A Movie With No Dialogue At All - Black Eyed

Taiwanese art-house director Tsai Ming-Liang's new movie Black Eyed will not have any dialogue at all! And it will have an even more daring scene than the last scene in his most recent film, the highly controversial Wayward Cloud.

Black Eyed will be one of the two Chinese movies vying for the Golden Lion Award at the 63rd Venice Film Festival starting on August 30 together with Hong Kong triad movie Exiled. Mainland Chinese movie The Banquet (Ye Yan) will also be screened at the film festival.

Black Eyed which was shot on location in Malaysia will star Lee Kang-Sheng who acted in practically all his previous productions and Chen Shiang-chyi who also starred in quite a number of his movies.

Actually, having seen a few of Tsai Ming Liang's movies like Wayward Cloud, What Time Is It There and Vive L'amour, I think to watch his movies, you really have to be very patient and just sit through the experience with no preconceived ideas of what a movie should be. There is usually very little dialogue and some of the scenes are honestly far out, for example the abrupt song and dance routines in Wayward Cloud which I really do not know serve what purpose besides generating a few laughs :-P But if you sit through it, you will come out of the experience with the images hanging in your mind... Perhaps its because his movies are so natural and still that its like you are watching someone real (ok, a strange and possibly disturbed someone) with a hidden camera and marvelling at their antics. And you may also recognise some uncomfortable truths in what the films are conveying.

Its really not for everyone, but I think its good to try to watch his movies at least once to get a totally different experience from the usual slam-bam dialogue filled films :-)

Tags: Taiwanese Movies, Tsai Ming Liang, Arthouse Movies.