Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang

A critical figure in queer Sinophone Cinema — and the first director ever comissioned  to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre — Tsai Ming-liang isa major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Conceiving Tsai's cinema as an intertextual network, "Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy" makes an important addition to scholarship on Tsai in English. Nicholas de Villiers draws on interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai's body of work, to argue that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai's films reveal striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema. 

"Condensed and intimate, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy offers a systematic and insightful method to approach the queerness of Tsai Ming-liang's cinema, presenting a renewed understanding of queerness and queering in relation to the cinema as a medium and to queer politics and power relations that are specific to East and Southeast Asian cinemas." [Victor Fan, author of Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism]

Author Nicholas de Villiers
1.º ed. 2022
ISBN 978-1-5179-1318-2
P.p 234
Language EN