Unspoken Cinema

TSAI Ming-liang 蔡明亮 (born October 27, 1957, Ku Ching, Malaysia) = 51 yold in 2008 13 films / 12 screenplays (1st film: 1991/latest film: 2009) INSPIRED BY : François Truffaut (Les 400 coups), Grace Chang, King Hu (Dragon Inn), Edward Yang? C.C.C. films ( strict model in red ) : Visage (2009); Madame Butterfly (2008); It's a Dream (2007) v ; I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006) v ; The Wayward Cloud (2005) v ; Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) v ; The Skywalk Is Gone (2002) v ; What Time Is It There? (2001) v ; The Hole (1998) v ; The River (1997) v ; Vive L'Amour (1994) v ; Rebels of the Neon God (1992) v ; Boys (1991); INFLUENCE ON : Lee Kang-sheng, Lisandro Alonso, James Lee? Quick scroll : BIBLIOGRAPHY | BOOK | ONLINE ARTICLES | INTERVIEW | WEBSITES | DOCUMENTARY Visage / Face (2009) IMDb Pre-production Press conference in Paris (14 Oct 2008) video [Chinese] " Tsai's Visages: When Salome faced the Dharma " Translation by: Edwin Mak ( Fas...

Rooms of Colossal Bones – Pedro Costa’s Trilogy (26 June, 2008) By Ana Balona de Oliveira (full article at Mute ) excerpts: "It is not surprising James Quandt titled an essay on the director’s work ‘ Still Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa ’ [at Artforum ]. Some of the shots of Bones , In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth , most frequently those of poorly lit and impoverished interiors, resemble painterly still lives: dark shacks into which scarce rays of sunlight enter just to illuminate a half empty bottle of wine, a smashed piece of old furniture, unexpected red flowers, but also the back of a neck, an old, beaten up hand, the longing of an immigrant labourer’s eye for his Cape Verdean forgotten youth and lost love. The phrase ‘still lives’ gains here, therefore, a double meaning – not only does it refer to the painterly, shadowy objects that accompany the quietly empty despair of Fontaínhas’ inhabitants, but also to these ghostly characters’ lives themselves, filmed in the resist...

Today in Paris, Taiwan director Tsai Ming-Liang described his new film Face [ Visages , 臉] commissioned by France’s Louvre Museum, as one that is going to be crazy. This is because Tsai wants to take notions of Buddhism into, and clash them, with the free-spiritedness of Western art as exemplified by those exhibited in the Louvre. Tsai Ming-liang stressed that the film will be very special, "because there is such a strange combination: the refreshingly beautiful Laetitia [Casta], * French Nouvelle Vague director Truffaut’s leading actor [Jean-Pierre] Léaud, as well as his last actress Fanny Ardent, a non-French speaking director, and my own alter ego ‘little-Kang’ (Lee Kang-sheng); all wrapped by the Louvre, the film shall be a gift. " Tsai Ming-liang’s own Buddhist beliefs have a special importance on the film’s theme, particularly the notion of Three Dharma Seals [三法印] “impermanence [諸行無常], impersonality [諸法無我] and unsatisfactoriness [涅盤寂靜],” states of which the film sha...

Edwin Mak : "Continuing on the theme of the negative, and objectionable ethics, may I ask you and anyone else for your examples and why? What is it about your examples, delimited by your own tastes, indicate an objectionable usage of minimalism/contemplative technique?" Let's open a new discussion here for a question asked by Edwin Mak in a recent post ( Atkinson on minimalism ) about the pros and cons of stylistics techniques and mise-en-scene characteristic or not of the CCC trend. (My apologize for taking so long to put up this new post) We seem to disagree on whether a particular film is part of CCC or not. We don't consider the same elements of film language as being "disqualifying", or as an evidence of a true/strict "contemplative" film. So let's see what everyone think are the cardinal sins found in a film that you consider "exploitation" or "over-the-top" or "betraying" or "objectionable" or sim...