In Another Country, dir. Hong Sangsoo, 2012

While my preoccupation with The Cinema has landed me in the $60/m “Pro” tier of MoviePass, I’ll admit Hong is the one auteur whose work I prefer to stream. Specifically, alone in my bed, cradling my laptop, stupefied by THC gummies. It’s not just that “theatrical” renders Hong’s relaxed approach to sound and image particularly obvious. Moreover, many of his movies have a holographic quality, as if the digital files that constitute them are simply evidence of his motives, and the work itself lies in my mind’s reconstruction of those motives. Without telling us, his movies express an understanding of this process of translation; perhaps this is why he often builds stories around breakdowns of communication. As in much of his work, the relationships, situations, and personalities present in In Another Country take on virtual yet palpable shapes through repetitions, variations, and nested narratives. To watch this movie is to feel Hong react to and harness his thought, an experience that, for me, is too intimate to take in communally. One man’s motives are always embarrassingly unavoidable… even when they’re profoundly intentional.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn, dir. Tsai Ming-liang, 2003

Goodbye, Dragon Inn: the title is an interpellation, an apostrophe in the lyric sense, of address. There is no mistaking its respondent: cinema itself. Goodbye, Dragon Inn is an epitaph to cinema, rendered in that medium’s own acrolect, the still or the moving image. Certainly it is the signal entry in the photographic advent now observing its quasquicentennial, for the film gathers under its aegis nearly the entire theatrical apparatus: the motion picture, the moviegoer, the factotum (projectionist and concierge), the screening room. Together they sustain the tradition of cinephilia, tend the camera’s archive of representations; through them, Tsai commends us to the habitat for vision which the cinematic form creates, exposes us to its métier of apparition, recognition, and regard. He informs us that the context of the cinematheque inspires a particular focus, an orientation of attention toward so many figures passed over in light: others, ourselves, and those dispensed upon the screen… I turn to Goodbye, Dragon Inn because it mirrors my ardor for the movie theatre, its exhibition of the mystery and trance of relation. Only there does history find its match, a repertoire of ghosts. Its annunciation unto us is that the gaze not only can be conditioned-but revolutionized.