[...] At the centre of that film is the story of the life and death of a particular kind of urban institution, the neighborhood cinema, a social space whose exitence brings with it the possibility of both communal artistic experience and the chance encounter. (These encounters tend not to end happily in his films, but such intersections, and the promises and disappointments of urban life, are nevertheless a source of touching fascination to him.) [...]

[...] (When I speak of cinemas I am not at this juncture referring to those multiplex monstrosities that dedicate their sixteen screens almost entirely to tentpole blockbusters directed by corporate committee; these only rare today happen to screen anything that could be described as cinema.)

[...] 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.

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' [...]

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 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.