Breathing together with Tsai Ming-Liang’s Rizi (Days)

Water in a glass reacting delicately to the rain outside. Is the rain shaking the table it’s on? Is the building also shaking then? The image has a gentle light blue colour to it. In the centre of the frame, Kang is looking towards the left of the camera with sad eyes. A glass façade, perhaps attached to the ceiling, reflects the tree branches dancing to the wind. The sound of the incessant rain, currently off-screen. There’s also a reflection of nature on the lower part of the frame, perhaps from a glass connected to the upper one? An intriguing “ocular riddle”...(1) But does it even matter?

 

On the program notes of his play The Monk from the Tang Dynasty, Tsai Ming-Liang writes “...I moved to a house up in the mountains. I would wake up naturally in the morning and look at the view outside my window – the clouds drifting slowly by, the interplay of light and shadow, the trees swaying in the breeze, and occasionally a misty rain would cover the entire mountain range. I would gaze at the scenery and be lost in thought for a long time.”(2) And in an interview: “In the mountains, you feel time. In the mountains, you feel time. Time is slowly fleeting. Wind blows and cloud moves. You can see time.”(3)

 

The shot continues without interruption, allowing us to internalise the passage of time. Kang is breathing, his chest going up and down. Then gradually, the storm begins to turn violent. Sounds of thunders. The branches of the tree start shaking violently. The water in the glass is agitating.

 

What’s he thinking? He seems lonely. He seems not only sad but also depressed. Something fragile deep down has been shattered. He’s suffering, but certainly not fighting it. Perhaps trying to come to an acceptance? How much of this is me projecting onto him? Impossible to know, except that we are certainly looking at somebody’s anguish head-on. Acknowledging the suffering already begins to have a therapeutic effect.(4)

 

As Tiago De Luca writes in his 2011 article Sensory everyday: Space, materiality and the body in the films of Tsai Ming-liang (which we’ll come back to very often), “...solitary characters are constantly depicted in their homes and delimited by windows, doors, mirrors and glasses, a frame-within-frame device that immediately calls to mind the handling of domestic spaces as effected by Douglas Sirk’s 1950s glossy melodramas.”(5) Rizi studies expanded performances of malaise, stretched compassionately and melodramatically over lengths of time.

 

But the long duration of the unblinking shots, averaging a hundred and sixty-five seconds in Rizi, also stimulates the awareness of our own position as spectators. We observe the movie and ourselves simultaneously,(6) which sometimes results in a feeling of emptiness so intense that I feel the need to breathe deeply. This feeling might be partly inspired by the way the persistent thusness of Rizi’s meditative images continuously shed whatever meaning or expectations we might project onto them.(7) While our minds dance with the film’s rhythms, the metaphors that occur to us dissipate like the bubble when Kang is lying underwater. Susan Sontag defines “interpretation” as the delusive ability to replicate a work’s essence on our minds, and she talks about “this liberating anti-symbolic quality” that some artworks have. “Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there”, she writes, before adding: “What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”(8) A gentle light blue is a gentle light blue is a gentle light blue, as Gertrude Stein might have said.(9)

 

Just like Kang is a “drifter”, as the film’s synopsis calls him, Rizi also drifts restlessly, continually bringing us back to the here-and-now, as one comes back to the breathing in meditation, engaging us with the immediate experience of its expressive images. Soothing, gentle colours in the beginning, or the mundane shaking of the bushes in the wind, or the elusive fluctuations of the water that deny to the reflection of the window a seamlessly geometric shape, slightly blurring Kang’s body.

 

Tsai argues that contemplation might inspire compassion: “...if you look at the moon really well, each time you have very different sensations. Her sight makes us more sensitive, more tender. Maybe that’s the solution to the world’s problems. In a way, this is what my films can’t achieve. The sight of the moon makes us more tender, more sensitive and able to feel other people’s sorrow.”(10) Which brings us to Anong. While Kang is always in the act of contemplation, Anong is in the act of caring, but just as lonely. The care with which he lights the ritual candles while flexing his right foot by stepping on the left one. The care with which he methodically washes the vivid green lettuce. The care with which he lights the fire, and then cooks. The care with which he eats the sticky rice.(11) Anong is so immersed in tactile interaction with concrete things that the geometrical shape of his equilaterally triangular earring seems to form an irreconcilable counterpoint.

