Kevin B. Lee (left) in conversation with Tsai Ming-liang.
Even though he didn't have a new film to premiere, Tsai Ming-liang was the guest of honor at this year's Locarno Film Festival. Tsai received the Pardo alla carriera achievement award at the Piazza Grande; was the subject of Moving Portraits, an exhibition at the Il Rivellino gallery; presented a screening of his 2020 film Days; and delivered several talks and masterclasses. One such talk was “On the Future of Cinema”: the centerpiece of a Locarno Film Festival initiative exploring the medium’s technological and cultural transformations.
The face of Locarno’s Future of Cinema programming is the scholar, media artist, and critic Kevin B. Lee. A prolific video essayist, Lee has produced over 350 works of audiovisual criticism, and with his award-winning Transformers: The Premake (2014), he introduced and popularized the “desktop documentary” format. Unfolding as a real-time screen recording of Lee’s MacBook, Transformers: The Premake begins by investigating amateur behind-the-scenes videos of Transformers movies, then explores the intercontinental web of tax breaks and financing that made the franchise viable. By placing the apparatuses of global capital front and center, Lee exposes how the processes of financing and production are inextricable from the franchise’s cultural impact.
Since 2022, Kevin has been the Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts at the Università della Svizzera italiana. In this role, he’s organized innovative events that contemplate the evolution of filmmaking, including gallery exhibitions, masterclasses with speakers like Hito Steyerl and Laura Mulvey, and an experimental 24-hour-long discussion called “The Future of Attention.” For this year’s talk, Tsai Ming-liang's work and manner of looking at the world seemed an ideal point of departure for some of Lee's most pressing questions. The quiet patience with which Tsai observes characters and spaces allows him to punctuate stretches of mundanity with moments of profundity, resulting in a body of work that resists the algorithm-driven future of cinema under capitalism.
During the festival, I spoke with Lee about his programming collaboration with Locarno, the relationship between cinema’s history and its future, and the ways in which new films by Radu Jude and Eduardo Williams embody both the spirit of a cinematic present and the embryo of a cinematic future.
Transformers: The Premake (Kevin B. Lee, 2014).
NOTEBOOK: I’m curious, how did your work with Locarno begin?
KEVIN B. LEE: In 2021, there was a call for a new professorship that had been established in collaboration between the Locarno Film Festival and the nearby University of Lugano to create a position that would do research and academic scholarship about the future of cinema. [The idea was that] that they could then offer new perspectives and ideas for the festival to consider for its own future programming and institutional development. I was lucky enough to receive the position. And, since the start of 2022, I've been the Professor for the Future of Cinema. This role is fairly open with regard to what I can propose. One of the first things that was proposed was that I could invite one guest each year to give a talk about the future of cinema.
In 2022, I invited Hito Steyerl. She accepted, and since she's a very established visual artist, it posed the question: if we bring Hito Steyerl to Locarno, what does that mean? Is there even the possibility of showing her work, just to provide additional context about who she is? Fortunately, we found this space in a local gallery, the Rivellino. Locarno has not typically had artistic installations as part of its program, but last year we experimented with this gallery that was built from a 15th-century fortress design by Leonardo da Vinci, and now it's like an occasionally used artistic gallery.
We decided to use that space for Hito's installation, and it was well-received. So, this year, we decided to try it again with a different artist. I thought of Tsai Ming-liang, who agreed and paid a lot of attention and care to the space. He was completely fascinated with it. And if you enter this space, it does have some characteristics that are reminiscent of some of Tsai’s films: dark, private spaces; dampness and water… It's not a pristine white cube by any means and there's actual water leaking from the surface because it gets rainy and humid here in Locarno. And that actually adds to the atmospherics of the space. He really played with that to present his installation, which is titled Living Portraits.
Besides this work with the festival, I teach classes on the Future of Cinema and the audiovisual at the university, where we explore all the different factors, societal, technological, industrial, and environmental, that are shaping the future of cinema. I also teach courses on video essays.
