A Crash Course on Cinematic Staging

The dinner table conundrum

The dinner table conundrum is a good place to start thinking about what do I mean by staging. David Bordwell in his Figures Traced in Light begins with this example:

You are a film director. Today the script requires four of your characters to have a conversation around a dinner table. How might you stage and shoot it?

You could place the camera a fair distance back and record the scene in one continuous shot. This can be efficient if your actors know their lines well; no need to change camera positions and relight several shots. But people tend to arrange themselves on all sides of a table, so unless you set up a Last Super composition, at least one person will be facing away from us. What if that person has some important lines? Even if that person merely reacts to others, don’t we want to see his or her face occassionally? Finally, what if during postproduction you decide that the pace is too sluggish? If you want to eliminate some dead spots, you’ll have to cut, but if you film one long take you have no shots to insert…

Bordwell went on to elaborate the problems of matching eyelines and propos that may occur once you decide to break the long take up. In the end he concludes, “Every choice eliminates certain possibilities.”

For more empirical examples, check out two lists of famous dinner table scenes at salon.com and brobile.com.

Bordwell’s description characterizes a filmmaker’s job as one of problem-solving. This is a highly original proposal and not everyone concurred; some are even hostile to this idea. In adopting a particular solution (such as the dinner table scene), we must first ask ourselves, what are the objectives of my staging? Although I imagine most directors do not ask this question explicitly, they nevertheless must have at least some of the following in mind when they choose one strategy over another:

• consistency/clarity of space perception
• dialogue coverage (including facial expression, gesture, etc., as well as reactions from others)
• character interaction, including the objects they manipulate
• the overall rhythm or feel of the scene

Look at the following example in Lust Caution (2007) by Ang Lee, pay attention to editing, camera movement and choice of framing, ask yourself: what is the staging strategy used here?

As the opening scene of this film (which contains some of the most authentic lovemaking scenes in film history IMO), this sequence is a master class in cinematic rhythm: smooth, compact editing accentuated by the occasional camera movement, which are themselves significant in many ways. They are agile, secretive, yet unflinching to the point of relentless, sort of like female intuition. Notice how close it gets to certain character at certain moments: this creates an effect of intimacy, but remains completely nonchalant. It is something you can’t explain well, but nevertheless feel.

Although this is confident and masterful filmmaking, the staging solution adopted here is rather conventional. Its solution to the dinner table conumdrum looks like this:

• establishing shot
• singles, singles/2 shots/3 shots etc.
• establishing shot
• singles, singles, etc.
• …

Are there alternative ways to do this? What about some unorthodox solutions? In the following we shall go over several highly idosyncratic ways of staging a dinner table scene. These are:

• the Ozu way
• the Tarantino way
• plan séquence (sequence shot) with or without camera movement
• and… the Godard way

The Ozu Way

The following scene is in fact randomly chosen (I just picked a scene with a table and more than two people from a Ozu film at hand). But it is very typical of Ozu’s “unreasonable style” (a phrase used by Kristin Thompson in her Breaking the Glass Armor). It is easy to lump everything you don’t understand to some distant and mysterious entity such as “zen” or “traditional Japanese culture” and forget about it. But Ozu’s style is indeed totally weird; it demands explanation on both sides: the filmmaker’s choice and the audience perception. We will get to that in a minute.

In the meantime, here is my bullet summary of Ozu, if you don’t already know him well.

• This is a loyal studio director (Shochiku) whose career spans from 1920s to 1960s.
• Many of his early silent films are lost. He made a dozen sound films and only six color films.
• In his early career he made several jidaigeki (period) films; but later on exclusively on gendaigeki (contemporary) film. This is actually a radical choice in the Japanese context.
• He is not bothered by doing the same topic over and over again. The following film Floating Weeds, is actually a remake of his own 1934 film (remaking one’s own film is rather a rare thing and usually not well received).
• For a certain period he is apparently obssessed with all seasons with the exception of winter: Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951), Early Spring (1956), Late Autumn (1960)
• Last but definitely not the least, he is a movie lover and watched a lot of Hollywood content. His films are brim with references to them. Some scholars would say “influence”; but this is not the word I would use to describe his relationship with Hollywood. I think he is mostly making fun of them.
• this list can go on…

Floating Weeds (1959)

As you can see from my very non-professional diagram on the left, the staging of this scene involves placing the camera at very unusual positions (the letters represent character positions around the table while the shot numbers represent where the camera is located and arrows indicating the camera’s direction). The first shot does give an establishing view of the whole scene, but the second shot immediately jumps to the opposite direction with all the following shots scattered all over the left side sphere of the table.

