Sleepy and Cruisy Queer Cinema
Presentation by Nicholas de Villiers
with a screening of GOODBYE, DRAGON INN
110min
Tickets

Taiwan-based filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang’s It’s a Dream (2007), his 3-minute contribution to the Cannes 60th anniversary compilation Chacun son cinéma, contains in nucleo his understanding of cinema as a dream-like state and his reflection on the cinema as a space so saturated with memory and cruisy queer desire that it can feel disorienting. This presentation illustrates how It’s a Dream condenses many of the central themes and motifs of Tsai’s entire body of work: melancholy, nostalgia, family intimacy, cruising, dreaming, and both temporal and spatial disorientation. The film harks back both to his own past experiences watching films in Malaysia with his maternal grandmother, and to the past of Chinese-language cinemas, especially the musicals and martial arts genre pictures Tsai pays homage to, queerly, in several of his films. 

Tsai’s short film invokes a set of affects and their interrelations: feeling cruisy, feeling sleepy, and feeling melancholy. The emotional landscape of Tsai’s body of work thus suggests new ways of understanding the way space and sexuality affect one another. Tsai has also revised and extended It’s a Dream in “expanded cinema” installations using chairs from the movie theater in Malaysia—a move to the museum also seen in Stray Dogs at the Museum, Tsai’s “sleepover” at an art museum. 

Tsai’s reflexive approach to “metacinema”—films about filmmaking and film viewing—is also at the heart of his feature film Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), a melancholy ode to a cruisy old Taipei movie theater at its last screening of King Hu’s swordsman picture Dragon Inn (1967). This presentation will provide some background on Tsai’s homage, the “haunted” movie theater location, and a renewed sense of longing for this cruisy cinema space, by way of introduction before the screening of a beautiful new 4K restoration of Goodbye, Dragon Inn.

Presenter Bio: Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and film at the University of North Florida. He is the author of Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol (2012), Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary (2017), and Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang (forthcoming Fall 2022) all from the University of Minnesota Press

Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Dir Tsai Min-liang
82min

Like the Royal Theater in The Last Picture Show and the title movie house in Cinema Paradiso, the Fu-Ho is shutting down for good. A palace with seemingly mile-wide rows of red velvet seats, the likes of which you’ve seen only in your most nostalgic dreams (though they’re beginning to fray), the Fu-Ho’s valedictory screening is King Hu’s 1967 wuxia epic Dragon Inn, playing to a motley smattering of spectators. The standard grievances persist: patrons snack noisily and remove their shoes, treating this temple of cinema like their living room, but as we watch the enveloping film deep into a pandemic, the sense that moviegoing as a communal experience is slipping away takes on a powerful and painful resonance. Yet Goodbye, Dragon Inn, released nearly two decades ago by the internationally acclaimed Tsai Ming-liang (whose latest, Days, premiered at this year’s Berlinale), is too multifaceted to collapse into a simple valentine to the age of pre-VOD cinephilia. A minimalist where King Hu was a maximalist, preferring long, static shots and sparse use of dialogue, Tsai rises to the narrative challenges he sets for himself and offers the slyest, most delicate of character arcs (the manager, a woman with an iron brace on her leg, embarks on a torturous odyssey to deliver food to the projectionist, played by Lee Kang-sheng). By the time the possibility arises that the theater is haunted, we’ve already identified it as a space outside of time—indeed, two stars of Hu’s original opus, Miao Tien and Shih Chun, watch their younger selves with tears in their eyes, past and present commingling harmoniously and poignantly. A Metrograph Pictures release.