Goodbye, Dragon Inn [Blu-ray] [2020]

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No, most cinephiles, especially those interested in the lowbrow side of the spectrum, are into the theatricality of the experience. What is Quentin Tarantino’s obsession with “grindhouse cinema” other than a Proustian return to the smell of wino jizz and Colt 45, the rustle of rats in the aisle, the nonsensical words spoken by PCP-crazed Vietnam vets in the balcony to a torn-up print of TAKE A HARD RIDE? A final thought. As the cinema in the film closed its doors for the last time I was reminded of a trip I made to the district of Nakano in Tokyo in 2004, where a Japanese friend had booked me into a reasonably priced hotel that was located directly above a basement cinema that specialised in screening older movies. While there, I just had to pay this venue a visit and saw Fukasaku Kinji’s 1966 Hokkaido no Abare-Ryu – without the aid of English subtitles, no less – and was seriously impressed by the whole experience. There weren’t many of us in attendance, but the cinema was immaculately kept, the seats were comfortable, the screen was a good size and the condition of the print being screened was close to miraculous. As I emerged, I remarked to my friend what a wonderful resource this was to have so close to his home, to which he sadly responded, “I know, I love to come here, but not enough other people do nowadays and so it’s closing next month.” This is where the lingering shot at the end of Goodbye, Dragon Inn of the empty auditorium really hit home, acting as it did as a reminder that sometimes you really don’t fully appreciate what you’ve got until it’s gone. sound and vision The Fu-Ho had already played a part for Tsai in What Time Is It There?, which likewise explored the cinema’s role as a cruising spot – very much an evocation of the theatre’s real-life function. Wrote Tsai: ‘After declining popularity but before closing down [the Fu-Ho] was said to have a few people of the gay community patronize the place... I’m very moved by this. Though it has declined and lost its glitter and you have forgotten about the theater, it still continues a long journey and still welcomes the outsiders of society.’ I made Goodbye, Dragon Inn in my 30s. I’d found a cinema that was closing in the suburbs of Taipei. All the cinemas in that style were closing down, and this was one of the last ones left. I was filming What Time Is It There? (2001), and there was a scene that took place in that cinema. After I wrapped, I held a single screening there. It was raining outside, but there were a thousand people in this about-to-close cinema. The cinema owner called me asking if we might be able to collaborate, and I said no.

Tsai’s filmography is concrete and uniquely teleological, yet his individual films rarely resolve themselves in so neat a fashion, and Goodbye, Dragon Inn in particular resists easy resolution. Yes, the theater is closed and its residents scattered into the rainy Taipei night, but alongside this Tsai affords characters the barest hint of a connection, which in this context registers as the most magnanimous of gestures. And then there is the Yao Lee song “Can’t Let Go,” dubbed “an oldie from the ‘60s” (the same decade Dragon Inn was released) by Tsai, lingering long after the final image of the theater fades away. Both wistful and accepting, bitter and sweet, both it and Goodbye, Dragon Inn refuse to side with one emotion over the other, and instead to embrace the irresolution, the mixed feelings. This film’s potency is all in the passing of years, the endless possibilities: though the glorious space that once connected us is lost, we may still find each other in another place, at another time. The history of cruising at the cinema, it can be reasonably supposed, is as old as the medium itself. The hysterical reactions of matriarch Amanda Wingfield to son Tom’s nightly excursions to the movies in Tennessee Williams’s 1944 The Glass Menagerie make quite a bit more sense when you consider that the memory play is the work of a gay man who’d spent his miserable mid-twenties working at the St. Louis factory of the International Shoe Company and concealing his furtive pleasures from the overbearing mother with whom he cohabited. (As in Williams’s play, Tsai and Lee’s earlier Hsiao-kang films are concerned with the practical exigencies of hiding one’s sex life from the family with whom one shares a living space, a concealment which in The River flows towards a catastrophic confluence.) Tsai’s movie also evokes the feeling of ghosts. During one rare encounter between the Japanese man and another movie goer, the Japanese man is told that the theater is haunted. Because the people watching the movie are constantly changing seats or getting up to go cruise for hook-ups in the bathrooms, the landscape of the theater feels fleeting. You find yourself wondering if the large mass of people you saw populating the seats at the beginning of the film were ever actually there at all. Did you imagine them? Have they all left? And if they have, are those few that remain there by choice or simply because they haunt the place? The atmosphere of the rest of the building does little to help quell these ghost-like feelings. It is a dark building with multiple ceiling leaks. People emerge and disappear into the shadows as easily as if they could walk through walls. And yet, the movie still plays on the screen, a lifeforce for this otherwise dead-end establishment. Though, when Dragon Inn’s final credits roll and the lights come on, the seats are empty leaving you to wonder if anyone had ever really been there at all. I had more fun reading about the movies here than I have in a long time and it exalts for me a film (and filmmaker) that admittedly had never gotten their hooks in me. Pinkerton uses seemingly every available resource to consider this film in the context of not just Tsai's body of work, but the filmmakers words from interviews, where he was raised and the historical context in which he formulated and produced the film.Goodbye, Dragon Inn ( Chinese: 不散) is a 2003 Taiwanese comedy-drama slow cinema film written and directed by Tsai Ming-liang about a movie theater about to close down and its final screening of the 1967 wuxia film Dragon Inn.

