Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: On filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang
Cruisy.
Beth Tsai:Sleepy.
Nicholas de Villiers:Melancholy. Hello. My name is Nicholas de Villiers. I'm professor of English and Film at the University of North Florida. I was also a visiting scholar at National Central University in Taiwan at the Center for the Study of Sexualities in 2017.
Nicholas de Villiers:I've now published three books with the University of Minnesota Press. The first was Opacity and the Queer Tactics in Foucault, Bart and Warhol from 2012, followed by Sexography, Sex Work and Documentary from 2017. And today, I'll be talking about my new book, which came out in September of twenty twenty two, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy, Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai and Yang.
Beth Tsai:Hi. My name is Beth Tsai. I am visiting assistant professor in East Asian languages and culture studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. My research focus primarily on the cinema of Taiwan, film festivals, and transnational film theory. I have published in the International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, quarterly review of film and video, Journal of Asian Cinema, and Oxford Bibliographies.
Beth Tsai:My first book is titled Taiwan Youth Cinema at Film Festivals, which will be out in April 2023 from Edinburgh University Press.
Nicholas de Villiers:So thanks for joining me, Beth. I wanted to use this podcast as an opportunity to talk about our new and forthcoming books, but also as a continuation of our collaboration, beginning when we first met at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, with thanks to Xian Chao. I'm a great admirer of your definitive Oxford bibliography on Malaysian born Taiwan based filmmaker Tsai Min Liang, which is really an amazing resource on scholarship on Tsai in Chinese, English, and French. We also share a connection to National Central University. So I really enjoyed collaborating with you, to co chair a panel at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies on Sleepy Cinema, Affect, Audience, and Embodiment, which also included Elena Gorfinkel and Jean Ma, whose work we both admire and will talk probably about today as well.
Nicholas de Villiers:I wanted to use this opportunity, now that my book is published and yours is coming out soon, to continue our conversation on these scenes. So that's how we'll be structuring this podcast, less as an interview and more like a conversation around keywords or different approaches to transnational Taiwan cinema and queer and feminist approaches to film.
Beth Tsai:Well, I am really happy to be here, Nicholas, and thank you for all the kind words. And the admiration has been mutual ever since you published in Jumpcut and Senses of Seminar. But I wanted to go back to the beginning, especially when we first met. I remember the first time that we met at SMS in Atlanta. You mentioned you were either working on or you were interested in exploring how and or nickname, Shaocang, own screen and off screen relationship.
Beth Tsai:And that relationship parallels the concept of the artist and the muse. And I remember I responded by saying, oh, I never thought of it that way. And even though from an auteur studies point of view, we all know it's it's common for an auteur like Truffaut or Wes Anderson to work with a steady group of actors. But I also think there's something more ambiguous, more intimate codependency, if you will, between Tsai and Shao Kahn's working relationship. So I'm wondering if you can tell us more about how you came to write this book and your research process, if you don't mind sharing.
Nicholas de Villiers:Sure. So the first person I really have to thank for introducing me to Seis Films is, Michelle Stewart. We both were at the University of Minnesota. I was in the comparative studies and discourse and society program for my PhD. I think probably Michelle recommended Psy's films to me, because she knew I had an interest in queer cinema, in Andy Warhol.
Nicholas de Villiers:We can talk about some parallels between Warhol and Psy, and, CAM. So my first published work on Simon and Yang was on Goodbye Dragon Inn. The, that was in 02/2008 that I published an article in Jumpcut, and I really want to thank Julia Lesage and the late Chuck Kleinhans for that first opportunity. Also senses of cinema was an important, kind of early venue and also resource for me for thinking about Psy's films. I also attended a queer diaspora conference at National Taiwan University, and the keynotes were by Fran Martin and Gayatri Gopinath.
Nicholas de Villiers:And they were, also really influential to my thinking about queer diaspora in Psy's films. So I also I met Earl Jackson in, at a conference, the Asian Cinema Studies Society conference, and he has been so instrumental. I mean, really, this he made my book possible by helping me make connections in, Taiwan. He specifically introduced me to Josephine Ho and her colleagues in the Center for the Study of Sexualities at National Central University, and they wrote a Ministry of Science and Technology grant, with the help of Amy Perry and Fifi Nifei Ding while I was on my sabbatical leave from, from UNF. So when I was at NCU, I just found this amazing community of scholars of queer theory and kind of transnational queerness.
Nicholas de Villiers:So while I was at NCU, Sih Lin Chung at the Chinese University of Hong Kong invited me to give a 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 influential to my to my thinking. And he was so wonderful. He sort of made me feel like I was part of this special club of admirers of Tsai Ming Diang, like we have to stick together and support each other. And, so he he forged a connection between me and, Claude Wong at, Home Green Films.
Nicholas de Villiers:That was an opportunity to interview Simon Yang, at his studio in a long conversation with my NCU colleague, Jonathan Yeh, who was, also worked as our translator during that conversation. It was kind of a long form, like, you know, multiple hour conversation about queerness and space in size films. I'm just so grateful to the director for sharing his time and his insights in that conversation. But also while I was teaching at MCU, it was really helpful to hear the kind of local insights of my students and my colleagues, and that really helped my understanding of Taiwan cinema and Tsai's place in Taiwan. I've also been helped by international conferences to kind of share my work on queer queer Sinophone cinema, the Asian Cinema Studies Society conference where I met ERL, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference where we met.
Nicholas de Villiers:And also there's a conference in Malaysia called Gender and Sexuality Justice in Asia that was at Monash University in Kuala Lumpur, which allowed me to visit Tsai's filming locations and to travel to Kuching, his birthplace in Sarawak, which, was really, I think, important to get a sense of where he grew up within the kind of ethnic Chinese community in this small town that, he's described as this kind of sleepy, sleepy town and that that was part of his culture shock of moving to Taipei. When I was in Malaysia, I met with Saw Tiong Kwan, who's a director of a documentary called Past Present, in which he interviews Sy about his relationship to movie theaters growing up in Malaysia and his experience watching movies with his grandparents. And so that was also just a really important part of sort of understanding Sy's background. But I didn't want to just write an auteur study. As much as Sy thinks of himself as an auteur and as much as he's kind of modeled himself on a director like Truffaut, and as much as it seemed like it was a good occasion to publish an auteur study upon his announcement of his retirement from commercial filmmaking after he made Stray Dogs.
Nicholas de Villiers:But I also wanted to really contribute to work in queer theory, on cinematic space, on cruising, on the idea of sexual disorientation, which is the subtitle to my book, and on queer film phenomenology. What about you? How did this book project come to be? What was the process of research and and revision?
Beth Tsai:Well, I just, first of all, wanted to, shout out to National Center University, and you were right, Nicholas, about our connection and and mutual experience there because I did my undergraduate studies in English literature at MCU in Taiwan. So I also had so much fond memories of being on the campus and studying under the same colleagues that you had, Josephine Ho and Dinghai Faye, and also, Wen Chi Lin, which I am very much indebted to, their teachings and their guidance and their mentorship. But about my book so the genesis of my book can be traced all the way back to a course I took at NYU in 2011, which is a course on transnationalism. The professor who taught the course, Zhongbong Cho, mentioned that if I wanted to work on Taiwan's national and cultural identity, the film festival is a platform in the battlefield for these kind of dialogues and cultural negotiations, that I could work through and come through. He felt that at the time, not a lot of scholarship had been dedicated to this topic, so I wrote a term paper for this class.
