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A barefoot monk in a red robe walks the length of San Sebastian’s La Concha, pauses beneath the concrete rooms of Chillida Leku and stands before the crashing wall of the Peine del Viento. He is Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker,
and in “Dust,” the 11th installment of the director’s “Walker” series, his slow procession moves through Spain for the first time.
The film debuts at the Venice Film Festival, then moves to the San Sebastian Film Festival.
Produced by Vitrine Filmes and Homegreen Films, with backing from the Basque regional government’s culture and language department, the Taiwan Public Television Service Foundation and Tabakalera, “Dust” continues a project Tsai launched in 2012 built around a single recurring image: Lee Kang-sheng walking in near-stillness through unfamiliar cities, his body tracing how a place is felt and moved through over time.
Tsai traces the whole project back to a stage production more than a decade ago, where a slow-walking performance by Lee left a lasting mark on him. “At the time, I had grown tired of making narrative films, and Lee’s slow walk gave me the idea of making something non-narrative, a form of pure visual expression,” he says. “The way he walks is extraordinarily beautiful, and the idea of ‘slowness’ itself has great power.” What still strikes him, after 15 years of filming the same gesture, is Lee’s physical control: “He is still able to maintain the same power he had at the very beginning.”
Spain entered the picture through a co-production partner. Tsai says he scouted San Sebastian twice before settling on it, taken with the city itself but even more with what surrounded it: “Basque stone houses, an abandoned mining tunnel, the tremendous force of the waves crashing against the Peine del Viento, the sound of church bells surrounding San Sebastian and the face of an elderly Basque farmer.”
That patience is, for Tsai, the whole point of the exercise. Cinema, he argues, has trained audiences to treat images as information to be processed rather than looked at. “Slowness may simply be a method: it allows you to become quiet, to really look and to feel — to gaze at a face, an object, an event,” he says. “Slowness, in fact, is also a form of rebellion.”
The series has by now carried the Walker from Taipei and Hong Kong through two further shorts shot at a Yunlin exhibition space, on to Kuching, Malaysia; Marseille, France; Tokyo; the Taiwan‘s Yilan coast; Paris; and Washington, D.C., before this latest journey to San Sebastian, and Tsai describes him as a kind of instrument for reading a place. Every city, he says, carries its own atmosphere and pace, and Lee’s shaved head, bare feet and red robe throw that character into relief. In San Sebastian, what caught him was the light: “The sunlight constantly shifting between brightness and shadow, falling across enormous sculptures, forests, streets, pedestrians and the Walker’s red robe. It is very beautiful.”
Underneath the travelogue is a much longer collaboration. Tsai and Lee have worked together for more than 30 years, and the director speaks of the series as something closer to a document of aging than a formal experiment. “We have watched Lee Kang-Sheng’s body, appearance, and even his skin change,” he says. “Only through looking at someone over a long period of time can the reality of a life be fully revealed. To have been able to keep filming Lee Kang-Sheng is the greatest gift heaven has given me.”
Venice has bookended Tsai’s career in its own way. “Vive L’Amour” won the Golden Lion there in 1994; “Dust” returns him to the festival with a film that shares almost nothing with it formally. Tsai frames the distance between the two less as a rupture than as an ongoing argument with the medium itself. Some assume he stopped making films, he says, simply because he stopped making the kind audiences expected: “In fact, I have never stopped making films. I have been searching for the possibilities of cinema: what else can cinema express, besides telling stories?” He questions whether the theater itself has grown too conservative a container: “It should be able to contain all kinds of films, not only narrative films or documentaries. The ‘Walker’ series is clearly neither fiction nor documentary. It is simply a form of cinema, and it deserves to be seen in a cinema.”
He’s less pessimistic about audiences than that argument might suggest. Tsai splits viewers into two camps — one seeking pure entertainment, another open to work that asks more of them — and says the second group hasn’t shrunk. “My films are screened in cities all over the world, and I have found that more and more young people are coming to see them.”
Working with a largely new Spanish crew, he says, didn’t require him to change anything. Tsai has long mixed his longtime Taiwanese team with international crews and film students, and this production was no exception: “I was very satisfied with the Spanish team this time, especially the two cinematographers. I really liked the way they handled the images.”
The series isn’t finished with him yet. The next “Walker” film will take him to Jeonju, Korea, on an invitation from the Jeonju Intl. Film Festival, and Tsai is untroubled by questions about where the project ends. “I think it will end only when either Lee Kang-Sheng or I am no longer here,” he says.
Beyond “Walker,” his ambitions have narrowed rather than faded. “I am getting older now, and I do not have the same energy I once had,” he says. “The one thing I still very much hope to do is to work once more with all the actors I have collaborated with over the years. Perhaps I will make one more narrative film that is not really a narrative film.”
Three decades after his Golden Lion, Tsai returns to Venice with a film that has no plot, no dialogue and, by his own account, no interest in changing that.
A poster has been unveiled:
