In a postmodern twist, this reissue of Goodbye, Dragon Inn brings new life to both a forgotten King Hu classic, and Tsai’s love letter to the Fu-Ho Theatre itself. It’s a statement on the cyclical and transformative nature of film – one that offers a hopeful sentiment when considering the future of cinemas in 2020 and beyond. For UK cinemagoers, a director’s statement from the film’s original press kit feels particularly prescient. Prod Co: Homegreen Films Prod: Liang Hung-Chih, Vincent Wang Dir: Tsai Ming-Liang Scr: Tsai Ming-Liang, Hsi Sung Phot: Liao Pen-Jung Ed: Chen Sheng-Chang

Inside a Dying Movie House Filled With Lonely Phantoms". The New York Times. 2004-09-17. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2017-08-20. The Fu-Ho isn’t explicitly catering to the raincoat crowd; insofar as we can tell, it is a “straight” commercial theatre, seen on the evening of a revival run – an unusual event judging from the visible posters, which include several for the Pang brothers’ 2002 The Eye (a Hong Kong-Singapore co-production and, fittingly, another ghost story). By the early aughts there was reportedly only one cinema left in Taipei still showing “blue movies”, presumably the Baixue grindhouse in Ximending, which was said to mix in Category III films from Hong Kong with straight fare, and was a popular cruising destination prior to its closure in 2012. (This sort of mixed-use programming was not unknown in the States; I used to frequent the three-screen Foxchase 3 in Alexandria, Virginia, which since the mid-seventies had been screening a combination of second-run arthouse movies and hardcore, and was demolished in 2005.)No, most cinephiles, especially those interested in the lowbrow side of the spectrum, are into the theatricality of the experience. What is Quentin Tarantino’s obsession with “grindhouse cinema” other than a Proustian return to the smell of wino jizz and Colt 45, the rustle of rats in the aisle, the nonsensical words spoken by PCP-crazed Vietnam vets in the balcony to a torn-up print of TAKE A HARD RIDE? Pinkerton’s meditation on the slow-almost-unto-total-stillness GOODBYE, DRAGON INN by Tsai Ming-Liang is a wafer-sized contemplation of the disintegration of what was formerly urban, crowded, and communal into the hideously cellular and isolated and agoraphobic world of the Internet. You can bet that the coronavirus and its dispatch of the First World into the realms of Netflix and Uber Eats gets its appropriate treatment here. Ou sont les big-ass two-dollar second-run theatres d’antan, asks Pinkerton, and the gallery space (Tsai’s favored new home) and the streaming universe strike him as unworthy.

