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Walking in the city, slowly:
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...
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spectacular temporal practices in
..
..
..
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Tsai Ming-liang’s ‘Slow Walk, Long
..
..
..
..
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March’ series
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SONG HWEE LIM
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...
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.. At the 2013 Venice Film Festival, where his tenth feature film, Jiaoyou/
..
..
.. Stray Dogs (2013), won the Grand Jury prize, the Malaysian-born,
..
..
..
Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang declared that this would be his
..
..
..
last film. In this he joined Béla Tarr, another master of slow cinema, who
..
... had also recently announced his retirement. Tsai’s statement came as no
..
..
.. surprise to those who had followed his career closely, as he had for quite
..
..
.. some time been deeply disillusioned by filmmaking as a practice. As he
..
..
.. said in an interview at Venice:
..
..
..
.. if you look back at the old films you have the feeling among all these
..
1 Michael Roddy, ‘A minute with: ..
.. products there were also some very good products and some very poor
director Tsai Ming-liang on ..
..
.. ones. Now we seem only to have the low quality and somehow we lost
retiring, next film’, Reuters, 6 ..
September 2013, <http://www.
..
.. the quality of film.1
..
reuters.com/article/2013/09/06/en ..
... With the completion of his previous film, the Louvre-commissioned
tertainment-us-venice-festival-tsai- ..
..
idUSBRE9850MJ20130906> ..
..
Lian/Visage (2009), Tsai had already claimed that the future of cinema
accessed 9 April 2017. ..
..
..
lay in museums and galleries. Since then Tsai has, with increasing
2 A. L. Rees, ‘Expanded cinema and ..
narrative: a troubled history’, in
..
..
frequency, ventured into the realm of what has been called ‘expanded
A. L. Rees, Duncan White, Steven
..
..
..
cinema’, an ‘elastic name for many sorts of film and projection event’.2
..
Ball and David Curtis (eds), ..
..
For example, in an installation entitled Shi meng/It’s a Dream, exhibited
Expanded Cinema: Art, ..
Performance, Film (London: Tate
..
..
at the 2007 Venice Biennale, fifty-four salvaged seats from an old
..
Publishing, 2011), p. 12. . cinema were displayed alongside a twenty-two-minute version of an

180 Screen 58:2 Summer 2017

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
doi:10.1093/screen/hjx015
 ..
3 Song-yong Sing, Rujing, chujing: ..
.. eponymous film,3 which had its origin in Tsai’s three-minute
Cai Ming-liang de yingxiang yishu ..
..
.. contribution to the portmanteau film, Chacun son cinéma .../To Each His
yu kuajie shijian (Projecting Tsai ..
Ming Liang: Towards Transart
..
.. Own Cinema (2007), made to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the
..
Cinema) (Taipei: Wunan, 2014), ..
.. Cannes Film Festival.
p. 105. ..
..
..
While Tarr went on to open a film academy (which has since closed)
4 Xan Brooks, ‘Death by degrees?
..
..
..
at the University Sarajevo School of Science and Technology,4 Tsai has
Bela Tarr to open film academy’, ..
... carved out a new career as an intermedial artist and returned to his first
The Guardian, 28 September 2012, ..
<https://www.theguardian.com/
..
.. career in theatre. During the four-year gap between Visage and Stray
..
film/2012/sep/28/bella-tarr-film- ..
.. Dogs, the longest break in his filmmaking career of over twenty years,
academy-sarajevo> accessed 9 ..
Tsai kept busy with other projects, most notably a series of short films

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..
..
April 2017. The Academy was shut ..
in December 2016 because,
..
.. entitled ‘Slow Walk, Long March’ (hereafter the Walker series). The
..
according to Tarr, it was too ..
.. series features Tsai’s regular actor, Lee Kang-sheng, walking in a
expensive for the university. See ..
..
..
deliberately slow temporality in various urban locations and artificial
Ben Croll, ‘Bela Tarr speaks: the ..
retired Hungarian director explains
..
..
structures, a literal rendition of slowness that has already become a
why he shut down his film school
..
... hallmark of Tsai’s full-length cinematic oeuvre.5 The series casts Lee in
..
project’, IndieWire, 23 December ..
.. the character of Xuanzang, a Buddhist monk who made a pilgrimage
2016, <http://www.indiewire. ..
com/2016/12/bela-tarr-interview-
..
.. from China to India in the seventh century, and consists, to date, of seven
..
marrakech-film-school- ..
.. short films made between 2012 and 2015.6
1201762173/> accessed 9 April ..
..
.. The Walker series can be seen as an exercise in staging slow walking
2017. ..
5 Song Hwee Lim, Tsai Ming-liang
..
.. as a spectacle, especially in the films that are set in real places where
..
and a Cinema of Slowness ..
..
Lee’s appearance becomes an attraction. The series begins with Wu se/No
(Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii ..
..
..
Form, a twenty-minute short film set in and around a Taipei street market
Press, 2014). ..
6 It is worth noting that, in an earlier ... and in an all-white space; the second, Xingzhe/Walker, is twenty-five
..
short film, Tianqiao bujian le/The ..
.. minutes long and set in various locations across Hong Kong. In the third,
..
Skywalk is Gone (2002), a real .. Jingangjing/Diamond Sutra, another twenty-minute short, Lee walks
..
Buddhist monk is shown walking ..
very slowly amidst busy human
..
.. slowly past a steaming rice cooker encased in a constructed wall; the
..
traffic in front of Taipei Train ..
.. fourth, also twenty minutes and entitled Mengyou/Sleepwalk, features
Station. ..
..
.. Lee moving among the architectural models of Taiwan’s 2012 entry in
..
..
..
the Architecture Biennale in Venice. Two longer pieces followed. The
..
..
..
thirty-minute Xing zai shui shang/Walking on Water sends Lee
..
... wandering in the neighbourhood in Kuching, East Malaysia, where Tsai
..
..
.. spent his formative years. Xiyou/Journey to the West, its title referencing
..
..
.. Wu Cheng’en’s Ming novel that fictionalized Xuanzang’s pilgrimage, is
..
..
.. the longest in the series at fifty-six minutes. The film sees Lee’s character
..
..
.. making the journey to the West, this time Marseille, where he is
..
..
.. mimetically followed, in equal slow motion, by the French actor Denis
..
..
..
Lavant. In 2015 Tsai produced the seventh instalment of the series, Wu
..
..
..
wumian/No No Sleep (thirty-four minutes long), in which Lee spends less
..
..
..
time walking in a wintry Tokyo and more time soaking and sleeping in a
... sauna.
..
..
..
.. The inspiration for the Walker series originated from a theatre
..
..
.. production directed by Tsai in 2011 for the National Theatre in Taipei.
..
..
.. Entitled Zhiyou ni/Only You, the production comprised three
..
..
.. ‘monodramas’ performed by Tsai’s regular actors (Yang Kuei-mei and
..
..
..
Lu Yi-ching, besides Lee), and marked Tsai’s return to theatre after a
..
..
..
twenty-seven-year break. In an interview Tsai expressed that he was
..
. profoundly touched by Lee’s extremely slow walking for thirty minutes

181 Screen 58:2 Summer 2017  Song Hwee Lim  Walking in the city, slowly
 ..
7 Maria Giovanna Vagenas, ..
.. over a short distance on stage, with no plot, sound, dialogue or action.7
‘Filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang says ..
..
.. He decided to isolate this walking process and to develop it into a series
his work should be appreciated ..
slowly’, South China Morning Post,
..
.. of short films, designing a new costume for Lee’s incarnation as
..
27 August 2013, <http://www. ..
.. Xuanzang. Draped in a scarlet robe and with his shaved head and bare
scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/arti ..
..
..
feet, Lee poses a striking figure in various cityscapes in the Walker
cle/1299497/filmmaker-tsai-ming- ..
liang-says-his-work-should-be-ap
..
..
series, but it is arguably his performance of slow walking amidst bustling
..
preciated> accessed 9 April 2017. ... everyday activities in the streets that attracts attention – from both the
..
..
.. passers-by (and the people that Lee passes) and from the films’
..
..
.. audiences.
..
In this essay I aim to complicate existing scholarship on the theme of

