Goodbye, Dragon Inn

Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Nick Pinkerton

March 2021
240 Pages
ISBN 9783981918670

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.

About the film
In an old Taipei movie theatre, on the eve of a ‘temporary closing’, King Hu’s 1967 wuxia classic Dragon Inn plays to a dwindling audience. Lonely souls cruise the aisles for companionship while two actors from Hu’s film watch themselves writ large, perhaps for the last time.

About the author
Nick Pinkerton is a Cincinnati-born, Brooklyn-based writer focused on moving image-based art. His writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Artforum, Frieze, Reverse Shot, The Guardian, 4Columns, The Baffler, Rhizome, Harper’s and the Village Voice, among other venues, and he operates the Substack newsletter Employee Picks.