Tsai Ming-Liang’s Walker: Part 1 - Cinema & Narrative

On Sunday, August 10th, I nearly 12 hours at the Santa Monica’s very own Aero Theater. I arrived at the theater at 9:30am, but did not get back in my car to drive home until near 10:30 at night. Going into this screening I knew I would up for an endurance test. But I was seeing no ordinary film. I was there to see 10 films. Talk about an absolute slaughter house of a number when it comes to film marathon. We were introduced to the films by the director of the films himself, Tsai Ming-Liang. He sat out of his chair, walked around his hand-held camcorder and then onto center stage, and shared his great appreciation for us and for the American Cinematheque for allowing him to put on such a one-of-a-kind moment. As he continued, he brought to our attention the fundamental premise for all of the films being presented, “a man walks”. When he concluded his intro, Tsai walked to his seat, which was along aside Lee Kang-sheng, and turns off the small hand-held camera he had been using to record the whole day. The first film begins, and we are presented with a bustling city. Thousands of conversations, water steaming into a glaze against the metal pipes of the city. Spontaneous and noisy honking from the city cars as they bob and weave through the road and crosswalks. The sonic power of the industrial world lays its relentless music onto all ears, causing a collective emptiness of the mind which the very environment feeds on. The very notion of color is contested by its appearance. This combination of audio and visual is denaturing, desensitizing, dehumanizing, and void. But still acknowledged as “The Big Other”. Then appears a man. A man who walks… Slowly. In fact, so slowly, each single solitary step approximates anywhere between 15-30 seconds per step. Covered in a bright orange kasaya, barefoot, and hairless. His head remains down and his hands open, as if he’s both accepting and rejecting reality. The man meditates on every step he makes, every sound he hears. He does this as he walks slowly.

Each of these 10 films vary in runtime. Anywhere between 20-90 minutes long. The marathon is cut into 2 hour blocks with intermissions, introductions, and Q&As in between the blocks. Tsai Ming-liang was joined by Kang-sheng Lee on the stage with a translator who also acted as moderator. To come back to the premise we are given,“A man walks”; that is what Tsai would like us to focus on. Despite all that is happening on the screen, it all comes back to the walk. No matter how long the take, how minimal the set, how subtle the sound design, the camerawork, or the character. Tsai wants us to focus on the humanity he captures in the simple sight of a man walking. Despite all this, there is something particularly special about The Walker series beyond the mere looks, premise, or insane runtime. At the end of it all, Tsai Ming-liang remains to be a humanitarian. He cares very dearly for the subjects he film and seeks to unfold anyone and everyone who finds themselves stepping into view by mere happenstance. For Tsai, it all comes back to the human experience, for it holds some of the most important experiences despite the tempo. Narratively speaking, there is not much to speak of, but that is also one of the most famous ‘unspoken rules’ in cinematic art, in which Tsai seeks to challenge.

We see cinema in a new form. For any independent filmmaker, the film industry plays a massive influence on the perception of what film ought to be. In other words, independent filmmakers seeking a living will say, “First, find the oil. Then, let the money flow”. However, after so many years of making films and building his own language in cinema, Tsai is conflicted by this power struggle. Between the way industry asserts itself, and the Tsai wishes to express himself, they couldn’t be any farther. The film industry ideologues is something Tsai finds dissatisfaction with, particularly the necessity of narrative structure. In film, narrative is told from a multitude of angles. From, lights, sound, visuals, and color, to costume, make-up, performance, and aesthetic. The physical and qualitative space follows a logic, or narrative, in which events happen over time within conceivable reason. For industry to thrive, there is such thing as cinema without narrative. Narrative is thought of as the only way to captivate an audience and keep people returning. Narrative connects the audience emotionally and rationally to the television. For Tsai, you can sense that there is a level of understanding the reason, and yet a rejection of the norm. For what reasons though? And how so? Those questions is what I am interested in speculating. Whatever it may be, it drove Tsai away from the film industry completely. And doing so put Tsai in a wrestle with very nature of his own films! Since he had been following the idea that films need narrative since the beginning of his filmography, there is going to be a struggle with creating film since we are to consider narrative extracted from cinema. In classic Tsai fashion, the walker functions as the manifestation of Tsai’s personal struggle. Can Cinema and Narrative be separated? This question alone asks us to question our conceptions of cinema and its limitation to express. Which brings to my mind the thought that Tsai’s challenge comes with some epistemological undertones. Such as, What do we know about Narrative? Does Cinema need narrative? What do we begin to distinguish the narrative experience from a cinematic one?

