----------------
“Did you know this theater is haunted?” From cinemas filled with ghosts to semi-abandoned apartment buildings, spaces designed for human occupation have consistently been at the core of Tsai Ming-liang’s work, and, more often than not, these spaces are on the brink of ruin. And if not buildings, then cities: Taipei, Paris, Kuala Lumpur. Places in a constant state of regeneration, where new builds take precedence over old spaces, and people are marginalised, abandoned and forgotten. In the midst of a water shortage, watermelons become a profitable substitute for drinking water on governmental advice. Homeless people compete against each other for the space to hold advertising boards for new houses by the side of a rainswept road. Non-solutions dictated by the bottom line, cost effective paper for long term cracks. And it’s the people who suffer. No space, no water. But maybe a new skyline.
In 2012, Tsai made Walker, the first in a loose series of short to mid-length films featuring a man dressed in red robes walking at a painstakingly slow pace through a variety of public and private spaces. With these films, Tsai’s claustrophobic and isolated vision of contemporary society shifts, to an extent, away from abandoned spaces and towards abandoned histories. The walker exists outside of time as a relic of a bygone era, free to live a life on one’s own terms, at one’s own speed. He’s at odds with his surroundings, and it takes an extraordinary level of mental and physical labour to live like this. But he does, and Tsai matches this exertion with a visual style comprised of extremely long, static shots, usually held for several minutes, in which the walker moves glacially towards the camera or through the frame as day-to-day life continues around him.
This long-take aesthetic and slow action inherently encourages and rewards engagement with a space and its details, so the news that Tsai was experimenting with virtual reality technology for an upcoming project made an odd kind of sense. The ability to create (or recreate) complex spaces and view them from a fixed position with scope for 360 degrees of spatial immersion seems a logical extension of Tsai’s cinema, and the resulting film, The Deserted, is immediately characterisable as such. A man lives alone in an abandoned building in the mountains. He has a large translucent plastic bathtub in the corner of his room, which doubles as a pool for a large white fish. He suffers from neck pain and is visited wordlessly and sporadically by three women who may or may not be ghosts. He eats, he bathes, he tends to a garden. Time passes.
And time passes differently in virtual reality than it does in cinema, but then there’s more to look at, I suppose. Tsai has always given his audience time to process his images, and here, removed of the ability to create compositions, time is more necessary than ever. He mostly limits the focus of a scene to a specific area of the shot, and space exists around this frame, so to speak, in which nothing much happens, with rare exceptions. Spinning around during a particular shot of an old woman walking down a road, for example, reveals another woman, dressed ethereally all in white, watching from a building behind the viewer’s position. The only way to see this part of the image is to look for it, and the viewer can’t ever see both women at the same time. It’s a strange dynamic that adds to the mystery of what’s happening in this space. What is their relationship to one another? Is something keeping them apart? What are they doing there? For the most part, however, Tsai keeps the camera fixed against walls, with many of the interior panoramas showing only empty corners or glimpses at rooms beyond doorways when the viewer turns around, limiting the scope of the shot to create a clear frame within it. In one scene, almost the exact counterpoint to the aforementioned shot of the road, the camera is placed against the back wall of a tiny, cupboard-like room with no door in which a woman is intently listening to something through the wall at its front. The perspective is enclosed within this narrow room, and, with nothing else to really look at, the viewer is pushed to both observe and join this woman as she hides away, listening to unseen events happening elsewhere.
After making Stray Dogs, Tsai moved out of Taipei to the solitude of the countryside to aid his recovery from an illness, and The Deserted, one of the rare few films he has made outside of a metropolis, feels like a similar form of respite necessitated by a life lived elsewhere. A chance to think, to reminisce, to rest. How do people spend their time when their pace of life has changed so dramatically? That’s what makes virtual reality such an interesting fit for Tsai. In cinema, the extended duration of his shots lends itself to depictions of day-to-day struggles. Think of the six-minute long close-up of Lee Kang-sheng in a yellow windbreaker, battered by a rainstorm as he holds an advertising board in Stray Dogs. The intention here is to illustrate the struggle of this man’s life cinematically, but in virtual reality, close-ups are fundamentally impossible and this shot would not have the same impact. In Walker, the wide-shot is integral to communicating the effort of maneuvering a space incredibly slowly, but this would be lost if the viewer could create their own compositions by turning their head. In The Deserted, Tsai provides a space for duration to become time. A space that provides freedom to live in one’s own way, on one’s own terms, and to find a way to relax, finally.
If The Deserted is an experiment beyond the boundaries of cinema, then Your Face is an embrace of its restrictions. Tsai has used close ups before, but sparingly, and, for the most part, his work is more focused on people as a product of their environment as opposed to the individuals themselves — that being said, one of the few exceptions to this rule, Autumn Days, a documentary portrait of Nogami Teruyo, script-supervisor for Akira Kurosawa, was screened as part of a shorts programme at Tate Modern the day after Your Face, and is an interesting diversion for Tsai, if only a brief one. Autumn Days is a study of personality, with the film’s first half giving Teruyo’s conversational talents centre stage as audio playing over a black screen and its second made up of Teruyo playfully mimicking Lee Kang-sheng while sat on a bench with him in a wide shot. Your Face, on the other hand, is a study of the physical. Comprised almost entirely of extreme close ups of the faces of people plucked from the streets of Taipei and put on stage in Zhongshan Hall, a public auditorium in the city at which Tsai used to own and run a small coffee shop, Tsai lets the camera roll on people’s faces as they sit under lights on the stage: sometimes they talk, sometimes they sit in silence. One elderly man slowly falls asleep, abruptly wakes up, and falls back to sleep again.
The majority of these people are elderly, and Tsai has clearly chosen them for the character of their faces over anything else. Every wrinkle, every mole and every smile tells a story of a life well-lived, far more interesting than the stories they tell themselves, and by holding shots for several minutes apiece and affording his subjects the time to settle and relax, Tsai gradually diffuses any shyness or awkwardness they may have. In one shot, a woman poses sternly and straight-facedly for a long time, before the facade slowly starts to break and a bashful smirk emerges. In this sense, Your Face is the opposite of The Deserted. The idea isn’t to immerse the viewer in a false space filled with ghosts, but rather to invite them to study a singular focal point and find the truths written on these faces. It’s only at the film’s conclusion that the location of these portraits becomes a factor. Tsai’s final close-up cuts back to a wide shot of the now-empty room in a moment that evokes his short film, Light, a Heinz Emigholz style architectural study of Zhongshan Hall made in tandem with Your Face and screened before its UK premiere here. Like many of the locations in his work, this is a space designed to accommodate people, and by the end of Your Face, everyone has left and their stories have been told. Tsai holds the shot of the now-empty hall in the same way as he did with the faces, waiting patiently for the facade to crack. But it never does. I wonder if this theater is haunted, too.