Sentimental journey? The drifting rhythms of Tsai Ming-liang’s Journey to the West

Abstract

With his experimental short, Journey to the West, Tsai Ming-liang creates a cinematic experience that recalls the early ‘cinema of attractions’, but this is an attraction with a twist. As a spectacle, it is more specular than spectacular. An attraction without the attendant excitement, his is a reflection that presents a provocation. By calling out the shortened attention span of contemporary life, Tsai identifies the level of distraction that characterizes the contemporary, post-industrialized spaces of late-stage capitalism. An attempt at redemption, his film conveys a sense of what Rey Chow refers to in contemporary Chinese cinema as ‘the sentimental’. Framed by Henri Lefebvre’s and Lea Jacobs’s respective ideas concerning rhythms both extrinsic and intrinsic to the cinematic, and complemented by considerations of temporality, rather than making meaning, this article attempts to make sense of the film by locating these rhythms within it.