While it has been an ugly season in terms of their record, the Chicago Cubs undoubtedly have a bright future ahead. The rebuild that seemed doomed for many years could be a lot quicker than most anticipated.

The young talent at the major league level is already showing early returns and the top prospects in the organization seem poised to make more debuts by the end of this season or the start of the 2023 year.

If you look at the Cubs’ performance this year, you have to dig a bit below the surface to find the real takeaways from this season. While the Cubs are near the bottom of the league in terms of record, looking at some of the team and individual stats tells a different story.

They are middle of the pack in terms of hits per game and they are among the league’s best in stolen bases. The ERA of their starting pitchers has been above league average this year as well. The signs of an up-and-coming team are showing.

The contact, patience, and athleticism are there, which is important for a young squad. There is strong veteran leadership from the clubhouse leaders.

The team’s energy and culture have remained strong throughout a tough season. All of these point to success down the line if they keep building.

These fundamentals are important for building a competitive team. Looking at the key position players going forward, names like Nico Hoerner, Seiya Suzuki, Willson Contreras (hopefully), Ian Happ, and Christopher Morel are all five-tool players who have all had excellent seasons.

While there have been ups and downs for all of these players, they have given the team a good foundation to build around. Happ and Contreras have especially become stars after a couple of down years. Both have changed their approach to make more contact and put together better at-bats.

The pitching, especially lately from the starters, has been surprisingly solid. What looked like a middle to bottom tier rotation has been a strength of the team with quality contributions from newcomer Marcus Stroman to lead the way.

The young guys, mainly Keegan Thompson and Justin Steele, have exceeded expectations. Steele especially has looked sharp in the second half of the year and could be a future top-of-the-rotation starter if he develops another pitch.

While Wade Miley and Kyle Hendricks have had disappointing years due to injury, Drew Smyly and Adrian Sampson have filled those spots very nicely in the rotation. Even some of the Triple-A players who got called up played well when asked, especially Javier Assad and Hayden Wesneski as of late.

There are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the Chicago Cubs in 2023.

Of course, we cannot forget about the plethora of minor league talent that is on deck. The hype around Pete Crow-Armstrong was insane this year and Brennan Davis has looked good since coming back from injury.

Guys like Matt Mervis and Kevin Alcantara have risen up rankings due to their great seasons and the pitching prospects have all been doing amazing. Caleb Killian deserves some extra praise as he has seen some major league time this season.

This is not a fluff piece on a bad team but rather a statement of realization that the team is not quite as bad as things would seem. There are still a lot of unanswered questions going into the offseason.

Some of the players have just been outright bad this year. Still, the Chicago Cubs just swept the NL East-leading New York Mets on the road. A lot of players are getting hot in the home stretch of the season which will help carry momentum into next season.

With another offseason for the young players and prospects, an added ace to the rotation, and a restocking of the bullpen after the deadline depletion, this team could be in the hunt for a playoff spot next season in a weaker division.

It has been an ugly season but the positives that have been seen from the Chicago Cubs give real hope for the upcoming years.

Where it was once seen as a long and grueling rebuild ahead, it is now a team that is on the rise with a lot of young talent waiting in reserve. Fans should be excited for this team after all that has happened in recent years.

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It’s day one of the Chicago House Music Festival and Conference, which runs through Sunday 9/18. Today’s the symposium portion of this free four-day event. At the Logan Center for the Arts (915 E. 60th), there will be a slate of panels focused on the history, culture, and business of house music: the House Music Entrepreneur’s Journey (5:30-6:30 PM), Comeback or Come Up? House Music in 2022 (7-8 PM), and a Fireside Chat with veteran dance music executive Patrick Moxey (8:30-9:45 PM). Participants are industry veterans such as DJs, producers, label owners, and music journalists including The TRiiBE cofounder and editor-in-chief Tiffany Walden. The rest of the weekend will involve music, music, and—did we mention music? Check out DCASE’s website for a complete schedule, including a headliner performance by Ten City on Friday night. (MC)