Beth Tsai:And then after his class, I had the opportunity to attend the European Film Cultures Conference in London, Sweden, where I was exposed to a group of film festival study scholars for the first time. But I've noticed then, which I will still say, the same thing for now, is that most of the people doing film festival studies do adopt sociologist and anthropologist approach, where they hang out at the festival site and observe the film festival as a research object, while the rest of them were more interested in uncovering or rediscovering archival documents, and they try to build collections and maybe adding on to the resources if the institution lacked an archival practice. You would be surprised a lot of film festivals actually do not keep their documents because their workers, their staffs, they're being shuffled every year, and they're nomadic in a sense that they don't always just work for one film festival. They may work for one and then travel to the other, because of a different timelines in in the year. These are what a lot of festival scholars were doing at the time, And I found myself and now I was inspired by these people, but I also felt like an outsider or an outlier in a sense that I was more interested in theorizing the political dimensions of films and filmmakers on the festival circuit without necessary investing in quantitative research or adopt a historical method to uncovering or underdocumented side of these film festivals.
Beth Tsai:And, also, it has a lot to do with, because I was training a critical theory. I felt slightly disqualified or maybe just reluctant. I feel uncertain to just simply ascribe French theories such as, French theorist, Pierre Baudoux, to one of the hypothesis that I had, which is to look at the practice of programming and how the practice shape taste in cultural hierarchy reinforced by the International Film Festival system. I also wanna mention, luckily or I had the opportunity at another conference to meet Elena Pulakhi, a scholar programmer, a really, really nice and fascinating person as well. She was a programmer for Chinese language film at the Venice International Film Festival, who basically confirmed that, it was not feasible for me to find hard evidence to support the claim I wanted to make about programming and taste.
Beth Tsai:And then especially neither would a programmer admit to their personal preference and political bias during the selection process. So this is all to say that this book ended up in a way it is now because despite how much I would like to focus on just platform studies, my projects is about how art house films were circulated and how Taiwanese filmmakers were received at film festivals, but also equally about their relationship with film festivals. So I feel like now would be a good time to segue into maybe reading a passage from both of our books, which I will. I wanted to read a passage from you, Nicholas, your book, which I'm holding in my hand. And I've mentioned to you this before that when you finish reading one person's book, it's always fascinating to go back to the introduction.
Beth Tsai:It's like you now realize that everything was packed and spelled out in the introduction. It has always been there, but you also needed to finish entire book to to understand the narrative and how everything progressed. But I am just very fascinated by this paragraph in your introduction, which you wrote, cruisy, sleepy, melancholy, sexual disorientation in the films of Cai Ming Liang shows how its high expands and revises the notion of queerness. By engaging with the local specificity and situated knowledge of the diasporic migrant, tourist, and otherwise displaced characters in his films and their experiences of sexuality in Taiwan, Malaysia, and France. Tsai's films are queer because they do not conceive of nationality and sexuality as essentialized identities or sexual orientation, but rather help us understand queerness in forms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation.
Beth Tsai:Cruzey's Sleepy Maleconte engages queer film theory and approaches to queer diaspora, queer regionalism, and queer phonology to understand Tsai's queering of space. Tsai's films help us think spatially about queerness, including the queerness of Crossing Borders, the border crossings of the director, the characters within the films, and the films themselves. I love this passage because the way that you frame and then situate is not bound in sexual or national identity, but rather really an intervention at queerness, the queer phonology, and not just a queer identity, but also queering originalism. So I guess if you could elaborate more about these keywords, drawing from your book's title, cruisy, or maybe cruising as well, sleepy, and melancholy. And then when I look at melancholy, I also think about insomnia for some reason.
Beth Tsai:So I wonder if you could just tell us more about these keywords.
Nicholas de Villiers:Thanks very much. So, yeah, the the term cruisy, I've always really liked the term. You see it in kind of gay guides to navigating the sexual landscape of a city. But cruising, I think, is a really important queer spatial practice. So I was thinking some really key texts that I wanted to engage with, are Samuel Delaney's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, where it's kind of a memoir, but also theorization of the role played by, cruising and queer and porn movie theaters.
Nicholas de Villiers:But also there's a documentary about, Samuel Delaney that I published a review of in Jump Cut called The Polymath by Fred Barney Taylor. And, that's a kind of documentary portrait of Delaney that also discusses this idea of navigating the sexual landscape of the city, including porn theaters and public toilets. Also Jose Munoz's work in Cruising Utopia. He has a really, wonderful chapter on what he calls the ghosts of public sex. And, also I discovered John Paul Ricco's book The Logic of the Lure, which has some really important theorizing of, cruising and, and queerness.
Nicholas de Villiers:There's also a book by Alex Espinosa called An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime that also I think has some really interesting insights about queerness as a spatial practice, but also a practice of, kind of, waiting and patience. So, I was trying to frame cruisy, also as an affect, not just as a practice of cruising, but also a kind of potential or erotic availability or openness. And, I got that idea from Roland Barthes, who wrote a preface to a book by Renault Camus called Tricks. And I'm horrified to learn that Renault Camus more recently has this kind of ethno nationalist racist reputation. But I would say that tricks was just kind of a pretext for Barthes to write a preface that was really his own way of thinking about cruising that generalizes the cruising experience for thinking about the reader and, the text, the reader's relationship to the text, or the text cruising the reader, which was really helpful for me for thinking about Goodbye Dragon Inn, which is where I was first starting to work through this idea of the affective element of being cruisy or feeling cruisy.
Nicholas de Villiers:I also recently saw a film by Elizabeth Churchill called Ask Anybody, which also has a really wonderful podcast that's all about cruisy gay spaces. It's kind of a mashup of gay adult film from the 60s through the 80s that really emphasizes the idea of gay spaces, including public toilets and movie theaters. And I recently had the opportunity to talk about Churchill's Ask Anybody at a conference on disorientation in, at the University of Malaga in Spain. It was just exciting to have that opportunity to kind of think through sexual disorientation at a conference, specifically on the theme of disorientation. Onto the keyword of sleepy.
Nicholas de Villiers:Again, Roland Barthes is one of the major kind of inspirations here. His essay Leaving the Movie Theater, where he talks about the experience leaving the theater feeling like his body is sleepy. And I know that that's a kind of common reference point for both of us. It's a really, like, productive and inspiring text. It's also true for, for Jean Ma.
Nicholas de Villiers:So we had that SCMS panel that we co chaired, where we invited Elena Gorfinkel and Jean Ma. And thinking Elena Gorfinkel has a really wonderful public lecture called The Soporific Between Exhaustion and Eros, and I know has published, other work on specifically the kind of exhausted body in art cinema. And then Jean Ma, was talking about her new book, At the Edges of Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators. But also in terms of my own inspiration, I drew from Proust's opening to Swan's Way, the way that he theorizes sleepiness and disorientation. I also have a faculty writing group at UNF, with really wonderful colleagues that gave me feedback.
Nicholas de Villiers:And I was kind of pitching my book proposal and title, and I was thinking about, you know, Cruisy Sleepy Melancholy. It has kind of a nice ring to it. And they 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 that might contribute to the way that the words work together in the title. And then the final term, melancholy, and I like your connection to insomnia.
Nicholas de Villiers:So again, I just wanted to start with kind of my reference points. Jean Ma's book Marking Time in Chinese Cinema was very influential for thinking about psi and melancholy. Also Jonathan Flatley's work on melancholia and modernism. And there's been a long running current of thought in queer theory on Melancholia and Gender, Sexuality and the AIDS crisis. Judith Butler, Douglas Crimp, Ann Svetkovich.