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..
..
..
..
.. walking in the city by exploring the temporal aspect of this everyday
..
..
.. practice. I argue that Tsai’s insistence on slowness, a temporal marker
..
..
..
that bridges his intermedial work, reformulates the praxis of walking in
..
..
..
the city as a means for questioning the speed and flow of everyday life
..
... via the politics of temporality embodied by a slow-moving corporeal
..
..
.. being. The Walker series asks what is a socially acceptable temporality –
..
..
.. precisely, the speed of walking in the city – and what kinds of effect and
..
..
.. affect are produced by what Brian Morris calls ‘differentiated practices of
..
8 Brian Morris, ‘What we talk about ..
.. walking’.8 The focus of my analysis will be Journey to the West, and I
when we talk about “walking in ..
..
.. will first situate my discussion in the context of slow cinema for which
the city”’, Cultural Studies, vol. 18, ..
no. 5 (2004), p. 676.
..
..
Tsai’s films are famed. I will then examine Lee’s slow walking in
..
..
..
relation to performance practices in Taiwan and Japan that draw on
..
9 On ‘a cinema of slowness’, see ... Buddhist notions of temporality. The issue of the labour of performance
..
Michel Ciment, ‘The State of ..
.. will be considered alongside the ethics of spectatorship, whilst taking
Cinema’, speech given at the San ..
Francisco Film Society on the
..
.. note of the materiality of the location (Marseille). By staging walking as
..
occasion of the 46th San Francisco ..
.. a spectacle in the cityscapes, the Walker series foregrounds corporeality
International Film Festival, 2003, ..
..
.. rather than technology as the vehicle for slowness in order to open up a
<http://web.archive.org/web/ ..
20040325130014/http://www.sfiff.
..
.. rethinking of the relationship between visuality and mediality as well as
..
org/fest03/special/state.html> ..
..
the politics of temporality.
accessed 9 April 2017. On ‘an ..
..
..
Over the past decade or so, a body of contemporary films that typically
aesthetic of slow’, see Matthew ..
Flanagan, ‘Towards an aesthetic of ... circulates at international film festivals has been noted for a shared
..
slow in contemporary cinema’, ..
.. propensity towards a long-take, long-shot style, with very little
16:9, vol. 6, no. 29 (2008), <http://
..
..
.. happening in the films’ diegeses. Citing variously the work of Lisandro
www.16-9.dk/2008-11/side11_ ..
inenglish.htm> accessed 9 April
..
.. Alonso, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhangke, Abbas
..
2017. ..
.. Kiarostami, Carlos Reygadas, Béla Tarr and Apichatpong
10 Karl Schoonover, ‘Wastrels of ..
..
.. Weerasethakul, among others, critics have begun to discuss these films in
time: slow cinema’s laboring ..
body, the political spectator, and
..
..
terms of ‘a cinema of slowness’ and ‘an aesthetic of slow’.9 Broadly
..
the queer’, Framework, vol. 53, ..
..
speaking, these films fall into the category of, and can be seen as a
no. 1 (2012), p. 65. ..
..
..
prominent strand within, global art cinema. As Karl Schoonover states,
11 Besides the three single-authored
... ‘valorizing slowness characterizes one crucial sociopolitical parameter of
monographs, Slow Cinema, a ..
..
volume edited by Tiago de Luca ..
.. art cinema’s consumption’.10
..
and Nuno Barradas Jorge was .. In 2014, anglophone academia responded to this emerging
..
subsequently published by ..
Edinburgh University Press in
..
.. phenomenon with the publication of three single-authored monographs.11
..
2016. ..
.. Providing a more comprehensive coverage by looking at films by more
12 Ira Jaffe, Slow Movies: ..
..
..
than a dozen directors and dating from the mid 1980s to 2011, Ira Jaffe’s
Countering the Cinema of Action ..
(New York, NY: Wallflower,
..
..
aim is ‘to examine elements besides plot that make certain movies both
2014), p. 1.
..
. slow and compelling’.12 For Jaffe, ‘these movies are slow by virtue of

182 Screen 58:2 Summer 2017  Song Hwee Lim  Walking in the city, slowly
 ..
..
.. their visual style, narrative structure and thematic content and the
..
..
.. demeanour of their characters’, resulting in a ‘continuous stillness,
..
13 Ibid., pp. 3, 5. ..
.. silence, impassivity and emptiness in the present tense’.13 Proposing that
..
..
.. Tsai occupies ‘a central position’ within both the discourse and practice
..
..
..
of a cinema of slowness, I have also identified stillness and silence as the
..
..
..
two defining features of slow cinema and interrogate them through Tsai’s
14 Lim, Tsai Ming-liang and a
..
... signature style.14 I further suggest that cinematic slowness manifests
..
Cinema of Slowness, pp. 9, 10. .. itself in the form of a narrative trope of waiting and the use of long takes
..
..
15 Ibid., pp. 16–17. ..
.. for subject matter that can be described as ‘nothing happening’.15 Lutz
..
Koepnick’s book, On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the

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..
..
..
..
.. Contemporary, differs from the above two studies on two major fronts:
..
..
.. an inclusion of media forms beyond film and the choice of slow-motion
..
..
..
photography as the vehicle through which to explore the notion of
..
..
..
slowness. Adopting a more historical approach to the technology of
..
... slow-motion photography, Koepnick proposes that
..
..
..
..
..
aesthetic slowness takes stock of its own processes of mediation – its
..
..
..
special effects, as it were – in order to open our senses to the multiple
..
..
..
rhythms, stories, and durations that structure our present in all its
16 Lutz Koepnick, On Slowness:
..
.. contingency and in each and every one of its moments.16
..
Toward an Aesthetic of the ..
..
Contemporary (New York, NY: ..
..
These three different takes seek to account for the workings (or what
..
Columbia University Press, 2014), ..
..
David Bordwell calls ‘poetics’) of slow cinema,17 whether in terms of
p. 13. ..
17 David Bordwell, Poetics of ... narrative structure and strategy, visual and aural style, thematic element
..
Cinema (New York, NY: ..
.. and characterization, or the technical dimension of slow-motion
..
Routledge, 2008). .. photography. This essay builds on this body of scholarship but also takes
..
..
..
.. it in new directions, focusing as it does on the trope of walking and how
..
..
.. this corporeal movement contributes to a slow temporality. While
..
..
.. Koepnick’s book contains a chapter on the role of walking in the work of
..
..
..
the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff, the emphasis there is on how the use of
..
..
..
sound ‘resists any sense of temporal linearity, sequentiality, and
18 Koepnick, On Slowness, p. 229.
..
... chronology’.18 Moreover, scholarship on slow cinema has pondered upon
..
..
.. the effect of slowness on spectatorship, whether in relation to the notion
..
19 On spectatorial boredom, see ..
.. of boredom or to seeing as a form of labour.19 Tsai’s Walker series
Lim, Tsai Ming-liang and a ..
..
.. prompts us to explore instead the labour of performing slowness. This
Cinema of Slowness, pp. 28–30; ..
on spectatorial labour, see
..
.. literal rendition of corporeal slowness reorients our attention from
..
Schoonover, ‘Wastrels of time’. ..
.. spectator to performer, foregrounding the work of the human body as the
..
..
..
vehicle for slowness. Yet the issue of spectatorship cannot be disregarded
..
..
..
altogether. In one sense the Walker series can be seen partly as a
..
..
..
documentation of pieces of performance art that are enacted in real
... places, at times eliciting responses from real people at these locations. In
..
..
..
.. this sense we need to consider not just the labour of performance but also
..
..
.. the ethics of the spectatorship – both onscreen and offscreen.
..
..
.. How can one think differently about the everyday practice of walking
..
..
.. in the city and the way in which it might be represented? In the
..
..
..
topography of walking in the city, spatiality is typically privileged over
..
..
..
temporality. Michel de Certeau’s seminal book The Practice of Everyday
..
. Life, for example, includes a chapter entitled ‘Walking in the city’ under

183 Screen 58:2 Summer 2017  Song Hwee Lim  Walking in the city, slowly
 ..
20 Michel de Certeau, The Practice ..
.. a section on ‘spatial practices’.20 In his critique of de Certeau’s work via
of Everyday Life, trans. Steven ..
..
.. a consideration of differentiated instances of walking, and building on the
Rendall (Berkeley and Los ..
Angeles, CA: University of
..
.. work of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, Morris suggests that habitual
..
California Press, 1984). ..
.. bodily attributes like walking are ‘not necessarily “unconscious” bodily
..
..
..
performances that must carry all the weight of that particular adjective’
..
..
..
(thus opposing de Certeau’s psychoanalytic framework that privileges the
..
... formation of the subject). Rather they are, following Mauss’s anecdote,
..
..
.. ‘always culturally and socially produced, often through mimetic
..
21 Morris, ‘What we talk about’, ..
.. processes’.21 In his 1934 lecture ‘Techniques of the body’, Mauss
p. 685. ..
described how he located the way that nurses walked in a New York