If you have an urge to s-t-r-e-t-c-h tonight, there’s two unique yoga classes to keep in mind. At 6 PM in Washington Square Park (901 N. Clark), instructor Gary Alexander teaches an outdoor basic yoga class for all levels . . . and your dog! Leashed and calm pooches are welcome to participate; bring a mat and no registration required. At the same time a little further north, DANK Haus German American Cultural Center (4740 N. Western) hosts instructor Janina Dunklau, as she offers a multi-level yoga class in both German and English: all levels of both yoga and German language knowledge (or lack thereof) are welcome. It’s $5 to join in the fun, and the class takes place outside on the center’s outdoor terrace. Check out Facebook for more information. (SCJ)

Cheese, glorious cheese! If you’re enamored with the stuff, and want to learn more about how it’s made, check out tonight’s Intro to Cheese class at the Palmer Square specialty cheese shop Beautiful Rind (2211 N. Milwaukee). This hour-long workshop will tell you a little cheese history, give you tips on how to care for your cheese and feature a tasting of five different styles. If you can’t make it in person, there’s virtual option (information for that will be given to you after booking tickets). It’s $35 and bring extra to buy some more dairy goodness when you’re done! Sign up for class at Tock. (SCJ)

A 1986 commercial for cheese; the theme song is based on a song from the musical Oliver!.

Are there any concerts tonight? Of course—it’s Chicago! Here’s a few shows featuring musicians that we’ve previously written about . . . Tonstartssbandht, the psych/postrock/art-rock duo of brothers Andy and Edwin Mathis White plays Sleeping Village (3734 W. Belmont), with local band Charlie Reed opening; show starts at 9 PM and advance tickets are available. Reader contributor David Anthony told us this week about Chicago punk band Alkaline Trio’s return to the stage for a sold-out concert tonight at Metro (3730 N. Clark); if you didn’t catch tickets for that, you can see them on Friday night as part of this weekend’s Riot Fest at Douglass Park (advance tickets are here). On a more experimental note, the Instigation Festival returns to Chicago this weekend to bring together improvisors from New Orleans, Chicago, and beyond. Festival shows this weekend inhabit Elastic Arts Foundation (3429 W. Diversey, second floor), Constellation, and Hungry Brain. Tonight’s show at Elastic features small groups including musicians Doug Garrison, Helen Gillet, Jason Marsalis, Dan Oestreicher, Mars Williams, and more. It’s $15 at the door and the first set starts at 8 PM. If you can’t make it in person, Elastic provides a livestream (donations welcome); go to Elastic’s website for details. (SCJ)

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Some might think of slow cinema—admittedly a nebulous designation at best—as dry. The films of Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based Tsai Ming-liang are often termed with that polysemous classification and thus may be considered as such. 

Though his films embody the technical definition of that word (another descriptor applied to his films, “minimalist,” also means to lack embellishment), there’s a benevolent irony to the fact that they’re usually quite wet. That is to say, in most of them either steady rainfall or another slaver tends the otherwise arid proceedings, at once a welcome interloper in its waterlogged enrichment and a manifestation of unrelenting heaviness inside and out.

In Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), which takes place in an old movie palace in Taipei, rain pours down outside as various characters inside the theater watch (or don’t) the last 90 minutes of King Hu’s titular 1967 wuxia film Dragon Inn. Though the characters are free to enter and leave at will, the rain serves as a partition of sorts, keeping both them and the viewers inside the damp and grimy theater, set to close after this final screening. 

More than two years ago, there was a 12-film Tsai Ming-liang series (ten features and two shorts), undertaken by local independent programmer J. Michael Eugenio, at the University of Chicago’s Doc Films. In the months leading up to the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic here in the U.S., all but one film of the series was screened. The last, Face (2009), was likely the last film many Chicago cinephiles saw in a theater for a good long while; walking out of it like the characters in Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one was deluged by the sudden onset of reality and that which would define it for the next few years.

The plan was to bring Tsai to various film organizations in Chicago, the first stop on a tour that would find the filmmaker in New York City and Washington, D.C. Alas, that trip was canceled, and for two-plus years we languished in a real-life scenario not unlike something from one of Tsai’s films. (Indeed, his 1998 film The Hole, which was rereleased in virtual theaters amid lockdown, centers on characters impacted by a sickness called the “Taiwan virus,” which causes people to go mad and seek refuge in tight, dark spaces.)