Nicholas de Villiers:But also work on racial melancholy, David Ng's work and Anne and Lynn Cheung's work on racial melancholy. And the recently published book by Shayan Qiao, Queer Representations in Chinese Language Film and the Cultural Landscape, thinks about gay melancholy within queer theory, but specifically in the xenophone context in relationship to the heteronormative patriarchal family and that sense of kind of gay melancholy in relationship to those expectations. But in terms of the technical and clinical terms, melancholia and insomnia, I wanted to think about them in the kind of more vernacular sense. And it might be that because my background is studying Foucault, I'm a little bit skeptical of clinical terminology and the wholesale adoption of clinical frameworks within queer theory because of the kind of medicalization of queerness. So I like Anne Svetkovich's work in Depression, A Public Feeling, where she sometimes uses more vernacular terms like feeling bad.
Nicholas de Villiers:So melancholy is a kind of slightly more vernacular term and I wanted to add to that really major and majorly theorized affect these more minor affects like feeling cruisy and feeling sleepy. And sleepy is kind of a third term, between being awake and asleep. So So that was kind of my approach of thinking about how do I bring melancholia down to a more vernacular sense of melancholy. And I don't spend too much time in the book on making distinctions like melancholia and mourning in the typically Freudian sense. But I was also kind of inspired by Sean Nye's work on, ugly feelings and minor affects, when thinking about these affects.
Nicholas de Villiers:But then, in terms of Psy's films, the, you know, 10 films that he's made all with Li Keqiang Sheng as his muse, They often feature characters who are sleepy, who are insomniac, who are suffering from jet lag. Especially What Time Is It There focuses a lot on the the experience of insomnia. During also the experience of, melancholy and mourning. And then his film that he shot as part of the Walker series in Japan called No No Sleep, which is about a capsule hotel and characters kind of finding rest within this capsule hotel and sauna, which I talked about for our SCMS panel. And his film Stray Dogs, which focuses on a homeless family and their attempts to find somewhere to sleep.
Nicholas de Villiers:And there's a really amazing scene where Li Keqiang's character, as this homeless father, who's he works basically holding a, a sandwich board for luxury real estate. He then sneaks into the luxury real estate for a nap. And I think it's one of the most amazing scenes in his films. I think this theme of rest and sleeping is something that, once you notice it, it's everywhere. So, I wanted to read a passage from your book, Beth.
Nicholas de Villiers:I want to quote from the introduction where you're talking about the film festival. You say the film festival is approached as a theoretical framework, as well as an objective study, to analyze how new cinema directors Ho Chioxian, Tsai Min Liang, and Midi Zhi specifically became representatives of Taiwan once their films were circulated internationally. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the idea of these as transnational, but also as representatives of new Taiwan cinema. And I was also really impressed by the feminist framework of your book, which you explain in the following quote: In situating Taiwan new cinema in the exhibition context, this book also takes a closer look at the productive roles women have played as discursive mediators of the cultural imaginary of the nation, the auteur, and the art of slow cinema. While the three primary case studies all focus on male directors, there's an unbending feminist caliber in the modes of production and feminist interventions that draw attention to who is writing the grand narrative of history?
Beth Tsai:Well, I think we're gonna have to come back to the larger framework of the film festival later in our conversation because I just wanted to focus on women, the the feminist approach, and women critics and the for now. Also, I I tend to answer questions with the story. I I don't know why. Maybe that's just the way I I think through things, and I'm a storyteller in that sense. And also, I I was really struck by one of the comments that I I received when my book manuscript was undergoing peer review that one of the reviewers said, this is a feminist project.
Beth Tsai:I guess it was obvious. It has been obvious in my writing. But I just didn't see it for some reason or maybe it was so natural and was so naturally embedded in my writing that I just think too much about it as a woman scholar writing this project that I didn't reflect on on my own position or methodology. But the more I think about it and I agree that and I I had to explain it in the introduction that, yes, it it is a feminist project that I I did take a feminist approach to it. So I'm gonna start with the flaneur because maybe some of, the readers might potentially ask this question.
Beth Tsai:Is that I used the word the French word flaneur, the masculine form instead of the feminine form flaneur, which is the correct form, supposedly, if I wanted to talk about women walking in the city. But I'm gonna start with my little story is that in the chapter three of my book where I group two of Huo Shaoxian's films, Le Voyage du Balan Roche and Cafe Lumiere, because I wanted to talk about the transnational co production and the transnational dimensions of these films. I presented an earlier version of this writing at a small one of boutique conference called World Cinema and Television in French at the University of Cincinnati. I was surprised my paper was accepted because I have working knowledge of French, but and nowhere near how these scholars were if they're not native speakers of French that I I feel very conscious about my insufficient knowledge of the language, but also the history and the culture. But they were very helpful, and the feedbacks I received were tremendously inspiring.
Beth Tsai:One of the professors who attended the conference pointed out that there's a flaneur aspect in my work because I was focusing a lot on women walking around and exploring the cities, meaning Tokyo and Paris in those films. Now looking back again, there was another obvious connection, but somehow I just didn't see it. And as any French or literally scholars would know, the flaneur is Charles Baudelaire's archetype of the modern man, the masculine figure who strolls through the Metropolitan City with privilege and leisure. I Metropolitan City with privilege and leisure. I said privilege because at the time, even in the late nineteenth century, women can actually be on the streets alone at the time they have to have a companion with them.
Beth Tsai:It is obvious that both protagonists in both films, Yoko and Song Feng, they are walking around the city alone, leisurely, slowly, sometimes with a purpose, sometimes without. But for me, I also think it's it's interesting that their figures are encapsulated by the reflections of the modern city, whether if it's a mirrored image on a train ride or Zengfeng in the Voyage de Balloon Hooch documenting the ubiquitous red balloon scene in Hou Xiaoxian's francophone film, creating a rich Maison Abbey. I didn't wanted to comment on the phone news and thereby creating a separate feminine discourse because I think the discussion was already gendered, And, I did want to create a separate discourse to separate the practice in the sense that the discussion has always been about how men gets to walk in the public, but women own the private spheres. I wanted to intervene in that conception of but these are also women walking in a city, and it doesn't matter whether if they're considered a foreigner or a feminist. Another reason for not adopting the feminine form of this French word is that I link this practice to film spectatorship, which is should be gender neutral Into the ways, in which a person walks around the city in a seemingly endless way, observing and perceiving the cityscape in everyday life.
Beth Tsai:As Janet Wolf has observed, the streets of the city are home to the flaneur because the city provides, and I quote, an asylum for the person on the margins of society. This kind of pictorial pleasure where one observes but rarely interact with others, specifically strangers, I consider it as very much like the in the melody of the crowd in the darkened theater, which is an element in the workings of the cinematic apparatus as you also quoted Roland Barthes, and I'm also quoting Roland Barthes here, that he has already explained about the darkened theater and that relationship with, spectatorship. I also wanted to talk for a little bit about the chapter on women critics because I'm very much indebted to Christopher Luke's book on, especially his chapter on women's writing or Akira of Feminine, where he unpacks how screenwriter Zhu Tianwen, which I've also included in my book, contributed to the understated gendered expressions in Huo Shaoxing's films, which is what he calls the subtle voce of female voice. And it's a female voice that subverts the patriarchal perspective and values in Huo Shaoxing cinema. Emily Yeh and Daryl Davis also talked about and wrote extensively on and covered Zhu Tianwen screenwriter Zhu Tianwen's writings and their book, which was considered the first English book on Taiwan cinema.
Beth Tsai:So I'd have to give them a shout out. But Christopher Luke's writing got me thinking and asked the second quote you've just mentioned. The question I have in my mind is who is writing the history here? And this goes back to one of the earlier feedbacks I received about my book was the concern that I didn't include a women director in my case study. My defense is that, well, there were women directors present during the time, but none really worked on Taiwan news cinema.