What do you think? What was the last film you saw in theaters? Share your thoughts in the comments below. The very definition of a film that will starkly divide opinion, Goodbye, Dragon Inn is likely to prove frustrating and unsatisfying viewing for some, but if you can adjust to its slow pace and fascination with stillness and small moments, then there’s a good chance it will really work for you. Given my initial uncertainty, I was surprised how involved I became in it and ultimately how much I gleaned from what is only suggested by what occurs on screen, and was certainly caught out by its poetic evocation of childhood memories, its moments of almost absurdist humour and its touching final moments. Nostalgia for the cinemagoing days of my youth certainly played its part here, but if the film also works for you then the quality of the restoration and transfer and the Tsai Ming-Laing interview make this Second Run Blu-ray an easy recommend. Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a meditative, impactful farewell to a cinema in Taipei and exerts even more resonance when looked at through the lens of the past year.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a beautiful film. With scarce dialogue, few camera movements, and an average shot length of 55 seconds, it offers a deeply contemplative meditation on the forgotten magic of the cinema as an institution. Whether observing a stroll down the well-trodden corridors, a lone usher completing menial tasks, or simply the dark blanket of the auditorium itself, each shot is composed to encourage a full ingestion of the architecture and atmosphere of this ancient temple of exhibition. As a “national” genre, the wuxia has most often been likened to the American western and the Japanese chambara, or samurai film. Like the western and samurai hero, the wuxia hero is guided by a personal code, though unlike the samurai, they typically stand outside of, and are often placed in direct conflict with, the aristocratic power structure. Pertinent to Tsai’s cinema – and here is the connection that de Villiers draws out – the wuxia hero is a wayfaring stranger, travelling the countryside of an ancient China that as often as not is being terrorised by its leaders, righting wrongs through martial mastery. Tsai, too, focuses on wanderers through hostile environments, though his chosen landscape is the depredated modern city terrorised, in a less direct and heavy-handed manner, by its leaders – not scheming eunuchs, but rather an eternally rebuilding local government and the larger forces of global capital, from the mandates of which no locality can be sovereign. This ongoing process of head-first, ravenous change, and in particular the continual destruction and reshaping of the city that goes on with little regard to servicing the needs of any but its richest residents, is felt throughout Tsai’s cinema. Tsai’s 1991 telefilm Give Me a Home and his 2006 I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, for example, portray the difficulties of construction workers and labourers who toil to alter the urban landscape while standing to benefit in no way from the changes. Goodbye, Dragon Inn feels in some ways like a tapestry of half-recalled memories triggered by the loss of the sort of movie palaces that some of us remember from our younger days, and yes, I’m including myself in that category. I’m old enough now to recall when even local cinemas were huge auditoriums with imposing screens, the majority of which were later subdivided into two or three smaller and altogether less impressive venues that offered more choice, but on a smaller scale. And while it could be argued that while up until the current pandemic put many of them at risk of permanent closure, cinemas in the UK were still attracting sizeable audiences, venues like the one in Goodbye, Dragon Inn (which was shot in a real cinema that was was on the verge of closure) that screen older movies for a specialist audience have become altogether rarer, at least outside of major cities. Watching the cashier make her way slowly up the steps of this cathedral of a cinema with its decaying walls and water-stained floors really does have a sense of sad finality to it, with the water that drips steadily through its leaking roof having the metaphoric feel of tears being shed by the venue for its imminent demise. As one is reminded throughout Goodbye, Dragon Inn, even when one goes to the movies alone, one does so to find a connection with others, whether it be the strangers in the auditorium with whom we may have nothing in common but a tendency to gasp and laugh at the same time or even just the characters on the screen. As the theater manager and the projectionist slowly but surely shutter their theater at the end of the dark, rainy night, one feels a tightening in one’s chest — is that it? Where will these lonely people go now? What will we all do if the cinemas close for good? Needless to say, sitting on my couch with my cat and a superhero film queued up on HBO Max, while easy enough, doesn’t have the same emotional resonance. Going to the movies reminds us that no matter what, we aren’t alone in this world — a beautiful, bittersweet feeling that, in an era of quarantine, is all the more necessary.

The wuxia – the word is commonly translated as ‘martial heroes’, and sometimes as synonymous with ‘martial arts’ – is both ancient and relatively new, like so much in the popular culture of Greater China. Wuxia stories centre on heroic xia warriors, and the scholar Sam Ho draws out an effective definition of the genre in its very name: Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. The audience doesn’t necessarily need to know that they are also watching their young selves – it could just be two old men admiring the youth of the swordfighters. A contest of youth and aging. Film can keep something eternal. It saves the youthfulness, but it’s also dying as well. Whatever you film is slowly dying at the same time. Whatever you film is no longer there. 8 The musings of these nameless moviegoers form little in the way of a narrative, but through masterful cinematography, and an evident admiration for the theatre itself, Tsai manages to conjure genuine wonderment across his film’s lean 82-minute runtime.Taiwan Movie theatres are like temples. You will always meet a true god. You can discover the details of extreme close-ups, and the breadth of extreme long shots. Then you experience the moments of magic that only a movie theatre can bring. When I was a child, my grandpa and I were always in and out of different movie theatres. In Kuching, a small town in Malaysia, these theatres weren’t far from each other and played various types of movies. Odeon Theatre specialised in Cantonese films from Hong Kong, opera or Taiwanese films. Capital Theatre was the exclusive theatre for Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers Studios, and also showed commercial films from Japan. Rex Cinema was the world of Hollywood. In the 1960s, these theatres were a large part of my childhood; in the 1980s, just a few years after I left my hometown, they were all razed to the ground. I thought I had forgotten them, but occasionally they return to my dreams.