View all notes
[...] 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. [...]
[...] 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. [...]
[...] 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.