Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: On filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang

Episode Transcript
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Nicholas de Villiers (00:06):
Cruisy.

Beth Tsai (00:07):
Sleepy.

Nicholas de Villiers: Melancholy. Hello. My name is (00:09):
undefined
Nicholas de Villiers. I'mprofessor of English and Film at
the University of North Florida.I was also a visiting scholar at
National Central University inTaiwan at the Center for the
Study of Sexualities in 2017.
I've now published three bookswith the University of Minnesota
Press. The first was Opacity andthe Queer Tactics in Foucault,

(00:33):
Bart and Warhol from 2012,followed by Sexography, Sex Work
and Documentary from 2017. Andtoday, I'll be talking about my
new book, which came out inSeptember of twenty twenty two,
Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy,Sexual Disorientation in the
Films of Tsai and Yang.

Beth Tsai (00:50):
Hi. My name is Beth Tsai. I am visiting assistant
professor in East Asianlanguages and culture studies at
the University of California,Santa Barbara. My research focus
primarily on the cinema ofTaiwan, film festivals, and
transnational film theory. Ihave published in the

(01:11):
International Journal of AsiaPacific Studies, quarterly
review of film and video,Journal of Asian Cinema, and
Oxford Bibliographies.
My first book is titled TaiwanYouth Cinema at Film Festivals,
which will be out in April 2023from Edinburgh University Press.

So thanks for joining me, Beth. I wanted
to use this podcast as anopportunity to talk about our
new and forthcoming books, butalso as a continuation of our
collaboration, beginning when wefirst met at the Society for
Cinema and Media Studiesconference, with thanks to Xian
Chao. I'm a great admirer ofyour definitive Oxford
bibliography on Malaysian bornTaiwan based filmmaker Tsai Min
Liang, which is really anamazing resource on scholarship

(01:55):
on Tsai in Chinese, English, andFrench. We also share a
connection to National CentralUniversity. So I really enjoyed
collaborating with you, to cochair a panel at the Society for
Cinema and Media Studies onSleepy Cinema, Affect, Audience,
and Embodiment, which alsoincluded Elena Gorfinkel and
Jean Ma, whose work we bothadmire and will talk probably
about today as well.

(02:16):
I wanted to use thisopportunity, now that my book is
published and yours is comingout soon, to continue our
conversation on these scenes. Sothat's how we'll be structuring
this podcast, less as aninterview and more like a
conversation around keywords ordifferent approaches to
transnational Taiwan cinema andqueer and feminist approaches to
film.

Beth Tsai (02:33):
Well, I am really happy to be here, Nicholas, and
thank you for all the kindwords. And the admiration has
been mutual ever since youpublished in Jumpcut and Senses
of Seminar. But I wanted to goback to the beginning,
especially when we first met. Iremember the first time that we

(02:53):
met at SMS in Atlanta. Youmentioned you were either
working on or you wereinterested in exploring how and
or nickname, Shaocang, ownscreen and off screen
relationship.
And that relationship parallelsthe concept of the artist and
the muse. And I remember Iresponded by saying, oh, I never

(03:16):
thought of it that way. And eventhough from an auteur studies
point of view, we all know it'sit's common for an auteur like
Truffaut or Wes Anderson to workwith a steady group of actors.
But I also think there'ssomething more ambiguous, more
intimate codependency, if youwill, between Tsai and Shao

(03:38):
Kahn's working relationship. SoI'm wondering if you can tell us
more about how you came to writethis book and your research
process, if you don't mindsharing.

Sure. So the first person I really have
to thank for introducing me toSeis Films is, Michelle Stewart.
We both were at the Universityof Minnesota. I was in the
comparative studies anddiscourse and society program
for my PhD. I think probablyMichelle recommended Psy's films
to me, because she knew I had aninterest in queer cinema, in
Andy Warhol.
We can talk about some parallelsbetween Warhol and Psy, and,

(04:12):
CAM. So my first published workon Simon and Yang was on Goodbye
Dragon Inn. The, that was in02/2008 that I published an
article in Jumpcut, and I reallywant to thank Julia Lesage and
the late Chuck Kleinhans forthat first opportunity. Also
senses of cinema was animportant, kind of early venue
and also resource for me forthinking about Psy's films. I

(04:33):
also attended a queer diasporaconference at National Taiwan
University, and the keynoteswere by Fran Martin and Gayatri
Gopinath.
And they were, also reallyinfluential to my thinking about
queer diaspora in Psy's films.So I also I met Earl Jackson in,
at a conference, the AsianCinema Studies Society
conference, and he has been soinstrumental. I mean, really,

(04:54):
this he made my book possible byhelping me make connections in,
Taiwan. He specificallyintroduced me to Josephine Ho
and her colleagues in the Centerfor the Study of Sexualities at
National Central University, andthey wrote a Ministry of Science
and Technology grant, with thehelp of Amy Perry and Fifi Nifei
Ding while I was on mysabbatical leave from, from UNF.

(05:15):
So when I was at NCU, I justfound this amazing community of
scholars of queer theory andkind of transnational queerness.
So while I was at NCU, Sih LinChung at the Chinese University
of Hong Kong invited me to givea talk there, which was my
opportunity to meet Songhui Lim,who's the author of Tsai Ming
Liang and a cinema of slowness.And his work is really

(05:36):
influential to my to mythinking. And he was so
wonderful. He sort of made mefeel like I was part of this
special club of admirers of TsaiMing Diang, like we have to
stick together and support eachother. And, so he he forged a
connection between me and,Claude Wong at, Home Green
Films.
That was an opportunity tointerview Simon Yang, at his
studio in a long conversationwith my NCU colleague, Jonathan

(05:58):
Yeh, who was, also worked as ourtranslator during that
conversation. It was kind of along form, like, you know,
multiple hour conversation aboutqueerness and space in size
films. I'm just so grateful tothe director for sharing his
time and his insights in thatconversation. But also while I
was teaching at MCU, it wasreally helpful to hear the kind
of local insights of my studentsand my colleagues, and that

(06:19):
really helped my understandingof Taiwan cinema and Tsai's
place in Taiwan. I've also beenhelped by international
conferences to kind of share mywork on queer queer Sinophone
cinema, the Asian Cinema StudiesSociety conference where I met
ERL, the Society for Cinema andMedia Studies conference where
we met.
And also there's a conference inMalaysia called Gender and
Sexuality Justice in Asia thatwas at Monash University in

(06:41):
Kuala Lumpur, which allowed meto visit Tsai's filming
locations and to travel toKuching, his birthplace in
Sarawak, which, was really, Ithink, important to get a sense
of where he grew up within thekind of ethnic Chinese community
in this small town that, he'sdescribed as this kind of
sleepy, sleepy town and thatthat was part of his culture
shock of moving to Taipei. WhenI was in Malaysia, I met with

(07:03):
Saw Tiong Kwan, who's a directorof a documentary called Past
Present, in which he interviewsSy about his relationship to
movie theaters growing up inMalaysia and his experience
watching movies with hisgrandparents. And so that was
also just a really importantpart of sort of understanding
Sy's background. But I didn'twant to just write an auteur
study. As much as Sy thinks ofhimself as an auteur and as much

(07:25):
as he's kind of modeled himselfon a director like Truffaut, and
as much as it seemed like it wasa good occasion to publish an
auteur study upon hisannouncement of his retirement
from commercial filmmaking afterhe made Stray Dogs.
But I also wanted to reallycontribute to work in queer
theory, on cinematic space, oncruising, on the idea of sexual
disorientation, which is thesubtitle to my book, and on

(07:48):
queer film phenomenology. Whatabout you? How did this book
project come to be? What was theprocess of research and and
revision?