Beth Tsai:They've created documentaries or they work on melodramas, but not in the new wave movement. And much like today, women were present, but you would have more women screenwriters and producers working behind the scene in the movement than someone who's at the frontier of, like, directors and cinematographers. So instead of being fixated on women directors, I wanted to take a marker approach to history and look at the labors behind directors' talents and maybe cinematographers and look at whose writing were shaping or to borrow at least one of his films title, to consider who were the pushing hands of the new wave movement. And that's how I ended up with a chapter on women critics.
Nicholas de Villiers:I really appreciate that about your approach to to women's labor as as screenwriters, as critics, as as actresses as well in in these films. So it was very noticeable to me reading this book that there is a a strong kind of feminist current, even if you do focus on on male directors.
Beth Tsai:Okay, Nicholas. So now I wanted to transition to some of the common themes in both of our work. Of course, we overlap with from my book, I have two chapters on timing now. But, also, I think space is really a prominent theme that has a storyline in both of our works. So I wonder if you could you elaborate on, you mentioned the keywords sexual disorientation in your introduction, and there's so much about queering the space and that connection to metacinema.
Beth Tsai:And what I also picked up was I'm really interested in the phrases that you use, such as rented space and portable life. I'm curious if if you could elaborate more on these phrases.
Nicholas de Villiers:Thanks very much. Yeah. The idea of orientation in space is obviously a very important part of phenomenology, but I wanted to think about sexual spaces and queering space, and how to foreground the queerness of Psy's films and the characters shifting or ambiguous sexual orientations in relationship to specific spaces. And I was thinking, you know, Psy is very famous for resisting the label gay films early on in his career. I think part of it is that he didn't want to be pigeonholed as a gay film festival director.
Nicholas de Villiers:And he's since given interviews about how he's really evolved on that, and the times have changed. But I think at the time, he was worried that that would be the way that he'd be branded. But I was sort of interested in that resistance, to the label gay films and maybe the label gay characters for the characters that, Xiaoqam plays. I was looking for examples of thinking beyond the kind of binary understanding of sexuality, And Michael Moon was the first person to coin the term sexual disorientation for thinking about what he called mimetic desire in films by Kenneth Anger and David Lynch, and the way in which those films also sexually disorient the viewer. So I wanted to kind of apply that, what he says about anger and Lynch's films, to Psy's films and thinking about his characters and the way in which Psy's films also tend to disorient audiences and critics, who are looking for explicit kind of gay characters.
Nicholas de Villiers:Also, Sara Ahmed revises Moon's idea of sexual disorientation in her book, Objects, Orientations, Others, by thinking about migration and space and queer relationships to home. I was thinking each of these is really interesting for thinking in terms of Sy's relationship to home or homelessness in terms of his characters, and their relationships to space and rented spaces. Especially in Vive la Moore, there's really interesting relationships, kind of triangulated, and sexually disoriented relationships among the characters and their occupation of this empty apartment. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone is also about a kind of sexually disorienting, caretaking relationship between these migrant characters in Malaysia. And The Whole also has, I think, a really interesting way of disorienting the gendered expectations we have about these characters, known only as the man upstairs and the woman downstairs during this kind of apocalyptic millennial outbreak of a mysterious fictional disease.
Nicholas de Villiers:So I think each of those kind of queer space and queer the idea of home in really interesting ways. So I was thinking about queer relationships to domestic space, migrant experiences, you know, even Tsai's own experience returning to Malaysia to make a film about migrants and comment obliquely on homophobia in Malaysian politics. So thinking about queering space and thinking kind of about queer tactics for using space, I was very much inspired by Delaney, as I've mentioned, his Times Square Red, Times Square Blue book and Ricoh's book on the logic of the lure. And I was also very, inspired by Michelle de Certeau's work on distinguishing between tactics and strategies. I'd originally used that in my first book on opacity in the closet for thinking about queer tactics, but I was largely focused on kind of linguistic tactics for outplaying or resisting the binary of closeted versus out.
Nicholas de Villiers:But, of course, de Certeau is also talking about spatial practices and he argues that strategies are really for those who possess and own real estate, whereas tactics are the tactics of the pedestrian. And going back to your discussion of kind of the person walking in the city. In this book, I'm kind of returning to Sarto's focus on spatial tactics by those who don't own property, which is really relevant to Sy's frequently homeless or displaced characters and their use of urban spaces in the film. And in terms of the key word or the idea of rented space or living a portable life, in my conversation with Sai about No No Sleep, Jonathan Ye and I were really fascinated by his discussion of his experience in Japan and his observation that it seems like Japanese people in the city of Tokyo live a kind of portable life, that they travel without being able to settle. And you can see that in capsule hotels, in kind of public baths and saunas, and especially the ubiquitous phenomenon of Internet cafes.
Nicholas de Villiers:So all of these themes, I think, come together in No No Sleep. And, really, all of Sci's films carry this theme of rented space. I was thinking of real estate markets in Vive la Moore and Stray Dogs, bath houses in The River and other films, But also movie theaters, and thinking about the movie theater as a rented space. Which gets to the topic of metacinema. You know, I teach film classes.
Nicholas de Villiers:I often start with examples of metacinema. We watch out for Hitchcock's Rear Window and other self reflexive films, films about filmmaking and film viewing. I also teach horror film and horror films are particularly self reflexive. You can see that in Scream or Blair Witch Project or, Ringu, which I know you've also written about that, that film. So Goodbye Dragon Inn, that was kind of how I approached it as an example of metacinema, a film about the film viewing experience.
Nicholas de Villiers:But I also wanted to apply this idea of kind of metacinematic cruising to Goodbye Dragon Inn. And then Tsai also made a film that was commissioned as part of the sixtieth anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, a collection of, of world cinema directors who made three minute films about the movie theater called Chacon Son cinema. Sy's film was called It's a Dream and it's set in a movie theater in Malaysia. And I use it in my preface to my book as a kind of microcosm and encapsulation of Sai's motifs for thinking about our relationship to the movie theater. And it's a somewhat kind of melancholy relationship that he has to movie theaters, which is also explored in Saw Kyung Wan's documentary on Tsai's relationship to movie theaters in Malaysia, Past Present.
Nicholas de Villiers:And in that film, he interviews Abichat Pong, Weera Setjikul and Chen Chien Chi, Tsai's actor, about the role of cinematic space and the space of the movie theater in all of Sy's films, and they express their kind of admiration for the poetics of space and the way that space speaks in a film like Goodbye Dragon Inn.
Beth Tsai:I love that you mentioned Sy's admiration for the poetic use of space. But the way that you just described and the way that you use orientation and disorientation to think through space is also very poetic in the sense that you unpack so much, so many unfolded meanings, just through one word and disorienting of directions in in that sense that I just find it really fascinating. And I realized that we we do approach the notion of space, albeit a different might be a slightly different approach, or I'm thinking again through maybe more of a macro framework and and looking at and using transnational as a framework, which I didn't have a chance to, respond to that.
Nicholas de Villiers:So, yeah, if you could talk about that, the the way that you've organized your chapters in terms of these, these movements and cardinal directions of going east, going west, and, the southbound turn.
Beth Tsai:Yeah. Absolutely. So the way I think through transnationalism is through movements. I I think by looking at movements, by tracing the routes and the roots of these movements helped me understand and think through the transnational theory. And the reason why I picked those filmmakers, Hou Shao Xian, Cai Liang, and Midi Zhi, who to some, they wouldn't necessarily consider or at first glance think that he belongs to the Taiwanese cinema movement, but I would consider him as a second wave or or continuation of the second wave because he his work came so much later.
