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During the shooting of Tsai Ming-liang’s first film, Rebels of the Neon God (1992), his lead actor, Lee Kang-Sheng—who would go on to act in all of Tsai’s subsequent features—sustained a neck injury that developed into chronic pain from which he suffers to this day. Tsai has, on occasion, explicitly incorporated Lee’s condition into his films, notably in The River (1997) and Days (2020); but images and narratives of illness and disability haunt his entire oeuvre. From the walking-impaired woman who wanders the halls of the movie theater in Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) to the eerily prescient scenes of quarantine and contagion in The Hole (1998), illness and disability in these films often take the form of compulsive repetition: habitual gestures, daily routines, and anxious rituals. Reading Tsai’s filmography alongside key texts in disability theory, film semiotics, and phenomenology, I argue in this talk that Tsai’s focus on the repetitive, ritualistic aspects of illness and disability is surprisingly radical for the ways it positions these phenomena not as aberrations or disruptions to the flow of meaning and time, but as the central sites around which meaning and time as such are organized.

Emma Ben Ayoun is Assistant Professor of Film and Media at the SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology, where she teaches courses on documentary cinema, film theory and criticism, global film history, melodrama, and slow cinema, among other things. She holds a PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Southern California and an MSt in Film Aesthetics from the University of Oxford. Her writing, on topics including disability theory, experimental documentary, animal studies, virtual reality, and disability justice, can be found in Camera Obscura, The Velvet Light Trap, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Intermedialités, and Visual Anthropology, as well as a new edited collection from Bloomsbury entitled Radical Embodiment on Film: Time and the Cinematic Body. She is currently a 2026 SUNY Accessibility Advocates and Allies Faculty Fellow.