Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of What Time Is It There?
2001 · Tsai Ming-liang · What Time Is It There? on Sightlines
A man reaches up to a clock that isn't his and turns the hands back. He does it fast, without permission and without any expression at all, the way you'd straighten a crooked picture in someone else's hallway. Then he walks out of the frame. The clock stays where it is, keeping Paris time, in Taipei, for nobody.
His father has just died. A young woman he barely spoke to has gone to Paris. He can't follow her and he can't bring the dead back, so he does the only thing within reach. He changes what time it is.
Hold onto how useless that is, because it's the hinge of the film and it happens to be the hinge of Deleuze's two books on cinema. Most movies run on what he called the movement-image: someone perceives a situation, feels something, acts, and the act changes the situation. The chain is so ordinary we stop seeing it. Hsiao-kang perceives and feels plenty. His action lands on nothing. Nobody in Taipei needs Paris time and Paris does not come any closer. Deleuze's name for the moment cinema stopped believing in that circuit is the crisis of the action-image; his name for what grew in its place is the time-image, where the protagonist becomes a watcher and endurer — a voyant, a seer — and time stops being the yardstick for movement and becomes the thing you are actually looking at.
Tsai's method makes that literal. Fixed camera. Long unbroken takes. Almost no dialogue. Deleuze called such moments pure optical and sound situations, opsigns: you can look and listen, and that is all that's on offer, because no action is available. Alongside them he took temps mortes from the Italians — dead time, the stretch where nothing advances and the everyday is simply held. Tsai inherits that from Antonioni by the shortest possible route; the emptied streets and apartments here are built the way L'Eclisse builds its closing walk through depopulated architecture. It's worth putting Bazin next to this. Bazin argued that cutting interprets for the viewer and the held shot lets the real keep its duration and its ambiguity. Tsai takes the contract and pushes it past observation into endurance. His shot isn't waiting to reveal something. It's waiting with you.
The rooms matter as much as the people. Tsai's low, frontal, unmoving camera and his habit of holding an interior after the body has left it come straight out of Ozu's Late Spring and its pillow shots. Deleuze has a term for what's left: espace quelconque, any-space-whatever — a space that has quit its job as a setting for action and become a disconnected fragment of feeling. Ozu's vacated rooms carry a kind of acceptance. Tsai keeps the geometry and removes the consolation.
Now the argument for why this lens actually opens the film. A frame is a closed set, and it opens outward in two different ways. Relatively, onto the room next door, the street you'll cut to in a second. Absolutely, onto something that presses on the image but cannot be located anywhere in space. Paris is this film's absolute out-of-field. Even when Tsai goes there and shoots it, it refuses to become the adjacent room; the two cities never resolve into one geography. The clocks are how that unlocatable elsewhere gets a body. Turn the hands, and the ache of elsewhere becomes a fact in the room — measurable, and wrong.
Which brings the film to its finest claim. When a movie shows you another time it usually dates it: here's a flashback, a former present, safely filed away. Tsai never files anything. He gives you two presents at once, both live, neither in charge. Deleuze called these peaks of present, contradictory nows coexisting inside a single event. It's how grief works — the father is gone and still owed a meal. It's how longing works — she is over there, now, while he is here, now. Grief and love as parallel time zones that never quite synchronize. A lesser film would have made Paris a fantasy. Tsai makes it a time signature.
Then the strangest gift in it. Hsiao-kang watches The 400 Blows on a bootleg tape. Later, in a Paris cemetery, Jean-Pierre Léaud himself turns up, aged into somebody's uncle, and 2001 shakes hands with 1959. Deleuze called an image where you can no longer separate the actual thing from its virtual double a crystal-image, and he thought film-inside-film was one of its purest forms. Here the crystal has a face. The boy running on the tape and the man in the graveyard are the same person and cannot possibly be the same person, and the film holds both without blinking. Tsai didn't quote the New Wave. He imported a living body from it.
Lee Kang-sheng carries all of this by doing almost nothing, which is Bresson's model performance extended one generation: flat, unexpressive, a surface rather than a psychology. Deleuze's cinema of the body is exactly this — attitudes and postures bearing duration instead of motivation. The mother's side of the film sharpens it. Her repetitive household tasks, shot in real time from a frontal fixed camera in the manner of Jeanne Dielman, become what Deleuze called a gest: a posture that exposes a whole relation. A household still keeping hours for someone who no longer has any. And the compulsion reads as a symptom, a drive that can't say its own name, which is also why the film is funny. We laugh at the clock-setting because the link between feeling and useful action has snapped, and the laugh doesn't cancel the heartbreak. It delivers it.
What it did to filmmaking is easy to state and hard to overstate. Tsai built a feature out of the gap between two clocks. Plot survives only as premise; causality is replaced by rhyme across two cities; the emotional engine is a failure of synchronization rather than a sequence of events. That structure — hold the shot, hold it after the body leaves, let the elsewhere do the work — became the common grammar of the slow cinema that followed, and Tsai's own later films of water, clocks and bodies in empty rooms all run on the engine he built here, in its purest form.
So watch it with one question. When he sets a clock he'll never see again, is he trying to reach her, or trying to make his own hours unlivable so the loss has somewhere to sit? The film won't say. That's not evasion; it's the discovery. Tsai found out that a shot doesn't need to do anything to be unbearable, and that time, left alone in a frame long enough, starts to look like a feeling.
Concepts in play
- crisis-of-the-action-image — Hsiao-kang resets every clock he encounters to Paris time: an act aimed at a situation (his father's death, her absence) that it cannot touch or change.
- pure optical & sound situations — Fixed camera, long unbroken takes, almost no dialogue — the vendor and the viewer can only look and listen, with no action available.
- voyant — Lee Kang-sheng's watcher, not agent: the bootleg VHS viewing of The 400 Blows, the stillness that 'carries whole weather systems of feeling.'
- temps mort — Held shots of emptied Taipei streets and apartments where nothing advances the action, built the way L'Eclisse builds its depopulated urban montage.
- espace quelconque — Vacated interiors held after the bodies exit — the low fixed-height camera and 'pillow-shot' empty rooms inherited from Ozu's Late Spring, with the setting no longer serving action.
- out-of-field-absolute — Paris as an elsewhere that never becomes adjacent space; the clocks turned back to its time make an unlocatable outside press physically on the Taipei frame.
- series of time / peaks of present — Taipei and Paris held as two simultaneous, equally live presents that 'never quite synchronize' — no flashback, no dated former present.
- hyalosign — Hsiao-kang watching The 400 Blows on bootleg VHS while the actual aged Jean-Pierre Léaud appears in the Père-Lachaise encounter — the film-within-the-film and its living body indistinguishable.
- attitudes & postures — Lee Kang-sheng's flat, undemonstrative performance extending Bresson's 'model' direction in Au Hasard Balthazar: duration carried by posture rather than psychology.
- the-gest — The clock-watching mother's repetitive domestic ritual, shot in real time from a frontal fixed camera in the manner of Jeanne Dielman — a household still keeping hours for the dead father.
- symptom — Compulsive clock-resetting as deadpan behavior so absurd it reads as the unspeakable drive beneath it — 'loneliness expresses itself in behavior so absurd it circles back to heartbreaking.'