Beth Tsai:But I chose these individual filmmakers as a case study, in Franklin in terms of cardinal directions of east, west, and south. Because if we go back to thinking about how transnationalism ten years ago was really a new buzzword to counter the outdated view of Immanuel Wallerstein's world systems theory, and scholars were unsatisfied with globalization theory and wanted to shift their attention to not just look at the uneven process between the East and West, the uneven process for globalization and its consequences. They look towards just nationalism as a response to the concept and recognize regionalization as a new possibility for a reimagined new world order. I was trying to wrap my head around these thoughts and and discussions. But also on the ground level, I am inspired by Edward Said's traveling theory and James Clifford's traveling cultures.
Beth Tsai:So traveling is also the theme that I'm trying to use to unpack transnationalism. With that together comes with the concept of mobility or movement. And on a literal meaning, travel is a form of movement, but figuratively, movement can also refer to a change of directions, a change of course, and can be referred to the origins and the different stages of the new cinema or new wave movement as my book title indicates. So I began these travels with Ho Chiossian going east, not only because Kapilumiya, a film that was commissioned by Shoshiku Studio. They invited Ho Chioshan to pay homage to, the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, but also this film, embodies and is an allegorical to the colonial relationship between Taiwan and imperialist Japan.
Beth Tsai:But I also noticed the easternization of Hou's only Francophone film, Le Voyage du Balen Houche, with Songfang, one of the characters in in the film, which goes by her real name, Songfang. She is in remaking Albert Lammohy's Le Balen Houche, and through the way that Heo Xiaoxian also incorporated Taiwanese puppetry and music in his films. And then moving on to Taim Lin Lang. I label Taim Lin Lang's work with the westbound framework not just because of his often confessed love for the French new wave, epitomized by Jean Pierre Liod who now appears in two of his films. But also many of the European funds, film festival, and and museum fundings have supported Taemin L's filmmaking career throughout.
Beth Tsai:And he also recently did a US tour and had his last job was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which he felt he very proud to be included as part of the conversation with the music practice. And MoMA was also the second museum that purchased his 35 millimeter print of Visage. And the Louvre Museum was the first to commission and also the proud collector of this film with its 35 millimeter print. And then lastly, with MidiZee, Myanmar, born director, is self bound, both in light of, of stinking light of Taiwan's self bound policy referring to how the the Southeast Asian and Chinese diaspora members migrate to Taiwan, because that experience and that opportunity potentially offer a spatial but also social mobility for these people, for these Chinese diasporas. As well as the marginalization of Midezi's ethnic minority despite his film work represented Taiwan as a whole.
Beth Tsai:Some reviewers and some film professionals don't necessarily consider Midi as representative of of Taiwan cinema simply for the fact that he wasn't born in Taiwan. He was born in Myanmar, which marginalized him and segregated him to more of a Southeast Asian identity. And in my writing, I wanted to challenge this misconception.
Nicholas de Villiers:Thanks very much. Yeah. And that's an interesting connection between Simon Yang and Midisi, is that that sense of being questioned in terms of do you belong, do you represent Taiwan? And so I think that they end up thematizing that in their in their films.
Beth Tsai:Well, now, Nicholas, I wanted to ask you about objects because I see, and I'm just excited about how not only those objects were repeatedly used in timing now's works throughout his filmography. But also, these objects kept reappearing in your chapters as well, and it also becomes another straight line that struts your arguments and your theories together in such a a beautiful way. There are many, many objects, but I'm particularly fascinated by you mentioning mattress or white underwear as we often see in Xiaotong, wears on screen, toilet, which you also mentioned earlier in one of your answers.
Nicholas de Villiers:So, yeah, I made the index to my book, and I was noticing that I was you know, I probably didn't need to do this, but I exhaustively catalogued these motifs and recurring objects inside films, probably because I think that's one of the things that makes him so interesting, is he's always recurring to these specific motifs. In terms of the mattress, I actually had a student at NCU, one of my graduate students, Martina Nye, who encouraged me to think more about mattresses in his work, but also as this kind of place of sleep and eroticism. And I was really struck, actually, when I went to the Museum of the National Taipei University of Education, where Tsai, had his Stray Dogs at the Museum installation. When you go to the museum cafe, there's a video projection of a mattress, from one of Sy's experimental pieces. The mattress recurs quite a bit, but especially in I Don't Want to Sleep Alone.
Nicholas de Villiers:It's almost like a character within the film. And in terms of underwear, the idea of characters being shown when they're alone, I think, is something that ties together a lot of Sy's films. That there's kind of emphasis on lonely characters in these kind of private and intimate moments when they're alone in underwear. Definitely in Rebels of the Neon God and in Vive la Morte, there's a lot of emphasis on that kind of solitary life. And I think Shao Kang's character is in his underwear for all of the whole as well in his apartment.
Nicholas de Villiers:It does remind me actually a little bit, I just recently screened for my class the Wong Kar wai film Chungking Express, in which Tony Leung's character also spends a lot of time alone, in his underwear. So I don't know if this is maybe a connection between the two directors. But it poses the question of public and private, which is also why toilets are a motif, because they also kind of raise this question of the public and private. And Fran Martin talks a little bit about this in her introduction to the Journal of Chinese Cinemas. There's a special issue of that journal in which there were a number of contributions on Tsai Ming Yang, and her introduction is called Tsai Ming Yang's Intimate Public Worlds, which I think is such a smart way of thinking about this director as the way his films capture intimacy and intimate moments, but are also about the dividing line between public and private, in his work.
Nicholas de Villiers:I want to ask you, Beth, about the role of festival films in your book and also the documentation. You have these beautiful illustrations of installation views of Sizewalker films, so thinking about expanded cinema, in relationship to the physical space. And then another object that I think you foreground is the red balloon in Ho Chi Chien's The Voyage of Balmain Rouge.
Beth Tsai:Yeah. So here's also another story again. When I defended my doctoral dissertation, one of my mentors, professor Liz Montaguri, she comment that she really liked my project because one of the main threads of my approach in film festival studies was following the money trail. Again, I didn't think about it until she pointed out. So by this, she means that my approach reflects one of the core understanding of culture studies, which is to stress both the cultural but also the material fabric of society.
Beth Tsai:At the same time, in point to the economic factors of societal transformation. And as media studies and culture studies often are often greatly invested in material culture and object studies, the way I approach objects in my book took on a literal but also a figurative form. So you pointed out the installation views, which it's still exhibiting. But when I visit the site, the dune, for Cai Minang's Walker Series exhibition, at the time, the gallery was supposed to rotate an artist every three years. I don't know.
Beth Tsai:Is it because they couldn't since the pandemic, they couldn't find the next artist, or they just negotiate a deal? So the exhibition was supposed to end in 2021, and I visited in 2020 just before the pandemic. But now I I believe it's still showing. But it was really fascinating with, a time announced installation at that particular site. He did had other exhibitions in in museums like the Palace Museum, where he also brought mattresses.
Beth Tsai:So, again, mattresses are one of his recurring objects. Vintage CRT TVs and old theater seats in into the exhibition. Later on with other works, he also brought in tree branches, recycled paper, sand, and water, and which is the one that I took I documented and I took photos of and I shared in the book. These are the material objects, the the feasible objects that we see. There's also the red balloon, which I didn't think of it as an object at first because it's such a iconic cinematic symbol that many associates with the French cinema, La Balloon Couche, as we talked about.
Beth Tsai:And the visual symbol is referenced everywhere. Not mentioned in the book, but I was thinking one of the Simpsons episodes even features the baby happily darting around with a red balloon. And that episode was a French, quote, unquote, gift from her brother, Bart. And in my book, in the context of Taiwan cinema, a floating red balloon symbolized the journey Ho Chioxing took to travel to France to make his first known Chinese language film. Again, a film commissioned by Museum du Oxy.
