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The Skywalk Is Gone
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About the film
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| Synopsis Shiang-Chyi wanders Taipei Main Station without purpose. Suddenly, a woman carrying a big suitcase crosses the street, regardless of traffic. Shiang-Chyi decides to follow her. They are both stopped by a policeman and asked to show their IDs. The woman refuses, arguing that she used to cross the street by taking the skywalk. It is not her fault, for now the skywalk is gone. More... |
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| A Night With Tsai Ming-Liang | ||
| Film Schedule | ||
| Producer Tsai's Biography | ||
| Producer: Tsai's Filmography | ||
| Home by Kent Jones | ||
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September 2003 To promote Taiwan’s achievement in cinema in recent years, “A Night With Tsai Ming-Liang: A Dialogue on Taiwan Films”, an event sponsored by The Council for Cultural Affairs, Taiwan, Taipei Cultural Center, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York, Yale University, Columbia University, Harvard University and University of California at Santa Barbara, co-sponsored by Taipei Economic and Cultural Offices in Boston & Los Angeles, will begin a week-long tour at afore-mentioned universities beginning October 2nd, through October 10th. The literary & artistic value, as well as the social realist content of Tsai’s films will be explored through screening, dialogue and discussion. According to Taipei Cultural Center, in his ten-year history as director, Tsai Ming-liang as directed the features “Rebels of a Neon God,” “Vive L’amour,” “The River,” “The Hole,” and “What Time is it There?” He has also directed over twenty short films and television dramas. His extraordinary sensitivity and neo-realist explorations of contemporary Taiwanese identity have won critical acclaim at the Tokyo Film Festival, Chicago Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, Asian-Pacific Film Festival, and the Golden Horse Festival. In light of his achievements, this is a rare opportunity for American audiences, teachers and students alike to meet the director in person, to hear his perspective on creativity and art, and hopefully to increase America’s understanding of Taiwan cinema - at the same time contribute to the study of Taiwan cinema in academic institutions. Besides “The Hole,” “What Time is it There?” and “My New Friend,” Tsai’s unreleased short film “The Skywalk is Gone” will also be shown for the first time for American audiences. As a prolific director, it has been an especially rewarding year for Mr. Tsai. His new film “Goodbye Dragon Inn” has already won the Fipresci Award at Venice Film Festival. It is also in competition both at the New York and Chicago Film Festivals. After the week long university tour, Mr. Tsai will attend the screening of “Goodbye Program: Organizers: For further information, please contact the |
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| Producer: Tsai Ming-Liang Biography Tsai Ming-Liang was born in Malaysia, where his grandfather and father had both emmigrated. He arrived in Taiwan in 1977. In 1981, he graduated with a degree in Dramatic Art from the Chinese Culture University. Originally a playwright, his three early productions often satirized the loneliness and frenetic lifestyle of contemporary society (in 1981 Instant Bean Sauce Noodle and in 1982, A Sealed Door in the Dark). In 1983, he wrote, directed and acted in the one –man- show A Wardrobe in the Room, about a city dweller entrenched in his own solitude. This became a recurrent theme in his work. For the following ten years, he devoted himself to television writing and screenwriting. Eventually, he returned to the threater to teach dramatic art. In 1987, back in television, he wrote a new screenplay and directed several short dramas (Corners of the World, Boys). This prepared him for his leap into feature films. While shooting the telefilm The Kid in 1991, Tsai Ming-Liang discovered Lee Kang-Sheng in a video arcade. With no prior acting experience, he became Tsai’s muse. Tsai subsequently wrote The Rebels of the Neon God for Lee. Since then, he has portrayed Xiao-Kang, the central character in all of Tsai’s films. In 1994, with Vive l’Amour, he received the Gold Lion Award at the Venice Mostra. In 1996, The River received the Silver Bear Award and the International Press Prize at the Berlin Festival. In 1999, he directed The Hole, as part of “2000 Seen By,” a series of ten movies commissioned and produced in France by Haut et Court and TV/La Sept-Arte, on the subject of the turn of the millenium. In the beginning of 2001, he finished his fifth feature What Time Is It There? which won the Technical Prize for Sound Recording in Cannes 2001. He has just completed a short film The Skywalk Is Gone. Currently, he is producing Lee Kang-Sheng’s directorial debut and writing the screenplay for his next project. |
