Tsai and Lee in LA

Few publications have expressed a collective appreciation of Tsai’s work with such steadfast devotion as Reverse Shot. Introducing a symposium on the oeuvre twenty years ago, editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert wrote that the six features Tsai had made by that point were “composed of remarkably lucid, stringently funny, deathly terrifying minimalist spectacles of suspended misery and tacit longing.” At the end of 2020, Reverse Shot contributors voted Days to the top of their list of the best films of the year.

“Days may prove most meaningful for those who have been following Lee’s evolution in Tsai’s films since the ’90s,” wrote Koresky a few months later. “As the punkish, disaffected teen in Rebels of the Neon God and the horny love-struck nomad of Vive L’amour, he was a totem of queer desire—both subject and object; as the peripatetic watch-seller in What Time Is It There? and the porn actor in The Wayward Cloud, he was a thwarted romantic lead.” Days is “an act of love, an expression of commitment—to a man, to an image, and to the cinematic medium as a means of expressing that love and commitment.”

Lee appears in Days as Kang, a man very much like himself, middle-aged and in need of treatment for the pain in his neck that has dogged him for much of his adult life. “Although Tsai’s interest in duration may be most evident in his affinity for glacial long takes,” wrote Erika Balsom in a 2020 issue of Artforum, “Lee’s sustained presence offers another way of approaching the filmmaker’s exploration of protracted temporality, one that sets him apart from many other festival favorites who traffic in slowness. Tsai’s cinema is, among other things, a practice of portraiture unfolding over decades. Mapping changes in the flesh occurring so gradually as to be invisible to the eye, he registers the beauty and the catastrophe of aging.”

In Los Angeles, Tsai and Lee will take part in several Q&As and introduce two films from their ongoing Walker series, Journey to the West (2014) and Abiding Nowhere, featuring Lee wearing the red robes of a Buddhist monk and moving at a barely perceptible pace through rural and urban landscapes. On Sunday, Tsai will introduce a screening of a 35 mm print of Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947), the first film Yasujiro Ozu made after the end of the Second World War.

“Why do we always assume that shooting a film is to tell a story?” Tsai asked the Los Angeles Times’s Mark Olsen in 2015. “My works have always been about expressing life experiences and sensations. In terms of the format, I am not passionate about ‘storytelling,’ but rather I approach movies more in the prosaic or poetic way. Rebels of the Neon God has been just like this. When I was shooting a film, I would constantly remind myself that ‘I am shooting a film, but not telling a story.’ With this approach, I have been freer.”