Watching this sequence, you should feel a jolt with the second shot and get completely disoriented with the 4th, 5th. But as it happens, you would most likely focus on dialogue delivery and quickly abandon this spatial awareness. The idea of not using subtitle here, therefore, is to precisely force you to stop paying attention to what they say and notice how these different shots suture up a space.

Another important thing is that Ozu film many of his shots fully frontal, with the character directly facing the camera. Yet you don’t get the sense that they are addressing the camera (or you as audience) because the eyeline is slightly off-kilter. This is not the place to discuss the intricacies of this maneuver, but let me say this: it is this desire to position actors frontally, and consecutively similar way (called graphic match) and has led him to disregard the conventions of continuity editing. His 360 degree editing system is a major alternative system of unifying shots, a principle of montage.

Tarantino’s way

Reservoir Dog (1992)

Tarantino demands no explanation as Ozu does. So I will be brief here. What Tarantino did here is to combine almost continuous arcing camera movement with closeups and heavy blocking. This is original. How would you describe the effect here? If you feel that the movements and blockings are slightly disorienting, this is precisely what Tarantino had intended.

One thing to add here though. If you are filming a dinner table where food has some importance, this is not going to work. As it shows literally nothing except faces and shoulders. Also, I would say that the dialogue does a good job balance these flashy shots which become boring quickly by themselves.

Sequence Shot (with static camera)

A sequence shot is a shot that lasts the whole scene. The idea is simple: to make the audience feel the uninterrupted duration of the whole event portrayed on the screen. If every cut is a cheat (it often is), then a sequence shot is a way to pursue maximum “truth” of performance in staging.

Is this the easiest way out? Isn’t it true that even an amateur knows how to put a camera on tripod and record a whole meal? Well, there is a huge difference between “simply recording” and “staging the scene so that it feels like a simple recording”. Watch this next sequence from Hou Hsiao Hsien’s epic City of Sadness (1989):

Bordwell in his chapter “Hou, or constraints” has some praises for this. He points out that our attention is directed “to the key participants through composition, lighting, and discreet blocking and revaling.” In other words, everything you see here is carefully staged to make you notice things that are important. Yet the staging is subtle; it gives you choices. It doesn’t raise a closeup underneath your eyeballs, saying “hey, you! look here!”

Instead the camera keeps its distance from the action. This is not only for reasons of coverage. This distance is intentional, and part of the signature style of the film (and several other Hou films, too). The closest this film gets is medium close-ups, such as the first shot shown here. The only true close-up of the film is of a photograph Wen-ching is touching up: a family portrait. The majority of shots in the film are close enough to make facial expressions legible, but still maintains a respectful distance from the action. It emphasizes the relationship between characters, between characters and the space they live in. Sometimes this literally translates to a cultural emphasis on the family before the individual. It might be said that in contrast, American movies showcase a cultural obsession with individuality, hence the abuse of close-up.

Abé Mark Nornes and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh in their study of Hou call this “a style of self-restriction” and summarize it as follows (I have listed only those related to staging):

• The use of relatively static, extremely long takes
• Minimal use of tracks, pans, intrashot reframing
• Tendency toward tableaux-like long shots/few closeups
• The geometricization of space
• Delimitation of the frame
• Locking the camera/spectator onto a single axis
• Rare, strategic use of the shot–reverse shot figure
• Gradual revelation and construction of spatial relationships

Clearly, this is not a style invented by Hou; nor does it belong to Hou exclusively. That’s why I didn’t call it “Hou’s way”. Most of these remarks can be applied to Tsai Ming Liang’s film, which we shall conclude with in the end.

The Godard Way (bonus):

Tired of all the above ways? Think they are all too pretentious? No problem. There is always a Godard way.

Vivre Sa Vie (1962)

What exactly does a film director do?

We have all heard of the joke about film director, that if you do not have any specific skill, then there is only one job left for you: the director. The idea behind this joke is that a director is perceived as not possessing any particular skill. He or she is even often seen merely sitting in the chair except for occasionally shouting with a megaphone: “action!” or “cut!”

On the other hand, if you base your judgement on Truffaut’s Day for Night, you might get the impression that a director is the busiest person on the set. There is a thousand things that need to be taken care of. And for everything there is a thousand possibilities. To direct a film a director needs professional help. He or she needs an entire crew to manage all aspects of filmmaking and he or she often has critical input on all these aspects.

