Film and Media Studies Speaker Series: Ruochen Bo

Join us for the Film and Media Studies Speaker Series with Prof. Ruochen Bo (Bilkent University). Prof. Bo will give a talk entitled, "Short Film, Slow Cinema: Tsai Ming-liang’s Diamond Sutra (2012)." This talk introduces Tsai Ming-liang’s ongoing Walker series and examines closely its one and only single-take short film, titled Diamond Sutra. The film’s duration is not arbitrary. It lasts as long as the real time of a single mundane material process: the cycle of a Tatung rice cooker onscreen. Its narrative minimalism, further intensified by the excruciating slowness in Lee Kang-sheng’s walking movement, is juxtaposed with an enclosed, invisible yet audible, dynamic and irreversible transformation: water boils, rice absorbs water and changes texture, steam accumulates and is expelled, culminating in a final release that Tsai associates with his mother’s final breath. In analyzing the heterogenous functions of the rice cooker, I show how it could serve as a metaphor for the short-film form itself. Furthermore, the attention to the way slowness is staged in the film could demonstrate how the film’s apparent minimalism renders emptiness as eventful form, illuminating the sutra’s paradoxical logic.

Ruochen Bo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Design at Bilkent University. She received her Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto in 2024. She previously served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film Studies at UNC Wilmington (2024-25) and a Hou Family Predoctoral Fellow at Harvard University (2022-23). Her work on film and philosophy has appeared in Film-Philosophy, Film Quarterly, Conversations: Journal of Cavellian Studies, and elsewhere.