NOTEBOOK: Was the Cinema Futures class already in place when you applied to teach at USI?
LEE: No. There was no class in cinema and I'm the only professor of film there. There's no film department, which is interesting, because it's like, okay, I don't have film students. I do have students who are interested in film, but their disciplines are mostly in marketing, communications, and media studies. So, it's interesting to think about what I have to say about cinema that's relevant to their professional trajectories. And how can I make cinema relevant to them without playing into their orientations, since I'm not interested in film marketing per se? How can I bring them to think more in terms of questions of cinematic experience and aesthetics, and what role could that have in their lives? What does cinema mean to people who are not cinema specialists?
I think this is a very important middle ground. It's relatively easy to teach cinema to people who are already invested in studying it. But to actually engage with students who are either not as informed or as interested but are open enough to take my class because they just want to see. That opens up a lot of questions about how to make cinema relevant for the next generation.
NOTEBOOK: To go from the future to the history of cinema, Locarno’s current retrospective program is an amazing selection of mid-century popular Mexican films. This program brings up some of the same questions you were talking about before, because these are films that were not designed for cinephiles or cinema specialists but were truly popular films. Today, they're getting a level of critical attention that they most certainly did not receive upon their release. So, what do you think about the changes in the critical and popular reception of films over time? And how do you see the relationship between the past and future of cinema?
LEE: We're looking at mid-century Mexican films 70 years later. So, what will we be looking at 70 years from now that survives from the early 2020s? That's a very interesting thought experiment. It's very speculative. We ask ourselves what is truly relevant in speaking to our times and shaping both the visual and cultural language of our lives, and there's no simple answer. We can look at some of the films that are in the main competition and think about which ones will be the time capsules of the future. But we can also look at social media, television, and VR and reflect on how these different works will be legible and valued 70 years from now. What stories will they have to tell about the way we lived, what we cared about, and how we saw the world?
NOTEBOOK: In the first volume of What Is Cinema?, Bazin says something like, "Cinema has yet to be invented." In the context of our conversation about the future and history of cinema, how would you read Bazin's line today?
LEE: It's a very optimistic sentiment because it's saying that there's something yet to be discovered, something yet to be devised. And we really have to embrace that spirit. It reminds me of how Tsai Ming-liang was talking about cinema when we did the Future of Cinema talk last week. He said that he doesn't really watch so many films these days. When he thinks about cinema, he thinks about the films that formed his sensibility when he was younger. Truffaut, Ozu, Carl Dreyer, and John Ford. Pretty classic, canonical stuff, right? And he doesn't have so much to say about contemporary filmmakers. This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you're either not exposed to, or you don't have the time to engage with, the films of the present, then you're probably going to conclude that there's not much that’s of interest. But I think this is the task of the younger generation, to bring that enthusiasm and sense of discovery, because the films of the present should speak to the generation of today.
The Human Surge 3 (Eduardo Williams, 2023).
NOTEBOOK: I wanted to ask you about two of the new films at the festival, which I thought really represented this spirit of searching for and discovering the cinema of today. One of them is Eduardo Williams's The Human Surge 3, a film that thinks a lot about the technologies and apparatus of cinema.
LEE: As you said, Human Surge 3 really is thoroughly and critically exploring the imaging technologies that are shaping our present day. Like the 360-degree camera, which I think is a similar technology to what Google Street View uses, which is a technology for visual data collection and a kind of mapping surveillance that is meant to serve us, on the one hand, but really serves Google more than anybody. It's their way of turning the planet into a commodifiable resource through images, and positioning everybody within it. And to take that technology and do what Williams does, which is to scramble it, to make things less perceptible, less easily measurable, or discernible or trackable, and allow these young protagonists to roam freely alongside it where sometimes you see them, sometimes you don't, sometimes you hear them, sometimes you don't know who you're hearing, I found this very liberating. It's great that using a technology like that against the way that it's intended to be used can be the means of cinematic liberation.