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| The Skywalk Is Gone Synopsis Shiang-Chyi wanders Taipei Main Station without purpose. Suddenly, a woman carrying a big suitcase crosses the street, regardless of traffic. Shiang-Chyi decides to follow her. They are both stopped by a policeman and asked to show their IDs. The woman refuses, arguing that she used to cross the street by taking the skywalk. It is not her fault, for now the skywalk is gone. The skywalk is gone. As if it never really existed. Why? Shiang-Chyi is confused. Was there once a skywalk here, where she met the watch vendor Hsiao Kang? Did it ever happen? Or, is the hot, blazing sun affecting her memory? She is obsessed by the idea of finding the watch vendor. She looks for him in the crowd, not feeling his close presence. The young man is just crossing her, going for his first casting… |
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Title: HELP ME Films 1982 Windmill And Train (dir.Chang Pei-cheng) / Little Fugitive (dir. Chang Pei-cheng) 1983 Runaway (dir.Wang Tong) 1984 Spring Daddy (dir.Wang Tong) 1985 Kung Fu Kids III (dir.Wang Tong) 1986 1987 Yellow Story (dir. Wang shaudi ) 1989 Endless Love (TV series) / Telefilms ( writing and direction) 1989 The Happy Weaver / All Corners of the Sea 1990 My name is Mary / Li-Hsiang’s Love Line / Ah-Hsiung’s First Love 1991 Give Me a Home / The Kid / Hsio Yueh’s Dowry 1995 My New Friends 2001 The Missing Moon Theatre |
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It was a year ago that I went to visit my grandmother, in the nursing home where she’d lived since the early 90s. It had been a long time since she’d known my name, but she always recognized me as someone close to her. I went with her to the physical therapy room and watched her stand up as she held onto the parallel bars. The nurses told me that she hadn’t been eating much. A week later I drove up from New York to be with her when she died. My mother and I sat up with her all night, listened as her breathing became more and more labored, and held her hand as she passed. One of the nurses opened the window, because she wanted to make it easier for my grandmother’s soul to find its way to heaven. Just then, it started to snow. May grandmother had gone away. I had gone away myself, many times before. It was the first time I went away that will always be the time. The summer before I left home, I started to have insomnia, and it kept up after I’d gone to live in Canada. I remember my time there as a series of achingly lonely walks between my home and the local movie theaters, with stops for food (and occasional visits to my classes). In the back of my mind, I knew that I would never really go home again. Just like my grandmother. But at the same time, I felt that I would always be on the verge of returning. Just like my grandmother. Two kinds of longing. To understand the “foreignness” of death, and to join the one who’s gone, and the fear of doing so, too. And to go “away,” but for “away” to be as familiar as home. In both cases, you’re apart, cut off, alone in your body, with the illusion of connectedness to familiar places and people completely undone. The fabric of life starts to unravel, and you’re left with a paralyzing knowledge that it’s all been woven together in the first place. In What Time Is It There?, Tsai Ming-liang links these two very basic human emotions and gets them talking to each other – a watch vendor whose father has just died (Lee Kang-sheng) pines for a woman he has met only briefly (Chen Shiang-chyi), while she endures a lonely stay in Paris. Tsai has always filmed longing better than anyone, and he’s the only filmmaker perceptive or brave enough (or both) to show the human tendency to squirrel away and hibernate, and to generate little private rituals, in the face of desire. There have been many filmmakers who have tried to represent daily human aloneness, but most of them make it into a little punctuation mark between more “meaningful” interactions, with everything prettified and speeded up. How many movies have we seen little musical montages of lonely people cleaning their house or eating ice cream in front of the television, set to a pop song. For instance: the unbearably cute moments where Faye Wong tidies up the cop’s apartment in the otherwise wonderful Chungking Express. Tsai not only films these rituals honestly, with a nice sense of enclosed space and a very lifelike concentration on private bodily functions, but he also makes them the main event . They’re the focal point of the whole movie, and they comprise its action and its dramatic trajectory as well. The movement of his films is always a build-up of longing until it mutates into a state of purely physical desire. Wes Anderson, Atom Egoyan and Wong Kar-wai are other modern filmmakers who work within this territory of obsessiveness, but they’re more result-oriented – Wong is fixated on the after-effect, the way emotions linger in the memory, Anderson