On September 12, however, the festivities resumed, with a screening of Goodbye, Dragon Inn at the Gene Siskel Film Center. This coming Monday his 2013 film Stray Dogs will screen at 8 PM, then his most recent feature, Days (2022), a week later at the same time. 

Films from Tsai’s Walker series—Journey to the West (2014) and No No Sleep (2015), two among the several projects that feature Lee as a Buddhist monk walking slowly in various spaces—will screen at Northwestern University’s Block Cinema, Friday, September 30, 6:30 PM, with Tsai and Lee Kang-sheng (a Taiwanese actor who has appeared in all of the director’s features and may be considered his muse) appearing in person for a post-screening discussion moderated by Dr. Jean Ma, professor of film and media studies at Stanford University.

The Chicago premieres of his short film Light and feature Your Face (both 2018) will screen at Doc Films on Saturday, October 1, 6 PM, again with Tsai and Lee in person. University of Chicago professor Paola Iovene will moderate that postshow discussion. Finally, the director will give an artist lecture back at the Film Center on the following Monday, October 3, at 6 PM, rounding out almost a full month of Tsai-related screenings and events. The tour will continue to New York City and Washington, D.C., as planned, as well as Boston.

For the Reader in 2005, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote about Goodbye, Dragon Inn that it’s “a Taiwanese Last Picture Show, a failed heterosexual love story, a gay cruising saga, a melancholy tone poem, a mordant comedy, [and] a creepy ghost tale.” Its myriad characters span the theater staff (a bashful female ticket taker with a limp, whose meanderings around the theater to find the elusive projectionist, played by Lee, give us the most visibility into the decrepit structure) and the film’s audience, from two elderly men intently watching the film to other, younger viewers (save an actual toddler, whose attention is rapt) less so.

The romantic notion of the dark movie theater is redirected from what’s going on onscreen to the goings-on of several male audience members who watch each other rather than the movie. (The latter almost becomes its own character, as its dialogue composes the majority of that in the film.) Tsai hadn’t initially intended to make Goodbye, Dragon Inn but came across the theater while scouting locations for What Time Is It There? (2001); he learned from its owner that attendance was down and it was mostly being used as a cruising spot for gay men. Something that one might expect to happen in a Tsai Ming-liang film occured in real life first, a discretely humorous coincidence that enhances its tender wit. 

In Stray Dogs, a man (Lee) and his two young children are houseless in Taipei, where the father works holding signs advertising luxury housing developments. While he does so his children roam the streets, gravitating toward a grocery store where the motherlike figure—who appears sporadically at first and then more frequently—works. She soon (again? One is unsure if this is their real mother) becomes a fixture in their lives, the four residing in a dilapidated house with stark white walls flecked with black crud. Like the urban settings in most of Tsai’s films, it’s stunning in its aesthetic beauty despite its apparent dilapidation.

The film’s title is evoked literally in a pack of stray dogs wandering around a derelict area that features a mural painted onto a building’s wall; the aforementioned motherlike figure brings expired meat to them. But the title applies to the characters as well: the father, whose job makes him a human billboard going largely unnoticed by the masses (a plot point reminiscent of Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien’s vignette in the 1983 film The Sandwich Man); his kids exploring freely with no parental oversight; and the motherlike figure, who may or may not be the children’s actual mother and who is played by three actresses (suggestive of Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, which featured two actresses as the same character), and even symbolized by an anthropomorphized cabbage. Whoever she is, she trudges about in the pouring rain to help the kids after their father goes on a bender. 

Tsai’s most recent feature, Days, begins with Lee’s Kang sitting in a barren room watching the rain outside his window and then languishing in a bath. Not much later, Non (Anong Houngheuangsy), a Laotian immigrant working in Thailand, laboriously rinses produce and fish in a bucket. These are but mere moments of how the two spend their time. Kang seeks treatment for his neck pain (this part of the film links it tenuously with Tsai’s 1997 film The River, in which Lee’s character has the same mysterious ailment) while Non goes about his day-to-day life somewhat aimlessly.