A 4K restoration was released on DVD and Blu-ray by Second Run on November 23, 2020, and digitally by Metrograph on December 18, 2020. [2] [3] Reception [ edit ] Join the BFI mailing list for regular programme updates. Not yet registered? Create a new account at www.bfi.org.uk/signup Prod Co: Homegreen Films Prod: Liang Hung-Chih, Vincent Wang Dir: Tsai Ming-Liang Scr: Tsai Ming-Liang, Hsi Sung Phot: Liao Pen-Jung Ed: Chen Sheng-ChangThe very definition of a film that will starkly divide opinion, Goodbye, Dragon Inn is likely to prove frustrating and unsatisfying viewing for some, but if you can adjust to its slow pace and fascination with stillness and small moments, then there’s a good chance it will really work for you. Given my initial uncertainty, I was surprised how involved I became in it and ultimately how much I gleaned from what is only suggested by what occurs on screen, and was certainly caught out by its poetic evocation of childhood memories, its moments of almost absurdist humour and its touching final moments. Nostalgia for the cinemagoing days of my youth certainly played its part here, but if the film also works for you then the quality of the restoration and transfer and the Tsai Ming-Laing interview make this Second Run Blu-ray an easy recommend. Tue 18 May 18:10; Sat 29 May 12:45 (+ intro by Stuart Brown, BFI Head of Programme and Acquisitions)

In his prior film, What Time is it There?, Tsai set a scene in the old Fu-Ho theater at the edge of Taipei. Reminded of the super-cinemas and the poetic King Hu films of his youth, he shot a scene in the theater and premiered the film there. After the premiere, Tsai approached the owner to shoot an entire film there, fearing the soon-to-close theater would be lost forever. What was envisioned as a long short soon turned into a feature due to the long takes. [1] Release [ edit ] The wuxia – the word is commonly translated as ‘martial heroes’, and sometimes as synonymous with ‘martial arts’ – is both ancient and relatively new, like so much in the popular culture of Greater China. Wuxia stories centre on heroic xia warriors, and the scholar Sam Ho draws out an effective definition of the genre in its very name: Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a beautiful film. With scarce dialogue, few camera movements, and an average shot length of 55 seconds, it offers a deeply contemplative meditation on the forgotten magic of the cinema as an institution. Whether observing a stroll down the well-trodden corridors, a lone usher completing menial tasks, or simply the dark blanket of the auditorium itself, each shot is composed to encourage a full ingestion of the architecture and atmosphere of this ancient temple of exhibition. As a singularly self-infatuated medium, almost as soon as cinema learned to walk, it toddled to the mirror and, with its first self-regarding gaze, reflected upon the means and methods of its own exhibition and reception. For about the first half of its life to date, ‘the cinema’ referred to both an artform and to the venue where that artform was, during that period, exclusively displayed, and in very little time the former was being used to contemplate the latter. Take D.W. Griffith’s short Those Awful Hats (1909), in which the sightlines of an audience attending a melodrama screening are violated by a parade of patrons wearing ostentatious top hats and millinery, the illusion of a film projection achieved through double printing and a travelling matte. As part of the Tsai Ming-liang: The Deserted film series, we are pleased to be presenting a 35mm screening of the filmmaker’s critically acclaimed Goodbye, Dragon Inn, followed by a discussion and Q&A.

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Tsai consciously evokes parallels between his film and Hu’s Dragon Inn , building up the metatextual foundations of Goodbye, Dragon Inn . He felt that the films were very closely related, especially in the degree of attention both directors paid to public spaces 7. This is bolstered by the fact that Miao Tien, an actor who features in several of Tsai’s films, got his first starring role in Dragon Inn . The choice to cast two of the lead actors of Dragon Inn grants Tsai’s film an extremely strong emotional weight. This is particularly true of one of the film’s final sequences. As Hu’s wuxia reaches its final climatic fight scene, Miao Tien and Chen Shih are shown to be the last people remaining in the theatre. As we see closeups of the two actors, now over 30 years older, we bear witness to their younger, immortalised selves. The weight of time and change feels ever present. Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. That is, a decrepit, old picture-house on the outskirts of Taipei, hosting its last ever screening– of King Hu's 1967 sword-fighting classic Dragon Inn– complete, or incomplete, with leaky ceilings, and a thoroughly depleted audience. Goodbye, Dragon Inn feels in some ways like a tapestry of half-recalled memories triggered by the loss of the sort of movie palaces that some of us remember from our younger days, and yes, I’m including myself in that category. I’m old enough now to recall when even local cinemas were huge auditoriums with imposing screens, the majority of which were later subdivided into two or three smaller and altogether less impressive venues that offered more choice, but on a smaller scale. And while it could be argued that while up until the current pandemic put many of them at risk of permanent closure, cinemas in the UK were still attracting sizeable audiences, venues like the one in Goodbye, Dragon Inn (which was shot in a real cinema that was was on the verge of closure) that screen older movies for a specialist audience have become altogether rarer, at least outside of major cities. Watching the cashier make her way slowly up the steps of this cathedral of a cinema with its decaying walls and water-stained floors really does have a sense of sad finality to it, with the water that drips steadily through its leaking roof having the metaphoric feel of tears being shed by the venue for its imminent demise. As one is reminded throughout Goodbye, Dragon Inn, even when one goes to the movies alone, one does so to find a connection with others, whether it be the strangers in the auditorium with whom we may have nothing in common but a tendency to gasp and laugh at the same time or even just the characters on the screen. As the theater manager and the projectionist slowly but surely shutter their theater at the end of the dark, rainy night, one feels a tightening in one’s chest — is that it? Where will these lonely people go now? What will we all do if the cinemas close for good? Needless to say, sitting on my couch with my cat and a superhero film queued up on HBO Max, while easy enough, doesn’t have the same emotional resonance. Going to the movies reminds us that no matter what, we aren’t alone in this world — a beautiful, bittersweet feeling that, in an era of quarantine, is all the more necessary.