‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn’
“No measure of grieving will resuscitate the disappeared customs sexual, ruminative-of the obscured theater,” Susan Sontag wrote in “The Decay of Cinema,” an article distributed in 1996. That keening has just developed stronger over the past 25 years. It’s been particularly articulated since the film houses all through the nation closed down; and many may never resume. In a motion both sad and pleasingly unreasonable, the Manhattan-based Metrograph presents, by means of its virtual film, another 4K rebuilding of quite possibly the most despairing film about moviegoing: Tsai Ming-liang’s ‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn’ (2003), an energetic funeral song that helps us to remember the sublimities and idiocies of a training that for certain has been a disruption, for others a profession.
This independent movie is set in the Fu-Ho Grand Theater, a genuine shelter for film, then, at that point, hazardously near liquidation, on the edges of Taipei. (Tsai had shot a scene for his past component, 2001’s ‘What Time Is It There?’ in the film house.) The preamble of ‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn’ envisions the theater in more promising times: draperies blowing at the rear of the hall uncover an almost sold-out swarm intently, respectfully watching Dragon Inn, the 1967 ‘Wuxia win’ coordinated by King Hu. In one little while, the short opening section powerfully brings to mind an entry from Roland Barthes’ 1975 paper “Leaving the Movie Theater,” which lauds the auxiliary wonders of cinemagoing, a cycle that includes “allowing oneself to be interested two times finished, by the picture and by maybe I had two bodies simultaneously: an egotistical body which looks, lost, into the inundating mirror, and an unreasonable body, prepared to fetishize not the picture but rather definitively what surpasses it: the surface of the sound, the corridor, the dimness, the dark mass of different bodies, the beams of light, entering the theater, leaving the lobby . . .”
Those auxiliary delights actually exist, regardless of whether in essentially reduced structure, during the occasion on which Tsai’s independent movie is focused: a last screening of ‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn’ on the final evening that the Fu-Ho is just getting started. (The theater shut down in 2002 following thirty years, soon after Tsai finished recording.) No in excess of ten onlookers are to be viewed as in any of the around 300 marginally shabby carmine seats. One of them, an anonymous youngster (Kiyonobu Mitamura), who we later learn is a Japanese traveler, has gotten away from the heavy storm a typical component in Tsai’s water-logged oeuvre-and sat down halfway through Dragon Inn. A few columns down sits a young man, quickly unattended and ecstatically ingested with his pack of sweets. In the mean time, the ticket taker (Chen Shiang-chyi), a pitiful lady with an iron support on her right leg, tastes tea and takes little chomps from an enormous pink steamed bun in her small office. She’ll cut a piece of that delicacy, affectionately wrap it, and leave it higher up for the main other worker at the Fu-Ho that evening, the projectionist, played by Tsai’s unmistakable entertainer, Lee Kang-sheng.
This independent movie is slow and made up of lengthy, static takes, ‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn’ switches back and forth between the activity inside the theater and that in the warrens, flights of stairs, and corridors outside it. Inside the theater, the Japanese guest travels his hard gaze at a moderately aged gent stayed away forever and repels the suggestion of another similar observer. These animalistic, comic pursuits happen somewhere else in the Fu-Ho: in the men’s room, here changed into a dazzlingly outlined scene where three men stay endlessly at the urinals, each trusting another person will take the principal action; and in a capacity region of the theater, so confined with boxes that the sex-searchers scarcely have space to crush past each other, actual vicinity that oddly appears to disperse instead of assisting hearty activity.
During this off-kilter roundelay, the main line of discourse is spoken, happening in ‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn’s’ 82 minutes: “Do you have an idea that this performance center is spooky?” All Tsai’s independent movie are sanctuaries to the powerful places, on the double heavenly and profane, where the outsize apparitions are shining before us. Or then again, to cite Sontag once more, “Motion pictures revive the delightful dead.” A change on that axiom is borne out when we find that two participants at the Fu-Ho’s last screening are Shih Chun and Miao Tien, entertainers in King Hu’s creation who see their more youthful selves onscreen. We watch them watching, a significantly every second as the camera stays tight all over. Shadows and light play across his look, tears gradually structure in his eyes, and he breaks into a slight grin.
They are simply a modest bunch of individuals talking something like twelve lines in ‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn.’ Tsai’s independent movie is thick with sound, not least the slurping and crunching of forceful snackers in the crowd’s aural gags that are enhanced by expertly planned visuals, similar to the two uncovered feet that out of nowhere emerge and lay on top of a seat promptly behind the Japanese person. The brutality is adjusted by a more agreeable musique concrète. For example, the buzz of a film projector and the different muted registers of Dragon Inn as it’s heard all through the Fu-Ho independent movie.
These improvements, these inconveniences, these enjoyments are conceivable just when we face the challenge of sitting in obscurity with individuals obscure to us-an undertaking that a large portion of us will not have the option to continue for a questionable number of months. I initially saw ‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn in the fall of 2003 on the tremendous screen of the Walter Reade Theater during the press screenings for the New York Film Festival. I returned to it seventeen years after on a PC while situated at my work area in the lounge. I thought about a different line from Barthes’ paper, with “the gadget” enhancing “TV”: “In this haziness of the independent . . . lies the interest of any movie. Consider the opposite experience: on TV, where movies are shown; haziness is deleted, secrecy curbed; space is recognizable, verbalized (by furniture, known objects), restrained: the suggestion . . . the eroticization of the spot is abandoned: TV bound us to the Family, whose family instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by its public pot.” I long for the day when I can indeed be flanked by an outsider’s unshod feet.