But there is one thing nobody else can help him.

This is how to stage the scene. If a director let somebody else do this, then this person is not really a director. The dinner table conundrum is therefore a characteristic problem that a direct need to face everyday. A problem such as this demands a film director’s true talent and ambition.

Quiz: look at the following division of “creative"labor in filmmaking, which part can be controlled by a director? What is the director’s job?

1. script writing/dialogue
2. setting, costume & makeup, lighting (the profilmic)
3. staging
4. performance
5. cinematography
6. editing/post production/sound recording-remix-edit

This Obscure Object of Mise-en-scène

If you watch French films, you would sometime see: “mis-en-scène par…” or “metteur-en-scène”, followed by the director’s name. This term literally means “put into scene” and “the one who put people and things into a scene” is what we call a staging director in theater. A staging director doesn’t have to be the script writer. In fact, in theater practice they are more often than not different roles. A script writer’s concern is words. But when a staging director comes to the set, with a script in hand, whose lines probably already memorized by the actors, what does he/she do? He or she needs to realize the script, to make the words become real utterances. This is why in French they also use the term “réalisateur”.

In theater the staging director needs to direct the actors and actresses; it is also his/her duty to direct lighting, set design, costume, makeup…everything on or off stage. This is why when the term is transferred to cinema, it carries with it almost the same coverage, although in filmmaking, all these departments are much more complicated than in theater. There are two significant additions to the scene, though. That is first camera and then microphone. Therefore anything related to these two objects are not included in mise-en-scène. The former has acquired a glorious term “cinematography”; the sound team, unfortunately, has not had such luck (we are working on it, folks!)

What is this theater term doing in cinema? How can something theaterical be cinematic? We shall return to this issue with more detail towards the end of this essay. Here let’s say a film director’s job does resemble a staging director’s. The consequence is that this might change your perception of what a film director do, and what filmmaking is about.

Many are you want to write scripts (you are good with words and you desire to tell stories and make a few bucks); some are obsessed with composing images (coming from photography perhaps) and some fascinated by the power of editing (you’ve watched too much MTV). So when you decide to go filmmaking, you are probably thinking about one of these things. Have you thought about film director as someone mainly working with human bodies (instead of expensive gadgets or really impressive looking film strips)? Do you expect the actors to just do their work and then you select what looks the most satisfying?

I am not claiming that all the other responsibilities are not important, they are indeed organic parts of filmmaking and many filmmakers are intimately involved in those processes. But very often, a director is given a script that is written by other people. He came to the set with everything already done by a highly professional crew. The DP has set up the lighting and ready to roll the camera. What can a director do to show that he, too, has some contribution to make? Staging. The only thing at this point. But this is also the ultimate challenge of filmmaking: with staging done right, you don’t need editing, you don’t need to move the camera. You can make a film with one single take.

Staging as a radical option!

This is how Bordwell defines staging:

“…a technique, or rather an art, of impregnation, of the directing of bodies, of choreography, of the occupation of space, of natural movement which remains irreducible to the script.”

How does staging differ from mise-en-scène? As I have explained, staging is really a director’s work while mise-en-scène involves a lot of other people. I chose the term staging mainly to emphasize the film director’s contribution to a scene.

Perhaps the best way to understand the art of staging is to take an extreme scenario and consider cases where the camera remain fixed. Bordwell in fact describes staging as a radical option in contemporary cinema:

“today perhaps the most radical thing you can do in Hollywood is put your camera on a tripod, set it a fair distance from the action, and let the whole scene play out.”

It is true: even in editing and camera movement there is staging involved. But in order to compare the effectiveness of staging, here I am isolating its use. I consider staging as an alternative to camera movement or editing. When I say staging as a solution, it means not using other techniques and just rely on staging as the sole means.

If you recall, we introduce the dinner table conumdrum in the beginning and mention that this let-the-camera roll option is the first and sort of natural option, until we decide to break it up for good. Now why are we coming back to this option? What can we possibly gain, after we have tried all the possible cuts, movements and flashy filters? What does staging offer as a solution to filming such as scene?

• less intervention, more “natural” presentation of event

Now that you have tried the all-over-the-place options do you crave for a more hollistic experience? In contrast to editing and camera movement, staging is a much less conspicuous choice. It feels more natural, because it often gives us the feeling that the camera is simply recording what is happening. After a while, you forget about the camera — you are simply there watching. There is little intervention; everything seems to be spontaneous.

