shots (or 10.3 percent of the 87 shots in total) with camera movement. It is argued that the strategies of camera stillness and narrative emptiness allow ample time to instill a sense of slowness and to create moments of nothing happening, during which our minds can contemplate as well as drift.

This chapter examines the use of sound and silence in the films of Tsai Ming-liang and how it relates to the concept of a cinema of slowness. It focuses on how Tsai's films construct a cinema of slowness through specific ways in which aspects of film sound are deployed and, in many cases, denied. The following sonic strategies that are common in Tsai's films are considered: (i) sparseness of dialogue; (ii) no use of voice-over; (iii) accentuation of sound effects, including background and ambient noises, as well as sounds of characters' actions; (iv) diegetic music; (v) non-diegetic music; (vi) uncomfortable sounds; and (vii) silence.

This book focuses on the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Wong Kar-wai, directors who have not only propelled Chinese cinema into the international spotlight in recent years, but also crafted a distinctive idiom, a cinema of time, across the realms of national and transnational film culture. The following chapters show the significance of this cinema of time as a response to the historical ruptures and political upheavals of modern Chinese history; a representational politics implicating questions of historiography, national identity, gender, and sexuality; and an active engagement with and reinvention of the modernist legacy of art cinema in response to globalization and shifting conceptions of narrativity in a post-classical film culture.

Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 Goodbye, Dragon Inn depicts a nearly vacant cinema screening King Hu’s martial arts film Dragon Gate Inn (1967) on its last night of business. The film’s composition of the theatre, empty and decaying, marks it as a haunted house, and the few people present as ghosts lingering nostalgically lamenting the theatre’s impending closure. “Consumption,” thus, offers a reading of Goodbye, Dragon Inn attending to the intertextual invocation of Dragon Gate Inn as well as the metacinematic focus of the theatre and its operation through the lens of horror film generic conventions. The ghosts populating the theatre present an alternative temporality that values and seeks to preserve the past. Yet the anomie infecting them, characteristically of Tsai’s films, prevents anything more than a temporary nostalgia that cannot adequately establish the past as a viable temporal mode. In the end, the theatre closes and the ghosts disperse.

This introductory chapter begins with a review of films that represent what has been called a cinema of slowness, tending towards a certain definite template: long takes (up to ten minutes), static camera, big distance between the camera [and] its human subjects, and a lot of the banality of daily life, such as walking, eating, or just plain mooching around. These films include Michelangelo Frammartino's Le quattro volte (2010) and Abbas Kiarostami'A Taste of Cherry (1997). The chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to analyze Tsai Ming-liang's films through a very particular lens of cinematic slowness. This book is not a comprehensive account of the films and directors who are generally identified with a cinema of slowness, though this body of work will be drawn into the discussion where appropriate. Neither is it a conventional book of auteur studies and makes no attempt at covering all of Tsai's films in a chronological or thematic fashion. What it examines is the overlapping area between Tsai Ming-liang and a cinema of slowness.

This chapter considers the opening shot of Tsai Ming-liang's short film, The Skywalk Is Gone, a shot that encapsulates an aesthetics of slowness, the technique of defamiliarization, and the notion of getting lost. In this opening shot, the giant sign of the Shin Kong Mitsukoshi department store divides the screen down the middle. Shiang-chyi stands transfixed in front of the skyscraper occupying the top-right quarter of the frame. On the building's façade an LED screen is churning out advertisements in bright colors. In a long take that lasts almost a minute and a half, Shiang-chyi stands in the foreground with her back to the low-angle camera, looking up at the screen in the middle ground. Her stillness and silence in the static shot provide a stark contrast to the incessantly changing images of the commercials and their loud soundtrack. The chapter suggests that this opening shot is a critique of a new kind of mediality marked by a proliferation of images with no auteurs, a proliferation that paradoxically undermines rather than enhances visual literacy. Furthermore, this opening shot is a comment on consumption, as the commercials are promoting, among other things, Japanese beauty products (Shiseido) and delicacies (Ganso).