Beth Tsai (07:55):
Well, I just, first of all, wanted to, shout out to
National Center University, andyou were right, Nicholas, about
our connection and and mutualexperience there because I did
my undergraduate studies inEnglish literature at MCU in
Taiwan. So I also had so muchfond memories of being on the

(08:17):
campus and studying under thesame colleagues that you had,
Josephine Ho and Dinghai Faye,and also, Wen Chi Lin, which I
am very much indebted to, theirteachings and their guidance and
their mentorship. But about mybook so the genesis of my book
can be traced all the way backto a course I took at NYU in

(08:41):
2011, which is a course ontransnationalism. The professor
who taught the course, ZhongbongCho, mentioned that if I wanted
to work on Taiwan's national andcultural identity, the film
festival is a platform in thebattlefield for these kind of
dialogues and culturalnegotiations, that I could work
through and come through. Hefelt that at the time, not a lot

(09:04):
of scholarship had beendedicated to this topic, so I
wrote a term paper for thisclass.
And then after his class, I hadthe opportunity to attend the
European Film CulturesConference in London, Sweden,
where I was exposed to a groupof film festival study scholars
for the first time. But I'venoticed then, which I will still

(09:27):
say, the same thing for now, isthat most of the people doing
film festival studies do adoptsociologist and anthropologist
approach, where they hang out atthe festival site and observe
the film festival as a researchobject, while the rest of them
were more interested inuncovering or rediscovering

(09:50):
archival documents, and they tryto build collections and maybe
adding on to the resources ifthe institution lacked an
archival practice. You would besurprised a lot of film
festivals actually do not keeptheir documents because their
workers, their staffs, they'rebeing shuffled every year, and

(10:10):
they're nomadic in a sense thatthey don't always just work for
one film festival. They may workfor one and then travel to the
other, because of a differenttimelines in in the year. These
are what a lot of festivalscholars were doing at the time,
And I found myself and now I wasinspired by these people, but I

(10:34):
also felt like an outsider or anoutlier in a sense that I was
more interested in theorizingthe political dimensions of
films and filmmakers on thefestival circuit without
necessary investing inquantitative research or adopt a
historical method to uncoveringor underdocumented side of these

(10:59):
film festivals.
And, also, it has a lot to dowith, because I was training a
critical theory. I felt slightlydisqualified or maybe just
reluctant. I feel uncertain tojust simply ascribe French
theories such as, Frenchtheorist, Pierre Baudoux, to one
of the hypothesis that I had,which is to look at the practice

(11:19):
of programming and how thepractice shape taste in cultural
hierarchy reinforced by theInternational Film Festival
system. I also wanna mention,luckily or I had the opportunity
at another conference to meetElena Pulakhi, a scholar
programmer, a really, reallynice and fascinating person as

(11:42):
well. She was a programmer forChinese language film at the
Venice International FilmFestival, who basically
confirmed that, it was notfeasible for me to find hard
evidence to support the claim Iwanted to make about programming
and taste.
And then especially neitherwould a programmer admit to
their personal preference andpolitical bias during the

(12:05):
selection process. So this isall to say that this book ended
up in a way it is now becausedespite how much I would like to
focus on just platform studies,my projects is about how art
house films were circulated andhow Taiwanese filmmakers were
received at film festivals, butalso equally about their

(12:27):
relationship with filmfestivals. So I feel like now
would be a good time to segueinto maybe reading a passage
from both of our books, which Iwill. I wanted to read a passage
from you, Nicholas, your book,which I'm holding in my hand.
And I've mentioned to you thisbefore that when you finish

(12:49):
reading one person's book, it'salways fascinating to go back to
the introduction.
It's like you now realize thateverything was packed and
spelled out in the introduction.It has always been there, but
you also needed to finish entirebook to to understand the
narrative and how everythingprogressed. But I am just very

(13:10):
fascinated by this paragraph inyour introduction, which you
wrote, cruisy, sleepy,melancholy, sexual
disorientation in the films ofCai Ming Liang shows how its
high expands and revises thenotion of queerness. By engaging
with the local specificity andsituated knowledge of the

(13:33):
diasporic migrant, tourist, andotherwise displaced characters
in his films and theirexperiences of sexuality in
Taiwan, Malaysia, and France.Tsai's films are queer because
they do not conceive ofnationality and sexuality as
essentialized identities orsexual orientation, but rather

(13:56):
help us understand queerness informs of spatial, temporal, and
sexual disorientation.
Cruzey's Sleepy Maleconteengages queer film theory and
approaches to queer diaspora,queer regionalism, and queer
phonology to understand Tsai'squeering of space. Tsai's films

(14:20):
help us think spatially aboutqueerness, including the
queerness of Crossing Borders,the border crossings of the
director, the characters withinthe films, and the films
themselves. I love this passagebecause the way that you frame
and then situate is not bound insexual or national identity, but

(14:43):
rather really an intervention atqueerness, the queer phonology,
and not just a queer identity,but also queering originalism.
So I guess if you couldelaborate more about these
keywords, drawing from yourbook's title, cruisy, or maybe
cruising as well, sleepy, andmelancholy. And then when I look

(15:07):
at melancholy, I also thinkabout insomnia for some reason.
So I wonder if you could justtell us more about these
keywords.

Thanks very much. So, yeah, the the
term cruisy, I've always reallyliked the term. You see it in
kind of gay guides to navigatingthe sexual landscape of a city.
But cruising, I think, is areally important queer spatial
practice. So I was thinking somereally key texts that I wanted
to engage with, are SamuelDelaney's Times Square Red,
Times Square Blue, where it'skind of a memoir, but also

(15:36):
theorization of the role playedby, cruising and queer and porn
movie theaters.
But also there's a documentaryabout, Samuel Delaney that I
published a review of in JumpCut called The Polymath by Fred
Barney Taylor. And, that's akind of documentary portrait of
Delaney that also discusses thisidea of navigating the sexual
landscape of the city, includingporn theaters and public

(15:57):
toilets. Also Jose Munoz's workin Cruising Utopia. He has a
really, wonderful chapter onwhat he calls the ghosts of
public sex. And, also Idiscovered John Paul Ricco's
book The Logic of the Lure,which has some really important
theorizing of, cruising and, andqueerness.
There's also a book by AlexEspinosa called An Intimate

(16:19):
History of a Radical Pastimethat also I think has some
really interesting insightsabout queerness as a spatial
practice, but also a practiceof, kind of, waiting and
patience. So, I was trying toframe cruisy, also as an affect,
not just as a practice ofcruising, but also a kind of
potential or erotic availabilityor openness. And, I got that
idea from Roland Barthes, whowrote a preface to a book by

(16:42):
Renault Camus called Tricks. AndI'm horrified to learn that
Renault Camus more recently hasthis kind of ethno nationalist
racist reputation. But I wouldsay that tricks was just kind of
a pretext for Barthes to write apreface that was really his own
way of thinking about cruisingthat generalizes the cruising
experience for thinking aboutthe reader and, the text, the

(17:05):
reader's relationship to thetext, or the text cruising the
reader, which was really helpfulfor me for thinking about
Goodbye Dragon Inn, which iswhere I was first starting to
work through this idea of theaffective element of being
cruisy or feeling cruisy.
I also recently saw a film byElizabeth Churchill called Ask
Anybody, which also has a reallywonderful podcast that's all

(17:26):
about cruisy gay spaces. It'skind of a mashup of gay adult
film from the 60s through the80s that really emphasizes the
idea of gay spaces, includingpublic toilets and movie
theaters. And I recently had theopportunity to talk about
Churchill's Ask Anybody at aconference on disorientation in,
at the University of Malaga inSpain. It was just exciting to
have that opportunity to kind ofthink through sexual

(17:48):
disorientation at a conference,specifically on the theme of
disorientation. Onto the keywordof sleepy.
Again, Roland Barthes is one ofthe major kind of inspirations
here. His essay Leaving theMovie Theater, where he talks
about the experience leaving thetheater feeling like his body is
sleepy. And I know that that's akind of common reference point
for both of us. It's a really,like, productive and inspiring
text. It's also true for, forJean Ma.

(18:10):
So we had that SCMS panel thatwe co chaired, where we invited
Elena Gorfinkel and Jean Ma. Andthinking Elena Gorfinkel has a
really wonderful public lecturecalled The Soporific Between
Exhaustion and Eros, and I knowhas published, other work on
specifically the kind ofexhausted body in art cinema.
And then Jean Ma, was talkingabout her new book, At the Edges

(18:32):
of Moving Images and SomnolentSpectators. But also in terms of
my own inspiration, I drew fromProust's opening to Swan's Way,
the way that he theorizessleepiness and disorientation. I
also have a faculty writinggroup at UNF, with really
wonderful colleagues that gaveme feedback.
And I was kind of pitching mybook proposal and title, and I

(18:53):
was thinking about, you know,Cruisy Sleepy Melancholy. It has
kind of a nice ring to it. Andthey teased me that it was kind
of like the seven dwarfs with,sleepy as one of the dwarfs. So
I do kind of I feel like thatmight contribute to the way that
the words work together in thetitle. And then the final term,
melancholy, and I like yourconnection to insomnia.
So again, I just wanted to startwith kind of my reference

(19:14):
points. Jean Ma's book MarkingTime in Chinese Cinema was very
influential for thinking aboutpsi and melancholy. Also
Jonathan Flatley's work onmelancholia and modernism. And
there's been a long runningcurrent of thought in queer
theory on Melancholia andGender, Sexuality and the AIDS
crisis. Judith Butler, DouglasCrimp, Ann Svetkovich.

