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Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Is cinema really dying? As movie houses close and corporations dominate, the art form is at risk of changing beyond recognition. In this wide-ranging and elegiac essay, Nick Pinkerton reflects upon Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 film Goodbye, Dragon Inn, a modern classic haunted by the ghosts and portents of a culture in flux.
240 pages, Paperback
Published March 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
June 13, 2021
It would be a misnomer to call this a single movie study because Nick Pinkerton smartly uses GOODBYE, DRAGON INN as a launching point to explore a hundred different related topics that pinball in endless directions. It makes for a very fast-paced if at times overwhelming, read that should be a textbook example on how to tackle these types of tomes - which I usually avoid like the plague due to their dry nature and tendency to devolve into dull scene-by-scene breakdowns. If you have even a passing interest in Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwanese cinema, or the arthouse director/cinema scene's current state, read this now.
March 10, 2021
One of our finest contemporary critics writing about one of the greatest films ever made. An elegiac monograph on Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan, the state of contemporary cinema, and the opiate of nostalgia. A winner all-around.
April 3, 2021
I had only heard of Nick Pinkerton from a few essays that came with movies I own (Charley Varrick & Police Story) and from following him on twitter. I like his writing and saw he was writing a book about a Chinese movie I had never heard of.
It is a nice little book and Pinkerton's writing is very pleasant and easy to read. I often get the feeling that many film critics today don't really like movies and they look down on them. I believe that Pinkerton really loves movies and he is great at articulating why a movie is special without coming off as arrogant and overly intellectual. I especially liked chapter 10 in this short book, where he talks about film naturally moving on from the cinema and how nothing can last forever. Tsai talks about film through a Buddhist viewpoint going through cycles and reincarnation. Most people today talk endlessly of the death of cinema and how bleak the landscape of movies is (I am guilty of this), but I appreciated Pinkerton not just being negative and exploring alternatives and possibilities for "moving image based art". I also learned a lot about Taiwanese film history and culture and Tsai's life.
I am grateful for this book because I don't think I would have watched Goodbye, Dragon Inn otherwise. It is a very beautiful movie and I will be looking out for the rest of Ming-liang Tsai films.
It is a nice little book and Pinkerton's writing is very pleasant and easy to read. I often get the feeling that many film critics today don't really like movies and they look down on them. I believe that Pinkerton really loves movies and he is great at articulating why a movie is special without coming off as arrogant and overly intellectual. I especially liked chapter 10 in this short book, where he talks about film naturally moving on from the cinema and how nothing can last forever. Tsai talks about film through a Buddhist viewpoint going through cycles and reincarnation. Most people today talk endlessly of the death of cinema and how bleak the landscape of movies is (I am guilty of this), but I appreciated Pinkerton not just being negative and exploring alternatives and possibilities for "moving image based art". I also learned a lot about Taiwanese film history and culture and Tsai's life.
I am grateful for this book because I don't think I would have watched Goodbye, Dragon Inn otherwise. It is a very beautiful movie and I will be looking out for the rest of Ming-liang Tsai films.
September 30, 2021
The New Yorker’s Richard Brody once told me that his experience of having seen a movie—in a room with many people or none, surrounded by the smell of popcorn or by the roar of passing subways, in a silent-picture palace or a beige multiplex box—meant nothing to him. “The equation of the movie is between the movie itself and me.” An extreme, I would say almost autistic position, but—do many cinephiles share it? Maybe some—and I do mean SOME!—millennial critics, used to watching everything from blockbusters to mumblecore on links. But not, I think, most.
No, most cinephiles, especially those interested in the lowbrow side of the spectrum, are into the theatricality of the experience. What is Quentin Tarantino’s obsession with “grindhouse cinema” other than a Proustian return to the smell of wino jizz and Colt 45, the rustle of rats in the aisle, the nonsensical words spoken by PCP-crazed Vietnam vets in the balcony to a torn-up print of TAKE A HARD RIDE?
Pinkerton’s meditation on the slow-almost-unto-total-stillness GOODBYE, DRAGON INN by Tsai Ming-Liang is a wafer-sized contemplation of the disintegration of what was formerly urban, crowded, and communal into the hideously cellular and isolated and agoraphobic world of the Internet. You can bet that the coronavirus and its dispatch of the First World into the realms of Netflix and Uber Eats gets its appropriate treatment here. Ou sont les big-ass two-dollar second-run theatres d’antan, asks Pinkerton, and the gallery space (Tsai’s favored new home) and the streaming universe strike him as unworthy.