• a continuous flow of action

It does not call attention to itself like camera movement, which often conveys a sense of intentionality. And it definitely isn’t as abrupt as a cut, which effectuates a drastic change of perception between two consecutive frames. Staging shows a continuous flow of action. It preserve the integrity of movements and the space in which these movements happen.

• integrity of space

The space itself doesn’t change; therefore no illusion of self-movement. We focus on the other bodies and forget our own.

• direct attention through human beings

Editing directs our attention by giving us new images and how they connect to each other. Camera movement guides us by revealing hidden objects and changing pespectives. Staging does this through the movements of human body, something we have learn to do since birth.

Staging’s unique status in the stylistic history of cinema

Every technique has a history. And it often means different things then than what it means now. Staging is an imperceptible art retrospectively recognized. It is something that the cinematic art shares with theater. Although cinematic staging does differ from theater staging, in its early stages it comes directly from theater staging, so critics of silent cinema tends to dismiss it. Only sound cinema illustrates, retrospectively, the power of staging.

In the beginning, there was no camera movement (except on vehicles), no editing. But there was staging. As cinema was striving for its survival, it soon recognized the importance of a bourgeois audience. Naturally theater, a popular bourgeois entertainment at the time (not true today), became a dominant influence and staging a strong candidate for cinema technique.

There is also another meaning of the phrase: in the beginning, there was staging. Staging was indeed there in the very beginning. Edison or Méliès films are completely shot on a stage and they retain unabashedly the look of stagey production. Even Lumière films, which are widely regarded as representing the opposite direction of documentary, have non-negligible elements of staging in them. Lumière films are not only about putting a camera there and let it roll. They are all staged.

Let’s take a look at some examples: the very first films made by Lumière brothers.

This is the three versions of the famous Workers Exiting the Factory: different seasons, hours of the day, women’s dress, exiting order. You notice variances on visual trajectories as well as small details such as a cart, a dog, bicycles, etc. Watch this over and over again and pay attention to the most inconsequential things. You will start to realize that this very idea is pure genius: it is so simple, yet it generates endless spontaneity. It tells the story of life itself.

Yet is this a simple recording? No.

How come nobody is paying any attention to the camera, an absolutely novelty at the time? Because they have been informed and begged not to do so. This is Lumière family’s factory. These workers are the family’s employees. Not only is the whole scene staged, it is staged in a particular fashion, deep staging.

Now, look the following, which among Lumière films is the most clearly staged. It is often considered the first comedy ever filmed.

Did you notice how the imp was taken back to a vantage position so that he can be spanked right in front of the camera?

On one hand, you can say that Lumière films are staged, for many of them are. On the other hand, the films don’t give you the sensation that they are explicitly staged, which means they are already diverting from the theatrical convention. This convention implies a stage, an audience, and most importantly, a spatial correlation, a particular kind of frontality. For an audience of Lumière films, the camera is not in the position of an audience, but rather a bystander. It also helps that Lumière often shoot in open air, and often include objects of the natural world to maximum effect. Many Lumière films contain natural motion (such as rustling leaves and sea waves).

This may not seem a big deal, but compare this tradition with what we may call the Edison-Méliès-Griffith paradigm, the difference is more than striking.

As one of the ealiest studio films (films shot indoor) Strongman Sandow is made to run in Edison’s kinetoscope. Edison chose to present his attraction, the strongman’s muscles (rather puny in today’s standards) with frontal lighting, shallow focus and dark background (thus named his studio, “Black Maria”).

After the ball (1897)

Similar to Edison’s case, what Meliès presented here a few years later is an attraction in this integrity. It is so-called world’s 1st adult movie (I would say it is mildly educational for middle-schoolers today). Notice how the actresses enter and exit through left and right, which is clearly a theatrical tradition.

This strategy is further developed by D. W. Griffith, whose works exemplify the principle of continuity editing. The emergence of continuity editing cannot be attributed to Griffith alone, but he is definitely a crucial figure in the history of continuity editing.

Lonely Villa (1915)

Notice how the film (especially the indoor scenes) is constructed as a series of room-boxes connected to one another. From the single scene/box films before him, Griffith introduced a way to multiply those boxes, and thereby making his mark in the history. He maintained a consistent screen direction of all those boxes so that the audience is not confused by the constant shifting between them. Bad guys enter from a door to the left, and they dart for another on the right. Cut to another room, where the mother and daughter try to block a door on the left. Seeing this the audience would have little difficulty figuring out how these two rooms are spatially connected. This is the central credo of continuity editing: to make space and action highly legible.