NOTEBOOK: It’s also a crucial point that this was shot in one way and projected in another way. Who would realistically have access to this if it were presented in VR? In this sense, I think the choice of presentation also has a political dimension.
LEE: I credit Devika Girish for pointing out that in the end, it is cinema in the classic sense because we are looking at a two-dimensional, rectangular screen, even though the image was created through a 360-degree camera. Somehow, that flattening, that limiting of the parameters of our vision, allows us to retrain our gaze and offer a counterpoint to this state of overseeing. By limiting our vision, we can re-find our focus even as the frame itself is full of more things than we can focus on. So, it's an amazing reorientation of our visual sense of who we are and where we are.
NOTEBOOK: The other film I wanted to talk about is Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World by Radu Jude. It’s a film that questions who has power over the apparatus of cinema, both through its story and the multiplicity of its images, which are drawn from different sources and eras.
LEE: Yeah, there are many levels there. Because you have the historical recontextualization, using the film from 40 years ago, and creating this montage effect between how a woman driving in the past compares to a woman driving in the present. As a way of seeing how they're situated within Romanian society and the urban spaces of Bucharest. And then there is this virtual montage effect, between Angela as an overworked, exhausted production assistant just driving through Bucharest, and her virtual avatar as this right-wing person. This queering of right-wing misogyny through this filter that apparently the real-life actress had designed as part of an artistic project for women to somehow reclaim the language that's being used against them.
So, there is this idea of reclamation and reappropriation, which has been a tradition with certain forms of found footage cinema as a political gesture or strategy. And now you see that in social media, right? Something about living in the 2020s is about trying to make sense of how we can exist in these states of volatility and instability of who we are, and how what we say or how we present ourselves gets interpreted or reinterpreted.
NOTEBOOK: Tsai Ming-liang was the guest for the On the Future of Cinema talk at this year's festival. How did you come to choose him? Were there other candidates?
LEE: Oh yeah, there were multiple people to consider. But he stood out because, in some ways, he was the most counterintuitive in a way that I found really refreshing. In the last year or so, investigating the future of cinema has always been about anticipating what's coming, and what's next. And you get caught up in this temporal state of perpetual dislocation or dislodging from the present moment because you always have to think about the next moment, and this just becomes exhausting.
So, I started to think about the future not as this other temporal state, but as more of a question of what our relationship to time itself is. And what relationship to time do we really want that can really serve us or sustain us? It seemed like constantly asking this question about the future was not sustainable. So I had to ask myself, what experience of time do I want to have that can re-ground me in a state of true, sustainable engagement with time and space? Tsai Ming-liang's work is one of the clearest examples of how cinema can devise a relationship with time that is about really being in a cinematic moment, inhabiting it, occupying it, tending to it, and caring about it. How he utilizes space, the way he uses silence, the way he situates bodies in space. You really feel like you can live in his films.
NOTEBOOK: This makes me think of Goodbye, Dragon Inn, and how the characters inhabit the movie theater space. They go from the screening room to the bathroom or move through the hallways as if they are walking through the halls of a museum, or between rooms in a gallery.
LEE: It just so happened that he had had an exhibition at the Pompidou last year, which was a huge career achievement. And that also got me thinking about his work differently. I'd always thought of him as a filmmaker, first and foremost, but I've just come to realize that he's actually had a longer period of activity as a visual artist than he has had purely as a filmmaker. I think people don't really realize this, that now Tsai sees himself first and foremost as a visual artist. So, this also raises some questions about the state of cinema in relation to visual art on a grander scale. And he's playing with that as well. It comes back to the two basic elements of cinema, which are space and time.
Moving Portraits, Il Rivellino gallery.
NOTEBOOK: You’ve invited Steyerl and Tsai as guests for the Future of Cinema so far, and both of their practices heavily intersect with the visual arts. Do you think this kind of filmmaking will be the essence of the Future of Cinema program at Locarno going forward?
