MIFF 2024 Film Review - Abiding Nowhere
Images courtesy of Common State.
A monk (Lee Kang-sheng) traverses Washington D.C. via the meditative art of slow-walking. He walks through the Washington Monument, the National Museum of Asian Art, Union Station, and various streets and national parks in the north-east USA. Interspersed with his walking is a young man (Anong Houngheangsy) who also observes, at a regular pace, the parks and museums of Washington D.C. and its surrounds, before making noodles with mushrooms and spring onions.
Ostensibly this sums up the contents of Tsai Ming-liang’s latest film. Well known for his films in Taiwan’s Second New Wave such as Rebels of the Neon God (1992), Vive L’Amour (1994) and Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) among many others, Ming-liang’s work is defined by its carefully controlled slowness. Plot is not remotely a concern, dialogue is generally minimal if not absent, the camera is perfectly still, and shots often last for minutes on end without much superficial movement - but this does not stop them from working their magic. The films are contemplative, yes, but there is a deeply rooted spirited passion to Ming-liang’s films that I’ve come to deeply love after viewing some of his films at ACMI’s Cinémathèque in 2023, often conveyed through Lee Kang-sheng’s performances, who features in every film of his. Abiding Nowhere is the tenth entry in Ming-liang’s Walker series of films (2012-present), which feature Kang-sheng as the aforementioned monk slow-walking across various locations. Each entry features a different setting, often endorsed and/or invited by a film organisation or otherwise, such as Journey to the West (2012), in which he was invited by the Marseille International Film Festival, and as such, slow-walks around Marseille. It gives the act a very large-scale feeling, as if Keng-sheng and Ming-liang are on a world tour - and I’m the Swiftie.
Slow-walking is a meditation practised by Buddhist monks, and involves walking extremely slowly - in Kang-sheng’s case he takes about 20-30 seconds to complete a single step. The film is wholly dedicated to the meditative yet quietly humorous notion of doing this in the busy public areas of D.C. - the camera is generally placed a distance from Kang-sheng, and gently observes him silently walking across the frame. Passerbys frequently stop to look at him, some notice the camera and inquire to their friends and family about a movie potentially being filmed, and two women pull out their phones and begin filming him for a period of time. A child even loudly asks if a movie is being filmed at one point. It’s an immediately striking image, Kang-sheng is obviously out of place, not abiding by the social norms of hustle and bustle. He innately draws attention to himself by merely practising this mediation in an area that is not architecturally designed for such an act, and it’s in this juxtaposition that the film shines. What almost emerges is a reckoning with modernity, a critique of the ever-increasing hustle of man, but this never feels innately critical - Ming-liang is reverent to this transformation. The citizens of D.C. may regard Kang-sheng’s act as a curiosity but the camera is careful to never frame these people as antagonists, rather as a collectively beautiful summation of mundane human fascination. It is doubtful as to how much of this is innate to Ming-liang’s concrete approach, as he famously has derided the idea in recent years that his films feature lessons or teaching of any sort. Such reflection is part of the meditation process that the film clearly encourages, however.
We are also granted what some audiences may call a reprieve in the form of Anong Houngheangsy’s character, who traverses the same spaces as Kang-sheng but as a ‘regular’ person, wearing jeans and a t-shirt as opposed to a large burgundy robe. Houngheangsy makes and snacks on noodles in two scenes, a callback to Ming-liang’s earlier Days (2020) in which he does the same thing in an extended scene. Houngheangsy’s on-and-off again presence in the film creates an idiosyncratic sense of comradery, it is genuinely heartwarming to see him and Kang-sheng return again and again to Ming-liang’s films, and their clear willingness to indulge and support this is what marks a large part of my enjoyment of his films. Last year at MIFF I watched a short film by Ming-liang called Where do you stand, Tsai Ming-Liang? (2022), in which he celebrates, in his own unique way, these collaborations in the form of paintings of them. It was a highlight of the festival for me and Abiding Nowhere is already one of my highlights of this year’s run so far. It feels as though I can return to and get a glimpse into this working relationship each year at the movies and I’m incredibly grateful for it.
It’d be easy to label Abiding Nowhere as tranquil and meditative, as it certainly is, but I still see so much of Ming-liang’s earlier passion present in the form of this late-stage mellowness. Many of the shots of Kang-sheng are filled with a fiery compulsion in their composition and lighting, sunlights warps itself into vast displays of idiosyncratic backlighting and vignettes, and amongst it all, he continues to walk onward. The film’s tail end features a beautiful sequence in a park with several large, old pillars, and the colours formed from the construction of this shot, as well as the framing formed from the experimentation with wider lenses are truly something else. This extends to so many of the film’s sequences, which also often engage in mundane editing with a disregard for sound design continuity - the running water of a creek will abruptly cut to another shot of running water in a jarring transition - something not new for Ming-liang and something that evokes his mentality to ‘realism’. He disregards this continuity in his acknowledgement of film as an artificial medium, and embraces the capture of Keng-sheng and Houngheangsy engaging in their respective activities as an artistic film. There’s something really special to me about giving your undivided attention to the act depicted in the film, to meditate ourselves, wander mentally as though we wander alongside Kang-sheng, and abide by nothing except our own momentum and rhythm.
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Abiding Nowhere screened as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival, running in cinemas and online August 8th-25th.
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