Tsai watch

"Truffaut was the first European director I connected with after leaving my home country, Malaysia," Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang told me at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 10. "The 400 Blows showed me that film could be like a diary – not melodramatic, not crowded with beautiful actors. When little Antoine looked directly at the camera [in The 400 Blows' final shot], that opened my vision."

Tsai's latest movie, What Time Is It There? (see review, above), adds another chapter to the life story of the director's own Antoine figure, Hsiao Kang, played by Lee Kang-sheng. At this point, the director said, he and Lee's artistic relationship is intuitive: "I would look, and Lee would be doing exactly what I was hoping he would do."

What Time Is It There?'s story ventures back and forth between Taipei and Paris, a new twist for Tsai. "I often find my environment is narrow," the director said. "I never go into computer high-tech places. For the past two years I've done research about labor in Malaysia, and there are next to no computers there. The world is moving very fast, and there are tons of people with computers. But I don't know if I should move 'ahead' with the rest of the world." (Johnny Ray Huston)

Straight into S.F.

While those who play Sundance as a game of celebrity safari may have been more interested in casual sightings of Brad and Jennifer and Parker and Bob himself, there was no bigger star in town than S.F.'s own Kevin Epps, who donned a hat and mittens for an unofficial screening of his Straight outta Hunters Point at a gallery in Park City. The movie's got legs, and since winning a Goldie award this past September, has gained momentum traveling its own festival circuit. It stops in at the Red Vic next week, and Epps appears in person for question-and-answer sessions. See 8 Days a Week, page 44, for details. (Susan Gerhard)

SFMOMA, at a loss

A year or two ago the idea of being a world-class museum meant generating a big new building, acquiring expensive art, and general expansion. Now the industry standard involves layoffs. In New York, the Guggenheim and the Whitney cut down their staffs, and last week the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art joined them, by losing 13 union and nonunion employees, while five other staffers were downgraded to part-time. A significant number of the cuts were to the Interactive Educational Technologies group, which produces cutting-edge but pricey electronic teaching programs, and the Collections Management department, which deals with researching and cataloging SFMOMA's holdings.

SFMOMA, while drawing big lines for the recent Ansel Adams exhibition, operated at a deficit in 2001 (some attribute the defection of director David Ross to money concerns) and, in the hopes of being more financially solvent, imposed a hiring freeze last year. But of course other issues entered the fray. "When you combine the economic downturn with the drop-off in consumer confidence and tourism that followed events on September 11, you have a confluence of events that together call for more drastic measures to ensure the long-term financial health of the Museum," reads part of an official memo from Elaine B. McKeon, chairman of the board of trustees.