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I wonder if anyone at River East yesterday attempted a double feature of Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs, which had its second and final screening in the Chicago International Film Festival, and Gravity, which was playing throughout the day on several screens. The two films strike me as complimentary in that both are decidedly theatrical experiences and will lose much of their meaning if seen in any other context. Gravity exploits the dimensions of the big screen to suggest infinite space, while Stray Dogs uses it to give a sense of monumentality to the very small. In one of the movie’s greatest shots, Tsai sets his camera inside a supermarket’s frozen-food cabinet and looks up at the bustle outside. The plexiglass window reflects the vertical lines of the food racks at the top of the frame, making them appear to extend into infinity. These lines recall the tops of skyscrapers we see in the backgrounds of the film’s exterior shots, creating the impression that the awesome, terrifying, impersonal design of Taipei is replicating itself on a minute scale.
This scene is one of the most thrilling I’ve experienced in a theater. For those minutes, the screen was like a giant spook-house mirror, offering the spectators a reflection in which they did not appear. The movie became an environment that expanded into ours. Alas, this shot is virtually meaningless on a television. Most of Tsai’s art is.
