Tsai Ming-liang: The Long Take as an Act of Resistance
*Vive l'Amour* ends with a woman sitting in Daan Forest Park in Taipei, weeping, for an extremely long time. Nothing else happens. Thirty years later, on New Year's Eve 2024, roughly 2,500 people gathered at that spot in a flash mob inspired by the scene, and the following year the gathering was formalised as a thirtieth-anniversary commemoration. Very few films of the 1990s have produced a public ritual. Tsai Ming-liang made one out of a shot in which a character simply cries until she stops.
Kuching
Tsai was born on 27 October 1957 in Malaysia, and spent his first two decades in Kuching, in Sarawak on the island of Borneo, before moving to Taipei. He has never resolved the displacement, and has said so plainly: "I feel I belong neither to Taiwan nor to Malaysia."
That sentence is the key to the films. Almost everything he has made is about people who occupy a space without belonging to it — squatting in an empty apartment, sitting in a dying cinema, sheltering in a building that is coming apart. The condition he describes as his own is the one he films.
He studied in the Drama and Cinema department at Chinese Culture University in Taipei, graduating in 1982, then worked in Hong Kong as a theatrical producer, screenwriter and television director before making a feature.
Rebels of the Neon God
His debut, *Rebels of the Neon God*, arrived in 1992 and did two things at once. It introduced the aesthetic — the long shot, the sparse dialogue, the alienated young man in a hostile city — and it introduced Lee Kang-sheng, the actor who would appear in every one of Tsai's feature films from that point through 2023. It is one of the most sustained director-actor partnerships in cinema, and it is not incidental to the style: Tsai's method requires a face he has watched age in real time across three decades of frames.
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Take the IQ test →Vive l'Amour and the Golden Lion
*Vive l'Amour* in 1994 made him internationally visible and won the Golden Lion at Venice, along with three Golden Horse Awards. Its structure is close to a thesis statement. Three people — an ossuary salesman played by Lee, a street vendor, and a real-estate agent played by Yang Kuei-mei — secretly occupy the same vacant Taipei apartment, circling each other, occasionally touching, never quite meeting. Dialogue is minimal to the point of near-absence. One reviewer described the film's Taipei as "a soulless, ultra-modern labyrinth where individuals cannot communicate."
It is bleak, and it is also, watched carefully, funnier and more tender than its reputation allows — the part that summaries of Tsai as an austerity merchant tend to lose. Eighty-six per cent of collected reviews are positive, and the recurring note in them is not admiration for the technique but recognition: one recent assessment holds that his "characters convey feelings so incredibly universal that it's impossible to not relate to them." That is a strange thing to say about a film in which almost nobody speaks, and it is the most useful thing anybody has said about Tsai.
The Films After
*The River* in 1997 is frequently named his masterpiece and took the Jury Prize at both Berlin and Chicago. *Goodbye, Dragon Inn* in 2003 has become a reference point for a whole strand of contemporary art cinema about obsolescence. *Stray Dogs* in 2013 won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, and the following year France made him an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Along the way *The Guardian* placed him among the world's forty best directors in 2003. His work has run through Venice, Cannes, Berlin and Chicago, collecting FIPRESCI recognition along the way.
His signature elements are consistent enough to be catalogued: extended shots that hold long past the point where a conventional edit would come; dialogue reduced to almost nothing; the persistent presence of running water, or the sound of it; urban isolation; and queer desire treated as a fact of life rather than as a subject requiring explanation. He is routinely cited as a founding figure of Slow Cinema, and among the central directors of Taiwan's Second New Wave.
Leaving the Cinema
After *Stray Dogs* Tsai largely moved away from conventional features, working instead on the *Walker* series, which ran from 2012 to 2024, and on films and installations made for galleries and museums rather than theatres. Since 2021 he has lived in the mountains of Taiwan, renovating abandoned apartments while producing exhibition work.
The move out of cinemas is not a retreat. It is the logical destination of a body of work that was always closer to sculpture than to narrative: if your films require an audience willing to sit still and look, a gallery may be a more honest venue than a multiplex.
Why Tsai Is Called a Genius
The claim rests on a formal invention that is real and identifiable. Tsai did not discover the long take, but he worked out something specific about it: that if you hold a shot far past the duration a story requires, the audience stops reading the image for information and starts reading it for feeling. The Daan Forest Park shot in *Vive l'Amour* is the proof. Nothing narrative happens; the shot simply refuses to end, and the refusal is what makes it devastating. That is a genuine discovery about how film time works on a viewer, and it has been absorbed by an entire generation of art-cinema directors who came after him.
The second claim is compositional. His frames are built, held, and populated sparsely, with water running through them as a recurring physical element. Three decades of watching one actor's face is part of the same discipline: an artist working the same material until it yields.
The counter-case is worth stating. Slow cinema is a taste, and Tsai's films can legitimately be experienced as inert; the technique that produces revelation for one viewer produces boredom for another, and there is no neutral ground from which to adjudicate. He is formally repetitive by design, which means later work risks becoming a signature performed rather than a discovery made. And his influence is confined almost entirely to festivals, museums and film schools. Genius of form, then — with the caveat that the form itself is contested.
Legacy
Tsai's most improbable achievement is that a director this uncompromising produced something a crowd of 2,500 people wanted to re-enact in a Taipei park thirty years later. The films are austere; the feeling underneath them evidently is not. What he leaves is a demonstration that duration is a tool — that a filmmaker can make you feel something by declining to cut — and a Taipei that exists on film as one of cinema's great lonely cities.