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..
..
..
..
.. hospital in the films he had watched, and how he subsequently attributed
..
..
.. the fact that this same gait had become commonplace among Parisian
..
..
..
girls to ‘American walking fashions’ having arrived in France ‘thanks to
22 Quoted in ibid., p. 684.
..
..
..
the cinema’.22 Cinema, therefore, becomes a means of both
..
... documentation and education in relation to the matter of walking in the
..
..
.. city.
..
..
.. Indeed, urban walking has been a prominent trope in cinema since the
..
..
.. postwar era, especially in European realist and modernist films. As James
..
..
.. Tweedie observes in a chapter entitled ‘Walking in the city’ in his book
..
..
.. The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization,
..
..
..
the protagonists of early French New Wave films ‘often have nothing
..
23 James Tweedie, The Age of New ..
..
more to do than walk through the city for minutes at a time’.23 The Italian
Waves: Art Cinema and the ..
... neorealist classic, Ladri di Biciclette/Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica,
Staging of Globalization (Oxford: ..
Oxford University Press, 2013),
..
.. 1948), was famously described by André Bazin as ‘the story of a walk
..
p. 86. ..
.. through Rome by a father and his son’, whose director wanted ‘to play
..
..
.. off the striding gait of the man against the short trotting steps of the child,
..
..
.. the harmony of this discord being for him of capital importance for the
..
24 André Bazin, What Is Cinema? ..
.. understanding of the film as a whole’.24 If Bazin merely pointed out the
Volume II, trans. Hugh Gray ..
..
..
role of rhythm in De Sica’s approach to the trope of walking, Gilles
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: ..
University of California Press,
..
..
Deleuze developed his thesis on the same topic along decidedly temporal
..
1972), pp. 55, 54–55. ... lines. For Deleuze, characters in what he calls ‘modern cinema’ in the
..
..
.. postwar period are ‘caught in certain pure optical and sound situations’,
..
..
.. so that they ‘find themselves condemned to wander about or go off on a
..
..
.. trip’. Because the characters are ‘given over to something intolerable
..
..
.. which is simply their everydayness itself’, their movement ‘is no longer
..
..
.. simply aberrant, aberration is now valid in itself and designates time as
..
..
..
its direct cause’. As such, ‘It is no longer time that depends on
..
25 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The ..
..
movement: it is aberrant movement that depends on time’.25
Time-Image, trans. Hugh ..
..
..
What, then, is the temporality of the movement that is walking, and
Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
... what is its vehicle? The cinematic representation of characters walking in
(London: Continuum, 2005), p. 39. ..
..
..
.. the city, recorded in real time using long takes, foregrounds slowness as
..
..
.. an embodiment of the human figure. Unlike the motorcar, an emblem of
..
..
.. the era of modernism characterized by ‘a speed madness’, leading to the
..
26 Enda Duffy, The Speed ..
.. car chase being regarded as one of cinema’s ‘biggest thrills’,26 the figure
Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, ..
..
..
of the flâneur, most celebrated in Walter Benjamin’s writing on Charles
Modernism (Durham, NC: Duke ..
University Press, 2009),
..
..
Baudelaire, is marked by a ‘slowness’ that ‘enables him to absorb and
..
pp. 263, 55. . filter, to render meaningful, the myriad shocks that the city in its very

184 Screen 58:2 Summer 2017  Song Hwee Lim  Walking in the city, slowly
 ..
..
.. newness emits’, thus contradicting ‘the speed of modern life at the same
..
27 Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: ..
.. time as he constitutes its focal point through his attentive watching’.27
Remapping European Art Cinema ..
..
.. Via the walking characters in films, as Tweedie elaborates,
(Minneapolis, MN: University of ..
..
Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 132. ..
.. The city is experienced through the most deliberate of vehicles, the
..
.. human body; the lugubrious pace of the pedestrian, rather than the
..
..
..
.. racing automobile or careering train, momentarily set the tempo for
...
..
..
cinema. [...] This figure in motion also becomes a support for the eyes
..
..
..
and ears that absorb and process a welter of information present in the
..
.. streets, architecture, and crowds. Like a camera traveling carefully

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..
..
..
..
through the city, the body serves as a device for recording the goings-
..
.. on throughout town. The city is imagined as an extension of the body
..
.. in motion and the body as an extension of cinema. And neither the city
..
..
28 Tweedie, The Age of New ..
.. nor the characters appear to be going anywhere fast.28
..
Waves, p. 90. ..
..
... Returning to Tsai’s body of work, not only have his films been routinely
..
29 See, for example, Mark Betz, ‘The ..
.. read within this largely European modernist genealogy,29 but they also
cinema of Tsai Ming-liang: a ..
..
.. often deploy the trope of walking in the city, littered as they are with
modernist genealogy’, in Maria ..
N. Ng and Philip Holden (eds.),
..
.. characters wandering in urban locations (Taipei, Paris and Kaohsiung),
..
Reading Chinese ..
.. from Lin Mei-mei in Aiqing wansui/Vive L’amour (1994) to Chen
Transnationalisms: Society, ..
..
.. Shiang-chyi in Ni nabian jidian/What Time Is It There? (2001) and
Literature, Film (Hong Kong: Hong ..
Kong University Press, 2006),
..
..
Tianbian yiduo yun/The Wayward Cloud (2005). In the Walker series,
..
pp. 161–72. ..
..
however, Tsai has literally reduced the distance traversed in the
..
... cityscapes via Lee’s slow-motion walking to the extent that temporality
..
..
.. dislodges spatiality and the tempo of cinema comes almost to a standstill.
..
..
.. Space, nevertheless, remains relevant to our discussion of time.
..
..
.. According to Benjamin, ‘Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take
..
..
.. turtles for a walk in the [Parisian] arcades. The flâneurs liked to have the
..
30 Walter Benjamin, Charles ..
.. turtles set the pace for them.’30 This temporality was thus inextricably
Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the ..
..
..
bound to a very specific space – the arcade – a site of leisure, gazing and
Era of High Capitalism, trans. ..
Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1997),
..
..
consumption.31 That is to say, following Benjamin’s example, spatiality
..
p. 54. ... and temporality should not be seen as mutually exclusive but symbiotic.
..
31 On a gendered account of the .. Indeed, if ‘Strolling could hardly have assumed the importance it did
..
shift from arcades to department ..
stores and from the male fl^a neur
..
.. without the arcades’,32 it can be argued that, in this instance, temporality
..
to the female fl^a neuse, see Betz, ..
.. had been born out of spatiality insofar as slowness would not have been
Beyond the Subtitle, pp. 133–34. ..
..
.. celebrated without the building of the arcades. Having had a site
32 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, ..
p. 36.
..
.. designed and designated specifically for leisurely passage, these urban
..
..
..
(and urbane) walkers, in turn, specifically chose an animal whose
..
..
..
temporality was appropriate to the task of strolling and made the ritual a
..
..
..
modern fashion statement: slow became cool.
... While walking may appear to be ‘instinctively performed’ and an
..
..
33 Filipa Matos Wunderlich, ..
.. ‘unquestioned form of movement’ through the city,33 it is, in fact, a
‘Walking and rhythmicity: sensing ..
..
.. complex practice that not only involves bodily movement, rhythm and
urban space’, Journal of Urban ..
Design, vol. 13, no. 1 (2008),
..
.. pace but also embodies aspects of affect, including ‘texture, attitude, or
..
p. 126. ..
.. tone’.34 Today, walking in the city is seen very much as a form of time-
34 Morris, ‘What we talk about’, ..
..
..
saving, a way of beating traffic jams and avoiding congested public
p. 686 (emphasis in original). ..
..
..
transport systems, to the extent that speed ‘has become so highly valued
..
. that it has been elevated almost to the status of an inalienable right, where

185 Screen 58:2 Summer 2017  Song Hwee Lim  Walking in the city, slowly
 ..
35 Peter Harris, Jamie Lewis and ..
.. the ability to travel as fast as possible is no longer questioned’.35 What
Barbara Adam, quoted in Jennie ..
..
.. happens, then, when multiple temporalities are placed together in the
Middleton, ‘“Stepping in time”: ..
walking, time, and space in the
..
.. same space or when a drastically different mode of walking is introduced
..
city’, Environment and Planning, ..
.. to a site designed for very specific purposes? Tsai’s Walker series, in
vol. 41, no. 8 (2009), p. 1945. ..
..
..
particular Journey to the West, provides interesting instances for
..
..
..
scrutinizing the effect and affect of staging slow walking as a spectacle in
..
... everyday cityscapes.
..
..
.. Let us begin with the temporally most extended instance in the series,
..
..
.. the longest take in Journey to the West. In a fifty-six-minute film that
..
contains only fourteen shots, the longest take kicks in at around a third

