Virtual Arthouse: Tsai Ming-liang’s The Deserted… | Little White Lies

Festivals

Vir­tu­al Art­house: Tsai Ming-liang’s The Desert­ed at the Tai­wan Film Festival

04 Apr 2019

Words by Anton Bitel

Dimly lit interior with a person reclining on a sofa, surrounded by furniture and lamps, creating a cosy, atmospheric scene.
Dimly lit interior with a person reclining on a sofa, surrounded by furniture and lamps, creating a cosy, atmospheric scene.
An 8K pre­sen­ta­tion of the director’s VR project pro­vides a unique­ly immer­sive experience.

You sit in a swiv­el chair in a base­ment room, sur­round­ed by up to 15 oth­er peo­ple each with their own swiv­el chairs. There is no com­mon big screen. Rather, indi­vid­ual com­put­ers feed the images direct to the head­gear that you are each wear­ing. This equip­ment tracks your head’s move­ments so that, with­in the film’s fic­tive envi­ron­ment, you have a 360-degree view, in every direc­tion, from a fixed point.

This is Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty, or VR, an audio­vi­su­al sys­tem that gives you a degree of free­dom over what you see and hear (every view­er is hav­ing a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence, with full con­trol over where the periph­ery of their vision falls), but that also in many ways restricts what you see and how the film’s sto­ry can be told.

The inau­gur­al Tai­wan Film Fes­ti­val in Lon­don fea­tures not only a ret­ro­spec­tive of films by Tsai Ming-liang (with Tsai him­self in atten­dance), but also rare show­ings (in a spe­cial­ly equipped pop-up screen­ing room at Asia House) of his 55-minute VR film The Desert­ed, shown in 8K rather than the low­er-def­i­n­i­tion 4K ver­sion which pre­miered at the 2017 Venice Film Festival.

Tsai is a mas­ter of slow cin­e­ma, and his style, typ­i­cal­ly involv­ing long fixed takes on faces or envi­ron­ments, lends itself per­fect­ly to the VR for­mat. For now, instead of being forced to stare at the play of light on a wall for many min­utes on end (as hap­pened in 2013’s Stray Dogs), view­ers can choose to look around and explore the deeply tex­tured loca­tions of an aban­doned build­ing, its walls all water-stained con­crete, exposed brick and weath­er-shred­ded wallpaper.

The first scene shows an apart­ment inte­ri­or in which an ail­ing man (Tsai reg­u­lar Lee Kang-sheng) sits attached to a TENS machine while his elder­ly moth­er (Lu Yi-ching) first cooks and then sits oppo­site, silent­ly watch­ing him. In their dif­fer­ent ways, both are of course fig­ures for us, strapped in to our own appa­ra­tus and seat­ed watching.

The moth­er may be a mere ghost watch­ing over her son, as might be the woman (Chen Shi­ang-chyi) who appears in lat­er scenes dressed incon­gru­ous­ly – amid all the squalor – in immac­u­late white bridal attire and heels, and who is at one point filmed sit­ting and lis­ten­ing at the wall in a nar­row cham­ber that, when you look around, is revealed impos­si­bly to have no entrance.

Like­wise, it is not clear whether the lover (Ivy Yin) – who mate­ri­alis­es along­side the man as he half-slum­bers naked in a tub with his pet carp – is real or fishy fan­ta­sy. Cer­tain­ly all three women seem to haunt the vacant, derelict spaces in this man’s des­o­late life, and to be a part of his silent interiority.

In the final scene of The Desert­ed, the man cooks, sits and eats entire­ly alone, with only us watch­ing him, even as we hear the roman­tic strains of Jin Liu’s Eyes of Pas­sion’, whose lyrics speak of a gaze that express­es mater­nal love’, tak­ing us right back to the open­ing scene, with its watch­ful moth­er. Accord­ing­ly, we are now, in lieu of the three absent women, our­selves posi­tioned as the film’s unseen, watch­ing ghosts – with a gaze that is unusu­al­ly female.

Tsai’s most­ly non-nar­ra­tive film invites its view­ers to recon­struct past stories/​storeys in its heav­i­ly dis­tressed archi­tec­ture, and to redec­o­rate those ruined, decay­ing rooms with the warmth of past mem­o­ries. Here, mere­ly through being invis­i­ble observers, we are co-opt­ed as unseen char­ac­ters in The Desert­ed, wan­der­ing the cor­ri­dors of this man’s desert­ed exis­tence, and imag­in­ing them fleshed out in fuller, more hab­it­able form.

In this way, Tsai exploits the rel­a­tive auton­o­my that VR affords its view­ers to turn us into active par­tic­i­pants in the fur­nish­ing of his film’s mean­ing. It is a unique­ly immer­sive expe­ri­ence, pitched some­where between cin­e­ma and gallery, and stretch­ing the bounds of both its medi­um and its ellip­ti­cal­ly plot­ted message.

The Desert­ed has sev­en screen­ings per day between 4 – 8 April. Find out more at film​tai​wan​.org

Details of oth­er Tsai Ming-liang films being show­cased as part of the 2019 Tai­wan Film Fes­ti­val can be found here.

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