As Vlad Dima fittingly asked about Estrella Sendra’s essay on Alan Gomis’s work, how to 'best trace the physical impact of his films'?[1] Adam Cook has chosen an astute way to make sense of Tsai Ming-liang 'physical impact', by using a complex split screen montage. It can be argued that Tsai’s body of work somehow resembles a high-brow soap opera: his movies and museum installations create a unified, coherent corpus where all elements resonate with one another in a holistic vertigo. Not only does Tsai use the same actors consistently – notoriously, Lee Kang-sheng appears in all his films – but, even if in a progressive refusal of traditional narrative, the filmmaker creates recurrent characters and plot lines that trace out a saga, and it is advisable to watch them in order of their release. 

In any case, Tsai has been experimenting for many years with different dispositifs and venues: he was primed for his VR work The Deserted, he collaborated with museums exhibitions and art galleries, and at the time I'm writing this he is a resident artist at the Centre Pompidou Paris, following Abbas Kiarostami and Jean-Luc Godard. It seems therefore appropriate to experiment with his images, putting them together, transforming them in a new collage that creates new sensations and a new spectatorial experience. As Tsai showcases his movies in an immersive environment, getting rid of linear temporality and letting visitors enter the experience at any time, or spreads his sequences on irregular surfaces that create new textures, so Cook molds glimpses of Tsai’s sequences in an immersive, silent universe which presents or condenses multiple plot and temporal lines in the unity of the frame.

The video starts in medias res, no captions are given. Then something happens around 40’’ seconds, and Cook splits the screen with a double image – and words, silent, to be read, each one with his or her inner voice – very appropiately since Tsai’s body of work is silent. Or, should I say, wordless, since the noises and surrounding sounds are of great importance in his world building. 

Certainly, the sensation of the long plan sequence is lost in a short video, yet the juxtaposition of sequences through split screen editing evokes the reverberations from film to film, by letting spectators peep into the monumental construction of Tsai’s work.

At 3’13 another shift, split screen x 4: Cook’s hypnotic, slow-paced montage spirals in a vertiginous slow accumulation that lets the bodily presence be apparent in its weight, and ponders on the reactions of the spectators, immersed in an experiment of haptic visuality.

The video also leaves some questions unanswered – just like Tsai’s movies themselves. Much is said about bodily senses: when does the mind come into play? Does it make an entrance? I would argue that it does. We are not in a body genre like horror movies or porn that solicit physical reactions from the spectators: Tsai’s bodies are offered up to pensive meditation. See for example 5’55: 'respite from the body'. Would it also be possible to read a tension between carnality and a striving towards metaphysics? 'Resistance vs gravity of solitude' is a nice phrase; it would be possible to read it also as a plunge into tired flesh in order to glimpse at a metaphysical redemption. The body weighs, yet the mind is somewhere, too, at least according to Tsai’s own admission: his belief in Buddhism is not inconsequential, and we might infer that between the lines – or, hidden behind the bleak images – it is possible (or better: Tsai asks us) to meditate on life, impermance, vacuity. The rhythmical split screen might suggest that a mindful gaze, watching attentively and perceiving hidden correspondences between timelines, people and things, can and should bring relief to earthly desires and their relative suffering, and openly transcendent perspective. 

I find the cut at 6'30 very compelling. It reminds us of Tsai’s montage itself: from 'the poverty of contemporary Taipei' we jump to the musical piece, and it’s music from the past – the text says, 'bodily of physical grounds' and the editing achieves this, convincingly. Yet I’d add that, in the musical pieces, nostalgia plays a pivotal role. Is nostalgia physical? It probably is according to Cook, even if the video fails to dig into another temporal dimension of Tsai’s oeuvre, namely his work with the memories of the past. Specifically, Tsai uses songs that he used to listen to in his youth, and that also create a common imaginary for sinophone diasporic communities. The songs of Grace Chang are a memory anchor for an entire generation, and listening to them today evokes a vintage, retro patina. Besides, these songs were also music for films. The images prompt nostalgia as well: the elder protagonists of Goodbye, Dragon Inn are watching themselves in their young age on the screen; of course, spectators can relate to their sadness regardless, yet knowing that the phantomatic images of King Hu’s wuxia are a specific temporal quotation enhances the power of the ethereal melancholia. The montage of 'aging bodies', is also a montage of ghosts – memories from an intangible cinepiliac yet insistent heritage. 

At 7’25, bodily presence is further emphasized in ruined architecture, or, the other way round: are the metal and concrete screaming out their wordily existence, responding to their forgetful creators? See Tsai's abstract, formalist  short The Night (2021), dedicated only to the urban landscape - unless houses can be bodies as well, as the astute parallel at 7’39 shows.

'The body helps us see, much like a frame makes us pay attention to what it contains', yes, but also to what it excludes – hors champ, off-camera. By allegory: ghosts; dead; past love; past youth; imagination. Here, the invisible forces evoked by Tsai are summoned by the split montage. 

A final note: one aspect of the body is not touched upon: the slapstick comedy. I personally find Tsai’s films more and more funny. His bodies are disarticulated, silently falling and stumble, grotesquely scorched by invisible aches. Yes, bodies can be ridiculous or grotesque, and – I think – in the dreary vision that Tsai’s work strongly proposes, he also lets some hints of humor slip between the tears and pain.