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..
..
..
..
.. into the film and lasts almost fifteen minutes. It is set at the entrance/exit
..
..
.. of a staircase that is presumably linked to a subway in Marseille. The
..
..
..
camera is placed below the third flight of steps from the top so that we
..
..
..
see, as a low-angle shot, two flights of staircases (of fourteen steps each)
..
... in the foreground and the middle ground, whereas the entrance/exit is
..
..
.. bathed in bright sunlight in the background with another flight of seven
..
..
.. steps or so leading onto the ground level. Metal railings run along both
..
..
.. walls and down the middle of the stairway. At the start of the shot Lee
..
..
.. Kang-sheng is situated at the top right-hand corner, practically occupying
..
..
.. the right side of the stairway over the duration of the shot, an
..
..
..
encumbrance to other pedestrians. He descends close to the camera by
..
..
..
the end of the shot (averaging around two steps per minute), during
..
... which time a hundred people (forty-three going up, fifty-seven down)
..
..
.. and a dog pass through the stairway. Shot in natural light, the static
..
..
.. camera tilts down gradually to accommodate Lee’s descent, resulting in
..
..
.. the shot becoming less bright over time. The long take begins with the
..
..
.. square-shaped entrance/exit at the top of the frame and ends with its
..
..
.. complete disappearance from the shot, and Lee’s figure is shrouded in
..
..
..
darkness in the final seconds.
..
..
..
Tsai’s films have always devoted attention to linking spaces such as
..
... corridors, skywalks, stairwells, escalators and elevators. These spaces are
..
..
.. linkages between places; they are not exactly places in themselves, even
..
..
.. less are they places for lingering. Walking through a passageway is a
..
..
.. form of ‘purposive walking’, typically performed ‘in a rather anxious
..
36 Wunderlich, ‘Walking and ..
.. mode, in which we long for arrival at a destination’.36 The staircase in the
rhythmicity’, p. 131. ..
..
.. shot described above is clearly a well-used passageway, with an average
..
..
..
of close to seven persons passing through it per minute during the shot.
..
..
..
Its function as a passageway is reflected in the way in which the
..
..
..
pedestrians use it: they are not necessarily in haste but there is also no
... reason to stop. In the shot only a few people pay momentary notice to
..
..
..
.. Lee, with a schoolgirl expressing the most fascination with this
..
..
.. spectacular attraction.
..
..
.. Lee’s rhythmicity becomes a sight of wonder at a site where the rite of
..
..
.. passage tends towards speed rather than slowness. The figure of Lee as a
..
..
..
Buddhist monk, with his rather extravagantly layered costume, is equally
..
..
..
striking in all the cityscapes captured in the Walker series, but perhaps
..
. more so in Marseille given its foreignness. The most immediate aspect of

186 Screen 58:2 Summer 2017  Song Hwee Lim  Walking in the city, slowly
 ..
..
.. his spectacularity, therefore, resides in his appearance, a visual register of
..
..
.. unusualness, an out-of-character character in the cityscape. Yet I would
..
..
.. suggest that the spectacle of Lee’s figure is also expressed by his
..
..
.. performance of a mode of walking whose temporality is at variance with
..
..
..
that of the city. Any initial attention attracted by Lee’s appearance would
..
..
..
very swiftly be turned into wonderment at the slowness of his movement,
..
... a progress so imperceptible it almost grinds to a halt. As Henri Lefebvre
..
..
.. and Catherine Régulier note, ‘We are only conscious of most of our
..
37 Henri Lefebvre and Catherine ..
.. rhythms when we begin to suffer from some irregularity’.37 In Journey to
Régulier, ‘The Rhythmanalytical ..
the West, this irregularity is embodied in the rhythm of Lee’s walking

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..
..
Project’, in Henri Lefebvre, ..
Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and
..
.. and the duration of his descent – almost fifteen minutes, counterposed to
..
Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden ..
.. that of most pedestrians who ascended the steps in around twenty
and Gerald Moore (London: ..
..
..
seconds and travelled down in even less time.
Continuum, 2004), p. 77. ..
..
..
Indeed, different modes of temporality have met in this single long
..
... take, the time of modernity encountering the time of Buddhism
..
38 I owe this observation about the ..
.. represented by Lee’s character of Xuanzang.38 Modernity is, of course,
meeting of modernity’s time and ..
..
.. governed by capitalism and a ‘regime of speed’, with its ‘time clocks,
Buddhism’s time to Jacqueline Lo ..
at the workshop in Berlin, though
..
.. schedules, and Taylorist efficiencies’,39 a linear temporality that charges
..
the subsequent elaboration of the ..
.. ceaselessly forward like the pedestrians passing by Lee with their
argument is mine. ..
..
.. purposive walking. This neat division of time into past, present and
39 Duffy, The Speed Handbook, ..
pp. 4–5.
..
..
future is, from the perspective of Buddhism, ‘a mental construct’, a
..
..
..
‘realm of relative truths because it is the realm of the visible, the tangible,
40 Kenneth K. Inada, ‘Time and
..
... the manipulatable, the empirical’.40 From the Buddhist standpoint,
..
temporality: a Buddhist ..
.. ‘experiential events do not take place or flow in time. Rather, it would be
approach’, in H. S. Prasad (ed.), ..
Essays on Time in Buddhism
..
.. more accurate to say that events flow as time, thus denying any primacy
..
(Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, ..
.. to an absolute status of time.’41 Hence the seconds in which the other
1991), p. 471. ..
..
.. passers-by spent getting up or down the steps represent, for them, a
41 Ibid. (emphasis in original). ..
..
.. present flowing in time that would take them from the past (point A) to the
..
..
..
future (point B), while Lee’s fifteen-minute descent embodies the
..
..
..
‘infinitesimally small’ experiential moments that constitute life itself, a
42 Ibid., pp. 469, 471.
..
... process of ‘the becomingness of being’ flowing as time.42 The latter is, in
..
..
.. Buddhist conception, not time in the conventional sense but temporality as a
..
..
.. ‘coming together of an event’, ‘a durational moment or rest to exhibit itself,
..
43 Ibid., pp. 475–76. ..
.. but it also has the nature of voidness’.43 The two modes of walking in the
..
..
.. city are thus out of synch with each other in this instance, and the irregular
..
..
.. Buddhist temporality becomes a spectacle set against the regularity of the
..
..
..
everyday time of the modern French nation-state at the site of Marseille.
..
..
..
For Tsai, a Buddhist who claims that his artistic form ‘possesses a
..
..
..
spiritual component’ and that the Walker series is ‘an actualisation’ of
... Xuanzang’s pilgrimage, Lee’s slow walking ‘has a direction, but not a
..
..
44 Vagenas, ‘Filmmaker Tsai Ming- ..
.. precise goal. His destination is an indefinite place he may never reach.’44
liang’. ..
..
.. Tsai’s ethos echoes performance practices in Taiwan and Japan that draw
..
45 Sondra Fraleigh, Butoh: ..
.. on Buddhist notions of temporality, most notably butoh, a metamorphic
..
Metamorphic Dance and Global ..
.. form of dance founded in Japan in 1959.45 According to one of its
Alchemy (Urbana, IL: University of ..
Illinois Press, 2010), p. 1.
..
..
founders, Hijikata Tatsumi, butoh cultivates movements of
..
46 Ibid., p. 3. ..
..
transformation and healing in ‘the body that becomes’.46 Hijikata creates
..
.

187 Screen 58:2 Summer 2017  Song Hwee Lim  Walking in the city, slowly
 ..
..
.. his work through what he calls butoh-fu (fu meaning ‘chronicle’),
..
..
.. ‘images in states of becoming and only seldom in states of arrival’, with
..
..
.. the primary means of butoh training involving ‘the streaming or
..
47 Ibid., p. 43. ..
.. morphing of images ever in the process of change’.47 In a similar spirit,
..
..
..
Tsai asserts that he is ‘not a filmmaker who tells stories’ but one ‘who
..
..
..
creates images’. More importantly, he insists that ‘To be able to
..
... appreciate details like the transformation of the light, or the particularity
..
48 Vagenas, ‘Filmmaker Tsai ..
.. of a sound, we need time’.48 In Journey to the West, the most spectacular
Ming-liang’. ..
..
.. images during the fifteen-minute long take are precisely the moments
..
when Lee’s figure is set against the bright sunlight behind him, casting a

