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Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3h0WiMMOUE
“I think I experienced the highest degree of artistic freedom when I was doing the Walker series, because it’s not about a story, not even about meanings. It’s painting.” —Tsai Ming-liang
In 2012, Tsai Ming-liang began a series of short video works in which his longtime collaborator Lee Kang-sheng dresses in the robes of a Buddhist monk and wanders slowly, almost imperceptibly so, through the exterior and interior spaces of cities around the world. The videos were born out of Tsai’s “obsession” with Xuanzang, a seventh-century Chinese Buddhist monk whose seventeen-year pilgrimage from China to India formed the basis for the sixteenth-century literary classic Journey to the West. Named after that work (and a sly reference to its setting in Marseille), this is the most ambitious of these videos so far. With his bright red robe contrasting with the subdued tones of the city, Lee moves with uncanny slowness through the bustling streets, this time accompanied by the equally eccentric French actor Denis Lavant (Beau Travail, Holy Motors). Praising the film as “an exquisite 56-minute gem,” Ronnie Scheib of Variety notes that Lee’s “barely moving presence turns the frame itself into narrative, with all passing figures in the tableau defined by their reactions to him . . . his stillness conjures up an alternate space-time continuum.” (Dir.: Tsai Ming-liang, France/Taiwan, 2014, 56 min., DCP, no dialogue)
Film still courtesy of Homegreen Films |
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