Temporal Landscape Scene 5: Tsai Ming-liang Short Films

Temporal Landscape pays tribute to the award-winning director Tsai Ming-liang, focusing on his short films that capture the unhomeliness of Asia and articulate his diasporic gaze and Sinophone identity. Marked by long takes that seem to sculpt time, these films convey a trans-Asian geopolitical experience. They chart a journey from his early days in Taipei as a Malaysian Chinese, a stranger both to himself and to the plight of the city’s modernity, to later works that explore displacement and the politics of memory. In the Walker series, Tsai reenacts the pilgrimage of Xuanzang, the seventh-century Buddhist monk who traversed to India to collect and translate sutras, reimagining the travel in contemporary Taipei, his hometown Kuching in Malaysia, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Films to be screened: Walking on Water, Autumn Days, No No Sleep

Walking on Water (29 minutes; 2013)
Tsai Ming-Liang’s family is a typical example of the Chinese diaspora shaped by centuries of migration, as many Sinophone communities in Southeast Asia trace their roots to Fujian, Cantonese, or Teochew origins. In Walking on Water, Tsai revisits his childhood home in Kuching, Malaysia, a seven-story social housing project built in 1958 where he spent his early years. Once filled with the joy of youth, the building is now inhabited by strangers, while his former neighbor, the girl who once bathed and fed him, has also grown old. As his hometown changed, the scenes, objects, and people recalled through memory now appear particularly lonely and dilapidated. In this setting, Lee Kang-Sheng portrays the monk Xuanzang on his Journey to the West, moving slowly through shallow pools that reflect vivid images of the red-robed figure. His measured steps are accompanied by the refrain of a song: “Every time I visit your house, I always hear your mother’s sigh.”

Autumn Days (24 minutes; 2015)
Autumn Days pays tribute to Japanese director Kurosawa Akira (1910–1998). It opens with recorded dialogues with Teao Jiro, Osaka Fumiko, and Kurosawa Mugihiko, accompanied by a black screen as an acknowledgment of the impossibility of representing Kurosawa’s achievement. The film then turns to Teruyo Nogami, Kurosawa’s longtime script supervisor, now in her nineties, reflecting on her years alongside the director. A close-up of Nogami’s face follows as she watches Journey to the West, intercut with her candid remarks on Tsai Ming-Liang’s films. The film concludes with Nogami and Lee Kang-Sheng sitting silently outside Toho Studios, recalling Nogami’s book Waiting for the Wind on Kurosawa, until she begins to mimic Lee’s gestures, an intimate moment where vision, memory, and the gentle breeze of autumn quietly converge.

Part of the Tsai Ming-liang film festival. Read more here.