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..
..
..
..
.. strong silhouette of electrifying glow that has been described in one
..
49 Kenji Fujishima, Review of ..
.. review as ‘heavenly’.49 Tsai’s long take, like butoh-fu, chronicles
Journey to the West, Slant ..
..
..
infinitesimally small moments of constantly changing light and sound, a
Magazine, 17 April 2014, ..
<http://www.slantmagazine.
..
..
Buddhist temporality of slowness during which a body, as in butoh, not
com/film/review/journey-to-the-
..
... only becomes but is also ‘reduced to nothingness’,50 a nothingness
..
west-2014> accessed 7 April ..
.. which, for Tsai, represents life itself.51
2017. ..
50 Fraleigh, Butoh, p. 46.
..
.. In Taiwan, Tsai’s ethos is shared by the Legend Lin Dance Theatre,
..
51 David Jenkins, ‘“Life is ..
.. whose Chinese name, Wugou (literally ‘no dirt or filth’, meaning
nothingness”: an interview with ..
..
.. ‘purity’), has strong Buddhist connotations. Lin Lee-Chen, the troupe’s
Tsai Ming-liang’, Little White ..
Lies, 7 May 2015, <http://www.
..
.. founder who advocates an aesthetic of ‘emptiness’ and ‘slowness’, has
..
littlewhitelies.co.uk/features/ ..
..
staged only three productions over a twenty-year career.52 Moreover, Lin
articles/tsai-ming-liang-stray- ..
..
..
believes that her dancers’ bodies require three years to build the
dogs-30163> last accessed 28
August 2015.
..
... foundation, five years to temper and ten years to sculpt and fine-tune.53
..
52 Wang Chin-he, ‘Xingzhe paishe ..
.. This ethos is manifested in a recent documentary about Lin and her
..
shi nian, jilu Wugou ji wudaojia .. troupe, incidentally also entitled The Walkers/Xingzhe (Singing Chen,
..
Lin Lizhen’ (‘Ten years to shoot ..
The Walkers, documenting
..
.. 2014), which started as a commission for a thirty-minute short but ended
..
Wougow and dancer Lin Lee- ..
.. up taking ten years to make, resulting in a 150-minute long
..
Chen’), China Times, 12 April ..
.. documentary.54 Tsai’s intermedial staging of slowness, therefore,
2015, <http://www.chinatimes. ..
com/realtimenews/
..
..
participates in a larger reflection in temporality and duration in artistic
..
20150412001030-260405> ac- ..
..
practices: not just the minutes taken to descend flights of steps, but also
cessed 9 April 2017. ..
... the years it would take to finesse a performing body or to complete a
53 Ibid. ..
54 Ibid.
..
.. documentary.
..
..
.. Tsai’s approach to Lee’s performing body, however, is different from
..
..
.. Lin’s. As Michael Lawrence points out in a rare study of Lee’s
..
55 Michael Lawrence, ‘Lee ..
.. performance, Lee’s body is ‘extraordinary in and by its ordinariness’.55 In
Kang-sheng: non-professional ..
..
.. fact it was Lee’s naturally slow rhythm in his movement that, from the
star’, in Mary Farquhar and ..
Yingjin Zhang (eds), Chinese Film
..
..
very beginning of the long collaboration between director and actor,
..
Stars (Abingdon: Routledge, ..
..
impacted on Tsai’s filmmaking process to the extent that ‘Tsai’s
2010), p. 159. ..
..
..
durational aesthetic is determined by Lee’s physical capacities’.56 If
56 Ibid., p. 154 (emphasis in
... Lee’s initial performance of slow walking in the play Only You made
original). ..
..
..
.. Tsai realize that he had been, over the course of their twenty-year
..
..
.. collaboration, ‘unconsciously longing for this moment to arrive’ so he
..
57 Vagenas, ‘Filmmaker Tsai ..
.. could follow Lee’s ‘transformation through ageing’,57 it is Tsai who now
Ming-liang’. ..
..
.. imposes, through the Walker series, an even slower temporality on Lee’s
..
..
..
naturally slow performing body. As the usually reticent Lee commented
..
..
..
on the weight (five kilograms) of the monk’s costume and the need to
..
. soak his feet in water after each performance to relieve the pain, ‘I am the

188 Screen 58:2 Summer 2017  Song Hwee Lim  Walking in the city, slowly
 ..
58 Chang Che-ming, ‘Cai Mingliang ..
.. one who suffers’.58 Indeed Lee, who does not take care of or train his
dai Xuanzang fei Weiyena, Li ..
..
.. body like a dancer does, suffered a minor stroke when they arrived in
Kangsheng shuizhe yan’ (‘Tsai ..
Ming-liang flies to Vienna with
..
.. Brussels to stage a theatre production of Xuanzang/The Monk from Tang
..
The Monk from the Tang Dynasty, ..
.. Dynasty in Spring 2014. Lee insisted on performing, and lay in the centre
Lee Kang-sheng performs by ..
..
..
of an enormous piece of white paper on stage while the artist Kao Jun-
sleeping’), Apple Daily, 22 April
2014, <http://www.appledaily.
..
..
..
honn drew around him.59 Like the instances of characters sleeping in
..
com.tw/realtimenews/article/ ... Tsai’s feature-length films, lying down flat and unmoving is perhaps the
..
new/20140422/383799/> .. ultimate form of performing slowness, even more so than Ohno Kazuo
..
accessed 9 April 2017. ..
59 ‘Cai Ming-liang xie yingdi Li
..
.. (the other founder of butoh), who continued to dance from his bed and
..
chair when he was over a hundred years old.60

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Kangsheng yishujie yanchu ..
..
Xuanzang’ (‘Tsai Ming-liang takes ..
..
.. As we can see, Journey to the West not only raises broader questions
best actor Lee Kang-sheng to ..
perform The Monk from the Tang
..
.. about the labour of performance and the ethics of spectatorship, it also
..
Dynasty in arts festival’), ..
..
resonates with the practice of long-duration performance art. Indeed,
Joymobee, 16 May 2014, ..
..
..
Xuanzang’s seventeen-year journey from China to India can be perceived
<http://www.joymobee.com/ ..
newsdetail.aspx?key ... as a precursor of long-duration performance art that is based on the trope
..
1089&year¼2014> accessed 9 ..
.. of walking. Prominent examples include The Great Wall Walk (also
..
April 2017. .. known as The Lovers) by Marina Abramovic and her then-partner Ulay,
..
60 On sleeping characters in Tsai’s ..
films, see Lim, Tsai Ming-liang
..
.. who each walked 2500 kilometres from opposite ends of the Great Wall
..
and a Cinema of Slowness, ..
.. of China to meet in the middle, arriving in June 1988 after ninety days of
..
pp. 104–10. On Ohno, see ..
.. walking;61 He Yunchang, who carried a rock counter-clockwise around
Fraleigh, Butoh, p. 3. ..
61 Marina Abramovic, Audio guide
..
..
Britain until returning it to the town of Boulmer, from where he first took
..
on The Great Wall Walk, MoMA ..
..
it, more than six months later;62 and Greg Hindy’s one-year performance,
Multimedia, <http://www. ..
... entitled Walking, Silence, which saw him walk 8700 miles from New
moma.org/explore/multimedia/ ..
audios/190/1986> accessed 9
..
.. Hampshire to California in silence.
..
April 2017. ..
.. These long-duration performance art pieces, however, differ from
..
62 Rachel Wolff, ‘Chinese artist He .. Tsai’s Journey to the West in two important regards. Firstly, whatever
..
Yunchang paints despite sore ..
feet’, Vulture, 13 November 2007,
..
.. drove these artists to perform such long-distance walking in the first
..
<http://www.vulture.com/2007/ ..
.. instance, the act of walking itself appears to be only the conceptual
11/chinese_artist_he_yunchang_ ..
..
..
premise or even the byproduct of the project, with the ‘work’ itself
pai.html> accessed 9 April 2017. ..
..
..
belatedly taking another form, after the walking ‘event’. Despite the
..
... physical effort and extended duration of the walks, the labour of
..
..
.. performance is often hidden from the audience and divorced from its
..
..
.. exhibition. The notion of labour becomes, like conceptual art, an idea
..
..
.. rather than being performative, despite an enactment that took place in an
..
..
.. earlier time and in another place. In Journey to the West, however, the
..
..
.. labour of performance was staged in Marseille for its citizens and
..
..
..
captured in long takes for the consumption of the film’s offscreen
..
..
..
audience. As such, we can begin to formulate a relationship between the
..
..
..
ethics of spectatorship and the labour of performance, though we have to
... distinguish between the two kinds of audiences (onsite and offscreen)
..
..
..
.. while paying attention to the materiality of the shooting location
..
..
.. (Marseille) as well as of the circumstances of the film’s production and
..
..
.. consumption.
..
..
.. Secondly, whereas Lee’s performance of slow walking has been
..
..
..
staged before various audiences in Marseille and reaches different kinds
..
..
..
of audiences when the film is released on multiple platforms, in the case
..
. of the long-duration performance pieces no audience (in the conventional

189 Screen 58:2 Summer 2017  Song Hwee Lim  Walking in the city, slowly
 ..
..
.. sense) is present during the staging. These pieces only find an audience
..
..
.. when they are presented later in different forms: a sixty-five-minute
..
..
.. documentary entitled The Great Wall: Lovers at the Brink (Murray
..
..
.. Grigor, 1989) for Abramovic, an exhibition of photographs and paintings
..
..
..
by He in New York in 2007, and, in Hindy’s case, ‘1800 large-format
..
..
..
film photographs currently stored in a safety deposit box at a bank in his
63 Karina Kimos, ‘Walking, Silence
..
... hometown’.63 Unlike Tsai’s onscreen audiences in Marseille, any
..
(2013–2014), Greg Hindy’, MAI- .. passers-by the long-duration performance artists might have encountered
..
Hudson, <http://www.mai- ..
hudson.org/content/2014/7/9/
..
.. en route may or may not have realized the performative nature of the
..
walks; they are, at best, an inadvertent audience unaware of their own

