GOODBYE, DRAGON INN

THE TEN PILLARS OF BEACON: DURATION

“Cinema was born in the rush and push of the turn of the newly electrified last century. Its continued existence–at least as a popular art, or an art at all–is threatened in a new century that is no less frantic in its own way. Changes occur with reckless speed, the assumption being that by the time anyone has noticed, the moment for protest will have passed… Against this, Tsai’s gentle protest is perhaps too quiet to be heard above the din of ceaseless activity, but worth registering all the same. Through cinema, GOODBYE, DRAGON INN tells us, time can be held in abeyance for a moment, or can be studied over and over again in its passing; in the cinema, they tell us, 1967 can for a couple of hours link hands with 2003. And if time can be regained through cinema, who is to say that cinema will fare so poorly in the hands of time.” – Nick Pinkerton

The guy who took duration to another level, making it the primary focus of his career as an artist in so many ways, is Tsai Ming-liang. Not only with his long takes and sprawling sequences, but by focusing on the image of a single man for over 30 years. We have seen Lee Kang-sheng’s body change from his adolescence into his middle age through Tsai’s features and short films, merging the duration of a real person’s life into the medium itself. GOODBYE, DRAGON INN marks duration as a primary focus of his career and is a melancholic love letter to the cinema.

Like the Royal Theater in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and the title movie house in CINEMA PARADISO, the Fu-Ho is shutting down for good. A palace with seemingly mile-wide rows of red velvet seats, the likes of which you’ve seen only in your most nostalgic dreams (though they’re beginning to fray), the Fu-Ho’s valedictory screening is King Hu’s 1967 wuxia epic DRAGON INN, playing to a motley smattering of spectators. The standard grievances persist: patrons snack noisily and remove their shoes, treating this temple of cinema like their living room, but as we watch the enveloping film deep into a pandemic, the sense that moviegoing as a communal experience is slipping away takes on a powerful and painful resonance.

Yet GOODBYE, DRAGON INN, released nearly two decades ago, is too multifaceted to collapse into a simple valentine to the age of pre-VOD cinephilia. A minimalist where King Hu was a maximalist, preferring long, static shots and sparse use of dialogue, Tsai rises to the narrative challenges he sets for himself and offers the slyest, most delicate of character arcs (the manager, a woman with an iron brace on her leg, embarks on a torturous odyssey to deliver food to the projectionist, played by Lee Kang-sheng). By the time the possibility arises that the theater is haunted, we’ve already identified it as a space outside of time—indeed, two stars of Hu’s original opus, Miao Tien and Shih Chun, watch their younger selves with tears in their eyes, past and present commingling harmoniously and poignantly.