Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: On filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang

University of Minnesota Press

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema, Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. A new book by Nicholas de Villiers, CRUISY, SLEEPY, MELANCHOLY, offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films and reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema. Here, the author is joined in conversation with Beth Tsai.

Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and film at the University of North Florida.

Beth Tsai is visiting assistant professor of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

REFERENCES:

Books by Nicholas de Villiers (all with University of Minnesota Press):

-Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual DIsorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang

-Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary

-Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol

Book by Beth Tsai:

-Taiwan New Cinema at Film Festivals (Edinburgh University Press)

Tsai Ming-liang films:

-No No Sleep

-Stray Dogs

-Goodbye, Dragon Inn

-Vive L’Amour

-I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone

-Rebels of the Neon God

-The Wayward Cloud

-It’s a Dream

-The Hole

-Face (Visage)

-What TIme Is It There?

-Days

Other films:

-Saw Tiong Guan / Past Present (documentary)

-Fred Barney Taylor / The Polymath

-Elizabeth Purchell / Ask Any Buddy (podcast: https://www.ask-any-buddy.com/podcast)

-Hou Hsiao-hsien / Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge

-Hou Hsiao-hsien / Café Lumière

-Albert Lamorisse / Le Ballon Rouge

-Wong Kar-wai / Chungking Express

-Jon M. Chu / Crazy Rich Asians

-Peter Wang / A Great Wall

-Edward Yang / The Terrorizers

Research, persons, publications:

-Song Hwee Lim / Tsai Mingliang and the Cinema of Slowness

-François Truffaut

-Elena Pollacchi

-Samuel Delany / Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

-José Esteban Muñoz / Cruising Utopia

-John Paul Ricco / The Logic of the Lure

-Alex Espinoza / Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pasttime

-Roland Barthes

-Elena Gorfinkel’s public lecture: Cinema, the Soporific: Between Exhaustion and Eros

-Jean Ma / At the Edges of Sleep

-Marcel Proust / Swann’s Way

-Jean Ma / Melancholy Drift

-Jonathan Flatley’s work on melancholia and modernism

-Judith Butler

-Douglas Crimp

-Anne Cvetkovich / Depression: A Public Feeling

-David Eng

-Anne Anlin Cheng

-Shi-Yan Chao / Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape

-Sianne Ngai

-Christopher Lupke / The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien

-Zhu Tianwen

-Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell Williams Davis / Thirty-Two New Takes on Taiwan Cinema

-David Lynch

-Sara Ahmed / Queer Phenomenology

-Michel de Certeau

-Fran Martin

-The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Camp: Notes on Fashion

-Susan Sontag on camp

-Esther Newton / Mother Camp

-Jonathan Te-hsuan Yeh

-Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, “Camping Out with Tsai Ming-liang”

-Stray Dogs at the Museum: Tsai Ming-liang Solo Exhibition

-Fran Martin, “Introduction: Tsai Ming-liang’s intimate public worlds,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas Vol. 1 No. 2.

-Eve Sedgwick’s idea of camp as a form of reparative reading

-Tom Roach / Friendship as a Way of Life

-Rey Chow / Writing Diaspora

-Michelle Bloom

-Fran Martin, “The European Undead: Tsai Ming-liang’s Temporal Dysphoria,” Senses of Cinema (https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/feature-articles/tsai_european_undead/)