Will the cinema ever rediscover the tracking shot? That was my overarching question watching the Taiwanese art film, Goodbye Dragon Inn, the other night. The premise is simple: on the closing night of an old cinema, a martial arts film (Dragon Inn) screens while various characters interact, mostly silently. Composed almost entirely of static long takes, it’s an exercise in cinematic duration that was reminiscent of Chantal Akerman’s work. Like in Jeanne Dielman, the tedium of characters’ lives ebbs occasionally and suddenly gives way to narrative movement. In the process, the viewer gets glimpses to the deeper narratives behind strangers — their sexuality, emotions, or pathos.
However, I can’t say I appreciated it nearly as much as an Akerman film. For one thing, I didn’t feel like I was watching an avant-garde film (Akerman makes films that are technically narrative, but with an avant-garde mode sustained throughout). Rather, I felt that the Goodbye Dragon Inn was the logical extension of an art cinema tendency to use static framing and long takes as a marker of profundity without doing the analysis of the subject matter. It’s like a generation of filmmakers (and filmgoers, by extension) has forgotten that long takes are far more impressive when action transpires (and when the camera moves! The martial arts film just teased me with its sweeping tracks.) And editing is far more revelatory when it’s used to make sense of inaction.
Why is the refusal to analyze now the hallmark of cinematic quality? I don’t necessarily mean intellectual analysis, though that too can be nice to have. I’m thinking of emotional analysis, as used in the formal term "analytical editing" — the tendency of classical cinema to break down a scene into different shot distances and perspectives to guide the viewer to grasp narrative significance (a person’s reaction, a telling detail, a metonym). Reacting against classicism, too many filmmakers have decided that guiding narrative meaning in any way is to be avoided. If it made for a more democratic approach to cinematic meaning (as in the avant-garde), I’d be for this. But somehow, I sense that too many simply want to be photographers, not filmmakers.
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