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

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Tue 18 May 18:10; Sat 29 May 12:45 (+ intro by Stuart Brown, BFI Head of Programme and Acquisitions) 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. Tsai’s movie also evokes the feeling of ghosts. During one rare encounter between the Japanese man and another movie goer, the Japanese man is told that the theater is haunted. Because the people watching the movie are constantly changing seats or getting up to go cruise for hook-ups in the bathrooms, the landscape of the theater feels fleeting. You find yourself wondering if the large mass of people you saw populating the seats at the beginning of the film were ever actually there at all. Did you imagine them? Have they all left? And if they have, are those few that remain there by choice or simply because they haunt the place? The atmosphere of the rest of the building does little to help quell these ghost-like feelings. It is a dark building with multiple ceiling leaks. People emerge and disappear into the shadows as easily as if they could walk through walls. And yet, the movie still plays on the screen, a lifeforce for this otherwise dead-end establishment. Though, when Dragon Inn’s final credits roll and the lights come on, the seats are empty leaving you to wonder if anyone had ever really been there at all. If it seems as though I’m dancing around not just my own opinion of the film but what happens within it, you can put this down to the fact that Goodbye, Dragon Inn is not an easy film to start making even close to definitive statements about. I do, you see, get where those who dislike the film are coming from, and even I at times found myself quietly muttering “cut” during some of the longer held static shots. Why, I wondered on occasion, is this image being held on for this length, past when it has not only done its job but underscored it multiple times? Or had it? You see, despite a hesitant start, for me watching Goodbye, Dragon Inn proved an increasingly involving and ultimately seductive experience, as I gradually adjusted to Tsai’s approach and the film’s unhurried pace and found myself oddly intrigued by characters about whom I knew little and situations in which little is explicitly stated. And while I’m still not sure about the length of some of those long-held shots, I also warmed to the idea that there was a very real purpose to many of them. Votes for BU SAN (2003) | BFI". www.bfi.org.uk. Archived from the original on March 7, 2017 . Retrieved 2017-08-18.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn feels in some ways like a tapestry of half-recalled memories triggered by the loss of the sort of movie palaces that some of us remember from our younger days, and yes, I’m including myself in that category. I’m old enough now to recall when even local cinemas were huge auditoriums with imposing screens, the majority of which were later subdivided into two or three smaller and altogether less impressive venues that offered more choice, but on a smaller scale. And while it could be argued that while up until the current pandemic put many of them at risk of permanent closure, cinemas in the UK were still attracting sizeable audiences, venues like the one in Goodbye, Dragon Inn (which was shot in a real cinema that was was on the verge of closure) that screen older movies for a specialist audience have become altogether rarer, at least outside of major cities. Watching the cashier make her way slowly up the steps of this cathedral of a cinema with its decaying walls and water-stained floors really does have a sense of sad finality to it, with the water that drips steadily through its leaking roof having the metaphoric feel of tears being shed by the venue for its imminent demise. The final screening at a run-down Taipei cinema is the venue for GOODBYE, DRAGON INN [BO SAN], Tsai Ming-Liang's poetic, touching and intermittently humorous example of 'slow cinema'. Slarek becomes absorbed by the film's lingering focus on suggestion and small character details and salutes the quality of Second Run's recent Blu-ray release.The musings of these nameless moviegoers form little in the way of a narrative, but through masterful cinematography, and an evident admiration for the theatre itself, Tsai manages to conjure genuine wonderment across his film’s lean 82-minute runtime. 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. 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. Join the BFI mailing list for regular programme updates. Not yet registered? Create a new account at www.bfi.org.uk/signup The wuxia – the word is commonly translated as ‘martial heroes’, and sometimes as synonymous with ‘martial arts’ – is both ancient and relatively new, like so much in the popular culture of Greater China. Wuxia stories centre on heroic xia warriors, and the scholar Sam Ho draws out an effective definition of the genre in its very name:

It is a nice little book and Pinkerton's writing is very pleasant and easy to read. I often get the feeling that many film critics today don't really like movies and they look down on them. I believe that Pinkerton really loves movies and he is great at articulating why a movie is special without coming off as arrogant and overly intellectual. I especially liked chapter 10 in this short book, where he talks about film naturally moving on from the cinema and how nothing can last forever. Tsai talks about film through a Buddhist viewpoint going through cycles and reincarnation. Most people today talk endlessly of the death of cinema and how bleak the landscape of movies is (I am guilty of this), but I appreciated Pinkerton not just being negative and exploring alternatives and possibilities for "moving image based art". I also learned a lot about Taiwanese film history and culture and Tsai's life. Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a beautiful film. With scarce dialogue, few camera movements, and an average shot length of 55 seconds, it offers a deeply contemplative meditation on the forgotten magic of the cinema as an institution. Whether observing a stroll down the well-trodden corridors, a lone usher completing menial tasks, or simply the dark blanket of the auditorium itself, each shot is composed to encourage a full ingestion of the architecture and atmosphere of this ancient temple of exhibition.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. 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.