The two come together in a hotel room, where Kang solicits Non for an erotic massage. Illness and unconventional sex are present in several of Tsai’s films (like The River) but never so tenderly as here. The fleeting moment of release between the men is underscored by Kang gifting Non a music box playing the theme to Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight. Where Tsai has made many films in which Lee is a Buster Keaton type, with a similarly imperturbable stone face, this film instead evokes Chaplin in its attenuated sentimentality. Gay sex aside, the broad strokes of Days aren’t too far off from how Chaplin sought to consecrate the human condition vis-à-vis the Tramp. 

Light, a short companion piece to Your Face, takes place in Zhongshan Hall, a locale in Taipei with personal significance to Tsai (he volunteered there as a student) and historical significance to the country, as it’s where Japanese forces surrendered at the end of World War II, concluding a half-century occupation of Taiwan. This is an exceedingly minimalistic work, made up of shots of various spots in the hall upon which natural light falls beautifully. It’s a rather simple endeavor but one that Tsai does exceptionally well; it achieves something similar to what I imagine a compilation of the exterior shots in Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries might be like. 

Tsai Ming-liang at the Gene Siskel Film CenterThrough October 3164 N. Statesiskelfilmcenter.org/tsai

The longer film, also shot in the hall, has the distinction of being the first film Tsai has made with a musical score. After meeting Ryuichi Sakamoto, he asked the Japanese composer if he could have a look at the film, after which the latter sent Tsai some files. Your Face came to fruition after a 2017 VR film, The Deserted, had made him want to film close-ups after working in such a protracted tableau. The film consists of 13 vignettes of Taipei citizens whom Tsai encountered on the streets. 

Participation varies, from some of the subjects sitting in relative silence, the movement and expressions on their faces accounting for the action of their section, to those with stories to share. Relationships are a hot topic among the people who speak; one woman does tongue and facial exercises, a man performs a short musical number on a harmonica. The film concludes with Lee, who recalls stories about his father and being in school. It’s almost jarring to see the actor in such a relaxed context, as he disappears so naturally into Tsai’s films that it’s sometimes difficult to separate him from the characters.

Denis Lavant—who is to French filmmaker Leos Carax what Lee is to Tsai—appears in Journey to the West (2014), the fifth in Tsai and Lee’s Walker series. The films center on Lee as a Buddhist monk who slowly walks across various spaces around the world, in this instance Marseilles. The films were inspired by Tsai’s obsession with seventh-century Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who inspired a novel published during the Ming dynasty, Journey to the West, from which this film takes its name. 

Along with slow cinema, the long, static takes are often remarked upon about Tsai’s films, as natural to their formation as Lee’s presence. Here awareness of such shots is heightened as Lee’s red robe-clad monk walks at a literal snail’s pace in various directions across a frame, the camera unmoving. Passersby sometimes acknowledge him, while some ignore him. Lavant, however, begins trailing him, walking at the same pace and mimicking his movements.

No No Sleep (2015), the seventh Walker project, takes place in Tokyo at night. Lee’s monk again moves amid the space slowly, though partway through the focus becomes a night train as it speeds, in stark contrast to the monk, across the cityscape, photographed to illuminate the bright neon colors inherent to the environment. Soon we find the monk at a spa, where he’s joined by Masanobu Ando, star of Kinji Fukusaku’s Battle Royale. The two don’t speak and eventually part ways, the rest of the film focusing equally on both of the men after they come to reside in what appears to be a micro-hotel of some sort. Where, in Journey to the West, the camera was at a studied distance from Lee and Lavant, it here takes a bold leap toward Lee in one provocative sequence with a gorgeous close-up of his face sheathed in red light.

Ultimately, the apparent dryness of Tsai’s films is but a facade, a layer under which a body of water—perhaps, like in one of his films, a river—is waiting to be found. “For me, water means a lot of things,” Tsai has said. “It’s my belief that human beings are just like plants. They can’t live without water or they’ll dry up. Human beings, without love or other nourishment, also dry up. The more water you see in my movies, the more the characters need to fill a gap in their lives, to get hydrated again.” The screenings and events in this series will furnish one similarly. 

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“The people who pick up flyers and show up to free classes tend to be restless searchers,” John tells his students, after remarking that there must be something wrong with them if they’re here. When one student takes offense, John assures her he means this as a compliment. This scene takes place early on in Nick Drnaso’s unsettling new graphic novel, Acting Class. What starts out as a low-key portrait of a group of ordinary unsatisfied people trying something new winds up a sometimes sinister but always philosophical meditation on the quest for deeper meaning.

