Pornography, musical, drag, and the art film: performing ‘queer’ in Tsai Ming-liang's The Wayward Cloud

Abstract

This article situates The Wayward Cloud alongside Tsai Ming-liang's previous films in which subjects such as urban alienation, generational conflicts, postmodern ennui, and the ambivalence and secrecy surrounding homosexual or queer identities in contemporary Taiwan are intricately woven into a cinematic aesthetic characterized by sparse dialogue, minimalist setting, and striking imagery of urban and social decay. It looks at how the film refers to Tsai's previous films by displacing and transforming a set of visual codes and metaphors that has been characteristically associated with Tsai's style. Connected to this self-referencing is the film's ironic and self-reflexive play with generic conventions that cuts across a vast terrain of cinematic forms i.e. the musical, pornography and drag, in the making of an ‘art film’. It argues that self-referentiality, intertextuality, and genre-bending in Tsai's film call into question established conventions about genre, hence audience expectations, by bringing these apparently incompatible generic forms and conventions into a mutual dialogue.