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

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What do you think? What was the last film you saw in theaters? Share your thoughts in the comments below. 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. As part of the Tsai Ming-liang: The Deserted film series, we are pleased to be presenting a 35mm screening of the filmmaker’s critically acclaimed Goodbye, Dragon Inn, followed by a discussion and Q&A. Baudelaire’s flâneur of the 1860s wandered a Paris unrecognisable from what it had been ten years previous, and to be rendered unrecognisable again ten years hence, a city in the midst of the seventeen-year process of Haussmannisation – the massive public works programme initiated by Emperor Napoléon III and spearheaded by his prefect of Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, which turned the knotty, dark, cluttered medieval city into the metropolis of broad boulevards we know today. Today, in most every major city in the world, from Ximending to Times Square, a new sort of Haussmannisation is and has been underway, one of its models the process of redevelopment that Delany describes.

Tue 18 May 18:10; Sat 29 May 12:45 (+ intro by Stuart Brown, BFI Head of Programme and Acquisitions) 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.Sometimes, I see [them] in my dreams,” Tsai says of the cinemas he would visit as a child in his hometown of Kuching. While they have long since disappeared, it was his warm memories of these places that inspired him to make something new. “One theatre,” he recalls, “was called the Odeon.” Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a meditative, impactful farewell to a cinema in Taipei and exerts even more resonance when looked at through the lens of the past year. 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. Join the BFI mailing list for regular programme updates. Not yet registered? Create a new account at www.bfi.org.uk/signup A 4K restoration was released on DVD and Blu-ray by Second Run on November 23, 2020, and digitally by Metrograph on December 18, 2020. [2] [3] Reception [ edit ]

Delany’s project was born of years observing the changing face of the city around him, an awareness of which is one of the side effects of growing older. On his early forays into Times Square, he writes, ‘Like many young people, I’d assumed the world –the physical reality of stores, restaurant locations, apartment buildings, and movie theaters and the kinds of people who lived in this or that neighbourhood –was far more stable than it was.’ Kent Jones, in a not wholly dissimilar vein, comments on awakening from this illusion of continuity in cinema at the dawn of the twenty-first century, for ‘through the nineties, “The Movies” was a common reference point, as apparently solid as the Grand Canyon.’ It was the first glimmer of this impermanence of things, I believe, that I experienced in 1997 at the Tri-County 1-5. As a singularly self-infatuated medium, almost as soon as cinema learned to walk, it toddled to the mirror and, with its first self-regarding gaze, reflected upon the means and methods of its own exhibition and reception. For about the first half of its life to date, ‘the cinema’ referred to both an artform and to the venue where that artform was, during that period, exclusively displayed, and in very little time the former was being used to contemplate the latter. Take D.W. Griffith’s short Those Awful Hats (1909), in which the sightlines of an audience attending a melodrama screening are violated by a parade of patrons wearing ostentatious top hats and millinery, the illusion of a film projection achieved through double printing and a travelling matte. But, what if a film didn’t have to be commercial to be enjoyable? It would have been easy, perhaps, for Ming-Liang to produce a documentary about cinema-going, about going to this cinema (the Fu-Ho) in particular, or even to offer his own take on Hu’s wuxiaclassic. Far more impressive is this surrealworld-within-a-world, a world stripped of action and shorn of dialogue, in which time seems to stand still – or limps slowly along, in rhythm with the stilted metronome of the Fu-Ho’s disabled attendant (Chen Hsiang-Chyi), one leg longer than the other, meandering ghost-like through its empty corridors.That is, a decrepit, old picture-house on the outskirts of Taipei, hosting its last ever screening– of King Hu's 1967 sword-fighting classic Dragon Inn– complete, or incomplete, with leaky ceilings, and a thoroughly depleted audience. 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.