Well, me too, bud—but this pessimist {total cinema fatalism is represented within by the shuttered multiplexes at the beginning of the Schrader/BEE/Lohan THE CANYONS} sees a world of climate collapse in which digital hermeticism will be replaced by a punch-in-the-face return to the natural world. We will reexperience the super-8 greatest hits reels of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO and THE DIRTY DOZEN my grandfather showed me when I was a tot. The VCR, and the unwieldy skeins of VHS tape, will be re-summoned. There may even be secret, samizdat, speakeasy screenings of 16 and 35mm prints. We may be done with the physical world but it is not done with us.
No, most cinephiles, especially those interested in the lowbrow side of the spectrum, are into the theatricality of the experience. What is Quentin Tarantino’s obsession with “grindhouse cinema” other than a Proustian return to the smell of wino jizz and Colt 45, the rustle of rats in the aisle, the nonsensical words spoken by PCP-crazed Vietnam vets in the balcony to a torn-up print of TAKE A HARD RIDE?
Pinkerton’s meditation on the slow-almost-unto-total-stillness GOODBYE, DRAGON INN by Tsai Ming-Liang is a wafer-sized contemplation of the disintegration of what was formerly urban, crowded, and communal into the hideously cellular and isolated and agoraphobic world of the Internet. You can bet that the coronavirus and its dispatch of the First World into the realms of Netflix and Uber Eats gets its appropriate treatment here. Ou sont les big-ass two-dollar second-run theatres d’antan, asks Pinkerton, and the gallery space (Tsai’s favored new home) and the streaming universe strike him as unworthy.
Well, me too, bud—but this pessimist {total cinema fatalism is represented within by the shuttered multiplexes at the beginning of the Schrader/BEE/Lohan THE CANYONS} sees a world of climate collapse in which digital hermeticism will be replaced by a punch-in-the-face return to the natural world. We will reexperience the super-8 greatest hits reels of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO and THE DIRTY DOZEN my grandfather showed me when I was a tot. The VCR, and the unwieldy skeins of VHS tape, will be re-summoned. There may even be secret, samizdat, speakeasy screenings of 16 and 35mm prints. We may be done with the physical world but it is not done with us.
May 23, 2021
Danke, Nick Pinkerton, für diese ausführliche und tiefgreifende Auseinandersetzung mit dem Film "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" von Tsai Ming-liang. Weit mehr als eine Kritik in Essayform, ist dieser Band eine Spurensuche in der Vergangenheit des Kinos, eine Momentaufnahme der weltweiten Zustände des Filmmarktes und eine Möglichkeit, die eigene Beziehung zu Film und deren Kosum zu hinterfragen.
Gefüllt mit klugen Gedanken, emotionalen Verbindungen und fachlichem Wissen ist "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" als Buch niemals eine biedere Auseinandersatzung mit der Materie, sondern eine universelle Betrachtung, geeignet für alle interessierten Personen, die sich mit mehr als nur fliessbandartigen Konsumprodukten Hollywoods konfrontieren wollen.
Gefüllt mit klugen Gedanken, emotionalen Verbindungen und fachlichem Wissen ist "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" als Buch niemals eine biedere Auseinandersatzung mit der Materie, sondern eine universelle Betrachtung, geeignet für alle interessierten Personen, die sich mit mehr als nur fliessbandartigen Konsumprodukten Hollywoods konfrontieren wollen.
May 23, 2022
Like the film, this book seems small but contains everything.
May 1, 2024
The closest any film writing I've read has come to translating the profound connection between cinema and time. Not so much a bible, not a Rosetta stone, but a bold inquisition into the medium's uncertain future - which is really the only thing of value now lest we be forever stuck in cinema's past. Pinkerton spins the elegiac tone of Tsai's masterpiece into something mournful but never doomed. Beautiful, inspiring book that has given me enough questions to guide me for my whole lifetime.
Inscribed by Nick himself on his tour down under for The Sweet East, after a day of drinking and sightseeing:
"To Shea
Fuck the haters,
Adelaide against the world."
Inscribed by Nick himself on his tour down under for The Sweet East, after a day of drinking and sightseeing:
"To Shea
Fuck the haters,
Adelaide against the world."
March 22, 2021
Pinkerton mines the corners of every frame of Goodbye, Dragon Inn (and every dripping corridor of the Fu Ho Grand, the dilapidated theater the film is set in) for the memories it might conjure, the context it denotes, the hints of formal influence in the plot, style, tone, rhythm and score all to consider the question asked time and again, What is Cinema? Is it dead or dying (and loving it - to reference an old twitter handle from the author)? What does it look like now? What was it to us in the first place? What have we lost as it changes and shrinks on one side of the spectrum and tears out of its clothes like the Hulk on the other side? Where will we see it in the future?
