Rare and valuable is the filmmaker who expands one’s conception of the cinematic art; rarer still is the filmmaker who enlarges one’s notion of the term “director.” Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based auteur Tsai Ming-liang (b. 1957) accomplished the former with his rigorous, uncompromising and reputation-defining features of the nineties and early 2000s, and ever since his self-declared retirement from narrative filmmaking after 2013’s Stray Dogs, he has been anything but inactive while exploring the endless permutations of what it means to be an image maker in the 21^st century. Among the many formally adventurous international filmmakers who have struck out for greener pastures in the past decade upon finding the commercial prospects of arthouse cinema distribution increasingly deficient, Tsai has dabbled in the gallery space, the black box theater, virtual reality and the independently run exhibition space as venues to both showcase his uncategorizable work and influence how he produces it. Along the way, he has transformed his very approach to capturing filmic material, and where once a pithy precis for his films existed—Antonioni-esque studies of alienated Taiwanese youth, for instance—there is no longer such a firm summary for exactly what a Tsai Ming-liang project looks like or how it operates.

Tsai Ming-Liang and his collaborators will appear in person at film screenings on October 10 and 14.

For more information on this series, including a complete listing of showtimes and information on purchasing tickets, visit https://harvardfilmarchive.org/programs/the-face-of-time-recent-films-by-tsai-ming-liang.

This event is co-sponsored by the Harvard Film Archive and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.