(19:36):
But also work on racialmelancholy, David Ng's work and
Anne and Lynn Cheung's work onracial melancholy. And the
recently published book byShayan Qiao, Queer
Representations in ChineseLanguage Film and the Cultural
Landscape, thinks about gaymelancholy within queer theory,
but specifically in thexenophone context in
relationship to theheteronormative patriarchal

(19:57):
family and that sense of kind ofgay melancholy in relationship
to those expectations. But interms of the technical and
clinical terms, melancholia andinsomnia, I wanted to think
about them in the kind of morevernacular sense. And it might
be that because my background isstudying Foucault, I'm a little
bit skeptical of clinicalterminology and the wholesale

(20:19):
adoption of clinical frameworkswithin queer theory because of
the kind of medicalization ofqueerness. So I like Anne
Svetkovich's work in Depression,A Public Feeling, where she
sometimes uses more vernacularterms like feeling bad.
So melancholy is a kind ofslightly more vernacular term
and I wanted to add to thatreally major and majorly
theorized affect these moreminor affects like feeling

(20:41):
cruisy and feeling sleepy. Andsleepy is kind of a third term,
between being awake and asleep.So So that was kind of my
approach of thinking about howdo I bring melancholia down to a
more vernacular sense ofmelancholy. And I don't spend
too much time in the book onmaking distinctions like
melancholia and mourning in thetypically Freudian sense. But I
was also kind of inspired bySean Nye's work on, ugly

(21:04):
feelings and minor affects, whenthinking about these affects.
But then, in terms of Psy'sfilms, the, you know, 10 films
that he's made all with LiKeqiang Sheng as his muse, They
often feature characters who aresleepy, who are insomniac, who
are suffering from jet lag.Especially What Time Is It There
focuses a lot on the theexperience of insomnia. During

(21:24):
also the experience of,melancholy and mourning. And
then his film that he shot aspart of the Walker series in
Japan called No No Sleep, whichis about a capsule hotel and
characters kind of finding restwithin this capsule hotel and
sauna, which I talked about forour SCMS panel. And his film
Stray Dogs, which focuses on ahomeless family and their

(21:45):
attempts to find somewhere tosleep.
And there's a really amazingscene where Li Keqiang's
character, as this homelessfather, who's he works basically
holding a, a sandwich board forluxury real estate. He then
sneaks into the luxury realestate for a nap. And I think
it's one of the most amazingscenes in his films. I think
this theme of rest and sleepingis something that, once you

(22:06):
notice it, it's everywhere. So,I wanted to read a passage from
your book, Beth.
I want to quote from theintroduction where you're
talking about the film festival.You say the film festival is
approached as a theoreticalframework, as well as an
objective study, to analyze hownew cinema directors Ho
Chioxian, Tsai Min Liang, andMidi Zhi specifically became

(22:28):
representatives of Taiwan oncetheir films were circulated
internationally. So I'mwondering if you could talk a
little bit about the idea ofthese as transnational, but also
as representatives of new Taiwancinema. And I was also really
impressed by the feministframework of your book, which
you explain in the followingquote: In situating Taiwan new
cinema in the exhibitioncontext, this book also takes a

(22:50):
closer look at the productiveroles women have played as
discursive mediators of thecultural imaginary of the
nation, the auteur, and the artof slow cinema. While the three
primary case studies all focuson male directors, there's an
unbending feminist caliber inthe modes of production and
feminist interventions that drawattention to who is writing the
grand narrative of history?

Beth Tsai (23:13):
Well, I think we're gonna have to come back to the
larger framework of the filmfestival later in our
conversation because I justwanted to focus on women, the
the feminist approach, and womencritics and the for now. Also, I
I tend to answer questions withthe story. I I don't know why.
Maybe that's just the way I Ithink through things, and I'm a

(23:36):
storyteller in that sense. Andalso, I I was really struck by
one of the comments that I Ireceived when my book manuscript
was undergoing peer review thatone of the reviewers said, this
is a feminist project.
I guess it was obvious. It hasbeen obvious in my writing. But
I just didn't see it for somereason or maybe it was so

(24:01):
natural and was so naturallyembedded in my writing that I
just think too much about it asa woman scholar writing this
project that I didn't reflect onon my own position or
methodology. But the more Ithink about it and I agree that
and I I had to explain it in theintroduction that, yes, it it is

(24:22):
a feminist project that I I didtake a feminist approach to it.
So I'm gonna start with theflaneur because maybe some of,
the readers might potentiallyask this question.
Is that I used the word theFrench word flaneur, the
masculine form instead of thefeminine form flaneur, which is

(24:43):
the correct form, supposedly, ifI wanted to talk about women
walking in the city. But I'mgonna start with my little story
is that in the chapter three ofmy book where I group two of Huo
Shaoxian's films, Le Voyage duBalan Roche and Cafe Lumiere,
because I wanted to talk aboutthe transnational co production
and the transnational dimensionsof these films. I presented an

(25:06):
earlier version of this writingat a small one of boutique
conference called World Cinemaand Television in French at the
University of Cincinnati. I wassurprised my paper was accepted
because I have working knowledgeof French, but and nowhere near

(25:26):
how these scholars were ifthey're not native speakers of
French that I I feel veryconscious about my insufficient
knowledge of the language, butalso the history and the
culture. But they were veryhelpful, and the feedbacks I
received were tremendouslyinspiring.

(25:46):
One of the professors whoattended the conference pointed
out that there's a flaneuraspect in my work because I was
focusing a lot on women walkingaround and exploring the cities,
meaning Tokyo and Paris in thosefilms. Now looking back again,
there was another obviousconnection, but somehow I just
didn't see it. And as any Frenchor literally scholars would

(26:08):
know, the flaneur is CharlesBaudelaire's archetype of the
modern man, the masculine figurewho strolls through the
Metropolitan City with privilegeand leisure. I Metropolitan City
with privilege and leisure. Isaid privilege because at the
time, even in the latenineteenth century, women can
actually be on the streets aloneat the time they have to have a

(26:32):
companion with them.
It is obvious that bothprotagonists in both films, Yoko
and Song Feng, they are walkingaround the city alone,
leisurely, slowly, sometimeswith a purpose, sometimes
without. But for me, I alsothink it's it's interesting that
their figures are encapsulatedby the reflections of the modern

(26:52):
city, whether if it's a mirroredimage on a train ride or
Zengfeng in the Voyage deBalloon Hooch documenting the
ubiquitous red balloon scene inHou Xiaoxian's francophone film,
creating a rich Maison Abbey. Ididn't wanted to comment on the
phone news and thereby creatinga separate feminine discourse

(27:14):
because I think the discussionwas already gendered, And, I did
want to create a separatediscourse to separate the
practice in the sense that thediscussion has always been about
how men gets to walk in thepublic, but women own the
private spheres. I wanted tointervene in that conception of

(27:35):
but these are also women walkingin a city, and it doesn't matter
whether if they're considered aforeigner or a feminist. Another
reason for not adopting thefeminine form of this French
word is that I link thispractice to film spectatorship,
which is should be genderneutral Into the ways, in which

(27:57):
a person walks around the cityin a seemingly endless way,
observing and perceiving thecityscape in everyday life.
As Janet Wolf has observed, thestreets of the city are home to
the flaneur because the cityprovides, and I quote, an asylum
for the person on the margins ofsociety. This kind of pictorial

(28:18):
pleasure where one observes butrarely interact with others,
specifically strangers, Iconsider it as very much like
the in the melody of the crowdin the darkened theater, which
is an element in the workings ofthe cinematic apparatus as you
also quoted Roland Barthes, andI'm also quoting Roland Barthes

(28:38):
here, that he has alreadyexplained about the darkened
theater and that relationshipwith, spectatorship. I also
wanted to talk for a little bitabout the chapter on women
critics because I'm very muchindebted to Christopher Luke's
book on, especially his chapteron women's writing or Akira of

(28:59):
Feminine, where he unpacks howscreenwriter Zhu Tianwen, which
I've also included in my book,contributed to the understated
gendered expressions in HuoShaoxing's films, which is what
he calls the subtle voce offemale voice. And it's a female
voice that subverts thepatriarchal perspective and
values in Huo Shaoxing cinema.Emily Yeh and Daryl Davis also

(29:24):
talked about and wroteextensively on and covered Zhu
Tianwen screenwriter ZhuTianwen's writings and their
book, which was considered thefirst English book on Taiwan
cinema.
So I'd have to give them a shoutout. But Christopher Luke's
writing got me thinking andasked the second quote you've

(29:45):
just mentioned. The question Ihave in my mind is who is
writing the history here? Andthis goes back to one of the
earlier feedbacks I receivedabout my book was the concern
that I didn't include a womendirector in my case study. My
defense is that, well, therewere women directors present
during the time, but none reallyworked on Taiwan news cinema.
They've created documentaries orthey work on melodramas, but not

(30:11):
in the new wave movement. Andmuch like today, women were
present, but you would have morewomen screenwriters and
producers working behind thescene in the movement than
someone who's at the frontierof, like, directors and
cinematographers. So instead ofbeing fixated on women

(30:33):
directors, I wanted to take amarker approach to history and
look at the labors behinddirectors' talents and maybe
cinematographers and look atwhose writing were shaping or to
borrow at least one of his filmstitle, to consider who were the

(30:53):
pushing hands of the new wavemovement. And that's how I ended
up with a chapter on womencritics.

