Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003)
“The best film of the last 125 years” Apichatpong Weerasethaku
Dear subscribers and fellow cinephiles, welcome, finally, to our first letter where we are unveiling the premiere screening of the No Home Movies Film Club.
Let’s get some practical details out of the way: the screening will take place the 16th of January at Bubblan at Fiskhamnsgatan 41B in Gothenburg. Seats are limited so be sure to book yours in time. More info on how to register to the event will roll out soon enough.
These last years have been peculiar ones for film culture and film watching across the world. The pandemic tightens its grip on public encounters as we speak and during the past two years many have uttered their words of preoccupation in regard to how the virus would strike the final blow or put the last nail in the coffin of cinema as we know it. I don’t want to go into that debate here but one thing is however certain, film has been marginalized in culture for a long time now, long before any sort of pandemic. This topic has been touched upon in a very insightful manner by previous New York film festival director Kent Jones in a Film Comment article and in the magazine’s podcast episode. Check it out to get a feeling of how things are more complicated than the average pundit or salesman might want you to think.
Film Comment Podcast, The Marginalization of Cinema
Even the brilliant American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum tackles this issue, from a different angle though, in his essay “Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia”, another wonderful reading.
In brief, cinema as an art-form has been re-configuring itself for a while now, the mass theater-centered experience is mainly relegated to the monster of block-buster IP and “the popular” has been effectively separated from the art in the last decades. What is left is not the death of cinema but an art form that when it really tries to be creative and new should actually be compared to poetry in terms of popular impact.
So why is this preamble so important? It ties quite crucially with our premiere film Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) from Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang. In it we witness the last screening of the Hong Kong classic wuxia film Dragon Inn (1967) in an old cinema hall in Taipei which is about to close down for good. Once a place for local communities to meet and enjoy popular culture together, this single hall theater (one of many) is now a haunted place and the expression of the decline of cinema as mass medium.
Maybe there is a certain degree of perverse irony into the choice of inaugurate a new film club with this pick, but in reality, it makes perfect sense. As cleverly observed by Nick Pinkerton in his book on the film, Tsai believes that the departure from the movie theater is part of a natural progression of things and in a Buddhist manner, the idea of impermanence becomes central here: “all things are susceptible to creation and dissolution” and so is the case for cinema and for the theatrical popular and collective experience.
Tsai is drawing strongly from his own experience, from his childhood and from the memories of both going to the screenings and then see those realities disappear in his 30s1. At the same time, Goodbye Dragon Inn is not a nostalgic swan song but a rigorously constructed film whose vital formalism and aesthetics indicates a clear-cut departure for Tsai from narrative film-making. A transformation of the art that has brought him in recent year from festivals to art exhibitions and other hybrid formats, following thus the idea of dissolution and re-creation of the art form.
As part of a global cinephile culture, Bubblan aims to embrace an ever evolving and changing cinephiliac imaginary. The old Fu-Ho theater in Taipei may have closed down but we want to take the torch further and meet those ghosts haunting our beautiful cinematic dreams. So we are proud to show this masterpiece of contemporary cinema and with it to participate from the margins with our little venue where the appreciation of the cinema as an art form will continue. To paraphrase the great Bell Hooks, whom we lost very recently: it is from the margins that radical things can happen.
The original Chinese title of Goodbye Dragon Inn is about the impossibility of saying goodbye and letting go, we shall never say goodbye to cinema.
Soundtrack: Can't let Go Performed by Yao lee
The Cinematologists Podcast on the film
Fireflies Press, the book on Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Something that the city of Gothenburg can very much relate to, since it once had one Europe’s highest concentration of film theaters.