A Sentimental Journey (Cole Seidl)

 "[..] While in college, I embarked upon a love affair with “Contemporary Contemplative Cinema” or what has come to be more frequently called “slow cinema” (a term that I think greatly misrepresents what I found so intriguing and invigorating about the films). I was enamored with two filmmakers in particular: Chantal Akerman and Tsai Ming-Liang. So, when faced with the standard post-graduation crisis, I made the obvious decision. Move to Taiwan in the hopes of finding a way into that specific film industry, and maybe even on to the set of one of Tsai’s films. 

That never happened. Though I did find myself at the premiere screening of what was, at the time, his purported final film Stray Dogs. I watched a beautiful 35mm print of I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone that had no subtitles, and listened to an hourlong Q+A with Tsai, without an interpreter, and thus gleaned almost no valuable information. I sat in some of the seats from the torn down Fu-Ho theatre, where Goodbye, Dragon Inn was filmed. I visited the shooting locations of The Wayward Cloud in Kaohsiung. I immersed myself in as much of his world of film as possible. 

Then, one day, I decided to pay a visit to his film company offices. They were located in Yonghe, the very same neighborhood in Taipei where I was living. It was about a 12-minute walk from my apartment. Me and my girlfriend made our way to the address, and ended up at a large cement husk of a building. We double checked the address, and it was correct. So we went inside. It was filled with some metal barrels, rebar, and pools of liquid that had turned blue, possibly from some sort of chemical reaction. It appeared abandoned. In short, it was the single most Tsai Ming-Liang location I could have imagined. 

Urban decay is one of the quintessential components of Tsai’s film work. I’m still not certain if the address given was some sort of a joke, a mistake, or simply out of date information, but it was enlightening to me. This strange liminal world that he creates in his films is fully present in the real Taiwan if you choose to look in the areas most people ignore. The areas that normally extend just outside the edges of the frames, or in the case of Tsai’s films, the moments that occur just after most other films would cut. [..]"

Cole Seidl; A Sentimental Journey Through the Films of Tsai Ming Liang; Aug 7th 2026; Perisphere