Acting Class by Nick Drnaso Drawn & Quarterly, hardcover $29.95, 248 pp., drawnandquarterly.com. Drnaso appears Wed 10/26 7 PM with Ling Ma (Bliss Montage) at Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark, womenandchildrenfirst.com.

Drnaso nimbly sketches in the lives of the acting class participants before they each see the flyer and make the fateful decision to see what it’s all about. A longtime couple tries to reignite their faltering relationship by playacting dinner as strangers. A man bakes cookies for his coworkers that they’re afraid to try because none trust him. Another must fundraise door-to-door as community service for an unrevealed crime while fighting his cripplingly negative inner monologue. A grandmother worries so much about her mentally fragile granddaughter that her care may be doing more harm than good. A single mother pours all her own problems out to a son who’s too young to understand and may later be crippled by her lack of boundaries. “Just don’t turn on me the way I had to turn on my parents. This situation will be totally different,” she begs as she rocks him to sleep. She must know it isn’t different, that whatever flaws she inherited keep getting passed down generation to generation.

As the teacher said, each of these people is looking for something. The question, which Drnaso wisely keeps close to his chest, is what they’re actually getting in this generic institutional basement. On the face of it, these strangers gather in a community center in the evening to try out some acting exercises. It’s a thing to do with your free time instead of watching TV, a way to be creative, to be engaged. None in this group comes off as aspiring thespians. This is not a first step to their new career on stage or screen. It’s more like therapy: an attempt to look deeper into themselves.

Drnaso’s drawing style is somewhere between Mike Judge’s King of the Hill and those airplane evacuation card graphics. His people are lumpy with small, barely rendered features. There were many times while reading the book that I got mixed up about which character was being depicted. But this isn’t a criticism. By leaving them half-realized and vague, his heroes become universal and also easily relatable to a variety of readers. They’re like unfinished costumes anyone could slip into. The acting exercises do nothing to lessen the characters’ interchangeability.

“It may seem like we’re moving unreasonably fast, but I don’t believe in building up all this suspense around performing. I’ve found it’s best to jump in awkwardly and work it out as we go. And again, it doesn’t matter, and yet it does, but it doesn’t, if that makes sense.”

To explain his approach, John says he’s trying to break down his students’ barriers and inhibitions. But to what end? Clearly their lives are not going so well that they couldn’t use a change. As one man remarks to a new trainee at his job, which involves mindlessly personalizing dolls and other souvenirs with names written in a variety of fonts, “I learned a long time ago not to hang too much self-esteem on a job.” What John offers instead of the drudgery of their everyday lives is a kind of mindfuck that takes on cultic overtones. Each week’s class seems to take in a different location and doesn’t conform to any set format.

As the book goes on, the line between everyday life and make-believe blurs, then vanishes. For some in the class, this is a dream come true. They like the characters they’ve invented much more than the personalities they’ve been saddled with up till then. For others, it’s a nightmare they’re increasingly desperate to escape. The gap between polar-opposite perceptions of the same event will be familiar to anyone engaged in the online world. 

The ending may be a bit too Twilight Zone for its own good in being weird for the sake of weird but if I ever see a flyer for a free acting class, I will run the other way. I might even tear it off the wall and throw it in the trash as a public service. Some doors are best left unopened.

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It’s day one of the Chicago House Music Festival and Conference, which runs through Sunday 9/18. Today’s the symposium portion of this free four-day event. At the Logan Center for the Arts (915 E. 60th), there will be a slate of panels focused on the history, culture, and business of house music: the House Music Entrepreneur’s Journey (5:30-6:30 PM), Comeback or Come Up? House Music in 2022 (7-8 PM), and a Fireside Chat with veteran dance music executive Patrick Moxey (8:30-9:45 PM). Participants are industry veterans such as DJs, producers, label owners, and music journalists including The TRiiBE cofounder and editor-in-chief Tiffany Walden. The rest of the weekend will involve music, music, and—did we mention music? Check out DCASE’s website for a complete schedule, including a headliner performance by Ten City on Friday night. (MC)

