Corporeal Movies: The Cinematic Body in Tsai Ming-Liang's Films

• Main Authors: Tzu-Ying Chen, 陳姿穎
• Other Authors: Kien Ket Lim
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/32179313415375316774

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 外國文學與語言學碩士班 === 95 === My thesis studies the cinematic body in Tsai Ming-Liang’s films. Tsai marks a significant turn in Taiwan cinema history, shifting from historical nostalgia to self-reflection. Criticisms of Tsai’s films often emphasize their symbolic meanings or the social references to the urban Taipei. Tsai’s concerns, however, are not only for the human body as a suffering receptacle in the modern world, but also the peculiarity of the film medium. In light of this, the “cinematic” body, instead of the body image, repositions the relation of the film medium and the spectators, where the suffering receptacle refers also to the corporeal spectators. My thesis attempts to establish Tsai’s cinematic body as a spectacle of corporeality. Firstly, applying minimalist aesthetics, Tsai effaces redundant indicative references from the cinematic body so to accentuate the presence of the body itself and constitutes an exhibition of the bodily habits, gestures, and actions. The exhibition of the biological needs contains a collectivity that communicates with the spectators’ everyday experience. The spectacle of corporeality, therefore, forces the spectators to stare as if confronting a close-up. This close-up is not, according to Bela Balázs, estimated by spatial distance but by emotional intensity that expels excessive performance and requires obvious nuances. Tsai’s films, from this perspective, tell an alternative story through the silent and everyday body. And Tsai’s musical numbers are usually ignored for its disruptive function in the narrative. Instead, they can be seen as a return back to “vaudeville aesthetic” in Henry Jenkins’ phrase. Vaudeville aesthetic carries the features of the explosive visual pleasure and fragmented narrative structure. Through vaudeville aesthetic, Tsai frustrates the musical convention of naturalization that mixes the imagery and the real. The characteristic of failed seriousness in Tsai’s musical numbers also holds camp sensibility that situates the spectators in a distanced position from the musical spectacle.