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No Man An Island - The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-Hsien PDF
No Man An Island - The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-Hsien PDF
Udden, James
Udden, James.
No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Second Edition.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, HKU, 2018.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
NO MAN AN ISLAND
ISLAND Second Edition
“An excellent and groundbreaking volume. This book’s very precise analyses of the films as
NO MAN
well as their context make it the primary source for any scholar working on Hou in English.”
— Chris Berry, King’s College London
“In this first book-length study on Hou Hsiao-hsien James Udden illuminates the most
intriguing yet mystifying filmmaker in world cinema. No Man an Island is without doubt a
major contribution to the fields of Chinese-language cinema and film studies.”
AN
— Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Lingnan University, Hong Kong
Taiwan is a peculiar place resulting in a peculiar cinema, with Hou Hsiao-hsien being its
most remarkable product. Hou’s signature long and static shots almost invite critics to
ISLAND
give auteurist readings of his films, often privileging the analysis of cinematic techniques
Hou Hsiao-hsien
The Cinema of
at the expense of the context from which Hou emerges. In this pioneering study, James
Udden argues instead that the Taiwanese experience is the key to understanding Hou’s art.
The convoluted history of Taiwan in the last century has often rendered fixed social and
229mm
political categories irrelevant. Changing circumstances have forced the people in Taiwan to
be hyperaware of how imaginary identity—above all national identity—is. Hou translates
this larger state of affairs in such masterpieces as City of Sadness , The Puppetmaster ,
and Flowers of Shanghai , which capture and perhaps even embody the elusive, slippery
contours of the collective experience of the islanders. Making extensive uses of Chinese
sources from Taiwan, the author shows how important the local matters for this globally The Cinema of
Hou Hsiao-hsien
recognized director.
In this new edition of No Man an Island , James Udden charts a new chapter in the evolving
art of Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose latest film, The Assassin , earned him the Best Director
Second Edition
Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015. Hou breaks new ground in turning the classic
wuxia genre into a vehicle to express his unique insight into the working of history. The
unconventional approach to conventions is quintessential Hou Hsiao-hsien.
James Udden is professor of cinema and media studies at Gettysburg College. Second Edition
Cover image: Hou Hsiao-hsien on the set of The Assassin in Inner Mongolia. Courtesy of Spot Films Co. Ltd.
Udden, James.
No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Second Edition.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, HKU, 2018.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
Now is perhaps the most appropriate time and place for me to read No Man
an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, because reading this has been like
receiving Zen enlightenment. In late May of 2015, at an academic conference
in Belgium, I ran into James Udden who gave me a copy of the mainland
Chinese translation of No Man an Island. At the time I was in a dark mood
about working in cinema; even Hou winning of the best director prize at
Cannes a couple of days earlier had not dispelled the feeling of alienation
I was experiencing.
Of the nineteen films made by Hou Hsiao-hsien, I have participated
in fifteen of them as a screenwriter covering over thirty years. Thirty years
equals a generation to me, and thus encompasses life, aging, sickness and
death, success and failure, things that do not last, where even our accom-
plishments become but ashes once nobody remembers them, as Stefan Zweig
reminds us. The world-weary Ingmar Bergman in his sixties shot Fanny and
Alexander after which he cloistered himself on a small island in the Baltic.
In his eighties he suddenly declared in an interview that he had said goodbye
to “a business akin to a butcher’s shop or a brothel.” For him looking at those
past movies was like how one thinks about a very distanced cousin. He felt
very little for his past work, and to force him to make another would be
most difficult. But what I find curious is what he did with the rest of his life
anyway even if he was so clear on this point. He had been writing scripts for
broadcasting and the stage. In many ways I felt the same while at Cannes.
Just the night before I arrived in Brussels, all the prizewinners at Cannes
were at a beach party. Shu Qi was wearing a champagne-colored gown with
complex gold and silver embroidery, yet her beauty was not the invasive,
nervous kind of a star, but more like a gently, floating apricot blossom.