I really appreciate that about your
approach to to women's labor asas screenwriters, as critics, as
as actresses as well in in thesefilms. So it was very noticeable
to me reading this book thatthere is a a strong kind of
feminist current, even if you dofocus on on male directors.

Beth Tsai (31:16):
Okay, Nicholas. So now I wanted to transition to
some of the common themes inboth of our work. Of course, we
overlap with from my book, Ihave two chapters on timing now.
But, also, I think space isreally a prominent theme that
has a storyline in both of ourworks. So I wonder if you could

(31:37):
you elaborate on, you mentionedthe keywords sexual
disorientation in yourintroduction, and there's so
much about queering the spaceand that connection to
metacinema.
And what I also picked up wasI'm really interested in the
phrases that you use, such asrented space and portable life.

(31:58):
I'm curious if if you couldelaborate more on these phrases.

Thanks very much. Yeah. The idea of
orientation in space isobviously a very important part
of phenomenology, but I wantedto think about sexual spaces and
queering space, and how toforeground the queerness of
Psy's films and the charactersshifting or ambiguous sexual
orientations in relationship tospecific spaces. And I was
thinking, you know, Psy is veryfamous for resisting the label

(32:23):
gay films early on in hiscareer. I think part of it is
that he didn't want to bepigeonholed as a gay film
festival director.
And he's since given interviewsabout how he's really evolved on
that, and the times havechanged. But I think at the
time, he was worried that thatwould be the way that he'd be
branded. But I was sort ofinterested in that resistance,
to the label gay films and maybethe label gay characters for the

(32:45):
characters that, Xiaoqam plays.I was looking for examples of
thinking beyond the kind ofbinary understanding of
sexuality, And Michael Moon wasthe first person to coin the
term sexual disorientation forthinking about what he called
mimetic desire in films byKenneth Anger and David Lynch,
and the way in which those filmsalso sexually disorient the
viewer. So I wanted to kind ofapply that, what he says about

(33:07):
anger and Lynch's films, toPsy's films and thinking about
his characters and the way inwhich Psy's films also tend to
disorient audiences and critics,who are looking for explicit
kind of gay characters.
Also, Sara Ahmed revises Moon'sidea of sexual disorientation in
her book, Objects, Orientations,Others, by thinking about

(33:30):
migration and space and queerrelationships to home. I was
thinking each of these is reallyinteresting for thinking in
terms of Sy's relationship tohome or homelessness in terms of
his characters, and theirrelationships to space and
rented spaces. Especially inVive la Moore, there's really
interesting relationships, kindof triangulated, and sexually
disoriented relationships amongthe characters and their

(33:51):
occupation of this emptyapartment. I Don't Want to Sleep
Alone is also about a kind ofsexually disorienting,
caretaking relationship betweenthese migrant characters in
Malaysia. And The Whole alsohas, I think, a really
interesting way of disorientingthe gendered expectations we
have about these characters,known only as the man upstairs
and the woman downstairs duringthis kind of apocalyptic

(34:11):
millennial outbreak of amysterious fictional disease.
So I think each of those kind ofqueer space and queer the idea
of home in really interestingways. So I was thinking about
queer relationships to domesticspace, migrant experiences, you
know, even Tsai's own experiencereturning to Malaysia to make a
film about migrants and commentobliquely on homophobia in

(34:33):
Malaysian politics. So thinkingabout queering space and
thinking kind of about queertactics for using space, I was
very much inspired by Delaney,as I've mentioned, his Times
Square Red, Times Square Bluebook and Ricoh's book on the
logic of the lure. And I wasalso very, inspired by Michelle
de Certeau's work ondistinguishing between tactics

(34:54):
and strategies. I'd originallyused that in my first book on
opacity in the closet forthinking about queer tactics,
but I was largely focused onkind of linguistic tactics for
outplaying or resisting thebinary of closeted versus out.
But, of course, de Certeau isalso talking about spatial
practices and he argues thatstrategies are really for those
who possess and own real estate,whereas tactics are the tactics

(35:17):
of the pedestrian. And goingback to your discussion of kind
of the person walking in thecity. In this book, I'm kind of
returning to Sarto's focus onspatial tactics by those who
don't own property, which isreally relevant to Sy's
frequently homeless or displacedcharacters and their use of
urban spaces in the film. And interms of the key word or the
idea of rented space or living aportable life, in my

(35:39):
conversation with Sai about NoNo Sleep, Jonathan Ye and I were
really fascinated by hisdiscussion of his experience in
Japan and his observation thatit seems like Japanese people in
the city of Tokyo live a kind ofportable life, that they travel
without being able to settle.And you can see that in capsule
hotels, in kind of public bathsand saunas, and especially the
ubiquitous phenomenon ofInternet cafes.

(36:01):
So all of these themes, I think,come together in No No Sleep.
And, really, all of Sci's filmscarry this theme of rented
space. I was thinking of realestate markets in Vive la Moore
and Stray Dogs, bath houses inThe River and other films, But
also movie theaters, andthinking about the movie theater
as a rented space. Which gets tothe topic of metacinema. You
know, I teach film classes.

(36:22):
I often start with examples ofmetacinema. We watch out for
Hitchcock's Rear Window andother self reflexive films,
films about filmmaking and filmviewing. I also teach horror
film and horror films areparticularly self reflexive. You
can see that in Scream or BlairWitch Project or, Ringu, which I
know you've also written aboutthat, that film. So Goodbye
Dragon Inn, that was kind of howI approached it as an example of

(36:44):
metacinema, a film about thefilm viewing experience.
But I also wanted to apply thisidea of kind of metacinematic
cruising to Goodbye Dragon Inn.And then Tsai also made a film
that was commissioned as part ofthe sixtieth anniversary of the
Cannes Film Festival, acollection of, of world cinema
directors who made three minutefilms about the movie theater
called Chacon Son cinema. Sy'sfilm was called It's a Dream and

(37:05):
it's set in a movie theater inMalaysia. And I use it in my
preface to my book as a kind ofmicrocosm and encapsulation of
Sai's motifs for thinking aboutour relationship to the movie
theater. And it's a somewhatkind of melancholy relationship
that he has to movie theaters,which is also explored in Saw
Kyung Wan's documentary onTsai's relationship to movie
theaters in Malaysia, PastPresent.

(37:26):
And in that film, he interviewsAbichat Pong, Weera Setjikul and
Chen Chien Chi, Tsai's actor,about the role of cinematic
space and the space of the movietheater in all of Sy's films,
and they express their kind ofadmiration for the poetics of
space and the way that spacespeaks in a film like Goodbye
Dragon Inn.

Beth Tsai (37:45):
I love that you mentioned Sy's admiration for
the poetic use of space. But theway that you just described and
the way that you use orientationand disorientation to think
through space is also verypoetic in the sense that you
unpack so much, so many unfoldedmeanings, just through one word

(38:07):
and disorienting of directionsin in that sense that I just
find it really fascinating. AndI realized that we we do
approach the notion of space,albeit a different might be a
slightly different approach, orI'm thinking again through maybe
more of a macro framework andand looking at and using

(38:28):
transnational as a framework,which I didn't have a chance to,
respond to that.

So, yeah, if you could talk about that,
the the way that you'veorganized your chapters in terms
of these, these movements andcardinal directions of going
east, going west, and, thesouthbound turn.