Two kinds of staging?

We may say that Méliès, Edison and Griffith initiate a tradition that emphasizes a horizontal, lateral staging strategy. It borrows from the theatrical mode of perception and builds on it so that the audience can navigate quickly through multiple scenes with ease. By chopping up a “canned theater” in such a reasonable way you get flat staging + continuity editing. All shots are fully frontal presentation with little depth and concatenated in a “matchbox chain” style.

In contrast, there exists an alternative tradition exemplified by Lumière, Feuilade, Welles, and many contemporary filmmakers such as Tsai Ming Liang. This kind of staging emphasizes spatial depth, hence we call this deep staging. Film Historian Tom Gunning argues that deep staging is in fact a dominant style of presentation in European cinema before 1915. Here is an example from Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires (1915):

Notice how Feullade’s mis-en-scène presents a gradation of attention. What we first notice are centerly placed characters, or characters that move, or bigger things. We thus see first the two men in the center, then Guerande, who occupies firmly our attention. Mazamette has been from the very start; but he is on the edge of the frame and blocked by Guerande when he tries to slip away. Only through Guerande’s gaze andturning around to address him that we notice the exiting Mazamette. Retrospectively, we will say his reaction is an important part of the story. But by not emphasizing this reaction the staging hides information from us and invites us to explore it. So when we do notice this reaction our perception of the scene changes. We see more about what is going on.

Another example comes from a famous scene from Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941)

In his classic analysis of the scene, Bazin writes:

The screen opens on Susan’s bedroom seen from behind the night table. In close-up, wedged against the camera, is an enormous glass, taking up almost a quarter of the image, along with a little spoon and an open medicine bottle. The glass almost entirely conceals Susan’s bed, en-closed in a shadowy zone from which only a faint sound of labored breathing escapes, like that of a drugged sleeper. The bedroom is empty; far away in the background of this private desert is the door, rendered even more distant by the lens’ false perspectives, and, behind the door, a knocking. . . . The scene’s dramatic structure is basically founded on the distinction between the two sound planes. . . . A tension is established between these two poles, which are kept at a distance from each other by the deep focus.

Enough said. Just read Bazin. Now a more contemporary example from Hou Hsiao-hsien:

Boys from Fengkuei (1983)

What is striking in this scene is that the axis of movement is perpendicular to the screen. Thus these axes dynamize the screen by extending its depth perception. The screen may be flat. But these axes create a palpable expansion of space beyond the limits of framing.

We may sum up strategies of deep staging as the following:

In deep staging a door, a window, or a pathway is often located in the center of the frame, where characters enter and exit.

Character movements are often perpendicular to the screen.

A mirror is often placed somewhere to enhance the depth effect.

Attention control is often achieved through character movement and blocking.

From theater to cinema

Now …Blocking, what is it?

Generally speaking, in blocking and framing a shot, the most important thing is to make sure the audience is looking where you want them to look. You have to make sure they clearly understand the story point that is taking place, and that they grasp all of the pertinent information while sort of ignoring everything that’s not important. Short of force-feeding the issue by blacking out everything else in the frame or providing blinking arrows, this is primarily accomplished through shot-composition and careful blocking. ROBERT ZEMECKIS

I like the idea of blinking arrows, and I will show you an example later how someone actually did that. What Zemeckis didn’t mention is that “force feeding attention” has been a very common technique in the early days of cinema. This is the technique of iris in and iris out, which is completely abolished today.

Why blocking is crucial in cinema? To understand this we need to go back to theater. Theater was there already when cinema was born and it had a huge influence on how cinema behave. What does a theater stage look like and why is it built this way?

As we all know, the audience in different position of the auditorium perceive the scene quite differently. In a certain sense, this is an artistic disadvantage, for not only this the variance cannot be used toward expressivity, as in a film , theater staging must in a sense counter these variances to ensure a uniform perception of the scene.

For example, in a particular scene one character may stand in front of another. But this “in front of” is only valid from a certain angle. In fact, for the majority of the audience, this effect doesn’t exist at all. Therefore it cannot be part of the play’s intention (unless, of course, it is the intention of the play to send a secret message to a particular audience member!).

