Eye film museum kicks off its Virtual Reality season with Tsai Ming Liang's The Deserted. Tsai himself was in the country for a masterclass, introductions and interviews. And although his films suggest otherwise, he is a very animated speaker. In his master class, he talked about his career, his collaboration with muse and regular actor Lee Kang-Sheng, and his position in the film world. I already loved his work, now I also love the man.
The Deserted is Tsai Ming Liang first VR work and it is of immense beauty. Lee Kang-Sheng is the protagonist in a nearly hour-long work about mortality, the passage of time and decay. The decay is physical when Lee administers electric shocks to himself to relieve his back pain. He suffers from this in his daily life too, one of the reasons for making this work close to home. It is also evident in the architecture: dilapidated buildings with peeling walls, no windows and water on the ground. When a tropical rain falls, I get goosebumps. Architectural decay and rain are recurring elements in all his work.
Tsai's look is guiding. Although he has had to make major concessions to the medium (no close-ups), it is entirely a Tsai work. While you can look 360 degrees around you and briefly focus on a toad sitting in a pool of water, you automatically come back to Lee. While the latter isn't actually doing anything. He sits on a sofa, he lies down, he sits in the bath and strokes a fish. He makes love to his neighbour (or actually his neighbour's ghostly apparition), he smokes a cigarette.
No gadgets, just look
Tsai takes you into a world of dreams and ghosts, of thinking about time and looking. What story there is is based on a short ghost story. But it's not about that at all. It's about looking and experiencing. Tsai wondered while making what calms you down in this setting.
That set-up works: after just under an hour, I left the room calm, a little wistful but very satisfied. It is the most cinematic VR work I have seen in Eye so far. You don't get controllers, just glasses. The only thing you can control is where you watch, although Tsai said he hopes and expects you to stay with Lee.
Yet it was not a disappointing experience. Quite the contrary. Even the limitations of the medium, the visible pixels for instance, do not detract from it. The strength in this lies in its proximity. You are not watching a film, you are a part of it, you are in it. The lack of distance works very well. You can't help but watch reflectively. The lack of action gives rise to that, but especially the richness in the setting, the attention to detail. In the 'making of' clip, you see how a dilapidated wall is made with the utmost attention. This translates into a work in which nothing is accidental, nothing is just in focus.
Gadgets though? You can do that at Eye too
Things can be different, the VR installations at Eye have shown. The overwhelming experience of Carne Y Arena still reverberates months after the fact. I did not expect that a VR work could touch me so deeply and permanently. The world that Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang built was a beautifully constructed architecture you could fly through and control the action yourself. And Marina Abramovic, let's stop talking about that. That was very disappointing.
Programmer Anna Abraham told me that she is looking for what artists and filmmakers do with the medium. She is not so much concerned with the technique itself, but with the content and form.
Tsai and the outside world: how to get your films noticed?
Logical, that said Tsai invited Ming Liang with his work. He is not interested in what you can do with controllers and how the viewer creates his own experience with a box of tricks. He wanted to make a film, but in a different medium. Even when he makes films to be shown in a museum, he is still a filmmaker and not a video artist or visual artist.
The medium is changing and, like it or not, he has to change with it. He sometimes does so ingeniously. For Visage for example, he himself sold 8,000 tickets on the street. Then there was no traditional DVD release, but he made a wooden box in a small edition. He painted it and put a Blue Ray inside. It cannot be copied, but it can be shown in a museum. And you have to pay handsomely for it.
The power of Tsai's films
For me, this autonomous way of filmmaking is the strength of Tsai's work. In the 3 decades he has been making films, he has increasingly gone back to the core. Muse Lee's roles are becoming more subdued and introspective. If distribution becomes difficult, you make your own outlet. If you are asked by a technology company for a VR film, it becomes the longest ever and with no significant action.
Tsai makes films for himself, where he himself is the dream viewer. Without concessions. But with an increasingly penetrating gaze. At the upcoming IFFR even literally: his film Your Face is a series of close-ups. You can't get any closer; looking at someone is an extremely intimate activity. Averse to conventions and expectations, Tsai goes his own way and en passant teaches us what looking really is.
Stories are not that fascinating, it's about what you see
In his master class, he told us that he is no longer that interested in stories. All stories end up looking alike. What matters to him is sharing an experience, sympathising with himself and with Lee. Perhaps that is also what makes the chemistry between them so strong. They know each other through and through, living together in the mountains and looking after each other in case of illness and need.
Tsai saw Lee on the street at an arcade and fell for something different in his appearance. He moves and talks slower than usual. So much so that Tsai endlessly urged him to pace a little, until he realised that this is the pace. And it became his pace too. With ever more slowing down and stillness. More and more attention to detail, more and more focused on the act of watching itself.
He is often compared to Apichatpong Weerasethakul because of the presence of ghosts. More and more, if you want to make a comparison, he reminds me of James Benning. His static 10-minute shots also give plenty of room to philosophise about what watching is. What a relief among all those plot-driven films. Let's go back to the core and just learn to watch again.
Good to knowYour face can be seen on the International Film Festival Rotterdam on 24, 29 and 32 January. Tickets are still available for these too.
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