Beth Tsai (38:44):
Yeah. Absolutely. So the way I think through
transnationalism is throughmovements. I I think by looking
at movements, by tracing theroutes and the roots of these
movements helped me understandand think through the
transnational theory. And thereason why I picked those
filmmakers, Hou Shao Xian, CaiLiang, and Midi Zhi, who to

(39:05):
some, they wouldn't necessarilyconsider or at first glance
think that he belongs to theTaiwanese cinema movement, but I
would consider him as a secondwave or or continuation of the
second wave because he his workcame so much later.
But I chose these individualfilmmakers as a case study, in

(39:26):
Franklin in terms of cardinaldirections of east, west, and
south. Because if we go back tothinking about how
transnationalism ten years agowas really a new buzzword to
counter the outdated view ofImmanuel Wallerstein's world
systems theory, and scholarswere unsatisfied with
globalization theory and wantedto shift their attention to not

(39:47):
just look at the uneven processbetween the East and West, the
uneven process for globalizationand its consequences. They look
towards just nationalism as aresponse to the concept and
recognize regionalization as anew possibility for a reimagined
new world order. I was trying towrap my head around these

(40:09):
thoughts and and discussions.But also on the ground level, I
am inspired by Edward Said'straveling theory and James
Clifford's traveling cultures.
So traveling is also the themethat I'm trying to use to unpack
transnationalism. With thattogether comes with the concept

(40:30):
of mobility or movement. And ona literal meaning, travel is a
form of movement, butfiguratively, movement can also
refer to a change of directions,a change of course, and can be
referred to the origins and thedifferent stages of the new
cinema or new wave movement asmy book title indicates. So I

(40:54):
began these travels with HoChiossian going east, not only
because Kapilumiya, a film thatwas commissioned by Shoshiku
Studio. They invited Ho Chioshanto pay homage to, the Japanese
master Yasujiro Ozu, but alsothis film, embodies and is an
allegorical to the colonialrelationship between Taiwan and

(41:15):
imperialist Japan.
But I also noticed theeasternization of Hou's only
Francophone film, Le Voyage duBalen Houche, with Songfang, one
of the characters in in thefilm, which goes by her real
name, Songfang. She is inremaking Albert Lammohy's Le

(41:38):
Balen Houche, and through theway that Heo Xiaoxian also
incorporated Taiwanese puppetryand music in his films. And then
moving on to Taim Lin Lang. Ilabel Taim Lin Lang's work with
the westbound framework not justbecause of his often confessed
love for the French new wave,epitomized by Jean Pierre Liod

(41:59):
who now appears in two of hisfilms. But also many of the
European funds, film festival,and and museum fundings have
supported Taemin L's filmmakingcareer throughout.
And he also recently did a UStour and had his last job was at
the Museum of Modern Art in NewYork, which he felt he very

(42:24):
proud to be included as part ofthe conversation with the music
practice. And MoMA was also thesecond museum that purchased his
35 millimeter print of Visage.And the Louvre Museum was the
first to commission and also theproud collector of this film

(42:48):
with its 35 millimeter print.And then lastly, with MidiZee,
Myanmar, born director, is selfbound, both in light of, of
stinking light of Taiwan's selfbound policy referring to how
the the Southeast Asian andChinese diaspora members migrate
to Taiwan, because thatexperience and that opportunity

(43:10):
potentially offer a spatial butalso social mobility for these
people, for these Chinesediasporas. As well as the
marginalization of Midezi'sethnic minority despite his film
work represented Taiwan as awhole.
Some reviewers and some filmprofessionals don't necessarily

(43:31):
consider Midi as representativeof of Taiwan cinema simply for
the fact that he wasn't born inTaiwan. He was born in Myanmar,
which marginalized him andsegregated him to more of a
Southeast Asian identity. And inmy writing, I wanted to
challenge this misconception.

Thanks very much. Yeah. And that's an
interesting connection betweenSimon Yang and Midisi, is that
that sense of being questionedin terms of do you belong, do
you represent Taiwan? And so Ithink that they end up
thematizing that in their intheir films.

Beth Tsai (44:04):
Well, now, Nicholas, I wanted to ask you about
objects because I see, and I'mjust excited about how not only
those objects were repeatedlyused in timing now's works
throughout his filmography. Butalso, these objects kept
reappearing in your chapters aswell, and it also becomes

(44:26):
another straight line thatstruts your arguments and your
theories together in such a abeautiful way. There are many,
many objects, but I'mparticularly fascinated by you
mentioning mattress or whiteunderwear as we often see in
Xiaotong, wears on screen,toilet, which you also mentioned

(44:48):
earlier in one of your answers.

So, yeah, I made the index to my book, and
I was noticing that I was youknow, I probably didn't need to
do this, but I exhaustivelycatalogued these motifs and
recurring objects inside films,probably because I think that's
one of the things that makes himso interesting, is he's always
recurring to these specificmotifs. In terms of the
mattress, I actually had astudent at NCU, one of my
graduate students, Martina Nye,who encouraged me to think more

(45:13):
about mattresses in his work,but also as this kind of place
of sleep and eroticism. And Iwas really struck, actually,
when I went to the Museum of theNational Taipei University of
Education, where Tsai, had hisStray Dogs at the Museum
installation. When you go to themuseum cafe, there's a video
projection of a mattress, fromone of Sy's experimental pieces.

(45:34):
The mattress recurs quite a bit,but especially in I Don't Want
to Sleep Alone.
It's almost like a characterwithin the film. And in terms of
underwear, the idea ofcharacters being shown when
they're alone, I think, issomething that ties together a
lot of Sy's films. That there'skind of emphasis on lonely
characters in these kind ofprivate and intimate moments
when they're alone in underwear.Definitely in Rebels of the Neon

(45:55):
God and in Vive la Morte,there's a lot of emphasis on
that kind of solitary life. AndI think Shao Kang's character is
in his underwear for all of thewhole as well in his apartment.
It does remind me actually alittle bit, I just recently
screened for my class the WongKar wai film Chungking Express,
in which Tony Leung's characteralso spends a lot of time alone,
in his underwear. So I don'tknow if this is maybe a

(46:16):
connection between the twodirectors. But it poses the
question of public and private,which is also why toilets are a
motif, because they also kind ofraise this question of the
public and private. And FranMartin talks a little bit about
this in her introduction to theJournal of Chinese Cinemas.
There's a special issue of thatjournal in which there were a
number of contributions on TsaiMing Yang, and her introduction

(46:38):
is called Tsai Ming Yang'sIntimate Public Worlds, which I
think is such a smart way ofthinking about this director as
the way his films captureintimacy and intimate moments,
but are also about the dividingline between public and private,
in his work.
I want to ask you, Beth, aboutthe role of festival films in
your book and also thedocumentation. You have these

(47:00):
beautiful illustrations ofinstallation views of Sizewalker
films, so thinking aboutexpanded cinema, in relationship
to the physical space. And thenanother object that I think you
foreground is the red balloon inHo Chi Chien's The Voyage of
Balmain Rouge.

Beth Tsai (47:16):
Yeah. So here's also another story again. When I
defended my doctoraldissertation, one of my mentors,
professor Liz Montaguri, shecomment that she really liked my
project because one of the mainthreads of my approach in film
festival studies was followingthe money trail. Again, I didn't

(47:37):
think about it until she pointedout. So by this, she means that
my approach reflects one of thecore understanding of culture
studies, which is to stress boththe cultural but also the
material fabric of society.
At the same time, in point tothe economic factors of societal
transformation. And as mediastudies and culture studies

(47:59):
often are often greatly investedin material culture and object
studies, the way I approachobjects in my book took on a
literal but also a figurativeform. So you pointed out the
installation views, which it'sstill exhibiting. But when I

(48:19):
visit the site, the dune, forCai Minang's Walker Series
exhibition, at the time, thegallery was supposed to rotate
an artist every three years. Idon't know.
Is it because they couldn'tsince the pandemic, they
couldn't find the next artist,or they just negotiate a deal?
So the exhibition was supposedto end in 2021, and I visited in

(48:44):
2020 just before the pandemic.But now I I believe it's still
showing. But it was reallyfascinating with, a time
announced installation at thatparticular site. He did had
other exhibitions in in museumslike the Palace Museum, where he
also brought mattresses.
So, again, mattresses are one ofhis recurring objects. Vintage

(49:08):
CRT TVs and old theater seats ininto the exhibition. Later on
with other works, he alsobrought in tree branches,
recycled paper, sand, and water,and which is the one that I took
I documented and I took photosof and I shared in the book.

(49:29):
These are the material objects,the the feasible objects that we
see. There's also the redballoon, which I didn't think of
it as an object at first becauseit's such a iconic cinematic
symbol that many associates withthe French cinema, La Balloon
Couche, as we talked about.
And the visual symbol isreferenced everywhere. Not

(49:51):
mentioned in the book, but I wasthinking one of the Simpsons
episodes even features the babyhappily darting around with a
red balloon. And that episodewas a French, quote, unquote,
gift from her brother, Bart. Andin my book, in the context of
Taiwan cinema, a floating redballoon symbolized the journey
Ho Chioxing took to travel toFrance to make his first known

(50:14):
Chinese language film. Again, afilm commissioned by Museum du
Oxy.
And then lastly, we could alsothink about way to approach
festival film as an objectbecause many of Taimi Leung and
also Ho Chiochen as well, theirfilms were funded by museums or
film festival funding. So thistype of festival film is

(50:39):
emblematic of how film festivalsas cultural institutions
exercise their material power.So they are concrete and
tangible, but they're also nottangible in the sense that we're
we're looking at them as filmexhibitions or or films that are
being circulated at thisplatform to being viewed by, the

(51:01):
audience. So in a way that it isan object, but it's also I
approach it as a figurative formas well.