I had more fun reading about the movies here than I have in a long time and it exalts for me a film (and filmmaker) that admittedly had never gotten their hooks in me. Pinkerton uses seemingly every available resource to consider this film in the context of not just Tsai's body of work, but the filmmakers words from interviews, where he was raised and the historical context in which he formulated and produced the film.
If it was only an awesome analysis of a film and filmmaker it might be good enough, but it's got such a strong voice and point of view. Besides a sort of constant editorializing in his use of unexpected adjectives & nouns (I lol'd at a well placed "boondoggle") Pinkerton pops in with personal anecdotes and memories only as it pertains to the question at hand, and when he does he is characteristically funny, at times acerbic, and possibly most surprising to people who might know him only from Twitter, reverent and earnest.
When near the end of the book he questions Tsai's recent move from feature length films to short films in gallery spaces, claiming they lack a certain power he has felt from the former he's quick to add a qualification: "I am well aware I am contending with a figure who has understood the coming changes in his medium better than most, and wonder to what degree I might be clinging to a reactionary conception of cinema rooted in a receding past". This balance of digging for the meaning and the power of the film on its own terms and the synthesis of what it all means to the author is what I found most profound. So happy to have read and can't recommend it enough.
I had more fun reading about the movies here than I have in a long time and it exalts for me a film (and filmmaker) that admittedly had never gotten their hooks in me. Pinkerton uses seemingly every available resource to consider this film in the context of not just Tsai's body of work, but the filmmakers words from interviews, where he was raised and the historical context in which he formulated and produced the film.
If it was only an awesome analysis of a film and filmmaker it might be good enough, but it's got such a strong voice and point of view. Besides a sort of constant editorializing in his use of unexpected adjectives & nouns (I lol'd at a well placed "boondoggle") Pinkerton pops in with personal anecdotes and memories only as it pertains to the question at hand, and when he does he is characteristically funny, at times acerbic, and possibly most surprising to people who might know him only from Twitter, reverent and earnest.
When near the end of the book he questions Tsai's recent move from feature length films to short films in gallery spaces, claiming they lack a certain power he has felt from the former he's quick to add a qualification: "I am well aware I am contending with a figure who has understood the coming changes in his medium better than most, and wonder to what degree I might be clinging to a reactionary conception of cinema rooted in a receding past". This balance of digging for the meaning and the power of the film on its own terms and the synthesis of what it all means to the author is what I found most profound. So happy to have read and can't recommend it enough.
April 7, 2021
A brilliant, insightful book on a movie that I fell asleep watching
April 6, 2021
Nick Pinkerton is one of my favorite film writers today. His erudition and wit spans the less popular Nouvelle Vague auteurs like Claude Chabrol to the beginnings of Brazilian cinema, but his tone and style are refreshingly grumpy. The contemporary curmudgeon, Pinkerton sees the shallow depth of A24 films and Avengers films ad infinitum as a bane on the cinematic landscape, a dead zone of garish CGI imagery and confusing unwatchable dreck. While there are movies being made today that do deserve admiration, Pinkerton still sees the overall tendency toward a flatter, narrower, overall worse state of cinema, and he's not afraid to say it. Pinkerton is a breath of fresh air, in that he points out that the current air is, in fact, filled with smog and the strong smell of shit.
At the same time as I've discovered Pinkerton, I've also become enamored by the films of Tsai Ming Liang. Downloading a file of his film The Hole (1998) early in quarantine was uncanny; the film's loose narrative centers on two people living in adjacent apartments during a pandemic in Taiwan, and as a hole appears between their apartments, an ambiguous but powerful relationship begins. His films are slow, screechingly slow, but their relative lack of movement makes one pay more attention to the smaller textural sensations that get lost in faster films. The sound of rain on tile, labored breathing when trying to sleep on a hot night, the shining mucous of a raw egg, Tsai Ming Liang's films are reflections on ontology, on what it means to be in a time and a place, and they're all fucking bangers.
So obviously I had to buy this. And I think that this would've been really influential on a younger me. Pinkerton uses a lot of touchstones that I've also learned to rely on (not to say I'm somehow equivalent, Pinkerton knowing way more about film than I do). Mark Fisher's use of Hauntology, Marc Augé's concept of non-places, these ideas continue to resonate as new housing complexes replace historic institutions around the country and the world. Pinkerton stays faithful to Tsai, although playfully prodding and teasing around some of his optimism of the future of cinema. It's a good book, and I can't wait to read more in this series of books.