 

Tsai says that he “felt compelled to fly over and film” Anong, whom he describes as “a Laotian worker in Bangkok” (so also a drifter, in some sense), after he saw him (“via video chat”), “cooking his hometown foods in his rather shabby room.”(12) The poem Tsai cites in his 2015 interview with Nick Pinkerton, Tidy by Chan Zhi (懺之->收拾), is worth quoting in its entirety:

 

『我們真的應該好好收拾一下屋子 We should tidy up around the house

即使這只是租賃的一間普通房舍 Although it’s a simple rental house

即使我們不久便要離開 Although we will leave it very soon

我們之所以努力的存在 We struggle thus to exist in the world

是因為我們需要並渴望美好的生活 Because we yearn for a more beautiful life

美好的生活 In this beautiful life

最基礎的一點便是一目了然 The most essential aspects present themselves in plain view

⋯⋯

房子就是我們身體的一部分 A house is part of our body

乃至更廣闊的山林、大地 By extension, a part of the forest, of the earth

房子潔淨一些 Cleaner house

心便潔淨一些 Cleaner heart

房子空曠一些 Emptier house

心便空曠一些 Emptier heart

直至虛空為舍（注：即房舍） Until emptiness can be home

大地結廬（注：多指簡樸房屋） This world is our dwelling

⋯⋯

如果你已經一無所有 If you lack everything

貧窮到只有一顆心 You still possess a pure heart

那麼請你不必吝惜 So please do not be greedy

盡情的光明 Enjoy the lightness and ethereality

只有無所住的人 Only a homeless person

是不必收拾什麼的』 Has nothing to clean up (13)

 

So in this city lodging without furniture, Anong calmly prepares food, which we watch for nearly seventeen minutes in three separate shots, the shortest of them lasting more than three minutes. His living space is full of gentle light blues and lavenders while the plastic tools and the lettuce have glossy videocolors. According to Rizi’s cinematographer Chang Jhong-Yuan who was kind enough to answer some of my questions, this saturation was partly obtained thanks to the use of a polarising filter in this specific scene.(14)

 

As often with Tsai, we have wide-angle, deep-focus takes, with the objects in the foreground and the perpendiculars heightening the sense of three-dimensionality.(15) It’s worth quoting De Luca at length:

 

“Through hyperbolization of perspective, camera fixity and temporal elongation, [Tsai’s] work programmatically reminds the viewer of its constructedness: it gives the apparatus its material weight. The pronounced symmetry and linear perspective of its visual compositions stand out for its meticulous, geometric, indeed artificial quality. The unwavering stare of its fixed camera destabilizes the representational dimension of the image, calling attention instead to the film medium itself and the materiality of the profilmic event. Unlike the cinema that Baudry dissects, in which the ‘eye ... is no longer fettered by a body’, here the eye is obstinately fettered by a body, that of the actual camera, which, endowed with a steady, solid immobility, enhances the sheer thereness of minimalist, sometimes empty, domestic spaces.”(16)

 

This “solid immobility” also gives these images a certain monumentality, a sense of form which the mind internalises so much that the image sometimes feels like the extension of our nervous system. And this is perhaps the clue to why every cut is a harsh event in Tsai’s cinema: A monument has disappeared. These palpable cuts shatter the illusion of “sheer materiality”(17) that we acquired by looking at them for so long, also reminding us that they are just impermanent forms, proven to be imitations of life. After all, what we see is never the objects themselves, but only a specific rendering of the light that they reflect. But something seemingly contradictory also happens: The spaces leave such a strong residue in our mind’s eye that the new image comes on top of the earlier one’s mental memory, creating a sense of morphing movement.

 

The assemblage of these three-dimensional shapes forms a folded architecture as described in Robert Duncan’s poem, Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow:

 

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,

that is not mine, but is a made place,

 

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,

an eternal pasture folded in all thought

so that there is a hall therein

 

that is a made place, created by light

wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

 

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am

...(18)

 

In this “made place”, namely our mind’s constant reimagining of the movie, the images sometimes collapse, forming new superimposed shapes, or alternatively extend again, creating new “architectures” or expressive labyrinths that seem to arise from the inner workings of the mind.(19)

 

Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, Kang is going through an acupuncture therapy for his neck ailment.(20) In his director’s notes on Rizi, Tsai mentions that it pained him to see Kang’s “frail appearance”: “Because his infirmity continued for so long, I sometimes filmed it. Though I didn’t know how I’d use the footage.”(21) In this videoed document, we can see that the acupuncturist is certainly careless, both in the way he handles his tools, but also in the way he treats Kang. For instance, the purple-glowing ashes burn Kang’s neck, which causes him to panic. And when the acupuncturist finally does a massage to end the treatment, it’s at best inconsiderate, if not anti-care.