Beth Tsai:And then lastly, we could also think about way to approach festival film as an object because many of Taimi Leung and also Ho Chiochen as well, their films were funded by museums or film festival funding. So this type of festival film is emblematic of how film festivals as cultural institutions exercise their material power. So they are concrete and tangible, but they're also not tangible in the sense that we're we're looking at them as film exhibitions or or films that are being circulated at this platform to being viewed by, the audience. So in a way that it is an object, but it's also I approach it as a figurative form as well.
Nicholas de Villiers:It's such an important insight, I think, in your book, the idea of film festivals as producers. I think we tend to think of festivals as just venues, or I do. And so I think that's a really important approach to think about the film festival as a producer of work like these commissioned films.
Beth Tsai:So let's also talk about aesthetics in both of our books because camp is also a really important keyword both in terms of thinking about aesthetics, but you also consider it more as sensibility and affect in your writing. So I wonder if you could maybe elaborate on how you think through the keyword camp and the way that you use it. And what are if it also carries different meanings in translation pertaining to the Taiwanese academic context because they're different and there's also separate discourses of how they think through this foreign word, this English word, camp.
Nicholas de Villiers:Yeah. And it also I'm glad you mentioned the the cultural studies approach to, material culture because I think that camp is a really interesting way of approaching material culture. So my undergraduate thesis actually at Bard College in the late 90s was on camp and queer culture. And, it corresponded with a revival of interest in camp within queer theory in the 90s. And there's been a more recently another revival of interest thanks to the Met Gala camp theme and the exhibit, Camp Notes on Fashion at the Met.
Nicholas de Villiers:So when I was writing this, thesis at Bard, I shared queer theorists' frustration with Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp, which has some really useful definitions, but it's also startlingly quick to disavow connections between camp sensibility and gay culture. I think part of that has to do with Sontag's investment with the idea of taste and making distinctions between naive and deliberate camp, which I think is, sort of a dead end. In general, prefer Esther Newton's work on camp in gay and drag queen culture as a way of, as she says, laughing instead of crying at one's incongruous position in straight society as a queer person. There's also a wonderful phrase from Richard Dyer, which is it's being so campus keeps us going. I prefer Newton and Dyer for acknowledging the centrality of camp as a practice to queer culture.
Nicholas de Villiers:And I was also very interested in learning about my NCU colleague Jonathan Yeh's Mandarin translation of camp as ganpu, meaning, dare to expose. In 2017, when I was in Taiwan, the theme of the Taipei International Queer Film Festival was actually queer, kuar, and ganpu, camp. And, using those translations and with a really memorable live drag show by local drag queens during a screening of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, which is also a kind of interesting, again, this 90s film getting revived in a more contemporary moment. I also read Camping Out with Simon Yang, the Emily, Emily Ye and, Darryl Williams Stavis, where they emphasized Tsai's aestheticization of working class culture and his approach to appropriating Grace Chang musicals in his films in relationship to the Taiwanese dialect term song, meaning tacky. So Xianqiu has also written a really comprehensive chapter of his book about Psy, musicals, and camp, also drawing from these sources and translations of camp in English, Chinese, and Taiwanese.
Nicholas de Villiers:So when I returned from Taiwan, I co chaired a panel at SCMS with John Paul Stadler, and it was on the theme of queering pornography, where I presented an early draft of my chapter on camp and porn musicals in Psy's The Wayward Cloud. And I just want to say that kind of shout out to the SCMS Adult Film History Scholarly Interest Group to be such a wonderful, supportive community of scholars that's made me think that pornography is something that we should write about and think about. It's really worthy of study despite the risks in the academy, due to, you know, assaults on academic freedom and freedom of speech right now. So I wanted to kind of work through in that chapter the differences of critical opinion on whether Psy's film is anti porn or the idea of camp perception and affective incongruousness inherent 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 queer fandom. So it's particularly helpful, I think, to work through those in that venue.
Beth Tsai:Well, I I love these connections that you have just presented. And and thinking through how you connect camp beyond just aesthetics, but also to other elements and also genres like porn musicals and music. I'm thinking this is also out out of self interest because I'm also invested in the word recycle or recycling as a verb. And so I'm wondering if you could also talk about how you use the word recycling or how you think through this idea of recycling in in its abstract sense.
Nicholas de Villiers:So, I mean pornography and old musicals are kind of thought of as cultural refuse and trash. And, Tsai has also given a lot of interviews about his approach to recycling. Sometimes literally recycling objects like theater chairs, as you mentioned, in his installation pieces, in the installation versions of, It's a Dream, and in the recycling of trees and paper at the Stray Dogs at the Museum, in these kind of expanded cinema installations. So recycling is a practice that Tsai is really dedicated to. You can also see his approach to recycling materials in his approach to old Mandarin pop songs.
Nicholas de Villiers:And I was thinking about it using Yves Sedgwick's idea of camp as a form of reparative reading in the sense of it's an attachment to things that are seen as outmoded or old fashioned. But, Psy's really effectively invested in them. Right at the end of the whole, there's that line: at the turn of the millennium, in this kind of bleak future, at least we have Christ Chang's songs to comfort us. So I think that there's a strong sense of reparative reading and a lot of Tsai's approach to outmoded forms. By contrast, I was actually wondering, since you emphasize newness in the new Taiwan cinema, if you could talk about the aesthetics of newness, but also the aesthetics of slowness, the idea of slow cinema as one of the defining features of, this new wave cinema.
Beth Tsai:Yeah. I just wanted to first insert comment that when you're mentioning Grace Chang, I was thinking the way Tsai uses her songs and the way they're being embedded or or lip synced, especially in the whole forever changes the way that I I approach the song or how I listen to the song. Because my last class, on Monday, the the class I just gave, I show a clip, which is the Singapore straight foot scene in Crazy Rich Asian. And before leading to that particular scene, we're basically a footpore in that sense. And I also use the song, from Grace Chen.
Beth Tsai:And immediately, I was thinking, oh, the camp aesthetics and and there's, you know, the added layers to viewing a film that's considered a romantic comedy that I just feel like you cannot sing it without looking from work, the lenses of work.
Nicholas de Villiers:I agree.
Beth Tsai: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 a sense, but the quality or the way that they're being framed as new. But there's a continuation of these practices and then lineage that we can pick up. And then especially thinking how cinema studies are often always on the lookout for newness from the shocking sensation that came with the cinema of attraction and also vernacular modernism of early cinema that they're always writing about this new technology, this new shock, this new sensation, this new experience. And if it's not that new sensation, then they're looking at the new directions and post war filmmaking, such as the French new wave, Italian neorealism, new German cinema, third cinema. There's a lot of the new in the titles as well.
Beth Tsai:So you can say that world cinema has always been built upon the premise worth mentioning because of the fresh perspectives these group of filmmakers could bring and how they incite new ideas. Films are made for a different a new kind of audience, and they wanted their films to be perceived differently. And also the critical theories that may generate the type of films that were produced. And new cinema certainly fits this framework and fits the dialogue. But I also wanted to argue that, telling you cinema has attracted so much attention not simply because these films with their mothers and socialist social realism dimensions were necessary newer compared to more of a previous romanticizing Chinese identity in the previous films.
Beth Tsai:And also that the filmmakers did take on a new direction in their storytelling and their subject matter. But these films, they're not as new as what the Western scholars would perceive because they also you can see the traces of how these films drew lineage from their predecessors, especially if the native's concerns in in Taiyupian, the realist aesthetics and and healthy realism. There is a continuation of that despite the healthy realism at their best attempt trying to reinvent or reinterpret it Italian neorealism in their way, but these films favored by the nationalists, produced in studios with big budgets, color films, stars, celebrities, they were very far from how film scholars would characterize Italian neorealism. But then it's interesting to see how Taiwan neo cinema fits the description and also creates a dialogue with, its predecessors. For slowness, I address the notion of slowness, as both as a discourse, but also as a critical lens.