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walking-silence-2013-2014> ..
..
accessed 9 April 2017. ..
..
.. status. On the contrary, the audiences in Marseille not only witness Lee’s
..
..
.. performance but are also, in many instances, conscious of their own
..
..
..
status as audiences due to the presence of the camera, at which some of
..
..
..
them are caught glimpsing. They are more akin to those who appeared in
..
... the actuality films of early cinema – workers leaving a factory in the
..
..
.. films of the Lumière brothers, for example – unwitting ‘actors’ as much
..
..
.. as spectators of the profilmic event. More than a hundred years since the
..
..
.. birth of cinema, however, the passers-by/audiences/actors of Marseille
..
..
.. are less astonished at the camera’s capacity to ‘perfectly represent the
..
64 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence ..
.. contingent, to provide the pure record of time’,64 and more intrigued by
of Cinematic Time: Modernity, ..
..
..
Lee’s performance of corporeal slowness in a typically fast-paced
Contingency, the Archive ..
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard
..
..
cityscape.
..
University Press, 2002), p. 22 ... Marseille is, of course, one of the most culturally diverse cities in
..
(emphasis in original). ..
.. France, its population having a substantial proportion of migrants who
..
..
.. have arrived over the centuries, including, in the interwar and postwar
..
..
.. periods, those from the (former) French colonies in north and sub-
..
..
.. Saharan Africa. This postcoloniality, with its hallmark traits of hybridity,
..
..
.. diversity and difference, is visibly marked in Journey to the West in the
..
..
..
long take discussed above, as well as in the penultimate shot of the film,
..
..
..
set on a busy street corner. Hence, if Marseille is itself distinguished by
..
... its ethnic difference within the body politic of the modern nation-state of
..
..
.. France, this difference is upstaged here by the appearance of Lee, a
..
..
.. pilgrim from the East who has journeyed to the West, in its cityscape.
..
..
.. This display of displaced difference is most evident in the
..
..
.. disproportionate attention paid to Lee in the penultimate shot of the film,
..
..
.. in comparison to Lavant, who mimics Lee every infinitesimal step of the
..
..
..
way, about four to five usual strides behind. The camera faces a cafe
..
..
..
where a small group of men of African origin sit around three tables on
..
..
..
the pavement. During the eleven-minute static long take, numerous
... pedestrians enter and exit the frame, most of whom are simply going
..
..
..
.. about their business on a bright summer’s day – carrying shopping bags,
..
..
.. pushing prams, delivering goods on trolleys, riding bicycles or
..
..
.. motorcycles – casting no more than a glance at Lee and hardly breaking
..
..
.. their stride. Lee stands out visually in terms of his foreignness, his
..
..
..
identity as a monk, and the bright scarlet robe he is wearing; Lavant,
..
..
..
despite his status as a French film actor, dissolves into the crowd with
..
. his somewhat ordinary appearance, dressed in blue denim jacket, black

190 Screen 58:2 Summer 2017  Song Hwee Lim  Walking in the city, slowly
 ..
65 It is perhaps worth noting that ..
.. T-shirt, black jeans and black shoes, his hair slightly dishevelled.65 The
Lavant also has a chameleon-like ..
..
.. attention paid to Lee is most salient when he has exited the frame but
appearance, playing eleven ..
characters not long before in
..
.. Lavant still remains visible: for almost a minute and a half, the eyeline of
..
Leos Carax’s Holy Motors (2012). ..
.. most of the observers is directed towards the offscreen Lee, while Lavant
..
..
..
receives scant notice throughout.
..
..
..
Unlike Xuanzang, whose pilgrimage was a spiritual pursuit, Lee’s
..
... appearance in Marseille is rooted in the materiality of a negotiation about
..
..
.. conditions of production and exhibition in relation to Tsai’s career. A
..
..
.. regular winner at European film festivals for his feature films, Tsai
..
appears to have little difficulty in securing funding sources and

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..
..
..
..
.. exhibition sites for his new venture into expanded cinema. Indeed, the
..
..
.. International Film Festival Marseille (FID) struck a deal to sponsor
..
..
..
Tsai’s production of Journey to the West in exchange for showcasing No
66 Tsai Ming-liang, ‘It’s Got to be
..
..
..
Form in its 2012 festival.66 Jean-Pierre Rehm, who became FID’s artistic
Slow’, plenary speech at the ..
... director in 2002, has a longstanding interest in Tsai’s work, contributing
annual meeting of the ..
Consortium of Humanities
..
.. an article to the first English-language book on Tsai and inviting him to
..
Centers and Institutes, The ..
.. present his short film, Yu shen duihua/A Conversation with God, for
..
Chinese University of Hong Kong, ..
.. competition in the year he assumed the FID post.67 Notwithstanding
6 June 2014. ..
67 For Rehm’s article, see ‘Bringing
..
.. Tsai’s declaration of retirement from feature filmmaking at Venice in
..
in the Rain’, in Jean-Pierre Rehm, ..
.. 2013, European interests in Tsai’s multimedia career seem only to have
Olivier Joyard and Danièle ..
..
..
gathered pace since. In spring 2014 alone, Tsai was honoured with an
Rivière, Tsai Ming-liang (Paris: ..
Dis Voir, 1999), pp. 9–40; on
..
..
achievement award at the Festival du Film Asiatique de Deauville in
..
Rehm’s FID role, see Vagenas, ... Normandy; a three-week retrospective of all his film and television work
..
‘Filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang’. .. at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris; a retrospective of his films, an
..
..
..
.. installation of the Walker series, and a theatre production of Xuanzang/
..
..
.. The Monk from Tang Dynasty, starring Lee, at the Kunsten Festival of
..
..
.. Arts in Brussels; and a similar programme subsequently at the Wiener
..
68 ‘Europe celebrates Tsai Ming- ..
.. Festwochen in Vienna.68
liang’s film legacy’, Ministry of ..
..
..
Tsai’s insertion of the figure of a Buddhist monk into the postcolonial
Culture. Republic of China ..
(Taiwan), 13 March 2013,
..
..
space of Marseille can easily be read as a form of self-orientalism that
..
<https://english.moc.gov.tw/ ... parades eastern mysticism for the consumption of the West (however
..
article/index.php?sn¼1831> ..
.. hybrid the ‘western’ space has become in this case). In fact this line of
accessed 9 April 2017. ..
69 For a forceful refutation of such
..
.. reading could be applied to most of Tsai’s career, and that of other ‘third-
..
kinds of reading, see Rey Chow, ..
.. world’ artists who have found favourable reception in the western world,
Primitive Passions: Visuality, ..
..
.. and is a somewhat predictable rhetoric that has already been challenged
Sexuality, Ethnography, and ..
Contemporary Chinese Cinema
..
.. and nuanced.69 A more productive approach might be to examine the
..
(New York, NY: Columbia ..
..
conditions of production and consumption that have made Tsai’s staging
University Press, 1995). ..
..
..
of slow walking in the city possible, wherever the site. For Tsai, the
70 Vagenas, ‘Filmmaker Tsai ..
Ming-liang’.
..
..
bottom line for the production of his work is this: ‘I need money. I need
71 Yu Chang-min, ‘Kafei shiguang: ...
.. freedom and I need Lee Kang-sheng.’70 A standout example is No Form,
..
Cai Mingliang chuangzuo mantan .. the first in the Walker series, which started life as a product
..
(‘Café Lumiere: On Tsai Ming- ..
liang’s creative work’), Fun
..
.. advertisement for a mobile phone company. The fact that the company
..
Screen, no. 348, 9 March 2012, ..
.. simply wanted to capitalize on his brand name did not seem to bother
<http://www.funscreen.com.tw/ ..
..
.. Tsai, who confessed to not even knowing the name of the company or
headline.asp?H_No¼397> ac- ..
cessed 9 April 2017.
..
..
what the mobile phone looked like.71 At the same time, Tsai proffered a
..
..
..
critique of mercantilism through the use of an old Cantonese song to
..
. close Walker. Entitled Yishui ge tianya/A Stream Divides the Land, the

191 Screen 58:2 Summer 2017  Song Hwee Lim  Walking in the city, slowly
 ..
..
.. version used in Tsai’s film is a rendition by Hong Kong singer Sam Hui,
..
..
.. the lyrics of which have been changed from being about romantic love to
..
..
.. how one’s status can be transformed with money. Indeed Walker can be
..
..
.. seen as a reflection on poverty and capitalism, as Lee’s figure inches past
..
..
..
walls of advertisements for properties and sites of consumerism, carrying
..
..
..
in one hand a plastic bag with a drink in it and in another hand a bun, and
..
... biting into the bun at the end of the film when Hui sings that ‘even bread
..
..
.. costs a few pennies a piece’.
..
..
.. Money, as it happens, returns us to the question of the ethics of
..
spectatorship precisely because, under the logic of capitalism, ‘there can