After the celebration, everyone followed her to meet the media, together
looking like they are in an Impressionist painting. I had a conversation with
Huang Wen-ying, the production designer, about her most recent experience
of working with Martin Scorsese in Taipei for the shooting of Silence. She said
most of crew treated Scorsese like a god, and except for a select few most only
watched him from afar, the complete opposite of how crews in a Taiwanese
Foreword vii
After dinner, under the late twilight of a Northern European summer, I saw
he was still there and decided not to pass him since I was with others. From
that point on until I left Brussels, I never saw him again. I felt a little ill at
ease and frustrated with myself.
That is how I was when back at my hotel, with James Udden’s book in
my hand. I opened it, and then I finished it.
The introduction, “The Problem of Hou Hsiao-hsien,” was like having
the scent of mint awaken me. For once I felt I was not the only one who had to
explain the road less travelled that Hou had happily been taking for some
time. Udden follows David Bordwell by placing Hou’s rarified long-take
style within a larger tradition of mise-en-scène. As opposed to Eisenstein’s
more systematic montage, the use of mise-en-scène though the long take
is more like hidden sounds in the wild as one sees the vastness of the world,
much like a poem by Li Shangyin, “End of the World” (天涯).1
However, Hou is not a lonely solitary figure in this tradition. In
Chapter 5, “Hou in the New Millennium,” Udden chooses three people as
points of comparison: Mizoguchi from Japan, Jancso from Hungary, and
Angelopoulos from Greece. These three long-take masters all use a mobile
camera for a large percentage of the time, seemingly the norm for long-
take masters. Udden then adds something in his research that has not been
done before. He produces statistics on average shot lengths with all of Hou’s
films and compares them with these other directors, using the numbers to
reveal Hou’s unique contribution to world cinema. Numbers alone are dead;
what matters is what they help explain: Hou is indeed a long-take director
as expected, but he also displays a frequently static camera all the way up to
The Puppetmaster (1993), the most extreme example of this unusual tendency.
As Udden points out, there are almost no followers of this exceptionally rare
path in the West, but this has now become a pan-Asian style.
In the final analysis artists have a difficult time explaining what stands
out about their art. Ozu’s fixed camera is often said to be the calm perspec-
tive of looking at the world while seated on tatami mats. But Ozu himself
downplays this by explaining that the fixed camera was largely due to limita-
tions of the equipment more than anything else. Similarly, Hou Hsiao-hsien
used the fixed camera and the long take as a way of best handling non-
professional actors — by not disrupting the flow of time or break up the
space so that the actors can relax while being absorbed into the setting. In this
way, using medium shots, long shots, and fixed angles is like approaching a
wild beast carefully so as to not startle, in an attempt to capture something
about them.
Hou himself does not seem very self-aware of how his films became
declared aesthetic works of a generation. While in Belgium, Udden was the
moderator of a question-and-answer session, and he himself asked Hou
about how he handles mise-en-scène. Hou gave a blunt response: “I have no
Foreword ix
Chu Tien-wen
February 5, 2016
Udden, James.
No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Second Edition.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, HKU, 2018.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
One of the most remembered adages from Rudyard Kipling is the notion that
East is East, and West is West, and never shall the twain meet. Many today
would prefer to see this oft-quoted phrase as nothing more than a quaint
post-colonial hangover, even believing themselves immune to such blatantly
essentialist, Orientalist terms. But one has to wonder.