If you have an urge to s-t-r-e-t-c-h tonight, there’s two unique yoga classes to keep in mind. At 6 PM in Washington Square Park (901 N. Clark), instructor Gary Alexander teaches an outdoor basic yoga class for all levels . . . and your dog! Leashed and calm pooches are welcome to participate; bring a mat and no registration required. At the same time a little further north, DANK Haus German American Cultural Center (4740 N. Western) hosts instructor Janina Dunklau, as she offers a multi-level yoga class in both German and English: all levels of both yoga and German language knowledge (or lack thereof) are welcome. It’s $5 to join in the fun, and the class takes place outside on the center’s outdoor terrace. Check out Facebook for more information. (SCJ)

Cheese, glorious cheese! If you’re enamored with the stuff, and want to learn more about how it’s made, check out tonight’s Intro to Cheese class at the Palmer Square specialty cheese shop Beautiful Rind (2211 N. Milwaukee). This hour-long workshop will tell you a little cheese history, give you tips on how to care for your cheese and feature a tasting of five different styles. If you can’t make it in person, there’s virtual option (information for that will be given to you after booking tickets). It’s $35 and bring extra to buy some more dairy goodness when you’re done! Sign up for class at Tock. (SCJ)

A 1986 commercial for cheese; the theme song is based on a song from the musical Oliver!.

Are there any concerts tonight? Of course—it’s Chicago! Here’s a few shows featuring musicians that we’ve previously written about . . . Tonstartssbandht, the psych/postrock/art-rock duo of brothers Andy and Edwin Mathis White plays Sleeping Village (3734 W. Belmont), with local band Charlie Reed opening; show starts at 9 PM and advance tickets are available. Reader contributor David Anthony told us this week about Chicago punk band Alkaline Trio’s return to the stage for a sold-out concert tonight at Metro (3730 N. Clark); if you didn’t catch tickets for that, you can see them on Friday night as part of this weekend’s Riot Fest at Douglass Park (advance tickets are here). On a more experimental note, the Instigation Festival returns to Chicago this weekend to bring together improvisors from New Orleans, Chicago, and beyond. Festival shows this weekend inhabit Elastic Arts Foundation (3429 W. Diversey, second floor), Constellation, and Hungry Brain. Tonight’s show at Elastic features small groups including musicians Doug Garrison, Helen Gillet, Jason Marsalis, Dan Oestreicher, Mars Williams, and more. It’s $15 at the door and the first set starts at 8 PM. If you can’t make it in person, Elastic provides a livestream (donations welcome); go to Elastic’s website for details. (SCJ)

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Some might think of slow cinema—admittedly a nebulous designation at best—as dry. The films of Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based Tsai Ming-liang are often termed with that polysemous classification and thus may be considered as such. 

Though his films embody the technical definition of that word (another descriptor applied to his films, “minimalist,” also means to lack embellishment), there’s a benevolent irony to the fact that they’re usually quite wet. That is to say, in most of them either steady rainfall or another slaver tends the otherwise arid proceedings, at once a welcome interloper in its waterlogged enrichment and a manifestation of unrelenting heaviness inside and out.

In Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), which takes place in an old movie palace in Taipei, rain pours down outside as various characters inside the theater watch (or don’t) the last 90 minutes of King Hu’s titular 1967 wuxia film Dragon Inn. Though the characters are free to enter and leave at will, the rain serves as a partition of sorts, keeping both them and the viewers inside the damp and grimy theater, set to close after this final screening. 

More than two years ago, there was a 12-film Tsai Ming-liang series (ten features and two shorts), undertaken by local independent programmer J. Michael Eugenio, at the University of Chicago’s Doc Films. In the months leading up to the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic here in the U.S., all but one film of the series was screened. The last, Face (2009), was likely the last film many Chicago cinephiles saw in a theater for a good long while; walking out of it like the characters in Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one was deluged by the sudden onset of reality and that which would define it for the next few years.

The plan was to bring Tsai to various film organizations in Chicago, the first stop on a tour that would find the filmmaker in New York City and Washington, D.C. Alas, that trip was canceled, and for two-plus years we languished in a real-life scenario not unlike something from one of Tsai’s films. (Indeed, his 1998 film The Hole, which was rereleased in virtual theaters amid lockdown, centers on characters impacted by a sickness called the “Taiwan virus,” which causes people to go mad and seek refuge in tight, dark spaces.)