It's such an important insight, I think,
in your book, the idea of filmfestivals as producers. I think
we tend to think of festivals asjust venues, or I do. And so I
think that's a really importantapproach to think about the film
festival as a producer of worklike these commissioned films.

Beth Tsai (51:24):
So let's also talk about aesthetics in both of our
books because camp is also areally important keyword both in
terms of thinking aboutaesthetics, but you also
consider it more as sensibilityand affect in your writing. So I
wonder if you could maybeelaborate on how you think

(51:46):
through the keyword camp and theway that you use it. And what
are if it also carries differentmeanings in translation
pertaining to the Taiwaneseacademic context because they're
different and there's alsoseparate discourses of how they
think through this foreign word,this English word, camp.

Yeah. And it also I'm glad you mentioned
the the cultural studiesapproach to, material culture
because I think that camp is areally interesting way of
approaching material culture. Somy undergraduate thesis actually
at Bard College in the late 90swas on camp and queer culture.
And, it corresponded with arevival of interest in camp
within queer theory in the 90s.And there's been a more recently

(52:29):
another revival of interestthanks to the Met Gala camp
theme and the exhibit, CampNotes on Fashion at the Met.
So when I was writing this,thesis at Bard, I shared queer
theorists' frustration withSusan Sontag's Notes on Camp,
which has some really usefuldefinitions, but it's also
startlingly quick to disavowconnections between camp

(52:49):
sensibility and gay culture. Ithink part of that has to do
with Sontag's investment withthe idea of taste and making
distinctions between naive anddeliberate camp, which I think
is, sort of a dead end. Ingeneral, prefer Esther Newton's
work on camp in gay and dragqueen culture as a way of, as
she says, laughing instead ofcrying at one's incongruous
position in straight society asa queer person. There's also a

(53:12):
wonderful phrase from RichardDyer, which is it's being so
campus keeps us going. I preferNewton and Dyer for
acknowledging the centrality ofcamp as a practice to queer
culture.
And I was also very interestedin learning about my NCU
colleague Jonathan Yeh'sMandarin translation of camp as
ganpu, meaning, dare to expose.In 2017, when I was in Taiwan,

(53:34):
the theme of the TaipeiInternational Queer Film
Festival was actually queer,kuar, and ganpu, camp. And,
using those translations andwith a really memorable live
drag show by local drag queensduring a screening of Priscilla
Queen of the Desert, which isalso a kind of interesting,
again, this 90s film gettingrevived in a more contemporary
moment. I also read Camping Outwith Simon Yang, the Emily,

(53:56):
Emily Ye and, Darryl WilliamsStavis, where they emphasized
Tsai's aestheticization ofworking class culture and his
approach to appropriating GraceChang musicals in his films in
relationship to the Taiwanesedialect term song, meaning
tacky. So Xianqiu has alsowritten a really comprehensive
chapter of his book about Psy,musicals, and camp, also drawing

(54:17):
from these sources andtranslations of camp in English,
Chinese, and Taiwanese.
So when I returned from Taiwan,I co chaired a panel at SCMS
with John Paul Stadler, and itwas on the theme of queering
pornography, where I presentedan early draft of my chapter on
camp and porn musicals in Psy'sThe Wayward Cloud. And I just
want to say that kind of shoutout to the SCMS Adult Film

(54:39):
History Scholarly Interest Groupto be such a wonderful,
supportive community of scholarsthat's made me think that
pornography is something that weshould write about and think
about. It's really worthy ofstudy despite the risks in the
academy, due to, you know,assaults on academic freedom and
freedom of speech right now. SoI wanted to kind of work through
in that chapter the differencesof critical opinion on whether

(55:01):
Psy's film is anti porn or theidea of camp perception and
affective incongruousnessinherent in this tragic comic
tone of a lot of Psy's films,and, the kind of humor to be
found in camp and drag and queerfandom. So it's particularly
helpful, I think, to workthrough those in that venue.

Beth Tsai (55:20):
Well, I I love these connections that you have just
presented. And and thinkingthrough how you connect camp
beyond just aesthetics, but alsoto other elements and also
genres like porn musicals andmusic. I'm thinking this is also
out out of self interest becauseI'm also invested in the word

(55:41):
recycle or recycling as a verb.And so I'm wondering if you
could also talk about how youuse the word recycling or how
you think through this idea ofrecycling in in its abstract
sense.

So, I mean pornography and old musicals are
kind of thought of as culturalrefuse and trash. And, Tsai has
also given a lot of interviewsabout his approach to recycling.
Sometimes literally recyclingobjects like theater chairs, as
you mentioned, in hisinstallation pieces, in the
installation versions of, It's aDream, and in the recycling of

(56:16):
trees and paper at the StrayDogs at the Museum, in these
kind of expanded cinemainstallations. So recycling is a
practice that Tsai is reallydedicated to. You can also see
his approach to recyclingmaterials in his approach to old
Mandarin pop songs.
And I was thinking about itusing Yves Sedgwick's idea of
camp as a form of reparativereading in the sense of it's an

(56:37):
attachment to things that areseen as outmoded or old
fashioned. But, Psy's reallyeffectively invested in them.
Right at the end of the whole,there's that line: at the turn
of the millennium, in this kindof bleak future, at least we
have Christ Chang's songs tocomfort us. So I think that
there's a strong sense ofreparative reading and a lot of
Tsai's approach to outmodedforms. By contrast, I was

(56:59):
actually wondering, since youemphasize newness in the new
Taiwan cinema, if you could talkabout the aesthetics of newness,
but also the aesthetics ofslowness, the idea of slow
cinema as one of the definingfeatures of, this new wave
cinema.

Beth Tsai (57:13):
Yeah. I just wanted to first insert comment that
when you're mentioning GraceChang, I was thinking the way
Tsai uses her songs and the waythey're being embedded or or lip
synced, especially in the wholeforever changes the way that I I
approach the song or how Ilisten to the song. Because my

(57:34):
last class, on Monday, the theclass I just gave, I show a
clip, which is the Singaporestraight foot scene in Crazy
Rich Asian. And before leadingto that particular scene, we're
basically a footpore in thatsense. And I also use the song,
from Grace Chen.
And immediately, I was thinking,oh, the camp aesthetics and and

(57:54):
there's, you know, the addedlayers to viewing a film that's
considered a romantic comedythat I just feel like you cannot
sing it without looking fromwork, the lenses of work.

I agree.

Beth Tsai (58:10):
But then coming back to how I use the word newness
and slowness as well, that new,I call it a newness or they may
not necessarily be new in asense, but the quality or the
way that they're being framed asnew. But there's a continuation
of these practices and thenlineage that we can pick up. And

(58:31):
then especially thinking howcinema studies are often always
on the lookout for newness fromthe shocking sensation that came
with the cinema of attractionand also vernacular modernism of
early cinema that they're alwayswriting about this new
technology, this new shock, thisnew sensation, this new
experience. And if it's not thatnew sensation, then they're

(58:56):
looking at the new directionsand post war filmmaking, such as
the French new wave, Italianneorealism, new German cinema,
third cinema. There's a lot ofthe new in the titles as well.
So you can say that world cinemahas always been built upon the
premise worth mentioning becauseof the fresh perspectives these
group of filmmakers could bringand how they incite new ideas.

(59:20):
Films are made for a different anew kind of audience, and they
wanted their films to beperceived differently. And also
the critical theories that maygenerate the type of films that
were produced. And new cinemacertainly fits this framework
and fits the dialogue. But Ialso wanted to argue that,

(59:42):
telling you cinema has attractedso much attention not simply
because these films with theirmothers and socialist social
realism dimensions werenecessary newer compared to more
of a previous romanticizingChinese identity in the previous
films.
And also that the filmmakers didtake on a new direction in their

(01:00:04):
storytelling and their subjectmatter. But these films, they're
not as new as what the Westernscholars would perceive because
they also you can see the tracesof how these films drew lineage
from their predecessors,especially if the native's
concerns in in Taiyupian, therealist aesthetics and and

(01:00:25):
healthy realism. There is acontinuation of that despite the
healthy realism at their bestattempt trying to reinvent or
reinterpret it Italianneorealism in their way, but
these films favored by thenationalists, produced in
studios with big budgets, colorfilms, stars, celebrities, they
were very far from how filmscholars would characterize

(01:00:50):
Italian neorealism. But thenit's interesting to see how
Taiwan neo cinema fits thedescription and also creates a
dialogue with, its predecessors.For slowness, I address the
notion of slowness, as both as adiscourse, but also as a
critical lens.