Take for example, what many critics have said about the Taiwanese
film director, Hou Hsiao-hsien. Godfrey Cheshire explains Hou’s turning
away from plot and character, and focusing more on objects and settings,
as a return to a long-standing, older tradition in Chinese art and culture.1
Jean-Michel Frodon claims that Hou is proof that there is no Chinese mon
tage, that here lies a cinematic model which calls into question the system
of Griffith and Eisenstein, instead basing itself on an alternative world view
that treats oppositions (i.e. space/time, reality/representation) in an entirely
different fashion.2 Jacques Pimpaneau says Hou faces the age-old problem of
every Chinese filmmaker: using a medium that is based on Western realism
when the dramatic traditions in China are pretty much the opposite of
realism. Pimpaneau says Hou is not the first to grapple with this issue, but
few have expressed a Chinese cultural view of the world so deeply in film
as he has.3
Such culturally essentialist ideas have crept in even the more nuanced
academic writings on Hou. Even this writer once declared that Hou’s “his-
torical posturing” and “sense of artistic intuition” are both very Chinese.4
Less surprisingly, scholars from mainland China have tried to accentu-
ate how Chinese Hou supposedly is. One writer, Ni Zhen, says this: “Hou
Hsiao-hsien’s systematic and highly stylized cinematic prose expresses very
incisively and vividly the ethical spirit of Confucian culture and the emo-
tional attachment to one’s native land typical of the Orient.”5 Li Tuo sets out
to demonstrate that Hou’s City of Sadness is difficult for people to under-
stand because of its “non-logical editing” that stands apart from hegemonic
Hollywood/Western narrative norms.6 Meng Hungfeng explains Hou’s
long-take/static-camera/distanced-framing style in terms of the Chinese
aesthetic concept of “yi jing” whereby people, objects and settings are
2 No Man an Island
down through the ages without having to suffer the ravages of history,
as if Chinese philosophy and thought have remained essentially unified and
easily definable, often under the grand rubric of “Confucianism.” Likewise,
there is the assumption that the true Chinese artist values the past and tradi-
tion over more individualistic and creative paths in the present. If we ever
hope to come to terms with Hou — most of all, to come to terms with how
he relates to his own culture, including its traditional aspects — then each of
these assumptions should be subjected to scrutiny.
Even the most cursory review of Chinese history suggests a more
dynamic and less easily definable Chinese culture than many will admit.
If one were to periodize this culture — for instance, pre-Han versus post-
Han, before and after Buddhism’s arrival, or before and after 1919 — one
discovers varying, even contradictory, traditions to choose from. Or suppose
other plausible divisions are made, such as dividing China into Northern
and Southern cultures, or high versus popular cultures, “amateurs” versus
“professionals.” These historical, geographical, and social divisions are all
real and long recognized by the Chinese themselves. But they are all ignored,
sometimes conveniently, when defining Hou as an essentially “Chinese”
director.
Consider as well that Confucianism has adapted itself many times over.
Before the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220), when Confucianism became the
ideology of the state, it was but one component in a mélange, contesting with
the Daoists, the Naturalists (philosophers of yin and yang), the Legalists, the
Logicians, the Mohists, the Diplomats, the Agriculturists, and one group
so loose in their thinking that they are simply called the Eclectics (za jia).14
Thereafter Confucianism was forced to reinvent itself to retain its ideological
supremacy. In fact, during the long period between the Han and Sui dynas-
ties (AD 220–589), Confucianism was so beleaguered that it had to contend
with both a strong Daoist revival and the influx of Buddhism.15 During the
Tang dynasty (618–907), considered the most cosmopolitan era in Chinese
history — indeed for most Chinese the pinnacle of Chinese civilization —
Confucianism still had to work side by side with Buddhism, since rituals
from the latter religion were now practiced even in the court.16 Only with
neo-Confucianism, which was consolidated later under the Song (976–1276),
was Confucianism to reign supreme again, a state of affairs that lasted up
until the encroachment of the West centuries later. In short, it would take
Confucianism several centuries to be as dominant as it once had been under
the Han. Moreover, it did so only by deftly co-opting many metaphysical
ideas from both Buddhism and Daoism.17 To put it another way, Confucianism
allowed itself to be impure, contradictory and thus historically useful in dif-
ferent ways during different eras.
