Framing Time: Tsai Ming Liang’s What Time Is It There? (2001) from Catrina Sun-Tan on Vimeo.
Framing Time: Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There?
Catrina Sun-Tan, Wellesley College
Tsai Ming-liang’s style is not for everyone — the first time I watched What Time Is It There? (2001), I realized that this is one of the slowest films I have ever seen. With only 103 shots in a span of 116 minutes, Tsai’s film can feel like pure torture. But, even though What Time is void of fast-paced, fast-cut action, I found myself so emotionally drawn to this picture from the first shot (which is four minutes long) to the last. The camera would linger on just one action — the mother making dinner, the son selling watches, the woman sitting in a Parisian cafe — and yet, I felt inevitable despair and heartbreak over the ordinary lives of three characters. These emotions made me question why the lingering, the “slowness,” and the title of the film are so significant. This essay’s introduction, which oscillates between silence and noise, slowly transitions from voiceover to onscreen text as it progresses to the main body of work.
What immediately struck me is the film’s allusion to Buddhism, from the subtle but intentional placing of a monk along the same plane as Hsiao Kang, when he beats the watch against the railing, to the deliberate chanting of Buddhist mantras. The mantras are named Pure Land Rebirth Mantra, Mantra for Transforming Food, and Mantra for Sprinkling Sweet Dew, which all are chanted for the dead, who then can consume the “transformed” food and have the chance to achieve rebirth in the Pure Land. At some points it felt as if Tsai was sarcastically mocking Buddhism, making it seem “gaudy,” “mystical,” and even humorous. But, then, I realized Buddhism is so inherent to the message of this film. According to the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, life is suffering — to live is to suffer physical, mental, and emotional pain. This completely shifted how I experienced this movie’s purposeful inclusion of Buddhism, including monks, cyclical imagery, red light altars, and mentioning of reincarnation.
What Time also plays with serendipity and mysticism. It features one shot of the son, Hsiao Kang, just watching Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) in Taiwan after meeting the woman, Xiang Qi, who travels to Paris alone. What Time then suddenly transitions into a scene of 400 Blows, and eventually shows Xiang Qi sitting on a bench in a cemetery with the now aging Jean-Pierre Léaud in Paris. In addition, I also consider the family’s large fish another character. The mother believes that her dead husband has reincarnated as the fish, which follows her gestures and even seems to respond when she breaks down crying in front of it. When the mother and son get into an argument, the fish solemnly observes.
Though the film lacks soundtrack, it is filled with reminders of time, such as visual images of clocks, alarms, an obsession with the time zones between Paris and Taiwan, beating wristwatches against railings, chopping roast duck, and train times. The characters go through the course of their lives, smoking, eating, fornicating, dying — all an indication of the ephemerality of time. In one moment, one character, Xiang Qi, is in her room (here) in Paris but wanders to investigate what is upstairs (there). And, there is the obvious indication of time “here” in Taiwan, and time “there” in Paris, but over the course of the film, “there” turns out to be something else. What the film hints at is the differentiation between “here,” timeline of the living, and “there,” of the dead. Inevitably, we are forced to question the validity of linear time and instead ponder time as a cyclical occurrence.
The distinction between “here” and “there” is also suggested through Tsai’s stylistically sculpted shots, highlighting the importance of framing. In a single shot (also one of Tsai’s long takes), so much occurs. As I suggest in the video essay, framing manipulates what and how we see — onscreen is the “here” and offscreen is the “there.” Whenever a frame is positioned in the house of the son and mother, colors on screen indicate the living (here) and the dead (there) — the green light of the kitchen, from which both characters enter and leave, and the red light on the altar of the dead father. Time and space are interconnected in this film, and they eventually cross-wire. The dead father shown in the first shot in Taiwan later reappears in Paris, transcending time in life, possibly even suggesting some kind of survival after death. The physical body and presence are no longer necessary when achieving transcendence, only made possible through Tsai’s approach to “slow cinema,” and manipulation of time and space.
Author Biography
Catrina Sun-Tan is a graduating senior majoring in Psychology and minoring in Cinema and Media Studies at Wellesley College. After Wellesley, she hopes to pursue film and media studies, and writing in graduate school and beyond. She is particularly inspired by films that tackle psychological theories and concepts. As a dancer and president of Wellesley’s hip-hop dance team, FreeStyle, she is also interested in films that observe and attend to rhythm, sound, the body, and space.
