Biomechanics of love: reinventing the avant-garde in Tsai Ming-liang's wayward ‘pornographic musical’

Abstract

Tsai Ming-liang's film aesthetics has been largely compared with European auteur film-making in style and philosophical concerns. This essay attempts to resituate Tsai's works in relation to his prior theatre practice and his deployment of popular film genres that carry a dialogue with film theories of genre and intermediality. I focus on The Wayward Cloud as a case study to examine the three distinct modes of production within the film, namely, the avant-garde theatre acting, the musical, and hardcore pornography, showing how Tsai Ming-liang crosses the boundaries between high and low as well as between cinema and theatre. I trace the acting style in the film to Taiwan's avant-garde theatre movement in the 1980s, particularly the aesthetics of environmental theatre, and its affinity with Meyerhold's 1920s' biomechanical actor training that redefines the technologically mediated interaction between the human body and its environment. Meanwhile, instead of privileging the avant-garde, I demonstrate how Tsai re-enacts pornography and revises its genre conventions and its assumptions of gender, power, and pleasure. By exploring the affinity between pornography and musical, I revisit their relationship with the avant-garde performance and suggest the possibility of a new film aesthetics and spectatorship, which operates on the fusion of and tension between distinct modes of cinematic production of affect.