The University of Wisconsin-Madison
VISUAL CULTURE CLUSTER
Rey Chow Guest Lecture
A Pain in the Neck, An Episode of ‘Incest,’
and other Enigmas of an Allegorical Cinema: Tsai Ming-liang’s ‘The
River.’
Abstract: "Once in a while, the encounter with a particular scene in a film is so challenging that it preempts one's relation to the entire film. I would like to talk about one such scene. It is from Taiwan director Tsai Ming-liang's HELIU / THE RIVER (1997), in which, among other events, a father and a son, not recognizing each other in the dark, engage in sex in a gay men's bathhouse (what in Taiwan is known as a san wennuan). Like much of Tsai's work, this scene is without musical accompaniment: the simple movements and gestures, the shadows cast by the dim light on the characters' flesh, and the occasional sounds they make constitute the totality of the diegesis of this astonishing event. Why astonishing? The obvious answer, for some viewers, would be that this is a reprehensible depiction of incest. But is it indeed so?"
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