Goodbye, Dragon Inn [Blu-ray] [2020]

Product Information

That is, a decrepit, old picture-house on the outskirts of Taipei, hosting its last ever screening– of King Hu's 1967 sword-fighting classic Dragon Inn– complete, or incomplete, with leaky ceilings, and a thoroughly depleted audience.

The film’s final image, a static long shot of the theatre space, now completely empty, invites and encourages an affective response from the audience and asks it to grieve the loss of place. What are we to do if we lose these places and spaces, other than grieve? The magic and profound impact of being able to watch films in a cinema has no limits other than this brute physical reality. It is painfully clear that this situation was not lost on Tsai. Song Hwee Lim writes that this final long shot of the cinema space “challenges us to rethink the relationship among slowness, nostalgia, and cinephilia”, to bear witness to the decay of cinema 9. From title on down, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one of the greatest films in the history of cinema, construes itself not as the simple paen to a dying artform as which it is often perceived, but a constellation of complex, aching desires; it is both wholly in keeping with Tsai’s oeuvre and stands starkly apart from it. The timing of the long-awaited restoration now seems almost too on-the-nose, given that theaters across America remain shuttered and spectatorship in its ideal form has temporarily ceased. But Goodbye is above all resolutely present-minded, less concerned with the future of theatergoing than with the material longing and mystery that its inhabitants experience. The final screening at a run-down Taipei cinema is the venue for GOODBYE, DRAGON INN [BO SAN], Tsai Ming-Liang's poetic, touching and intermittently humorous example of 'slow cinema'. Slarek becomes absorbed by the film's lingering focus on suggestion and small character details and salutes the quality of Second Run's recent Blu-ray release.

Rate And Review

Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. Inside, meanwhile, the epic wuxia film Dragon Inn, by Chinese filmmaker King Hu, plays for the last time on the big screen. On its initial release in 1967, the film broke box-office records in multiple East Asian territories – but here it plays out in a near-empty room. The wuxia – the word is commonly translated as ‘martial heroes’, and sometimes as synonymous with ‘martial arts’ – is both ancient and relatively new, like so much in the popular culture of Greater China. Wuxia stories centre on heroic xia warriors, and the scholar Sam Ho draws out an effective definition of the genre in its very name: As one is reminded throughout Goodbye, Dragon Inn, even when one goes to the movies alone, one does so to find a connection with others, whether it be the strangers in the auditorium with whom we may have nothing in common but a tendency to gasp and laugh at the same time or even just the characters on the screen. As the theater manager and the projectionist slowly but surely shutter their theater at the end of the dark, rainy night, one feels a tightening in one’s chest — is that it? Where will these lonely people go now? What will we all do if the cinemas close for good? Needless to say, sitting on my couch with my cat and a superhero film queued up on HBO Max, while easy enough, doesn’t have the same emotional resonance. Going to the movies reminds us that no matter what, we aren’t alone in this world — a beautiful, bittersweet feeling that, in an era of quarantine, is all the more necessary. Join the BFI mailing list for regular programme updates. Not yet registered? Create a new account at www.bfi.org.uk/signup

Tsai Ming-liang's "Goodbye Dragon Inn" is a spectacularly dull movie, a limp ode to the bygone days of cinema-going. A film smitten with its own stasis, "Goodbye" culminates in a shot held for an obscene amount of time of an empty movie theater. Tsai's known for holding his shots way past the point most directors yell cut, and the result can be strikingly effective in the right context (the brilliant final shot of "Vive L'Amour") but "Goodbye" is almost an art film parody in its studied minimalism. The money shot in particular is a groan-inducer that makes you long for a fast-forward button. Tsai’s movie also evokes the feeling of ghosts. During one rare encounter between the Japanese man and another movie goer, the Japanese man is told that the theater is haunted. Because the people watching the movie are constantly changing seats or getting up to go cruise for hook-ups in the bathrooms, the landscape of the theater feels fleeting. You find yourself wondering if the large mass of people you saw populating the seats at the beginning of the film were ever actually there at all. Did you imagine them? Have they all left? And if they have, are those few that remain there by choice or simply because they haunt the place? The atmosphere of the rest of the building does little to help quell these ghost-like feelings. It is a dark building with multiple ceiling leaks. People emerge and disappear into the shadows as easily as if they could walk through walls. And yet, the movie still plays on the screen, a lifeforce for this otherwise dead-end establishment. Though, when Dragon Inn’s final credits roll and the lights come on, the seats are empty leaving you to wonder if anyone had ever really been there at all. Taiwan Movie theatres are like temples. You will always meet a true god. You can discover the details of extreme close-ups, and the breadth of extreme long shots. Then you experience the moments of magic that only a movie theatre can bring. When I was a child, my grandpa and I were always in and out of different movie theatres. In Kuching, a small town in Malaysia, these theatres weren’t far from each other and played various types of movies. Odeon Theatre specialised in Cantonese films from Hong Kong, opera or Taiwanese films. Capital Theatre was the exclusive theatre for Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers Studios, and also showed commercial films from Japan. Rex Cinema was the world of Hollywood. In the 1960s, these theatres were a large part of my childhood; in the 1980s, just a few years after I left my hometown, they were all razed to the ground. I thought I had forgotten them, but occasionally they return to my dreams. Pinkerton’s meditation on the slow-almost-unto-total-stillness GOODBYE, DRAGON INN by Tsai Ming-Liang is a wafer-sized contemplation of the disintegration of what was formerly urban, crowded, and communal into the hideously cellular and isolated and agoraphobic world of the Internet. You can bet that the coronavirus and its dispatch of the First World into the realms of Netflix and Uber Eats gets its appropriate treatment here. Ou sont les big-ass two-dollar second-run theatres d’antan, asks Pinkerton, and the gallery space (Tsai’s favored new home) and the streaming universe strike him as unworthy.A 4K restoration was released on DVD and Blu-ray by Second Run on November 23, 2020, and digitally by Metrograph on December 18, 2020. [2] [3] Reception [ edit ] A final thought. As the cinema in the film closed its doors for the last time I was reminded of a trip I made to the district of Nakano in Tokyo in 2004, where a Japanese friend had booked me into a reasonably priced hotel that was located directly above a basement cinema that specialised in screening older movies. While there, I just had to pay this venue a visit and saw Fukasaku Kinji’s 1966 Hokkaido no Abare-Ryu – without the aid of English subtitles, no less – and was seriously impressed by the whole experience. There weren’t many of us in attendance, but the cinema was immaculately kept, the seats were comfortable, the screen was a good size and the condition of the print being screened was close to miraculous. As I emerged, I remarked to my friend what a wonderful resource this was to have so close to his home, to which he sadly responded, “I know, I love to come here, but not enough other people do nowadays and so it’s closing next month.” This is where the lingering shot at the end of Goodbye, Dragon Inn of the empty auditorium really hit home, acting as it did as a reminder that sometimes you really don’t fully appreciate what you’ve got until it’s gone. sound and vision Prod Co: Homegreen Films Prod: Liang Hung-Chih, Vincent Wang Dir: Tsai Ming-Liang Scr: Tsai Ming-Liang, Hsi Sung Phot: Liao Pen-Jung Ed: Chen Sheng-Chang