Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy
eBook - PDF

Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy

Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang

  1. 235 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy

Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang

About this book

A brilliant approach to the queerness of one of Taiwan’s greatest auteurs

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films.

Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai’s films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation.

Conceiving of Tsai’s cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai’s body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema.

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Yes, you can access Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy by Nicholas de Villiers in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Film History & Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Contents
  5. Preface. Queer Metacinema: It’s a Dream
  6. Introduction: Feeling Melancholy, Cruisy, Sleepy
  7. Chapter 1. Spatial and Sexual Disorientation: Vive L’Amour and I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone
  8. Chapter 2. Leaving the Cinema: Metacinematic Cruising in Goodbye, Dragon Inn
  9. Chapter 3. Queer Camp and Porn Musicals: The Hole and The Wayward Cloud
  10. Chapter 4. Different Time Zones: What Time Is It There? and Visage
  11. Chapter 5. Haunted, Rented, Queer Spaces: From Vive L’Amour to Stray Dogs
  12. Conclusion: Expanded Cinema, Sleepovers, and Cruising the Museum
  13. Acknowledgments
  14. Notes
  15. Index
  16. About the Author