LEE: I don't know, it just seemed to happen that way. It just started because of who Hito is and what she does. And then that opened up the Rivellino Gallery. I'm already thinking, do I want to do this again next year? Who do I want to invite? But I don't identify as a gallerist or curator, and it involves a lot of work. It’s ultimately about extending the parameters of this film festival beyond what is normally recognized as cinema, a way of offering some new perspectives.
NOTEBOOK: You mentioned to me before that the next president of the festival is going to be very much connected with the art world. Do you think that could have an impact on the future of the Futures of Cinema?
LEE: Well, insofar as the Locarno Film Festival will influence the future of cinema, absolutely! [Laughs.] I mean, [incoming festival president] Maja Hoffmann hasn't started yet, so we don't know what direction she's going to take. We can only infer based on her biography and career. She really is a major figure in art curation and collection, definitely in Switzerland and in Europe. So, she brings us into a different realm of, let's say, curatorial or creative consequence.
Because she's so situated in the art world, it does pose this question of what cinema's position and relevance within a larger world of visual art and creation is. Is cinema a bigger world than visual art, or vice versa? How do they fit together? I think we're still in the process of figuring out what the configurations between the two are, but I don't think it should be surprising or shocking to say visual arts will definitely be part of the equation for the future of the festival.
NOTEBOOK: It's interesting to consider how film studies initially grew out of English and literature departments, and not art history or fine arts schools. It took decades for people to let go of placing the primary emphasis on analyzing the plot. Maybe that is the direction the future of cinema is moving towards.
LEE: Yeah. When I was an undergrad, I studied film in an English department. And I guess that has something to do with what the prevailing associations were for cinema as a narrative art form, since Hollywood and mainstream motion pictures were narrative. But we're definitely in a more varied and diverse world of associations with cinema today. I guess you could also put cinema in literary festivals, but the art festivals seem to be where there's a lot of energy and attention. So, if cinema can make use of that attention, then I think this is one way for it to reassert its position within the larger field of culture.
NOTEBOOK: Many of the new films at the festival center the texture of the image as much as, if not more than, the story or the characters: The Human Surge 3, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, Dreaming and Dying, Conann, Negu hurbilak, On the Go, et cetera. On the other hand, if we look at the Mexican cinema retrospective, or classical cinema in general, of course, the texture is there, but it's more secondary to the characters and the story.
LEE: That's interesting. And it makes me wonder if there's some wild-card element at play. And by this, I mean social media. In that, you don't think of social media as having a texture, right? You usually watch things on your phone, but within this small screen, there's a lot of attention and nuance paid to the quality of an image: whether it's a low-res image, or a computer-generated image, or a highly filtered or high-resolution image. And social media has had a revolutionary effect on the visual literacy of an entire generation. And it is less dependent on narrative. It's like, okay, here's an image. How do you read this image? It's like the gallery on our hand that’s turning our palm into the space we scroll through with our fingers. So, the effect of that on our visual literacy may have influenced cinema's development into something more about textures, moments, and vibes.
NOTEBOOK: This morning, I don’t know if jokingly or seriously, you said we can think of Tsai as an influencer at the festival as well.
LEE: [Laughs.] Well, I don't think that's what he intends for himself, but it's how he is received. I know this anecdotally from a Q&A he did at the MoMA in New York. I heard that, at the end of his screening, the younger audience members were not asking questions about his film, but about him. This is interesting with regard to what we want out of our artists these days. Although this is only one data point, you don't want to extrapolate too much from it. But it did [prompt] a very interesting question of whether we want to learn about the craft of cinema, and ask questions about directing, lighting, and the camera, or is it more about an idealized individual that we just want to emulate? We may not even want to be filmmakers, but he's an established figure in his field, and we want to be successful in our own field, so what are the life hacks that Tsai Ming-liang can offer us? [Laughs.]