Beth Tsai:Because for many, this is a lens that is essential to understand works by Taim Lin Yang, Huo Shaoxian, and Midi Zhi. And, of course, the concept of slowness, at first glance, it's it's so much of an aesthetic inquiry as Sun Hui Ling has pointed out. But he also pointed out and Sun Hui Ling pointed out his book, Temiao in a Cinema of Slowness, that the slowness is also a lifestyle. It's not just aesthetics, but it's also response and resistance to the fast paced life is aggravated by capitalism. So I borrow this idea, but I also use slow and extend that idea of slowness to to describe the way that there was a delayed response for some Taiwanese scholars to appreciate, to recognize, and even to accept the qualities of new cinema, which at the time, for some of them, were antagonistic towards this movement, this emergence of a new group of filmmakers.
Beth Tsai:And I think the way this delayed response for the scholars is also in tune with how Fred Martin, and I believe you also mentioned her name, Fred Martin characterized a post colonial relations or a temporal the structure, albeit it's it's a transforming one. So even though there was a delayed response, they were not stuck in that time capsule or stuck in that delayedness, the time lag, as she calls it, between Taiwan and European modernism. So this was one of the ways that I also use slowness in in my book.
Nicholas de Villiers:Yeah. I think Fran Martin's idea of post colonial time lag is really interesting to connect as you do with the idea of slow cinema.
Beth Tsai:Yeah. Now I wanted to ask you the questions about tactics and queer tactics. In the introduction, I mentioned that when we first met and you talk about this potential book project, I didn't know if it was a project at the time, but I'm fascinated by the way that you characterized Haim Yin and El's relationship with Shao Kahn, that that there is an admiration. There's obsession of with the body, if you will, but there's also a genuine and very firm grounded friendship. I don't know if they steal, but there's also cohabitation between these two that they live together for for quite a while.
Beth Tsai:So I wonder if you could tell us more about that.
Nicholas de Villiers:Sure. I was thinking of the long filmed conversation. It's kind of a retrospective conversation with Li Gangsheng called Afternoon, that he made after completing Stray Dogs, and it's almost like an exit interview about their relationship of making films together and living together. And I was thinking of Michel Foucault's interview Friendship as a Way of Life, which is also about the possibilities of friendship outside of, kind of, institutional and heteronormative family. And also my friend Tom Roche's book of the same title Friendship as a Way of Life.
Nicholas de Villiers:But also Roland Barthes' course at the College de France, How to Live Together, and specifically his discussion of Ideorhythmy, the idea of thinking about how to respect someone's pace of living. And I think that that's a really an important lesson that Tsai learned in his interactions with Lee as a non professional actor. And Son Weilim talks about this in his book. A kind of evolving approach to slow cinema, actually emerged out of Tsai learning how to respect Lee's slow style of acting. And that strongly impacted his approach to kind of filming daily life and, his approach to slow cinema.
Nicholas de Villiers:And their conversation in afternoon, Li Keung Sheng and Simon Yang reminds me a lot of Roland Barthes discussion of the kind of dynamic between the lover and the beloved. Even though it's not necessarily a romantic relationship, The way that Bart understands the idea of the kind of maternal relationship in love, and there's a lot of moments in Afternoon where they joke about, you know, Tsai Ming is like his mother. They keep switching these kind of kinship roles of father son, mother son, and artist muse, employer employee, and friend, and, you know, confidant, etcetera. So I was thinking that Oliver's discourse was actually worth revisiting for thinking about this queer kinship between them, again, as this sort of strange phrase of artist and male muse. He's often referred to as as Psy's male muse.
Nicholas de Villiers:But I liked thinking about it in also this kind of maternal term and thinking about the value of queer kinship within the sinephone context. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the conclusion to your book, which talks about the idea of hyphenated people.
Beth Tsai:Yeah. That would be my tactics. And it also came very late at, the stage of writing that I wasn't thinking about this term. I mentioned it briefly in the introduction. I sort of just tabled it and never revisited until one of, again, peer reviewer pointed out that it didn't feel like there's a closure for my writing.
Beth Tsai:So I decided to put myself in the story and talk about my hyphenated identity. But I first came across this work while reading Rachel's writing diaspora, tactics of intervention and contemporary culture studies. It was a very fleeting moment, actually. It wasn't one of more obvious keyword that she structures her arguments around, but I just picked up this detail because I was fascinated by it. And that she was recounting, one of her friend's reaction to a 1986 film called A Great Wall by Peter Wang.
Beth Tsai:And then her friend said, quote, real people are hyphenated people. I've always I'm forever curious what does this person mean by real people, but I pick up on the word hyphenated people. I was struck by it, not just the simplicity of it in thinking and reflecting of how my own identity, whether if I consider as myself a Taiwanese or Taiwanese American or Asian American. And also thinking about how another culture, another ethnic practices such as the Hispanic practice of having two surnames, We may not all be hyphenated people, but a lot of us are hyphenated. So if Rachel coined the term hyphenated people to counter orientalism, essentialism, or particularism, and even geographical determinism in East Asian culture studies.
Beth Tsai:I think the the hyphen can do a lot more and invites questions that are not just about identity politics as I've been trying to search for the meanings behind it, but also it can be used towards thinking about the intersection of gender, of queerness as you've done so so brilliantly in your book. Migration, mobility, border crossing, which is the main discussion threads in my book. And then the international funds and transnational players, I also consider them as hyphens in in in the sense how they commission and produce and present world cinema. So the invisible hyphen is a way to connect to the diaspora and migrant experiences, but also to the economic forces that drives those transnational networks. After all, if you look at a film festival, you think of, the cosmopolitan congregation of people, of culture exchanges, opportunities for these kind of exchange.
Beth Tsai:But at the same time, it also speaks to how these films are being circulated. And lastly, how the industry can capitalize on these events in these exchanges and the congregation of people. So two things that keep coming up that we haven't discussed yet. One is about time because we touch upon slowness. We touch upon different time zones, but we haven't had a chance to to fully elaborate on it.
Beth Tsai:And the other thing, building up time, For me, I I think I would also think about the word of frustration or feeling frustrated when watching Tian Yu Niu's films or watching any slow cinema in general, which applies to Huo Shaoxian and also Mid East films. So what do you think about this concept of time and frustration? And how how do you use that in in your book? I'm curious.
Nicholas de Villiers: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 kind of running thread, as we've been discussing, of slow cinema, or Gilles Deleuze's, Cinema two: The Time Image, which I've also found helpful for thinking about Ho Chioshan's films and Tsai Ing yang. But I like the term time zone for thinking about Psy's films, especially his Sino French films, What Time Is It There? And Visage, as discussed by Michelle Bloom and as you also talk about in your book. I think the time zone makes us think about time and space together, feeling both temporally and spatially disoriented when you're considering what time zone someone else is in. And, again, responding to Fran Martin's work on What Time Is It There?
Nicholas de Villiers:And what she calls post colonial time lag in that essay The European Undead. But I really I found this concept of the time zone to be really helpful because it shows how you have to think about time and space together. You can't really disentangle them. And then in terms of frustration of the viewing experience of slow cinema, you know, I screen size films in my classes. I know that slow cinema, where nothing happens, sometimes frustrates, audiences that are more familiar with the pacing of Hollywood films.
