[...] for film theorist Rudolf Anheim and contemporaries, the cinema's potential as an art form largely ended with the coming of the Talkies; for the Boomer counterculture critics, Steven Spielberg was Satan incarnate, the revenge of Rockwellian repression, a hawker of tie-in toys and pre-packaged arcade game levels. What one generation perceives as catastrophe, the next takes as the natural state of things and the medium marches on.

[...] as time passes, one must endeavour to discriminate between changes that have taken place in cinema and changes that have taken place in one's self. I could not imagine, for example, enduring every new multiplex release in the 2010s as I did in 1997 [...] That I no longer exercise the same omnivorous (or, more accurately, indifferent) moviegoing practices has nothing to do with the movies getting worse - maybe they have, but that's neither here nor there - and everything to do with the changing demands on my time and patience, and perhaps a creeping comprehension of my own mortality.

Film history is borne along by technological innovation, and by ructions in business models, and by the whims of the viewing public as ineffably impacted by broader socio-historical-political trends

An art form that has traditionally required the use of prohibitively costly tools, cinema in the capitalist world has from its inception been shaped by the demands of commerce - those working under a regime than a corporation, meanwhile, must negotiate their own compromises. Such a thing as a free filmmaker has never existed, be it in Beijing or Hollywood or Timbuktu, and no small part of film scholarship consists of elucidating how artists have managed to function as artists within these imposed strictures, the proof that they've done so being readily found in the works they've left behind.

[...] going to the multiplex has felt like witnessing the execution of bullet-pointed instructions on a front office memorandum rather than a creative collaboration by human beings.

How can cinema be dead when business is booming? This depends on how we define cinema. Jones builds a contrast between 'audiovisual spectacle', that 'succession of ruthlessly calibrated, wind tunnel-tested, wholly interchangeable slabs of worldwide entertainment that roll of the assembly line year by year' of the sort specialised in by the franchise-oriented studios, and cinema. The latter he defines as an art of compression where 'every choice becomes charged and interacts with every other choice in the momentum toward a defined end point' [...]

Schrader and Jones' old confrere Martin Scorsese generated a good bit of copy

the films of Wang Bing, many of them durational epics, frequently shown abroad in a gallery context and seen in his native China mostly on circulated samizdat-style files

At this moment, it was these Pacific Rim filmmakers from territories in what has sometimes been referred to as Greater China - here, Tsai and Yang's Taiwan and Wong's Hong Kong - who seemed poised most precisely and precariously on the edge of contemporaneity, who seemed best situated to explain where precisely we in the industrialised and post-industrialised world were and were going as we approached the Y2K deadline. As residents of these cosmopolite refugee territories, they were accustomed to the bewilderment of cultural dislocation, the social isolation resultant from the dissolution of traditional community ties, and the transitory nature of life lived in teeming transit lounge cities, subject to constant construction and destruction under the conditions of hypercapitalist overdrive.

[...] these yearnings exist within a larger yearning. Their unquenched desire echoes Tsai's own desire for the popular cinema of his youth - and not just the movies, but everything that goes along with them: the big neighborhood cinemas, the communal culture of family moviegoing, the family itself, and the absolute surrender to the screen that is perhaps only possible for the very young, that perhaps can never be experienced again, not quite the same way.

the Japanese tourist, wandering the Fu-Ho in search of succour or maybe just a suck

The fanfare that opens Goodbye, Dragon Inn is followed by a comedown crash. The prologue gives us a vision of the Fu-Ho in its heyday, but immediately afterwards we encounter a Fu-Ho that’s anything but Grand. It’s just another underpopulated declining urban theatre on the eve of a ‘Temporary Closing’, which one suspects management has optimistically identified as such in order to soften the blow of their establishment’s inevitable quiet passing, leaving behind no next of kin when it goes. A torrential rain – a regular presence in Tsai’s wringing-wet filmography – is lapping at the lobby, and there is a sense that the entire operation might soon be underwater. Après le cinéma, le déluge.

[...] The nagging pressure of sex separates the ageing Fu-Ho from the idealised cinema of a child's memory, a popular cinema seen at its prelapsarian pinnacle. The movie is only an afterthought for most of the contemporary theatregoers, pushed and pulled about by carnal need. [...]

His proclivity for dramatising urban peregrinations have led many to compare Tsai, particularly early in his career, to Antonioni, though Tsai is individuated by, if nothing else, his sense of humour, a characteristic Antonioni can't be said to have had in overabundance

carrying on a desultory affair with a porno vendor

[...] These architectural manifestations of hypermodern existence, liminal sites through which one passes in transit, include shopping malls, supermarkets, hotels and motels, airports, superhighways, food courts and convenience stores - all backdrops, it should be noted, against which a goodly portion of Tsai's films are seen to play out. Taipei and Hong Kong, modern cities grown overnight to metropolis-size at mid-century by an influx of refugees, are perhaps the definitive non-place cities of the twentieth century, and as such ideal bellwethers to understanding the changing cultural constructions of public space in a world increasingly given over to non-spaces. [...]

along with the liquescent clanging of swords

[...] we need art and artists for our dark days, too [...] If Shangguan's fighter in Dragon Inn represents a fantasy of supreme physical control, Chen's ticket taker in Goodbye, Dragon Inn recalls us to the ungainliness of fallible boies made of skin, blood, and bone, and to the often onerous reality of having to be a person in the world. Like ourselves, then, it is reasonable to suppose that looking up at the screen, Chen has a glimpse of utopia, of a world without unending ache, in which staircases can be mounted in a single bound rather than a succession of excruciating steps.

sun peering through a scrim of cloud coverage

The sound of hauntology, as limned out by Fisher and Reynolds, is a corrupted one, born of the very fallibility of analogue recording mediums

a senescent prosperity enjoyed under a wise ruler

A curious side effect of open access: a level of vituperation rarely encountered from paying customers, the wrathful indignity of the freeloader!

Not a year has passed since its birth when it hasn't been pronounced dead, and in Goodbye, Dragon Inn we find one of its most eloquent and plangent eulogies.

Through cinema, his films tell us, time can be held in abeyance for a moment