(an additional note: theater stage is traditionally shallow, but contemporary staging often uses strong effect of depth. It is in this respect an innovated form of theater. But the above issue persists and cannot be remedied.)

We might say therefore that theater staging does not have the precision of film staging. By precision I mean the amount of control over what exactly an audience would see. A film presents an absolutely same picture to every audience member, therefore it can be sure that whatever is composed in that picture is accessible to all audience; if there is a message it is duely delivered.

In contrast, cinema has a “trapezoidal play space”, defined by the front line of focus and the background decor. This front line is historically defined by the need to see whole body, and the whole room. This is certainly a legacy of theatrical viewing habit. Gradually other shot scales are introduced which eliminate the psychological need to see the whole body or room all the time (we do maintain the need to go back to them from time to time). So the play space becomes dynamic depending on the lens used, camera’s position, lighting, etc. Yet the widest possible view that a film can use is still not equal to what a theater stage offers. The anamorphic format may look like wide. But using a lens shorter than 20mm will have serious optical distortions. Really usable FOV in cinema is capped at 90 degree while a theater stage always has 180 degree (or even more if the stage protrudes into the seats).

Granted its vast simplifications of the matter, we may distinguish the two traditions as what belongs to theater and what belongs to cinema.

Theater stage is a space characters enter and leave. It has a definitely boundary between on and off. The moment actors leave our view, they stop acting. They go to change costumes, or they stand by and watch the act. In cinema, this is not the case. Why? Because the camera might move; it might follow you. You cannot stop acting unless you hear cut.

The camera frame has an inherent mobility. We know that what we are seeing is a slice of the world. We have the sense that something can enter the frame at any time and startles us. When a theater actor exists the stage, he/she also exists our mind. We stop thinking about him/her. But when a film actor exits the frame, he is still very much in our mind, because we can tell by the look of those on screen that their action is still present; it is just that we don’t see it.

Because of the narrow field of vision and multiple characters in different planes, blocking constantly occurs in cinema. As such it is part of what cinematic staging differs from theater staging. There is also another recognition that blocking is not initially what is desirable in cinema: like editing, it is a craft that is discovered accidentally and perfected later.

What you often see in the early days of cinema is a desire to avoid blocking. Take Méliès’s famous Trip to the Moon as an example. In the opening scene the savants stand in ladder formation in the background. This curious mise-en-scène can only be explained by Méliès’s idea to grant everybody on the set equal and constant visibility. The result is? Chaos. Seeing everyone moving at once, we cannot focus our attention and appreciate any detail.

In theater, actions cannot be carried off stage. It is imperative that you come to the stage, come to our view. You might hear somebody singing, or arguing off the stage. For actions of real consequence, we need to see it. But in cinema, quite often we don’t see what we want to see. This is a matter of artistic control. The film grabs our attention because it blocks our view, or withhold critical knowledge.

To sum up, blocking as means of attention control:

• command our attention by making a figure center, bigger
• eliminate faces and bodies from our field of vision
• manifest a gradation of attention
• effectuate an interplay between different zones of interest.

Feature presentation

For a film that best illustrates what cinematic staging can do, I recommend Tsai Mingliang’s What Time is it there? (2001).

As an ethnographic Chinese born in Malaysia, Tsai went to college in TW and stayed there afterwards. He was enrolled in some sort of script writing program and did three plays. I have not read or seen any of them but according to the description I can find it is most consistent with his his themes later in film works.

For a whole decade Tsai worked as script writer, most for television, occasionally for film. He also directed some TV works and taught dramaturgy. In 1991 he discovered the boy in a video game parlor. And he wrote a film for him, which is 1993’s Rebel of Neon Nezha. Lee Kang Sheng has been the protagonist for every single Tsai’s film ever since.

Vive l’amour is Tsai’s first mature work, one that has his distinctive signature. It won Golden Lion in Venice. It was also a formally daring work that contains many superb staging work. But the film does have some reframings and camera followings.

What is interesting is how this tendency toward innovative staging in his first and second feature quickly ascends to a climax just a few years later. He manages to do a film where not a single camera movement exists: What Time is it There is thus one of the rarest films whose raison d’être seems more to prove a formal principle than to tell a story. Through this film Tsai demonstrates an important theoretical point, namely: what can cinema achieve by relying solely on staging?

The result is so impressive that, retrospectively, when I watched his other films, I found myself constantly trying to alter the scenes where camera movements do exist and in my mind figuring out a way to make them into pure staging.