Talk: (re)claiming the lost object: the construction of screen memories in Tsai Ming-liang’s films

a talk by
E.K. Tan

Thursday, Jan. 25
Lucy Ellis Lounge
1080 FLB
5:10-6:40 PM



This presentation examines how internationally acclaimed Malaysian-Chinese
director Tsai Ming-liang’s films, The Hole (1997), What Time is it There? (2001),
and Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003) adopts the genres of musical, French New
Wave, and martial arts to denaturalize narrative coherence and arouse the
audience’s curiosity in locating the significance of these indifferent forms to the
films’ overall presentation. As a result, the presentation posits that Tsai casts
denaturalizing objects such as Chinese musicals from the sixties, Truffaut’s The
400 Blows and martial arts classic Dragon Inn as screen memories to distort and
disguise the anxiety of rootlessness experienced by the director, a culturally-
displaced Chinese diasporic filmmaker. The casting of these screen memories is
on the one hand the screening of metonymical links for the audience; while, on
the other, the screening of the origin of past memories from the audience.

EK Tan is a graduate student in the Program for Comparative and World
Literature, where he works on modern Chinese literature, Asian American
studies, Southeast Asian studies, postcolonial theory, diaspora, psychoanalysis
and film theory. He is currently finishing his dissertation, entitled I Write
Therefore I Am: Aestheticization of Loss and Displacement in the Literary and
Cinematic Works of Southeast Asian Chinese Diasporas.