On September 12, however, the festivities resumed, with a screening of Goodbye, Dragon Inn at the Gene Siskel Film Center. This coming Monday his 2013 film Stray Dogs will screen at 8 PM, then his most recent feature, Days (2022), a week later at the same time. 

Films from Tsai’s Walker series—Journey to the West (2014) and No No Sleep (2015), two among the several projects that feature Lee as a Buddhist monk walking slowly in various spaces—will screen at Northwestern University’s Block Cinema, Friday, September 30, 6:30 PM, with Tsai and Lee Kang-sheng (a Taiwanese actor who has appeared in all of the director’s features and may be considered his muse) appearing in person for a post-screening discussion moderated by Dr. Jean Ma, professor of film and media studies at Stanford University.

The Chicago premieres of his short film Light and feature Your Face (both 2018) will screen at Doc Films on Saturday, October 1, 6 PM, again with Tsai and Lee in person. University of Chicago professor Paola Iovene will moderate that postshow discussion. Finally, the director will give an artist lecture back at the Film Center on the following Monday, October 3, at 6 PM, rounding out almost a full month of Tsai-related screenings and events. The tour will continue to New York City and Washington, D.C., as planned, as well as Boston.

For the Reader in 2005, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote about Goodbye, Dragon Inn that it’s “a Taiwanese Last Picture Show, a failed heterosexual love story, a gay cruising saga, a melancholy tone poem, a mordant comedy, [and] a creepy ghost tale.” Its myriad characters span the theater staff (a bashful female ticket taker with a limp, whose meanderings around the theater to find the elusive projectionist, played by Lee, give us the most visibility into the decrepit structure) and the film’s audience, from two elderly men intently watching the film to other, younger viewers (save an actual toddler, whose attention is rapt) less so.

The romantic notion of the dark movie theater is redirected from what’s going on onscreen to the goings-on of several male audience members who watch each other rather than the movie. (The latter almost becomes its own character, as its dialogue composes the majority of that in the film.) Tsai hadn’t initially intended to make Goodbye, Dragon Inn but came across the theater while scouting locations for What Time Is It There? (2001); he learned from its owner that attendance was down and it was mostly being used as a cruising spot for gay men. Something that one might expect to happen in a Tsai Ming-liang film occured in real life first, a discretely humorous coincidence that enhances its tender wit. 

In Stray Dogs, a man (Lee) and his two young children are houseless in Taipei, where the father works holding signs advertising luxury housing developments. While he does so his children roam the streets, gravitating toward a grocery store where the motherlike figure—who appears sporadically at first and then more frequently—works. She soon (again? One is unsure if this is their real mother) becomes a fixture in their lives, the four residing in a dilapidated house with stark white walls flecked with black crud. Like the urban settings in most of Tsai’s films, it’s stunning in its aesthetic beauty despite its apparent dilapidation.

The film’s title is evoked literally in a pack of stray dogs wandering around a derelict area that features a mural painted onto a building’s wall; the aforementioned motherlike figure brings expired meat to them. But the title applies to the characters as well: the father, whose job makes him a human billboard going largely unnoticed by the masses (a plot point reminiscent of Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien’s vignette in the 1983 film The Sandwich Man); his kids exploring freely with no parental oversight; and the motherlike figure, who may or may not be the children’s actual mother and who is played by three actresses (suggestive of Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, which featured two actresses as the same character), and even symbolized by an anthropomorphized cabbage. Whoever she is, she trudges about in the pouring rain to help the kids after their father goes on a bender. 

Tsai’s most recent feature, Days, begins with Lee’s Kang sitting in a barren room watching the rain outside his window and then languishing in a bath. Not much later, Non (Anong Houngheuangsy), a Laotian immigrant working in Thailand, laboriously rinses produce and fish in a bucket. These are but mere moments of how the two spend their time. Kang seeks treatment for his neck pain (this part of the film links it tenuously with Tsai’s 1997 film The River, in which Lee’s character has the same mysterious ailment) while Non goes about his day-to-day life somewhat aimlessly.