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..
..
..
..
.. be no greater luxury than the luxury of time or, rather, the crime of
..
72 Lim, Tsai Ming-liang and a ..
.. boredom’.72 While the onsite audiences in Marseille could choose to go
Cinema of Slowness, p. 30. ..
..
..
about their business, passing Lee by or stopping for a momentary look of
..
..
..
wonderment, the offscreen audiences of Journey to the West are expected
..
... to match Lee’s labour of performance with an equally long labour of
..
..
.. spectatorship, leading to a common complaint about boredom. In an
..
..
.. insightful article on slow cinema, Schoonover suggests that art cinema
..
..
.. turns the spectator’s boredom into ‘a kind of special work’ to the extent
..
..
.. that the debate about film spectatorship has been restaged as an
..
73 Schoonover, ‘Wastrels of time’, ..
.. ‘opposition of time wasted versus time labored’.73 Building on
pp. 70, 67. ..
..
..
Schoonover’s argument to postulate a paradoxical notion of waste within
..
..
..
capitalist modernity that sees it as both material necessity and temporal
..
... luxury, I have argued elsewhere that a cinema of slowness ‘invites us to
..
..
.. reconsider the value of waste even as this notion of waste challenges
..
74 Lim, Tsai Ming-liang and a ..
.. conventional ideas about utility, productivity, and labor’.74 In the case of
Cinema of Slowness, p. 30. ..
..
.. the Walker series, Lee’s slow walking not only stages the labour of
..
..
.. performance and enforces the labour of spectatorship, it also
..
..
.. fundamentally interrogates the nature of cinema and challenges a notion
..
..
..
of temporal waste premised upon assumptions of what cinema should be
..
..
..
(rather than could be). The trope of slow walking in the city, to return to
..
... Tsai’s statement cited earlier, upstages the notion of cinema as
..
..
.. storytelling with that of cinema as image – ‘time-image’, as Deleuze
..
75 Deleuze, Cinema 2: The ..
.. would put it.75 It is the luxury of time, or the lack thereof, that is at issue
Time-Image. ..
..
.. in the practices of slow cinema and long-duration art.
..
..
.. The demand for more attentive modes of spectatorship that pay due
..
..
.. respect to the labour of performance (or the duration of artistic creation)
..
76 Trent Morse, ‘Slow down, you ..
..
has appeared across many art forms. Started in 2009, the ‘Slow Art Day’
look too fast’, ARTnews, 1 April ..
..
..
event aims to change spectatorial behaviour by asking its participants to
2011, <http://www.artnews. ..
com/2011/04/01/slow-down-you-
..
..
examine objects in museums and galleries for five to ten minutes each (in
look-too-fast/> accessed 9 April ... contradistinction to the average of seventeen seconds that a study showed
..
..
2017. ..
.. museumgoers spent looking at an individual painting) before convening
77 Grant Johnson, ‘“They need ..
time”: the Marina Abramovic
..
.. to discuss their impressions over lunch.76 Abramovic is in the process of
..
interview’, Performa Magazine, ..
.. setting up an institute devoted solely to the staging of long-duration art,
20 December 2012, <http:// ..
..
.. which would require audiences to deposit their electronic devices,
performa-arts.org/magazine/ ..
entry/they-need-time-the-marina-
..
..
cameras and watches prior to admission, and to sign a contract agreeing
..
abramovic-interview> accessed ..
..
to spend at least six hours in the space.77 Reflecting on her 2010
9 April 2017. ..
. performance of The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in

192 Screen 58:2 Summer 2017  Song Hwee Lim  Walking in the city, slowly
 ..
..
.. New York, in which she engaged in mutual gaze with more than 1000
..
..
.. strangers for 716 hours over the course of three months, Abramovic
..
..
.. claimed that ‘the public needs some kind of experience of getting to their
..
78 Ibid. ..
.. own center and changing consciousness, for all that, they need time’.78
..
..
..
Yet the ethics of spectatorship is also tied to space. Tsai’s move from
..
..
..
making feature-length films typically screened in the black box of
..
... theatres to expanded cinema exhibited in the white cube of galleries and
..
..
.. museums highlights not just the institutional boundaries and varying
..
..
.. practices embedded in intermedial visuality but also the different modes
..
of and spaces for experiencing temporality. Proponents of expanded

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..
..
..
..
.. cinema regard the conventional form of spectatorship in theatre as ‘a
..
79 Rees, ‘Expanded cinema’, p. 13. ..
.. commercialised regime of passive consumption and entertainment’,79 but
..
..
..
the reception aesthetics of video art installation is commonly regarded as
80 Anne Ring Peterson, ‘Attention
..
..
..
marked by a state of distraction.80 While Tsai’s announcement of
and distraction: on the aesthetic ..
... retirement from feature-length filmmaking can be seen as a rejection
experience of video installation ..
art’, Journal of the International
..
.. of the commercialization of cinema, his wish for a more attentive mode
..
Association of Research ..
.. of spectatorship via a venture into expanded cinema practices may
Institutes in the History of Art, ..
..
.. actually run counter to the usual logic of reception in these exhibition
no. 0009 (2010), <http://www. ..
riha-journal.org/articles/2010/
..
.. spaces.
..
ring-petersen-attention-and- ..
.. The mismatch between an ethics of spectatorship and modes of
distraction> accessed 9 April ..
..
..
exhibition – between visuality and mediality – can only be aggravated in
2017. ..
81 The other three directors involved
..
..
the virtual world of the web. Walker, the second instalment of the series,
..
in the 2012 project were Ann Hui ... was commissioned as part of the ‘Beautiful 2012’ project by the Hong
..
(Hong Kong), Gu Changwei (PRC) ..
.. Kong International Film Festival Society and Youku (China’s leading
and Kim Tae-yong (South Korea). ..
Tsai’s No No Sleep is part of the
..
.. online video network), whose aim was to produce films suitable for
..
‘Beautiful 2015’ project, which ..
.. viewing on the web as well as for theatrical release and film festival
..
also includes films by Huang ..
.. screening.81 When Walker premiered on Youku it garnered more than a
Jianxin (PRC), Mohsen ..
Makhmalbaf (Iran) and Yim Ho
..
.. thousand comments within an hour and over ten thousand in a day,
..
(Hong Kong). ..
.. setting a new record for the number of comments for Youku-
..
82 ‘Cai Mingliang shoubu ..
.. commissioned short films (or micro-films, weidianying, in Chinese).82 In
weidianying Xingzhe shouying, ..
kaowen kuai rensheng yin ...
..
the end there were more than four million clicks to access the film, with
..
zhengyi’ (‘Premiere of Tsai Ming- ..
..
many viewers complaining about its ‘unbearable’ slowness and
liang’s micro-film, Walker, stirs ..
controversy through its
..
..
incomprehensibility; some even suggested that someone should push Lee
questioning of fast life’), Xinhua
..
..
..
or hit him on the head to make him react.83 Moreover, some netizens
..
yule (Xinhua Entertainment ..
..
produced compressed versions of Tsai’s film, uploading three-minute
News), 28 April 2012, <http:// ..
ent.news.cn/2012-04/28/c_
..
..
and six-minute versions online, to which other netizens let out a sigh of
123054983.htm> accessed 9
..
..
..
relief that they had now finally finished watching the film.84 Journey to
April 2017. ..
..
..
the West met with a similar fate after Arte, the French television
83 Vagenas, ‘Filmmaker Tsai Ming- ..
liang’. .. company, made the film available online for seven days following its
...
84 ‘Cai Mingliang shoubu ..
.. premiere in a Parisian cinema and public screening on television:
weidianying Xingzhe shouying’. ..
..
.. apparently a ‘fan’ from the People’s Republic of China compressed the
85 Hsu Ming-han and Ella Raidel, ‘Qu ..
juchang Xiyou, lai meishuguan
..
.. fifty-six-minute film into one minute and added a score before uploading
..
Jiaoyou’ (‘Go to the theatre to ..
.. it online.85
Journey to the West, come to the ..
..
..
Is viewing a highly compressed version of Walker or Journey to the
art gallery for Stray Dogs’), Dianying ..
xinshang (Film Appreciation
..
..
West the same as having ‘watched’ Tsai’s films? What is now referred to
..
Journal), no. 159 (2014), p. 70. ..
..
as ‘secondary creation’ (also known as kuso in Japanese or egao in
.

