Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Paperback)

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.

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.

"A brilliant concept brilliantly executed, Tsai Ming-liang’s deceptively modest Goodbye, Dragon Inn is among the most resonant films of the still young twenty-first century. Its exegetist Nick Pinkerton ranks among the top film critics who have emerged this side of the millennium. The book is a fortuitous match – engagingly personal, securely erudite, stylish, and very, very smart." - J. Hoberman

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.