Nicholas de Villiers:But I'm interested in the more productive aspects of frustration and boredom. Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text juxtaposes what he calls text of pleasure, which grants satisfaction and feel culturally familiar with what he calls texts of bliss or chouissance, which can involve a sense of a loss of self, a loss of one's bearings, and he suggests that boredom is not far from bliss. I think his phrase is it's bliss seen from the shores of pleasure. But I think that the concept of a text of bliss is really helpful for thinking about the productive aspects of frustration or even boredom in watching Si's films, especially in Goodbye Dragon Inn, thinking about the
Beth Tsai:spectators' experience of watching that film or watching other
Nicholas de Villiers:people watch another film. The film, or watching other people watch another film, in that case, the film King Who's Dragon Inn, which is much more of a kind of text of pleasure. It's a recognizable genre film that is sort of iconic of Taiwan cinema and also memorable from Psy's childhood. But I think, you know, queer theory and affect theory are so helpful because they help us think about difficulty, experiences of difficulty and frustration of our expectations. We maybe have expectations about sexuality in cinema that are frustrated, productively frustrated by Tsai's films or expectations about the sexuality of his characters.
Nicholas de Villiers:So I think the concept of sexual disorientation helps us think about the productivity of that frustration, the productivity of the feeling of being disoriented.
Beth Tsai:Yeah. I can definitely relate to your teaching experience about how you worry that the students might feel frustrated, and you spend a lot of time just really programming the framework and also these different aesthetics practices just in case that they might want to walk out of the screening. Luckily, I think once you explain it quite well, they do look up to you, and they're respectful in the sense that I have not had a student who walked out of my screens. But I was thinking that frustration, definitely agree. For me, it has twofold meanings when when I use it to characterize Taiwanese cinema as well because they could go a different way that on the one hand, yes, there is also the the common frustration that's associated with the slowness, as you mentioned.
Beth Tsai:Nothing happens. The the pace is slow. But I also think how, you know, for example, the ending scene of Edward Young's The Terrorizer also offers a different kind of frustration that's not slow cinema. But it's it's a it's a film that has multiple story lines that come together at some point. This is a film that you have a fiction writer, a woman who struggles to write her next book or her next project.
Beth Tsai:And you also have a different character happening in a different space, a photographer who falls in love with a mysterious woman. And this woman somehow becomes a catalyst for everything that goes wrong in the film, especially how she disrupts and breaks up the couples two couples in the film. So the film frustrates the viewers, especially the ending because I I call it it has a very Louis Bunuel esque kind of a surrealist puncture that leaves the audience wondering whether if the tragic ending is a reality or it's someone else dreaming about it. I don't want it to spoil the film, but the ending is quite obscure in a sense. So I think frustration is such a great word to think through this work, but also connects both of our writing because we're both trying to argue and advocate for this kind of frustration as a necessity that's essential to appreciating and understanding the filmmakers that we've undergone such a close reading.
Beth Tsai:And especially, it's also said so much about how even with a frustration, this kind of sentiments can bring us closer or even intimate with their work, which is something that you pointed out, is a form of pleasure. That boredom can also be intimate and provide bodily pleasure in that sense. So my last question for you, Nicholas, would be, what is the next project that you're working on now that your third book is already out? I imagine you're already planning for your fourth book.
Nicholas de Villiers:Yes. So, I've conceived of the next book length project, which is tentatively titled Inter Asia Network Films and Cosmopolitan Sex Workers, that kind of returns to some of the themes of my, previous book Sexography, but also thinking about the kind of network of migrant characters, explored in my book on Sam and Liang. So I'm looking at a complex twenty first century cycle of East and Southeast Asian films that employ network narratives. So films with several protagonists and distinct but intermingling storylines, to represent the lives of sex workers in East Asian networks of migration and labor and commerce. I'm hoping that analyzing these cross cultural encounters in these East and Southeast Asian network films will offer a timely challenge to the dominance of the trafficking framework, the belief that all sex workers are victims of trafficking, while also accounting for the narrative dominance and global cinematic appeal of that framework.
Nicholas de Villiers:And my hope is to return to Taiwan, ideally to National Central University, to the Center for the Study of Sexualities, to work on, three chapters that I've conceived. Number one is on Sami Ngaang's queer, Teddy award winning post retirement film Days from 2020 that's set in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thailand, and, features sex work as, I think, a form of care work for, Li Keqiang, who has this the same neck affliction, that he suffered from in, the river that Tsai incorporated into the river. The second film is The Receptionist from 2016, which is a UK Taiwanese diasporic filmmaker Jenny Liu's work on diasporic Chinese and Taiwanese women working in an illegal brothel in London. And it stars, Tsai's actors Chen Chanchi, and it ends in, Kaohsiung in Taiwan, and there's that sort of sense of diasporic longing throughout her work. And then number three, Li Kang Sheng, Tsai's actor, is in a film called Come and Go.
Nicholas de Villiers:He plays a Taiwanese sex tourist in that film from 2020. It's by Japan based Malaysian director Lin Ka Wai, and, it's a portrait of converging Asian migrant stories in the Umeda district of Osaka, which challenges the ethnically homogeneous image of contemporary Japan. And I'm hoping that based on the previous books, I'm kind of uniquely situated to intervene in an intersectional analysis of Inter Asia, Cinema Studies, films about underrepresented sex workers, migration, and the idea of cosmopolitanism in the twenty first century. And so since your book is coming out this spring, I'm wondering if you could talk about the audience that you hope to reach with your book.
Beth Tsai:Well, the first group of people, I think, obviously, would be those who already closely follow Taiwan cinema. I wanted to emphasize Taiwan and separate that from the shuffle of Chinese language films because a lot of times, the studies or films from Taiwan are often filed under non Western cinema, Asian cinema, or or Chinese cinema. So I hope that by accentuating Taiwan and the title, I could also accentuate an importance of doing Taiwan studies by ways of looking at Taiwan's, peculiarities. And I don't just mean the focus should be on Taiwan China tensions and thereby by separating Taiwan from Chinese language cinema. But, also, it's equally important to look at the cultural politics of Taiwan, how Taiwan intersect with colonial legacies and globalization, and displace migrant workers, especially how the relationship Taiwan has with, Southeast Asian countries and how all of these factors contributed to the distinct Taiwanese culture identity.
Beth Tsai:But I also think that my book can speak to a wide array of, disciplines outside of Asian studies. As I'm currently housed in the department of Asian studies. I believe the theoretical discussions on film festivals and the cinema viewing experience and also on the topics of sleep and installations could easily spark interest from students and scholars from cinema studies, media studies, arts and art history, comparative literature, and communication programs. But then lastly, while academic books tend to have a steady audience with, existing interest in in the subject matter. I genuinely hope that my book can appeal to a broader audience beyond the academic community and contribute to public knowledge about Taiwan and and drive more interest in in Taiwan studies.
Beth Tsai:That would be the goal of of my book. Thank you.
Nicholas de Villiers:Thank you very much. I'm I'm sure that it will, reach those audiences, and and it's been such a pleasure to to read your work and to talk with you.
Beth Tsai:Likewise.
Nicholas de Villiers:I hope that we can continue to collaborate, especially I mentioned before Tsai's, announcement of his retirement, at least his retirement from making commercial films. But, obviously, he's been very productive since that retirement, making a feature length film Days and the Walker series. So, so I hope that we can keep collaborating on this kind of post retirement era of Tsai Ing'en's filmmaking.
Beth Tsai:Absolutely. Looking forward to it.
Nicholas de Villiers:Thanks very much.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota press production. The book Cruisy, Sleepy Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Sai Ming Lang by Nicholas de Villiers is available from University of Minnesota Press. The book, Taiwan: New Cinema at Film Festivals by Beth Tsai publishes in April 2023 with Edinburgh University Press. Thank you for listening.