At the same time as I've discovered Pinkerton, I've also become enamored by the films of Tsai Ming Liang. Downloading a file of his film The Hole (1998) early in quarantine was uncanny; the film's loose narrative centers on two people living in adjacent apartments during a pandemic in Taiwan, and as a hole appears between their apartments, an ambiguous but powerful relationship begins. His films are slow, screechingly slow, but their relative lack of movement makes one pay more attention to the smaller textural sensations that get lost in faster films. The sound of rain on tile, labored breathing when trying to sleep on a hot night, the shining mucous of a raw egg, Tsai Ming Liang's films are reflections on ontology, on what it means to be in a time and a place, and they're all fucking bangers.
So obviously I had to buy this. And I think that this would've been really influential on a younger me. Pinkerton uses a lot of touchstones that I've also learned to rely on (not to say I'm somehow equivalent, Pinkerton knowing way more about film than I do). Mark Fisher's use of Hauntology, Marc Augé's concept of non-places, these ideas continue to resonate as new housing complexes replace historic institutions around the country and the world. Pinkerton stays faithful to Tsai, although playfully prodding and teasing around some of his optimism of the future of cinema. It's a good book, and I can't wait to read more in this series of books.
February 12, 2025
This is exemplary long-form film criticism. A great mix of scholarship, close observation, insightful interpretation, personal opinion and cultural context - it hugely enriched my experience of watching the film.
October 9, 2024
Sweet Sanni got me this book for my birthday based on the last film we watched with our friend before she moved to Taiwan, and I devoured it in a week while traveling. I appreciated this book because it not only discussed the film, a contemplation of a long gone era of the golden age of Taiwanese and Hong Kong cinema wrt to wuxia films, but also contextualizes it with the changing landscape of how we watch films, alienation, and connect with each other. References to Mark Fisher, Ariel Pink, Wong Kar Wai, Edward Yang, Christopher Doyle, Pedro Almodovar, Paul Schrader, etc...yeah this was up my alley. I will definitely revisit this one again
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February 8, 2024I’m beyond words when it comes to how pleasurable is to read Nick’s writing and how amazingly he traces themes and ideas throughout cinema’s history. Ultimately, it is not an essay about goodbye, dragon inn, rather a meditation that uses Tsai’s work as a starting point to reflect on the death of cinema and what could eventually come with its reincarnation. This book went straight to my heart and soaked me in deep nostalgia, as well in a faithful spirit towards the future.
August 29, 2024
i feel so much smarter after reading this. like i know so much more about history, culture, and movies from just this book alone
April 5, 2021
Really wonderful book. The film in question is a text that is both austere and rich. Pinkerton comes at in from a bunch of different angles: wuxia movies, the "New Waves" of Taiwan and Hong Kong filmmakers, the legal status of pornography and homosexuality in Taiwan, and the flaneur of Benjamin's Arcades Project, to name a few (I just can't seem to get away from the Arcades Project).
Ultimately the book is thinking through the state of cinema at a time when cinemas are closing, big movies are worse than ever, small movies are auditions for big movies rather than works of art in their own right, and home viewing, prestige TV, and the internet have eroded much of cinema's aura. Pinkerton is (rightly, I think) bearish on the move of filmmakers to galleries and museums but remains bullish on the cinema as a whole. I'm going to Film Forum on Thursday; it'll be the first time since the pandemic started. I hope Pinkerton is right.
Ultimately the book is thinking through the state of cinema at a time when cinemas are closing, big movies are worse than ever, small movies are auditions for big movies rather than works of art in their own right, and home viewing, prestige TV, and the internet have eroded much of cinema's aura. Pinkerton is (rightly, I think) bearish on the move of filmmakers to galleries and museums but remains bullish on the cinema as a whole. I'm going to Film Forum on Thursday; it'll be the first time since the pandemic started. I hope Pinkerton is right.
January 11, 2022
Not only does Pinkerton represent the essence of Ming-Liang's film excellently here, he also manages to gently weave the themes of the film into very crucial and timely commentary on the state of cinema in the post-COVID era, via 1998's Spawn, Walter Benjamin, Ming-Liang's broader filmography among other topics.
Extremely readable and charmingly written - essential reading for not only fans of Ming-Liang, but anyone concerned with the future of film in relation to the cinema as a cultural entity.
Extremely readable and charmingly written - essential reading for not only fans of Ming-Liang, but anyone concerned with the future of film in relation to the cinema as a cultural entity.