The two come together in a hotel room, where Kang solicits Non for an erotic massage. Illness and unconventional sex are present in several of Tsai’s films (like The River) but never so tenderly as here. The fleeting moment of release between the men is underscored by Kang gifting Non a music box playing the theme to Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight. Where Tsai has made many films in which Lee is a Buster Keaton type, with a similarly imperturbable stone face, this film instead evokes Chaplin in its attenuated sentimentality. Gay sex aside, the broad strokes of Days aren’t too far off from how Chaplin sought to consecrate the human condition vis-à-vis the Tramp. 

Light, a short companion piece to Your Face, takes place in Zhongshan Hall, a locale in Taipei with personal significance to Tsai (he volunteered there as a student) and historical significance to the country, as it’s where Japanese forces surrendered at the end of World War II, concluding a half-century occupation of Taiwan. This is an exceedingly minimalistic work, made up of shots of various spots in the hall upon which natural light falls beautifully. It’s a rather simple endeavor but one that Tsai does exceptionally well; it achieves something similar to what I imagine a compilation of the exterior shots in Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries might be like. 

Tsai Ming-liang at the Gene Siskel Film CenterThrough October 3164 N. Statesiskelfilmcenter.org/tsai

The longer film, also shot in the hall, has the distinction of being the first film Tsai has made with a musical score. After meeting Ryuichi Sakamoto, he asked the Japanese composer if he could have a look at the film, after which the latter sent Tsai some files. Your Face came to fruition after a 2017 VR film, The Deserted, had made him want to film close-ups after working in such a protracted tableau. The film consists of 13 vignettes of Taipei citizens whom Tsai encountered on the streets. 

Participation varies, from some of the subjects sitting in relative silence, the movement and expressions on their faces accounting for the action of their section, to those with stories to share. Relationships are a hot topic among the people who speak; one woman does tongue and facial exercises, a man performs a short musical number on a harmonica. The film concludes with Lee, who recalls stories about his father and being in school. It’s almost jarring to see the actor in such a relaxed context, as he disappears so naturally into Tsai’s films that it’s sometimes difficult to separate him from the characters.

Denis Lavant—who is to French filmmaker Leos Carax what Lee is to Tsai—appears in Journey to the West (2014), the fifth in Tsai and Lee’s Walker series. The films center on Lee as a Buddhist monk who slowly walks across various spaces around the world, in this instance Marseilles. The films were inspired by Tsai’s obsession with seventh-century Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who inspired a novel published during the Ming dynasty, Journey to the West, from which this film takes its name. 

Along with slow cinema, the long, static takes are often remarked upon about Tsai’s films, as natural to their formation as Lee’s presence. Here awareness of such shots is heightened as Lee’s red robe-clad monk walks at a literal snail’s pace in various directions across a frame, the camera unmoving. Passersby sometimes acknowledge him, while some ignore him. Lavant, however, begins trailing him, walking at the same pace and mimicking his movements.

No No Sleep (2015), the seventh Walker project, takes place in Tokyo at night. Lee’s monk again moves amid the space slowly, though partway through the focus becomes a night train as it speeds, in stark contrast to the monk, across the cityscape, photographed to illuminate the bright neon colors inherent to the environment. Soon we find the monk at a spa, where he’s joined by Masanobu Ando, star of Kinji Fukusaku’s Battle Royale. The two don’t speak and eventually part ways, the rest of the film focusing equally on both of the men after they come to reside in what appears to be a micro-hotel of some sort. Where, in Journey to the West, the camera was at a studied distance from Lee and Lavant, it here takes a bold leap toward Lee in one provocative sequence with a gorgeous close-up of his face sheathed in red light.

Ultimately, the apparent dryness of Tsai’s films is but a facade, a layer under which a body of water—perhaps, like in one of his films, a river—is waiting to be found. “For me, water means a lot of things,” Tsai has said. “It’s my belief that human beings are just like plants. They can’t live without water or they’ll dry up. Human beings, without love or other nourishment, also dry up. The more water you see in my movies, the more the characters need to fill a gap in their lives, to get hydrated again.” The screenings and events in this series will furnish one similarly. 

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