(01:01:11):
Because for many, this is a lensthat is essential to understand
works by Taim Lin Yang, HuoShaoxian, and Midi Zhi. And, of
course, the concept of slowness,at first glance, it's it's so
much of an aesthetic inquiry asSun Hui Ling has pointed out.
But he also pointed out and SunHui Ling pointed out his book,

(01:01:32):
Temiao in a Cinema of Slowness,that the slowness is also a
lifestyle. It's not justaesthetics, but it's also
response and resistance to thefast paced life is aggravated by
capitalism. So I borrow thisidea, but I also use slow and
extend that idea of slowness toto describe the way that there

(01:01:56):
was a delayed response for someTaiwanese scholars to
appreciate, to recognize, andeven to accept the qualities of
new cinema, which at the time,for some of them, were
antagonistic towards thismovement, this emergence of a
new group of filmmakers.

(01:02:16):
And I think the way this delayedresponse for the scholars is
also in tune with how FredMartin, and I believe you also
mentioned her name, Fred Martincharacterized a post colonial
relations or a temporal thestructure, albeit it's it's a
transforming one. So even thoughthere was a delayed response,
they were not stuck in that timecapsule or stuck in that

(01:02:39):
delayedness, the time lag, asshe calls it, between Taiwan and
European modernism. So this wasone of the ways that I also use
slowness in in my book.

Nicholas de Villiers (01:02:52):
Yeah. I think Fran Martin's idea of post
colonial time lag is reallyinteresting to connect as you do
with the idea of slow cinema.

Beth Tsai (01:03:01):
Yeah. Now I wanted to ask you the questions about
tactics and queer tactics. Inthe introduction, I mentioned
that when we first met and youtalk about this potential book
project, I didn't know if it wasa project at the time, but I'm
fascinated by the way that youcharacterized Haim Yin and El's
relationship with Shao Kahn,that that there is an

(01:03:23):
admiration. There's obsession ofwith the body, if you will, but
there's also a genuine and veryfirm grounded friendship. I
don't know if they steal, butthere's also cohabitation
between these two that they livetogether for for quite a while.
So I wonder if you could tell usmore about that.

Sure. I was thinking of the long filmed
conversation. It's kind of aretrospective conversation with
Li Gangsheng called Afternoon,that he made after completing
Stray Dogs, and it's almost likean exit interview about their
relationship of making filmstogether and living together.
And I was thinking of MichelFoucault's interview Friendship
as a Way of Life, which is alsoabout the possibilities of

(01:04:05):
friendship outside of, kind of,institutional and
heteronormative family. And alsomy friend Tom Roche's book of
the same title Friendship as aWay of Life.
But also Roland Barthes' courseat the College de France, How to
Live Together, and specificallyhis discussion of Ideorhythmy,
the idea of thinking about howto respect someone's pace of
living. And I think that that'sa really an important lesson
that Tsai learned in hisinteractions with Lee as a non

(01:04:27):
professional actor. And SonWeilim talks about this in his
book. A kind of evolvingapproach to slow cinema,
actually emerged out of Tsailearning how to respect Lee's
slow style of acting. And thatstrongly impacted his approach
to kind of filming daily lifeand, his approach to slow
cinema.
And their conversation inafternoon, Li Keung Sheng and
Simon Yang reminds me a lot ofRoland Barthes discussion of the

(01:04:50):
kind of dynamic between thelover and the beloved. Even
though it's not necessarily aromantic relationship, The way
that Bart understands the ideaof the kind of maternal
relationship in love, andthere's a lot of moments in
Afternoon where they joke about,you know, Tsai Ming is like his
mother. They keep switchingthese kind of kinship roles of
father son, mother son, andartist muse, employer employee,

(01:05:12):
and friend, and, you know,confidant, etcetera. So I was
thinking that Oliver's discoursewas actually worth revisiting
for thinking about this queerkinship between them, again, as
this sort of strange phrase ofartist and male muse. He's often
referred to as as Psy's malemuse.
But I liked thinking about it inalso this kind of maternal term
and thinking about the value ofqueer kinship within the

(01:05:33):
sinephone context. I waswondering if you could talk a
little bit about the conclusionto your book, which talks about
the idea of hyphenated people.

Beth Tsai (01:05:42):
Yeah. That would be my tactics. And it also came
very late at, the stage ofwriting that I wasn't thinking
about this term. I mentioned itbriefly in the introduction. I
sort of just tabled it and neverrevisited until one of, again,
peer reviewer pointed out thatit didn't feel like there's a

(01:06:04):
closure for my writing.
So I decided to put myself inthe story and talk about my
hyphenated identity. But I firstcame across this work while
reading Rachel's writingdiaspora, tactics of
intervention and contemporaryculture studies. It was a very
fleeting moment, actually. Itwasn't one of more obvious

(01:06:27):
keyword that she structures herarguments around, but I just
picked up this detail because Iwas fascinated by it. And that
she was recounting, one of herfriend's reaction to a 1986 film
called A Great Wall by PeterWang.
And then her friend said, quote,real people are hyphenated

(01:06:48):
people. I've always I'm forevercurious what does this person
mean by real people, but I pickup on the word hyphenated
people. I was struck by it, notjust the simplicity of it in
thinking and reflecting of howmy own identity, whether if I
consider as myself a Taiwaneseor Taiwanese American or Asian

(01:07:10):
American. And also thinkingabout how another culture,
another ethnic practices such asthe Hispanic practice of having
two surnames, We may not all behyphenated people, but a lot of
us are hyphenated. So if Rachelcoined the term hyphenated
people to counter orientalism,essentialism, or particularism,

(01:07:32):
and even geographicaldeterminism in East Asian
culture studies.
I think the the hyphen can do alot more and invites questions
that are not just about identitypolitics as I've been trying to
search for the meanings behindit, but also it can be used
towards thinking about theintersection of gender, of

(01:07:55):
queerness as you've done so sobrilliantly in your book.
Migration, mobility, bordercrossing, which is the main
discussion threads in my book.And then the international funds
and transnational players, Ialso consider them as hyphens in
in in the sense how theycommission and produce and

(01:08:17):
present world cinema. So theinvisible hyphen is a way to
connect to the diaspora andmigrant experiences, but also to
the economic forces that drivesthose transnational networks.
After all, if you look at a filmfestival, you think of, the
cosmopolitan congregation ofpeople, of culture exchanges,

(01:08:37):
opportunities for these kind ofexchange.
But at the same time, it alsospeaks to how these films are
being circulated. And lastly,how the industry can capitalize
on these events in theseexchanges and the congregation
of people. So two things thatkeep coming up that we haven't

(01:08:58):
discussed yet. One is about timebecause we touch upon slowness.
We touch upon different timezones, but we haven't had a
chance to to fully elaborate onit.
And the other thing, building uptime, For me, I I think I would
also think about the word offrustration or feeling
frustrated when watching Tian YuNiu's films or watching any slow

(01:09:23):
cinema in general, which appliesto Huo Shaoxian and also Mid
East films. So what do you thinkabout this concept of time and
frustration? And how how do youuse that in in your book? I'm
curious.

So a lot of the published work on Tsai is
about time, Samhui Lim's book,also Jean Ma's Marking Time,
and, you know, that this is kindof running thread, as we've been
discussing, of slow cinema, orGilles Deleuze's, Cinema two:
The Time Image, which I've alsofound helpful for thinking about
Ho Chioshan's films and Tsai Ingyang. But I like the term time
zone for thinking about Psy'sfilms, especially his Sino

(01:10:00):
French films, What Time Is ItThere? And Visage, as discussed
by Michelle Bloom and as youalso talk about in your book. I
think the time zone makes usthink about time and space
together, feeling bothtemporally and spatially
disoriented when you'reconsidering what time zone
someone else is in. And, again,responding to Fran Martin's work
on What Time Is It There?
And what she calls post colonialtime lag in that essay The

(01:10:21):
European Undead. But I really Ifound this concept of the time
zone to be really helpfulbecause it shows how you have to
think about time and spacetogether. You can't really
disentangle them. And then interms of frustration of the
viewing experience of slowcinema, you know, I screen size
films in my classes. I know thatslow cinema, where nothing
happens, sometimes frustrates,audiences that are more familiar

(01:10:43):
with the pacing of Hollywoodfilms.
But I'm interested in the moreproductive aspects of
frustration and boredom. RolandBarthes in The Pleasure of the
Text juxtaposes what he callstext of pleasure, which grants
satisfaction and feel culturallyfamiliar with what he calls
texts of bliss or chouissance,which can involve a sense of a
loss of self, a loss of one'sbearings, and he suggests that

(01:11:05):
boredom is not far from bliss. Ithink his phrase is it's bliss
seen from the shores ofpleasure. But I think that the
concept of a text of bliss isreally helpful for thinking
about the productive aspects offrustration or even boredom in
watching Si's films, especiallyin Goodbye Dragon Inn, thinking
about the

Beth Tsai (01:11:23):
spectators' experience of watching that film
or watching other

people watch another film. The film, or
watching other people watchanother film, in that case, the
film King Who's Dragon Inn,which is much more of a kind of
text of pleasure. It's arecognizable genre film that is
sort of iconic of Taiwan cinemaand also memorable from Psy's
childhood. But I think, youknow, queer theory and affect
theory are so helpful becausethey help us think about

(01:11:45):
difficulty, experiences ofdifficulty and frustration of
our expectations. We maybe haveexpectations about sexuality in
cinema that are frustrated,productively frustrated by
Tsai's films or expectationsabout the sexuality of his
characters.
So I think the concept of sexualdisorientation helps us think
about the productivity of thatfrustration, the productivity of
the feeling of beingdisoriented.