February 28, 2022
A small format 216 page book that delves as much (or more so) into the history of Taiwanese cinema culture and Tsai's biography / filmography as it does one of Tsai's standout films 'Goodbye, Dragon Inn'. The breadth of knowledge around Tsai Ming-Liang's films and the world they are born from and reference is incredible, the language is easy to understand but never superficial. Highly recommended for fans of his work, I just wished it was longer and perhaps talked about certain films a little more.
May 3, 2021
Over 200 pages dedicated to a single film! What a brilliant concept by Decadent Editions. Yes it does wander through Tsai’s oeuvre but the detailed analysis of ‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn’ is simple phenomenal. Produced in consult with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), this was launched with a screening & a pretaped zoom interview with Pinkerton. Can’t wait for the next book in the series ‘Ten Skies’ coming in June (again with a screening). Top quality stuff.
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October 6, 2021Uses the film (to my feeble mind, one of or possibly the greatest of the 21st century) merely as a jumping off point to explore not just the future of film/cinema from the theatrical point of view, but to delve into what exactly 'cinema' is, and what it is even capable of being or becoming.
Particularly liked the entwining of the Buddhist concept of reincarnation into the centuries old idea that cinema is dying. Maybe it is, but it will be reborn again.
Particularly liked the entwining of the Buddhist concept of reincarnation into the centuries old idea that cinema is dying. Maybe it is, but it will be reborn again.
March 5, 2021
hopeful!
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April 22, 2022Such a unique book of film crit, and a good look into the Taiwanese film industry too. Loved it
November 13, 2025
Like the film it chronicles, this is a deceptively svelte and ruminative experience, with Pinkerton's larger-scale suppositions about the medium of cinema registering more as intellectually engaging than onanistically academic.
Criticism about any film - except 1997's Spawn - that opens with a discussion of 1997's Spawn is bound to preserve both my interest and the requisite suspension of disbelief that requires immersion in the knotty conceptual arguments it entertains. I haven't seen much of Tsai Ming-Liang's work (just this and "What Time Is It There?" - both of which I genuinely love), but this has encouraged me to both revisit this particular film and to track down the rest of his filmography.
Criticism about any film - except 1997's Spawn - that opens with a discussion of 1997's Spawn is bound to preserve both my interest and the requisite suspension of disbelief that requires immersion in the knotty conceptual arguments it entertains. I haven't seen much of Tsai Ming-Liang's work (just this and "What Time Is It There?" - both of which I genuinely love), but this has encouraged me to both revisit this particular film and to track down the rest of his filmography.
August 23, 2021
didn't expect anything less from my favorite film critic (and twitter malcontent) but this is what long form film criticism should strive for ; both a highly researched analysis of the film and its director as well as a more exploratory and more personal process of exhuming what the film can mean to the writer, to its audience in general. It describes in a way that helps us to watch the film in a deeper way but it also moves beyond this to make us wonder about the greater world, about ourselves, about the direction culture is moving.
September 14, 2021
Multifaceted and profound, much like the movie it discusses. Great overview of Tsai's career, an insightful look into the craft of filmmaking, and an elegiac yet forward-thinking reflection on the state of cinema. Manages to not lose me even when it dives into theory from Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida.
February 14, 2024
Pretty good nostalgia porn. Gets a little too academic in the way all leftist literature does (wasn't expecting this to be leftist literature, but of course it is) but oddly not during the leftist parts. The leftist-artist theoretical overlap must be strong.
Good book, better movie. Please go to the AFI with your friends.
Good book, better movie. Please go to the AFI with your friends.
April 19, 2025
6/20
Have had this on my shelf for a couple years. Finally reading this as I’m working on a film inspired by Goodbye, Dragon Inn.
Star rating this one as I want to give Pinkerton due credit.
Nick Pinkerton’s essay is equal parts engaging, informative and touching. Made me feel very inspired to create, even in a medium that’s always dying. But hey, aren’t we all?
Have had this on my shelf for a couple years. Finally reading this as I’m working on a film inspired by Goodbye, Dragon Inn.
Star rating this one as I want to give Pinkerton due credit.
Nick Pinkerton’s essay is equal parts engaging, informative and touching. Made me feel very inspired to create, even in a medium that’s always dying. But hey, aren’t we all?
April 8, 2021
Beautifully written, I would love for Pinkerton to write a full length book
May 13, 2021
A "must-read." You must read it.
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September 14, 2021Interlibrary Loan
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July 14, 2022One of the best pieces of film writing I've read .
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews