Goodbye, Dragon Inn

Is cinema really dead? As movie houses close and corporations dominate, the art form is at risk of changing beyond recognition. In this wide-ranging and elegiac essay, writer and film critic Nick Pinkerton takes a deep dive into Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 film ‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn’, a modern classic haunted by the ghosts and portents of a culture in flux. The book is both a eulogy and a call to arms for cinema. The essay evokes a defiant sadness and ponders how it might be preserved amidst the tyranny of tiny screens and the banality of the bottom line. It is part of a Decadent Editions series of 10 books about 10 films.

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 P