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

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Pinkerton’s meditation on the slow-almost-unto-total-stillness GOODBYE, DRAGON INN by Tsai Ming-Liang is a wafer-sized contemplation of the disintegration of what was formerly urban, crowded, and communal into the hideously cellular and isolated and agoraphobic world of the Internet. You can bet that the coronavirus and its dispatch of the First World into the realms of Netflix and Uber Eats gets its appropriate treatment here. Ou sont les big-ass two-dollar second-run theatres d’antan, asks Pinkerton, and the gallery space (Tsai’s favored new home) and the streaming universe strike him as unworthy. 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

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.

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A FIPRESCI Award-winner at the Venice Film Festival in 2003, Goodbye, Dragon Inn feels even more potent today than it did upon initial release. It’s a film that makes you yearn for those imperfect spaces that are feeling increasingly out of reach – not only the cinemas; but also the concert halls, the decaying Victorian pubs, the dive bars and even the greasy spoon cafes. Inside a Dying Movie House Filled With Lonely Phantoms". The New York Times. 2004-09-17. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2017-08-20. 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. Baudelaire’s flâneur of the 1860s wandered a Paris unrecognisable from what it had been ten years previous, and to be rendered unrecognisable again ten years hence, a city in the midst of the seventeen-year process of Haussmannisation – the massive public works programme initiated by Emperor Napoléon III and spearheaded by his prefect of Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, which turned the knotty, dark, cluttered medieval city into the metropolis of broad boulevards we know today. Today, in most every major city in the world, from Ximending to Times Square, a new sort of Haussmannisation is and has been underway, one of its models the process of redevelopment that Delany describes.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a meditative, impactful farewell to a cinema in Taipei and exerts even more resonance when looked at through the lens of the past year. Tue 18 May 18:10; Sat 29 May 12:45 (+ intro by Stuart Brown, BFI Head of Programme and Acquisitions) In a postmodern twist, this reissue of Goodbye, Dragon Inn brings new life to both a forgotten King Hu classic, and Tsai’s love letter to the Fu-Ho Theatre itself. It’s a statement on the cyclical and transformative nature of film – one that offers a hopeful sentiment when considering the future of cinemas in 2020 and beyond. For UK cinemagoers, a director’s statement from the film’s original press kit feels particularly prescient. In 2003, Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang released his masterful ode to the magic of movie theaters, Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Like his quarantine-focused 1998 musical The Hole, which was re-released in virtual cinemas this year, it’s hard to think of a better time to revisit Goodbye, Dragon Inn than at the close of a year that has threatened to destroy the theatergoing experience once and for all. And while watching Goodbye, Dragon Inn’s new 4K restoration on your laptop, instead of gazing up at it on a massive screen in the dark, surrounded by fellow film lovers, feels wrong, the act of doing so also reminds us exactly what we’re missing. The Last Picture Show In essence, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang’s 2003 feature, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, is a record of the final screening at a large but run-down Taipei cinema before it permanently shuts its doors. I will admit that this last bit of information is not revealed by the film itself until its final scene, but I can’t see that doing so here is going to act as a spoiler because it’s been stated in every synopsis I’ve seen, including the one on the cover of this Blu-ray release from Second Run. If you’re looking for a Taiwanese take on The Last Picture Show, however, you’ve come to the wrong film, as while there are indeed multiple characters to keep tabs on here, this is no coming-of-age story and there aren’t any real character arcs of note. Some will argue that the same could be said for anything approaching a story, at least in the traditional sense. But does that matter? Well, I’m coming to that.But, what if a film didn’t have to be commercial to be enjoyable? It would have been easy, perhaps, for Ming-Liang to produce a documentary about cinema-going, about going to this cinema (the Fu-Ho) in particular, or even to offer his own take on Hu’s wuxiaclassic. Far more impressive is this surrealworld-within-a-world, a world stripped of action and shorn of dialogue, in which time seems to stand still – or limps slowly along, in rhythm with the stilted metronome of the Fu-Ho’s disabled attendant (Chen Hsiang-Chyi), one leg longer than the other, meandering ghost-like through its empty corridors. Befitting a film that mostly takes place inside a movie theater auditorium, there is very little dialogue in Goodbye, Dragon Inn (apart from what is spoken by the characters in the film they are watching, of course). When the Japanese tourist is informed that the theater is haunted, at approximately the halfway mark of the film, I found myself struggling to remember if anyone had spoken out loud before then — I don’t believe they had. Yet because this is a film by Tsai, renowned for his minimalist storytelling and apt use of imagery and ambient sound to convey inner emotion, one doesn’t need words to understand the hunger for human connection at the heart of Goodbye, Dragon Inn — not to mention, at the heart of moviegoing. source: Metrograph Pictures 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.

The 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.

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Tsai Ming-liang's "Goodbye Dragon Inn" is a spectacularly dull movie, a limp ode to the bygone days of cinema-going. A film smitten with its own stasis, "Goodbye" culminates in a shot held for an obscene amount of time of an empty movie theater. Tsai's known for holding his shots way past the point most directors yell cut, and the result can be strikingly effective in the right context (the brilliant final shot of "Vive L'Amour") but "Goodbye" is almost an art film parody in its studied minimalism. The money shot in particular is a groan-inducer that makes you long for a fast-forward button.

The film’s final image, a static long shot of the theatre space, now completely empty, invites and encourages an affective response from the audience and asks it to grieve the loss of place. What are we to do if we lose these places and spaces, other than grieve? The magic and profound impact of being able to watch films in a cinema has no limits other than this brute physical reality. It is painfully clear that this situation was not lost on Tsai. Song Hwee Lim writes that this final long shot of the cinema space “challenges us to rethink the relationship among slowness, nostalgia, and cinephilia”, to bear witness to the decay of cinema 9. With the passage of time, the transitory, mutable nature of a cityscape – or an art form – becomes more and more evident. If you stay in a city long enough, it becomes populated by the ghosts of storefronts past – the restaurants that are now Chase banks, the Dunkin’ Donuts that used to be a bar where you once puked in the bathroom sink, the storefronts and cinemas standing empty while neighbourhoods are made ghost towns by the prohibitively expensive demands of landlords. This consciousness of change was central to Antonioni and several of his Italian contemporaries, whose films captured the concrete fever of the Italian economic miracle – il boom – and it is essential, too, to Tsai. 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.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. 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.’ 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. 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 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.