on the way people stumble into change, Egoyan on the sheer terror of catharsis. But for Tsai, life itself is a parade of longing that always takes a sexual form. And once his lonely characters have their orgasm, another kind of emptiness awaits them. There’s something touchingly real about the yearning in his films, and about his characters’ very anti-heroic sense of themselves when they come face to face with it. There’s always an aura of modesty about Tsai’s people. More often than not, they ‘re worried, nervous, jumpy, dissatisfied, consumed with the problems eating away at them. They’re incapable of making grand gestures, which seem immaterial within Tsai’s universe of daily human concerns. Even the final, transcendent moment of The Hole, where Lee Kang-sheng lifts Yang Kuei-mei out of her dark cocoon, is simply a fulfillment of basic human need. Lee is Tsai’s alter ego, his shining star, the fixed point in his universe. All of his feelings for the human race seem to be embodied in the magical presence of this man who looks like a boy, in whom joy and torment seem to go hand in hand, who is at once graceful and touchingly awkward, decidedly masculine but possessed of a feminine delicacy, and at all times resolutely private. In What Time Is It There?, there’s a funny aura of serenity to his character. Even when his behavior is at its most extreme – peeing in a plastic bag so that he doesn’t have to leave his bedroom at night and possibly meet his father’s ghost, making a game attempt to set every clock in Taipei to Paris time – it’s carried out with a sense of calm, as though he was the only one wise enough to know that this is the way life is, after all. Meanwhile, his mother (Yi Ching-lu) and Chen flail about in states of extreme upset. This is a shift in Tsai’s carefully defined cosmology, with its set of constants (Lee, Tien Miao as his father, a hysterical mother, running water, the mean city of Taipei). The nervous, raw behavior of Lee’s characters in Rebels of the Neon God and Vive l’amour! reached a full, physical crescendo with The River. This serenity – half Lee’s, half Tsai’s - started to become present in The Hole, and it reaches a fullness here (perhaps it was with The River that Tsai started to step back from his characters and look at them from a more contemplative remove, placing them in ravishing, darkened compositions that were themselves objects of contemplation). The rest of the film responds in kind. What Time Is It There? lacks Tsai’s usual keynote sense of anxiously accumulating time, exemplified by Yang Kuei-mei’s walk through the park and epic sob at the climax of Vive l’amour! Here, Tsai and his camera observe the characters and their dilemmas as though they were strapped to the wheel of life itself…which actually makes an appearance in the guise of the Parisian ferris wheel as the film arrives at its lovely final moments. There is nothing here as grand as the accidental communion between father and son in The River, or that final gesture of hope in The Hole. Like the earlier films, but in an even more concentrated fashion, What Time Is It There? builds to a nightlong fugue of longing between the three central characters – Lee in the back of his car with a hooker, his mother dressed to party and masturbating with his father’s urn, and Chen in Paris, on the verge of erasing her loneliness with a Hong Kong woman she’s met in a café. The rhythm here is gentler than in the previous films, but the perspective on humanity is grander. The sense of time may be the most exquisite thing about the movie: it’s time reclaimed by desire from the purely functional, bending in three very different ways. For Chen, time becomes a matter of intervals between returns to the tentative familiarity of her hotel room, terrifyingly lonely journeys to the metro, a restaurant, a tabac, a park. For Lee, it’s long bouts of night terror alleviated by comforting images from The 400 Blows, as well as that crazy quest to alter the time on all those clocks, culminating in a magnificent image of him trying to operate what looks like the biggest clock in Taipei as the city hums below. For the mother, it’s a desperate withdrawl that becomes nuttier and nuttier (she seals up the entire apartment because she’s afraid the father’s soul will escape), a desperate waiting action for some kind of ultimate arrival. By the time the fugue form takes shape, the purely geographical separation in time has dissolved: it’s a night of longing for everyone, whether they’re in Paris or Taipei. Followed by a magical moment, in which two continents, two souls and two worlds (this one and the next) converge for one quietly rapturous moment. What Time Is It There? is a movie about home – as a place, an ideal, a disappointment, and as the origin of one’s self. The moment you leave it, you start looking for it. And when someone who has been part of your home leaves this world, you immediately await their return.
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