193 Screen 58:2 Summer 2017  Song Hwee Lim  Walking in the city, slowly
 ..
..
.. Chinese) has become common practice on the web, with original
..
..
.. footages (news items, films, documentaries, home videos) re-edited for
..
..
.. political satire or pure pleasure, and other visual materials overlayed with
..
..
.. soundtracks to render new meanings. The compression of Tsai’s slow
..
..
..
walking films into much shorter and faster ones, however, has gone
..
..
..
beyond the question of ‘who is authorized to quantify, substantiate, or
86 Schoonover, ‘Wastrels of time’,
..
... measure the labour of reception’.86 Despite the shorter duration of the
..
p. 67. .. films, the longer duration of the single takes – thanks to digital
..
..
..
.. technology – coupled with walking as the only plot element in the
..
Walker series can only demand more patience on the part of the

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..
..
..
..
.. spectator, all the more challenging on platforms on which patience is
..
..
.. often in short supply. According to Tsai, Walker was made ‘as a
..
..
..
conscious act of rebellion against the way cinema is perceived in today’s
87 Vagenas, ‘Filmmaker
..
..
..
society’.87 Yet if distraction is a precondition of the ‘non-place’ of
Tsai Ming-liang’. ..
... interactive screens, from mobile phones and tablets to laptops and
..
88 On ‘non-places’, see Marc Augé, ..
.. desktops,88 the release of the Walker series online is set on a collision
Non-places: Introduction to an ..
..
.. course with impatient netizens whose viewing habits, Tsai claims, he
Anthropology of Supermodernity, ..
trans. John Howe (London: Verso,
..
.. wants to ‘deconstruct’.89
..
1995). ..
.. Compressing Tsai’s films not only creates a second-order authorship
89 Sing, Rujing, chujing, p. 236. ..
..
.. but also betrays a profound lack in the ethics of spectatorship to the
..
..
..
extent that the labour of performance cannot be rewarded with the labour
..
..
..
of spectatorship because the latter is deemed to be too much work, too
..
... boring and too demanding. This lack in the ethics of spectatorship is, in
..
..
.. fact, a lack in work ethics. Drawing on Jacques Rancière, I have argued
..
..
.. in Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness that a slow cinema is
..
..
.. ‘much more than a temporal aesthetics that appeals to a certain class of
..
90 Lim, Tsai Ming-liang and a ..
.. audience with a particular taste for art cinema’.90 Rather, by formulating
Cinema of Slowness, pp. 32–33. ..
..
.. a different relationship between film images and their spectators, this
..
..
..
cinema ‘comprises aesthetic acts that promote new modes of temporal
..
..
..
experience, new ways of seeing, and new subjectivities that are
91 Ibid., p. 33.
..
... politically committed to an ethos of slowness’.91 Koepnick similarly cites
..
..
.. Rancière to propose that Tom Tykwer’s films ‘open up new passages
..
92 Cited in Koepnick, On Slowness, ..
.. towards new forms of political subjectivation’.92
p. 187. ..
..
.. This new form of political subjectivity has found expression in recent
..
..
.. social movements such as the Slow Food movement, which appropriately
..
93 For an overview of the slow ..
.. adopts a snail as its logo.93 Like the practice of walking in the city, such
movement, see Carl Honoré, In ..
..
..
movements are rooted in the everyday, which, as Lefebvre and Régulier
Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide ..
Movement Is Challenging the
..
..
remind us, is ‘simultaneously the site of, the theatre for, and what is at
..
Cult of Speed (London: Orion, ..
..
stake in a conflict between great indestructible rhythms and the processes
2004). ... imposed by the socio-economic organisation of production,
..
..
94 Lefebvre and Régulier, ‘The ..
.. consumption, circulation and habitat’.94 In the spirit of the French New
Rhythmanalytical Project’, p. 73. ..
..
.. Wave ideal ‘to render the gap between the film and urban life as
95 Tweedie, The Age of New ..
Waves, p. 96.
..
.. indistinct as possible’,95 Tsai’s Walker series presents what can be called
..
96 Jennie Middleton, ‘Walking in ..
.. ‘walking as a method’ for reflecting upon the politics of temporality in
..
the city: the geographies of ..
..
the contemporary city.96 In what can be perceived as a rejection of
everyday pedestrian practices’, ..
Geography Compass, vol. 5, no. 2
..
..
technological advances to record physical movement in ever greater
..
(2011), p. 100. . precision (such as the slow-motion photography discussed by Koepnick),

194 Screen 58:2 Summer 2017  Song Hwee Lim  Walking in the city, slowly
 ..
..
.. Tsai favours, instead, the organicity of the human body to perform
..
..
.. almost imperceptible movement whilst exploiting digitality’s potential to
..
..
.. record the spectacle in extended duration.
..
..
.. The Walker series can be regarded as a form of late cinema in Tsai’s
..
..
..
career, as its production coincided with Tsai’s decision to retire from
..
..
..
feature-length filmmaking, though it also paradoxically returns to the
..
... very beginning of the medium in its resemblance to the genre of actuality
..
..
.. film. The main distinction between Tsai’s late cinema and film history’s
..
..
.. early cinema, however, lies in the object of spectacles staged. If Eadward
..
Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey had to find ways of capturing

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..
..
..
..
.. movement because it was too quick for the naked eye, Tsai reconfigures
..
..
.. the relationship between movement and temporality by rendering
..
..
..
movement visible through physical slow motion. Whereas at the turn of
..
..
..
the twentieth century the cinema itself was an attraction and what
97 Tom Gunning, ‘The cinema of
..
... audiences went to see was ‘machines demonstrated’,97 Tsai shifts the
..
attraction: early film, its ..
.. dimension of temporality from the technical properties of the medium to
spectator and the avant-garde’, ..
Wide Angle, vol. 8, nos 3/4
..
.. the technology of the body. In other words, temporality in the Walker
..
(1986), p. 66. ..
.. series is not only expressed by the ability of the cinematic apparatus to
..
..
.. capture duration (as in early cinema) but also embodied in the capacity of
..
..
.. the human body to perform slowness.
..
..
..
By placing his focus on corporeality, exhibiting slow motion in literal
..
..
..
instead of technical terms, Tsai not only betrays his long-held resistance
..
... towards the use of digital technology in his feature-length filmmaking
..
..
.. (used for the first time in Stray Dogs) but, more importantly, foregrounds
..
..
.. the labour of performance as a premise for the ethics of spectatorship,
..
..
.. demanding as it does a corresponding labour of seeing. Film can be
..
..
.. understood, to borrow Guy Debord’s terms, as ‘“fully equipped” blocks
..
..
.. of time’ sold under capitalism, a ‘complete [temporal] commodity
..
98 Guy Debord, The Society of the ..
..
combining a variety of other commodities’.98 As a form of leisure
Spectacle, trans. Donald ..
..
..
activity, film is an example of ‘consumable pseudo-cyclical time’, the
Nicholson-Smith (New York, NY:
Zone, 1995), p. 111.
..
... ‘time of the spectacle’ and the ‘image of the consumption of time’.99 If
..
99 Ibid., p. 112. ..
.. the labour of spectatorship is aimed at challenging the passivity of
..
..
.. watching films, the labour of performance can be regarded as an attempt
..
..
.. to undermine the passivity of making films, with its over-reliance on
..
..
.. machines to generate spectacles. By staging spectacles of the labour of
..
..
.. performance, Tsai reformulates walking in the city as embodied
..
..
..
slowness, reorients our attention from spatiality to temporality, and
..
..
..
dislodges the centrality of the machine in favour of the human body.
..
..
..
Slow cinema can, therefore, invite the audience to participate in a
... different mode of production and consumption that values and valorizes
..
..
..
.. time for its own sake rather than time as a commodity. According to
..
..
.. Debord, ‘Of the many sagas in which we take part, with or without
..
..
.. interest, the sole thrilling direction remains the fragmentary search for a
..
100 Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a ..
.. new way of life’.100 The Walker series represents Tsai’s search for a new
critique of urban geography’, in ..
..
..
way of making films, fragmented as it is in its conditions of production,
Tom McDonough (ed.), The ..
Situationists and the City
..
..
consumption, exhibition and reception. Walking in the city, as the recent
..
(London: Verso, 2009), p. 59. . Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong has demonstrated, can be a

195 Screen 58:2 Summer 2017  Song Hwee Lim  Walking in the city, slowly
 ..
..
.. profoundly political act. Following the police’s clearing of the obstacles
..
..
.. put up by protestors in downtown Kowloon to allow traffic to pass
..
..
.. through, many citizens returned to the site to stage what was, in effect,
..
..
.. performance art, by deliberately dropping then picking up coins on
..
..
..
pedestrian crossings in order to re-stop traffic. Under the pretext of
..
..
..
‘shopping’, these citizens are reclaiming their right to protest at a site
..
... through purposive slow walking, a creative piece of performance art
..
..
.. enacted at a time of political struggle. If the Paris Commune in the
..
..
.. nineteenth century pointed to the emergence of ‘festival-spaces where
..
individuals and social classes could become conscious of themselves for

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..
..
..
101 Tom McDonough, ‘Introduction’, ..
.. the first time as subjects, or rather, as fully human’,101 Tsai’s spectacular
in McDonough (ed.), The ..
..
.. temporal practices similarly urge us to become human again by walking
Situationists and the City, p. 29. ..
..
..
very slowly in the city.
..
..
..
..
... I am grateful to the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong for a grant to visit
..
.. Tsai Ming-liang’s exhibition at the Museum of National Taipei University of Education in October 2014. For their useful feed-
..
.. back and suggestions, I thank participants of the workshop on ‘Circular and Vectorial Trends in Cultural Dynamics’ at Freie
..
..
.. Universit€at Berlin in July 2014, and the audience at my talk at National Chiao Tung University in December 2014. Tiago de
..
.. Luca and Sing Song-yong kindly commented on an earlier version of this essay. Finally, thanks to Tsai Ming-liang and his assis-
..
.. tant Claude Wang for providing access to films in the Walker series.
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
..
..
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196 Screen 58:2 Summer 2017  Song Hwee Lim  Walking in the city, slowly