 

The violence that Kang feels during this session is expressed through the dirty-brown yellows, and the wide-angle lens oppressively blurting out Kang’s body at the centre of the frame (as opposed to the wide-open spaces we have seen until then). At one point, the acupuncturist comes so close to the camera that Chang Jhong-Yuan cannot help zooming out. “I felt too oppressed and wanted to get some space”, he says. Chang also informs us that the Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro camera and the Zeiss Lightweight Zoom 2 15.5-45mm lens that they used in Hong Kong are different from the rest of the movie, as at that point there were no plans for Rizi. “But It helped distinguish the narrative in terms of place and time”, he adds. It’s only after Tsai decided to film Anong that they switched to Sony FS5/FS7 cameras with Angenieux EZ-2 15-40mm / EZ-1 30-90mm lenses: “I thought that we could change the camera equipment as necessary, so the quality of the images would also change, as in real life. Tsai Ming-Liang’s directions were more like verses, quite abstract on the technical side. But it also increases the possibilities. Thanks to this documentary-like freedom, we were able to follow our intuitions and search for the true feelings of each scene separately. But in the acupuncture scene, there was no time to set up angles.” This would also explain the disorienting sequence of shots (seemingly kept chronological in the editing) that first revolve around Kang in one direction, then goes back and forth, alternating between high and low angles.

 

At the end of the acupuncture session, we have a head-on image of Kang, looking around, perplexed. To me, it’s an amazingly succinct expression of the position in which the medicine often puts “the patient”: Not only are we helpless because of the pain we feel, but we also don’t have the necessary know-how to heal ourselves, so we trust others who are in a position of authority. This passive state, when mixed with the carelessness of the practitioner, can be soul-shattering. And this is what we see expressed nakedly in Kang’s eyes.

 

In an interview, Tsai says that The River (1997), another film of his where Kang is dealing with the same neck ailment, “was about the body and its lack of autonomy and how it’s shackled and caught up in fate.”(22) Virginia Woolf seems to be on the same wavelength in her essay On Being Ill:

 

“Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to tooth-ache. But no; (...) literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record.”(23)

 

Rizi is the novel about neck ailment and its imperfect treatment that Woolf might have hoped for. In Tsai’s films, the illnesses or disabilities do not need narrative explanations, nor are they marginalising metaphors for the psychological deficiencies of normative able-bodies. Speaking of Tsai’s characters, De Luca talks about “undisciplined bodies resistant to essentialist and normative assumptions.”(24) Kang, for example, seems to have three nipples, or perhaps doesn’t. It’s there, but it’s not an issue.

 

All the while Kang is going through the travails of this uncaring therapy in which his body colours change between heavy yellows, purples, oranges and reds, Anong eats, and then showers using a bucket, taking his time. And every time we come back to him, we also come back to the light blue, pink, lavender colours of his environment. Happy, colourful flowers spring from the soothing blue wall of his bathroom. Even when we see him on an ugly highway, the camera is far enough to give us plenty of breathing space for a calmly contemplative perspective.

 

A decaying building, shot from an impersonal angle, seems to take the movie completely off the narrative track when, perhaps the same day, the two bodies meet. It almost feels like a miracle. While Kang is lying naked in a hotel room which we’ve seen him carefully prepare (healing had already started?), Anong enters the frame from the right ever-so-gently and starts massaging him with the same care we have seen in him throughout. Before the encounter, the dirty yellow glow of the table lamp was still on. The overexposed daylight washed over from the window. But as soon as the curtains are closed, and the yellow lamp turned off, the bodies reflect the brownish reds that surround them, warm yet stifling. But the massage has just started...

