Abiding Nowhere

Screening after: The Long Valley

ERIC SAYS To know the films of Tsai Ming-liang is to know what the outer reaches of cinema can accomplish. His pioneering work in the sphere of narrative slow cinema—always starring Lee Kang-sheng, and often resituating Lee as a solitary figure within an unforgiving new landscape somewhere in Asia—has expanded many viewers’ frontiers when it comes to durational, painterly moving images.

Parallel to those narrative films, Tsai has also built the Walker series, which distills his aesthetics to their ascetic essence. Whereas patient narrative masterpieces like Rebels of the Neon God or What Time Is It There? also include moments of surreal humor and explicit queer sexuality, the non-narrative experimental Walker films–of which Abiding Nowhere is the latest—depict, quite literally and quite simply, Buddhist monks moving slowly, one foot at a time, across a frame as the world continues to bustle around them. In other words, if you’re looking for an accessible introduction to Tsai’s work, this isn’t it. But for those already attuned to the refined pleasures his work offers, Abiding Nowhere gives us the quietly astonishing gift of Tsai and Lee touching down in Washington, D.C., applying their radical sparseness to a landscape that, for many of us here in Baltimore, couldn’t be more familiar. (Eric Allen Hatch)