Abstract

Commissioned by the Louvre Museum for their art collection to mark a centenary of filmmaking, Tsai Ming-Liang’s masterpiece Visage (2009) is at once strange and visually stunning. Conceived as a film within a film, the plot loosely revolves around a Taiwanese film director’s attempt to shoot the story of Salomé inside the Louvre, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s painting St. John the Baptist, which hangs in the museum. Shifting between reality – in the form of the director’s private life in Taipei and logistical problems with the shoot in Paris – and the richly infused scenes from the imaginary film that unfold in the Louvre’s public and hidden spaces, the scenes that compose the collaged narrative of Visage are reminiscent of individual works of art constituted to form a collection. Replete with references to films, Visage also pays homage to pioneers of the medium and in particular to the late French film director François Truffaut.

The screening will be followed by a roundtable discussion with:

Catherine Derosier-Pouchous (Head of Cultural Production, Louvre Museum) Song Hwee Lim (Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, University of Exeter) Isabelle McNeill (Philomathia Fellow in French, Trinity Hall, Cambridge)