 

Reminding the affectionate body-washing in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006) where a divine light was glowing on the carer, Anong gracefully dances his hands along Kang’s body. He takes his time, repeats gestures with variations, confident, and always making sure he has consent. We see Kang inadvertently giving in to relaxation. Here, what is clear is that what we’re watching is not only a performance of an actor, but him honestly reacting to the expertly administered rubbings of a professional. We can’t help giving a sympathetic bodily reaction ourselves.(25)

 

Then a cut, which at first doesn’t seem like an expressive one: Now the camera is a little closer, cutting out completely the brownish reds of the room and the depth-of-field that was locating the bodies. Instead, we are left with a low depth-of-field image where the background is out-of-focus, and therefore Kang’s body feels to be floating in space. The screen is dominated by the white sheets, and the soothing white light is being reflected from Kang’s body without the earlier red tones. Soon it is clear that Anong is not only a masseur but also a sex worker. Eventually, Anong’s pink soothing fingertips reach Kang’s off-screen penis and lead him masterfully and therapeutically to an orgasm (potentially without sperm). A “direct, unambiguous connection”(26) has formed between the two, a sexuality built on trust. Anong smiles the first smile of the film.

 

Then, we go to the shower with its peaceful light blues where Anong washes Kang’s body, a certain narrative and formal tension having been near-completely resolved. Kang looks around, a bit lost but calm, in stark contrast to the earlier healing experience we witnessed. Chang wrote to me: “For me, things should feel quiet after the massage. The blues come back, as the initial feeling of loneliness is also coming back.”

 

In the shot that follows, the longest in the film, we’re back to the hotel room, the yellow light is on, but the overall image is low-contrasty compared to the earlier shots of the same space, carrying the brightness of the shower with it. A robust fluorescent blue emanates from the bathroom door, contrasting with the warmer colours in the foreground, accentuating the depth-of-field. We witness the private moment Kang decides how much he’ll tip, then he pays Anand, offers a glass of water, returning the care, and gifts him a music box.

 

The shot continuing without any camera movements, Anong starts turning the lever, setting off a melody that feels all the more sentimental because of its nostalgic twinkle. As the music extends in duration, the materiality of the space becomes less and less tangible. In a way, we experience real-time how our perception of space and perspective depends on other factors, including emotional ones. Tenderness has the ability to mould space, or rather, our perception of it.

 

This is partly why the concreteness reimposing itself on the continuation of the same shot after they leave the room has such a strong effect. As De Luca writes: “The momentary lack of human presence gives objects and spaces a heightened sense of physicality.”27 And then the lights go out automatically, a cut non-cut, leaving us first with an afterimage and then the lingering mental imagination of the space. “It reminds you of the traces of time”, says Tsai about this specific moment in the film.(28)

 

The red lanterns dance pleasantly while they eat together, but we’re heading towards the inevitable separation. “Each encounter, as soon as it has taken place, is eternal, even if it does not last”, says Tsai.(29) The specific parting in Rizi leads to a dreamy sequence, sadness overcoming. Anong feels anxious for the first time, emphasised by the shadowy lighting. Kang walks languorously at night, imposing blacks inviting the unconscious to fill in large parts of the image.(30) Later, while sleeping, he makes some grumbling sounds that give away his discontent while a strange but painterly yellow light coming from nowhere illuminates him. When he wakes up, there’s the sound of another person coughing in the background, adding to the film’s narrative restlessness even though we’re so close to the ending.

 

In its final image, Rizi invites us to witness the transformation of another mundane space: A blank white advertising board with a metal bench seen from a diagonal perspective, people and cars passing by, the neon pink city lights flashing at a distance. Anong comes into the frame, then sits. He cheerlessly takes out the music box and starts playing. The white advertising board behind him reflects perfectly the colourful lights of the city, which looks like joyful little abstract movies that are playing over it continuously. At one point an overly saturated purple shape moves in, then disintegrates to come off from a different part of the board which actually resembles a cinema screen, even mimicking Rizi’s aspect ratio. But the delightful reflections are actually everywhere: the concrete, the plastic, the metals, and the bodies… It all feels harmoniously relational, despite Anong standing up and walking away from us. The film climactically cuts to white. Tsai’s familiar signature appears. Credits roll…

 

 

 

 

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I would first and foremost like to thank Rizi’s cinematographer Chang Jhong-Yuan for taking the time to answer my questions. Chang himself wished to thank Tsai Ming-Liang for inviting him to participate in this journey. He also expressed his wish that “more people see this movie on the big screen” which I wholeheartedly share. I also want to extend my gratitudes to the film’s producer Claude Wang and Commissioning Editor Rasha Salti for making the interview possible. Warm thanks to Lorenzo Esposito for inviting me to write, Tiago de Luca for his incredible insights, Nina Otter for the care with which she edited the article, Neslihan Tepehan for the inspirations whenever I lost my way, Chia-hsin Liu for kindly helping me with the translation, and Poulet (the cat) for literally breathing together during the writing of this article.