We Had Faces Then: Cinephilia, Warhol’s Screen Tests, and Tsai Ming-liang’s Late Digital Era

Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang’s late museum-commissioned and “post-retirement” film and digital video works mark an important shift in the auteur’s approach to moving images. Tsai’s recent works have moved away from scripted narrative and more toward film and digital images as images in his reflections on time, space, and memory. I connect Tsai’s experiments with the ontology of the image and the role of the face in cinema – specifically the ageing face of his “male muse” Lee Kang-sheng – to the early Screen Tests of Andy Warhol and ageing star Norma Desmond’s famous line from Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) about the fate of silent cinema: “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.” I examine how a devoted cinephile culture in Taiwan has allowed Tsai to collaboratively curate retrospective events such as Tsai Ming-liang’s Days at the Museum of National Taipei University of Education even as he has been remarkably productive beyond “retirement” with new commissioned works such as Xining Public Housing. Tsai thus revisits early filming locations, recalls and restages his career, and reflects on the ageing faces of his nonprofessional actors and the face of the city of Taipei itself. I advance a series of propositions about cinephilia – as nostalgic, intercultural, reparative, and pedagogical – that are both general and tied directly to Tsai’s focus on faces and time in his late and post-retirement body of work.