I mean, if that's what it takes, I don't know if I'll object to that. But it does get you thinking about what the prevailing values of this generation, or our generation, are [such] that we're all looking for insights on how to live our lives. And part of that is reflecting on our work. But part of that is also [reflecting] on every dimension of our lives, and what advice and insights we can get to live our lives in the way that seems to apply to the people whom we idealize.
NOTEBOOK: Even Tsai’s presence here at Locarno... I interviewed him once, then I saw him at the gallery opening, then he was asked to speak before the screening of an unrelated film at the Piazza Grande, another day he held a masterclass, and then there was another public conversation with you. It really seemed like the festival was trying to use this highly respected and important artist as much as possible, almost as a spectacle…
It seemed like Locarno was trying to make the most of Tsai's presence at the festival. Only from what I personally saw, he was present at the Rivellino gallery opening, was asked to speak before the screening of an [unrelated] Italian film at the Piazza Grande, participated in a masterclass, and appeared in another public conversation with you about the future of cinema. Did you feel like there was an element of “spectacle” in the way Locarno utilized Tsai’s presence?
LEE: I honestly would not have expected Tsai Ming-liang to have been as big a deal as it turned out to be. In fact, it was unclear what the extent of his presence would be. The only starting parameters were that he would be invited to give a talk and he could also [be the subject of] an exhibition. But as we drew closer to the festival, it became apparent that as far as Locarno was concerned, he's Tsai Ming-liang, so why not make a big deal out of his presence? Then it was decided to give him the Pardo alla carriera and to show his latest film, Days. And it kind of kept building and building. The effect was that the more the festival invested in his presence, this actually did have a snowball effect, so that even people who didn't know who Tsai Ming-liang was cared about him. But I do think it was also due in part to who Tsai is. He has a very devoted following. There was one critic who's been watching his films for the last 30 years and interviewing him for, like, 25 years. And she joked that she could publish a book of all their interviews, and she really could!
That sense of devotion is very much a reflection of Tsai’s own films. His films have this devotional quality, this intensity of intimacy between himself, his collaborators whom he's worked with his whole career, and the spaces he works within, which reflect the intense attentiveness to places and how we experience them. And all of this somehow just percolated into an intensity surrounding his own visit to the festival. It was interesting to see how he was received by the public, that people really appreciated his films, and could perceive a certain intensity and a specialness in them. I'm grateful because I would rather have Tsai Ming-liang be hyped the way he was and receive this attention, than for him to be here and not be given his due.
NOTEBOOK: Tsai’s recent collaborator and actor from Days, Anong, was also here at Locarno. What did you observe about how they communicated with each other, despite the language barriers?
LEE: Anong, who's Laotian, only speaks Thai and Lao, and no Mandarin or English. I found how he and Tsai interacted fascinating. They didn't say so many words to each other, but somehow there was this ease between them that I found really profound. Like, what does it mean to spend time with someone and also trust in your own artistic creation, because he's the main character in Tsai's last film, Days. He’s also featured in the installation and one of the video projections, and they worked together to produce several paintings during the festival that are now on the walls of the Rivellino. And to do all that without being able to converse at length in any language and just by cohabiting a space, reading body language and gestures, and being totally okay with that, is truly remarkable. I try to imagine what it would be like to have such a meaningful relationship that transcends conventional language.
NOTEBOOK: We started by talking about how Tsai transformed the exhibition space of Rivellino into a space that looked and felt like one of his films, and I think even this relationship, which is maybe not something physical and tangible, seems like it's imbued with the spirit of the way in which he looks at the world. It recalls the feeling that you get when watching his films, which is a kind of nonverbal state of presence.
LEE: It's this thing that's more ambient and imperceptible and it's not linear, it's not data-driven, it's not operating along the normal procedures and algorithms and parameters of how contemporary society is meant to work. And for that reason, it's valuable, it's precious. It reminds us of another possibility for existence, that can be as simple as just being quiet and sharing a space with another person.