Narrative at its core is a series of events with a given level of logic or cohesion connecting one event to another. In a story such as, “The child sitting under the apple tree fell asleep when the sun went down” follows has logical, narrative value. That of being awake, and falling asleep. Or that of the sun being above the horizon, and the sun setting. And there is also an implicated narrative of the child being somewhere before being under the apple tree, and being drawn to sitting under the apple tree. Some narratives do not need to relate to other narratives cooccurring. Being under the apple tree has no relevance to the child’s sleep or the sun setting. The sun could have been rising, or it could have already been night time. The child could have been sitting, or standing, or playing, pro reading, under any old tree, or no tree at all. While the individual narratives that play out to create the narrative “a child sitting under an apple tree falls asleep when the sun goes down” do not undermine the logic of another narrative, these individual narratives have cohesion. It may make sense to sleep when the sun goes down, or when sitting under an apple tree. There is a trans-narrative build between the phase spaces of each individual narrative that hold the narrative structure together. And these narrative/trans-narrative relationships seamlessly work together to give sense to not only a story, also our own lives and our search for truth amongst the narratives. During the walker marathon Q&A, Tsai stood adamantly aside the narrative line that “The walker walks, that is what is about”. The description alone dismantles the possibility of extracting an implied narrative. Where is the walker walking to? Where is the walker walking from? These types of implied narrative questions are resolved by Tsai symbolic statement, "There is no ‘To’ and there is no ‘From’”, with cuts opening and closing in the midst of the walker’s slow, time bending walk with no further context. Tsai asserts this upfront in No Form with the walker within a white, endless space traveling in all directions. Away from the audience, up the screen, down the screen, and concluding the piece with the walker walking directly towards the audience and starring down at the crowd. The description also does not leave room for the existence of a trans-narrative. What does the walker adhere to? It would be a mistake in assuming that since he looks like a monk, that his intensions, goals, and motives are determined by his buddhist belief. In fact there is no recognition made across all the films that the walker associates with any religion. We may infer so by his appearance but that is exactly where Tsai is seeking after. Tsai toys with the concept of implied narrative in Abiding Nowhere as Tsai splices in a narrative of a man cooking then eating instant ramen. There is truly no relation between the walker and the man and they are played as two cooccurring narratives yet do not create cohesion. Tsai also delivered this kind of rhetorical point about trans-narrative in No No Sleep where the walker rests in a public bath house across a man. This theme of man’s vulnerability and nakedness is consist with Tsai’s film and narrative language. The film itself shares vastly more similarities than differences with Days. In Diamond Sutra, a 20 minute film shit in one take, the walker passes a rice cooker, and Tsai holds on the rice cooker for the remainder of the film. What is the connection between the walker and the rice cooker? There is none, it’s simply there to observe, to function as a spectacle without the alienating, domineering properties that make it a societal “spectacle”. In Walking on Water, Tsai blends in moments of the walker with a variety of shots of families and grandmothers within a local apartment complex (Which Tsai stated was actually the complex where he grew up with his own grandmother). But again, there no adhering quality between the narratives. But this last example leads me to consider who does the walker represent?

Can Cinema and Narrative become separated? I believe this is where Tsai does not accomplish complete separation. Within the meta-narrative of the walker films the walker is the demonstration of the “Anti-Spectacle”. A representation in presentation, but reared To this point, I refer to Guy Dabord concept of “The Spectacle”. A phenomenon in which the human experience is replaced by a symbol, an image, or an token. The act of detaching from all aspects of life creates a separation from what is real or possibly true. The spectacle is deeply rooted in from capitalist mode of production and economics. In the films No Form, Walker, Journey to the West and Abidding Nowhere, the walker travels through urban landscapes. Many people stop and stare, some even imitate the walker’s motion (a blessed cameo by Denis Levant). People pull their phones out to record, walk around, watch, talk about him. No one dares to make contact with the walker, or call out for him.

He is alienated; separated from the rest of society while still exists amongst it. The walker is in fact a real individual, but the responses that the walker evokes out of urban people is a reflection of the condition that is produced under a society of spectacles: To spectate, and to make spectacles. For Guy Debord, "This reciprocal alienation is the essence and support of the existing society… The spectacle’s social function is the concrete manufacture of alienation.” In the film Sand, we see the walker travels the beach amongst wrecked and abandoned tents, advertisements, boats, and concrete. This film in particular exhibits wonderful soundscapes as the sounds of dialogue and human beings haunt the space he walks. It was critical that such a film follows the contrast of occupied urban spaces, as if where a type of foreshadow, or lingering possibility that the current society of a spectacles would follow in suit later down the line. Signs of life fundamentally become mediated by production. In the film No Form, we receive this gripping and wonderful motif of spectatorship once the walker starts to walk towards the audience, surrounded by darkness, highlighted by a small white square in the center of the screen. The walker then sticks his head through the box with a penetrating gaze. The walker looks back at the spectator, producing an unexpected moment of connection and contact between the spectacle, and the spectator. Unifying the two realities, while still being universally separated by time and dimension, “The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life” (Dabord). The spectacle depends on social life, its ability to commodify and give value to material and the present the materialized world as the inherent signifier of quality of life. All that is needed is a spectator, passive but actively separating from their own life in replace on “false choices based on illusory qualities” (Dabord).

The meta-narrative in which life, even in its most honest and humbled form can never escape the reduction to “a spectacle” is heavily noted upon through the exhibition.

To be continued…

Cited Work

“Culture Jamming: Subversion as Protest.” Harvard Political Review, 16 Aug. 2022, https://harvardpolitics.com/culture-jamming-subversion-as-protest/.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Zone Books, 1995. “Guy Debord – Society of the Spectacle.” Media Art & Theory, 24 Feb. 2016, https://www.csus.edu/indiv/o/obriene/art206/readings/debord-the_society_of_the_spectacle.pdf

Perplexity.AI. Response to “Guy Debord’s Concept of “The Spectacle” 25 Aug. 2025, www.perplexity.ai.