Beth Tsai (01:12:06):
Yeah. I can definitely relate to your
teaching experience about howyou worry that the students
might feel frustrated, and youspend a lot of time just really
programming the framework andalso these different aesthetics
practices just in case that theymight want to walk out of the
screening. Luckily, I think onceyou explain it quite well, they

(01:12:27):
do look up to you, and they'rerespectful in the sense that I
have not had a student whowalked out of my screens. But I
was thinking that frustration,definitely agree. For me, it has
twofold meanings when when I useit to characterize Taiwanese
cinema as well because theycould go a different way that on
the one hand, yes, there is alsothe the common frustration
that's associated with theslowness, as you mentioned.

(01:12:51):
Nothing happens. The the pace isslow. But I also think how, you
know, for example, the endingscene of Edward Young's The
Terrorizer also offers adifferent kind of frustration
that's not slow cinema. But it'sit's a it's a film that has
multiple story lines that cometogether at some point. This is
a film that you have a fictionwriter, a woman who struggles to

(01:13:13):
write her next book or her nextproject.
And you also have a differentcharacter happening in a
different space, a photographerwho falls in love with a
mysterious woman. And this womansomehow becomes a catalyst for
everything that goes wrong inthe film, especially how she
disrupts and breaks up thecouples two couples in the film.

(01:13:37):
So the film frustrates theviewers, especially the ending
because I I call it it has avery Louis Bunuel esque kind of
a surrealist puncture thatleaves the audience wondering
whether if the tragic ending isa reality or it's someone else
dreaming about it. I don't wantit to spoil the film, but the
ending is quite obscure in asense. So I think frustration is

(01:14:01):
such a great word to thinkthrough this work, but also
connects both of our writingbecause we're both trying to
argue and advocate for this kindof frustration as a necessity
that's essential to appreciatingand understanding the filmmakers
that we've undergone such aclose reading.
And especially, it's also saidso much about how even with a

(01:14:25):
frustration, this kind ofsentiments can bring us closer
or even intimate with theirwork, which is something that
you pointed out, is a form ofpleasure. That boredom can also
be intimate and provide bodilypleasure in that sense. So my
last question for you, Nicholas,would be, what is the next

(01:14:47):
project that you're working onnow that your third book is
already out? I imagine you'realready planning for your fourth
book.

Yes. So, I've conceived of the next book
length project, which istentatively titled Inter Asia
Network Films and CosmopolitanSex Workers, that kind of
returns to some of the themes ofmy, previous book Sexography,
but also thinking about the kindof network of migrant
characters, explored in my bookon Sam and Liang. So I'm looking

(01:15:15):
at a complex twenty firstcentury cycle of East and
Southeast Asian films thatemploy network narratives. So
films with several protagonistsand distinct but intermingling
storylines, to represent thelives of sex workers in East
Asian networks of migration andlabor and commerce. I'm hoping
that analyzing these crosscultural encounters in these
East and Southeast Asian networkfilms will offer a timely

(01:15:38):
challenge to the dominance ofthe trafficking framework, the
belief that all sex workers arevictims of trafficking, while
also accounting for thenarrative dominance and global
cinematic appeal of thatframework.
And my hope is to return toTaiwan, ideally to National
Central University, to theCenter for the Study of
Sexualities, to work on, threechapters that I've conceived.

(01:15:58):
Number one is on Sami Ngaang'squeer, Teddy award winning post
retirement film Days from 2020that's set in Taiwan, Hong Kong,
and Thailand, and, features sexwork as, I think, a form of care
work for, Li Keqiang, who hasthis the same neck affliction,
that he suffered from in, theriver that Tsai incorporated
into the river. The second filmis The Receptionist from 2016,

(01:16:21):
which is a UK Taiwanesediasporic filmmaker Jenny Liu's
work on diasporic Chinese andTaiwanese women working in an
illegal brothel in London. Andit stars, Tsai's actors Chen
Chanchi, and it ends in,Kaohsiung in Taiwan, and there's
that sort of sense of diasporiclonging throughout her work. And
then number three, Li KangSheng, Tsai's actor, is in a

(01:16:41):
film called Come and Go.
He plays a Taiwanese sex touristin that film from 2020. It's by
Japan based Malaysian directorLin Ka Wai, and, it's a portrait
of converging Asian migrantstories in the Umeda district of
Osaka, which challenges theethnically homogeneous image of
contemporary Japan. And I'mhoping that based on the
previous books, I'm kind ofuniquely situated to intervene

(01:17:03):
in an intersectional analysis ofInter Asia, Cinema Studies,
films about underrepresented sexworkers, migration, and the idea
of cosmopolitanism in the twentyfirst century. And so since your
book is coming out this spring,I'm wondering if you could talk
about the audience that you hopeto reach with your book.

Beth Tsai (01:17:19):
Well, the first group of people, I think, obviously,
would be those who alreadyclosely follow Taiwan cinema. I
wanted to emphasize Taiwan andseparate that from the shuffle
of Chinese language filmsbecause a lot of times, the
studies or films from Taiwan areoften filed under non Western
cinema, Asian cinema, or orChinese cinema. So I hope that

(01:17:45):
by accentuating Taiwan and thetitle, I could also accentuate
an importance of doing Taiwanstudies by ways of looking at
Taiwan's, peculiarities. And Idon't just mean the focus should
be on Taiwan China tensions andthereby by separating Taiwan

(01:18:05):
from Chinese language cinema.But, also, it's equally
important to look at thecultural politics of Taiwan, how
Taiwan intersect with coloniallegacies and globalization, and
displace migrant workers,especially how the relationship
Taiwan has with, Southeast Asiancountries and how all of these
factors contributed to thedistinct Taiwanese culture

(01:18:28):
identity.
But I also think that my bookcan speak to a wide array of,
disciplines outside of Asianstudies. As I'm currently housed
in the department of Asianstudies. I believe the
theoretical discussions on filmfestivals and the cinema viewing
experience and also on thetopics of sleep and
installations could easily sparkinterest from students and

(01:18:50):
scholars from cinema studies,media studies, arts and art
history, comparative literature,and communication programs. But
then lastly, while academicbooks tend to have a steady
audience with, existing interestin in the subject matter. I
genuinely hope that my book canappeal to a broader audience

(01:19:12):
beyond the academic communityand contribute to public
knowledge about Taiwan and anddrive more interest in in Taiwan
studies.
That would be the goal of of mybook. Thank you.

Thank you very much. I'm I'm sure that it
will, reach those audiences, andand it's been such a pleasure to
to read your work and to talkwith you.

Beth Tsai (01:19:31):
Likewise.

I hope that we can continue to
collaborate, especially Imentioned before Tsai's,
announcement of his retirement,at least his retirement from
making commercial films. But,obviously, he's been very
productive since thatretirement, making a feature
length film Days and the Walkerseries. So, so I hope that we
can keep collaborating on thiskind of post retirement era of

(01:19:52):
Tsai Ing'en's filmmaking.

Beth Tsai (01:19:54):
Absolutely. Looking forward to it.

Thanks very much.

Narrator (01:19:59):
This has been a University of Minnesota press
production. The book Cruisy,Sleepy Sexual Disorientation in
the Films of Sai Ming Lang byNicholas de Villiers is
available from University ofMinnesota Press. The book,

Taiwan (01:20:12):
New Cinema at Film Festivals by Beth Tsai publishes
in April 2023 with EdinburghUniversity Press. Thank you for
listening.

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