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Tsai Ming Liang Guide: As the 20th century drew to a close, cinema, like other art forms, was undergoing a metamorphosis. Hollywood, in a desperate attempt to keep audiences engaged, embraced new technological advancements, such as improved visual effects. It sought to captivate the masses by blurring the lines between reality and imagination, producing sci-fi blockbusters like “Terminator 2” (1991), “Jurassic Park” (1993), and “Armageddon” (1998). However, thousands of miles away from sunny Los Angeles, another group of filmmakers across Europe and Asia consciously took cinema in a different direction. Rather than helping audiences forget the fourth wall, they aimed to reinforce it, creating films that were acutely aware of their own impact, intentionally distancing viewers from the on-screen events by withholding the cut.

In contemporary film theory, this shift is referred to as ‘Slow Cinema.’ To an avid cinephile, it is now a fairly common term. Maestros like Béla Tarr, Pedro Costa,...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Tsai Ming-liang's Rebels of the Neon God (1992) is showing December 27, 2017 - January 26, 2018 on Mubi in the United States. Rebels of the Neon God (1992) is an exquisitely controlled movie. It's also a nakedly desperate work, in which anguish and isolation radiate from nearly every frame. I think it's best to start with this seeming contrast: intense emotion and rigorous calculation are commonly thought of as opposed to each other, and, outside of art, they usually are. Saying that the movie's writer-director, Tsai Ming-liang, tempers his pain with his artistry is too neat a formulation; what's more plausible is that, to the extent to which they're distinguishable, each inflects the other, and neither one comes first. There are doublings, recurrences and rhymes in the film’s narrative of alienated youth in 90s Taipei; the action is elaborately composed and unfolds in long,...