China’s art was no less dynamic historically as were its ideological and
religious ideas. In traditional China, the artist was not a special category;
6 No Man an Island
rather the famous artists/writers were usually part of the educated, bureau-
cratic elite with a vested interest in the Confucian system, at least when
times were good. However, when one looks at what has been preserved,
even praised, in this putatively monolithic tradition, one finds ample
evidence of other traditions also at work.18 No non-Confucian philosophy
has had greater influence on Chinese poets, painters and calligraphers than
Daoism, even though this is an anarchist philosophy which in its original
form directly opposed Confucianism’s hierarchal ideals. Some of the most
revered artistic figures in Chinese history were heavily imbued with Daoist
ideas. Wang Xizhi (303–361) is considered the greatest practitioner of perhaps
the highest art form in China, calligraphy, and yet his works represented
not only “the aristocratic ideals of spontaneity and relaxed nonchalance”
in vogue at the time, but also carried with them deeper Daoist underpin-
nings.19 The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove were a group of highly
accomplished poets now described as the epitome of the “individualistic
and idiosyncratic artist”20 who had little regard for Confucianism. Equally
idiosyncratic was the notorious Ruan Ji (210–263) who shocked everyone
by crying at the death of an unknown little girl, yet daring to feast on the
day of his mother’s funeral without shedding a tear — yet another affront to
Confucian morality.21 Guo Xi (after 1000–c. 1090), the immensely influential
landscape painter, depicted a vision of a Daoist paradise in his most famous
work, Early Spring.22 Landscapes in general, preeminent in the history of
Chinese painting, often depict hermits who have retreated from society and
are dwarfed by nature, ideas clearly of Daoist import, even if a Confucian
interpretation would be applied to them later on by Confucian scholars.
The diversity of the Chinese artistic tradition can be seen in the
High Tang, most of all in the poets Li Bai (also known as Li Bo, 701–762) and
Du Fu (712–770), two poets who hold the same stature in China as Mozart
and Beethoven hold in the West. Yet the two poets are quite different.23 Du Fu
became one of those models whom later generations would try to follow in
poetry, but he himself was a Confucian original. Li Bai, on the other hand,
was a Daoist bad boy, a failed, drunken bureaucrat whose poetry Li Zehou
describes as “an unpredictable outpouring of emotion in inimitable tones.”24
Even the critical values expressed in the past imply a dynamic rather
than static cultural development. For all of their Confucian certitudes, it is
surprising how often traditional writings on art and literature extolled the
virtues of originality, not the imitation of tradition. One example is the Qing
dynasty scholar, Ye Xie (1627–1703):
Poetry is a “final” art: it must say what no one before has ever said and
bring out what no one before has ever thought out. Only then can it be
“my” poem. If a person thinks it is real mastery to ape the expressions and
gait of others and call this “rules,” then not only will poetry be destroyed,
[a legitimate concept of] rules will also be destroyed. If I have made rules
Introduction: The Problem of Hou Hsiao-hsien 7
into something posterior, it does not mean that I have abandoned rules;
rather this is the way to preserve rules.25
Traced in Light, has situated Hou’s rarefied long-take style in a larger tradi-
tion of filmmaking based on mise-en-scène and staging.37 Bordwell does for
Hou what he earlier has done for the Japanese director, Ozu, noting how
blanket cultural explanations are often too facile since they fail to explain
the complexity of the phenomenon before us. Once again, what is at issue
is not culture in general, but the specific accomplishments of Hou and how
to account for them in specific ways. Chinese culture, most of all traditional
culture, is found to be wanting in its explanatory power. As it turns out, this
story — this problem — is far more interesting than that.
The purpose of this monograph is to provide not only an overview of
Hou’s career to the present day, but also to try to explain the myriad reasons
why it turned out the way it has. It does assume some agency on the part
of Hou — a view that is not always accepted in film and cultural studies.
However, it also recognizes that this is a highly circumscribed agency, that
the range of choices Hou faced has always been limited by the particulars of
every historical moment, shaped by the ideological, industrial, and institu-
tional constraints in which he has always operated under. This study does
not just explore how Hou defied the system, or overcame his circumstances
in the traditional auteurist sense, but more importantly how he took advan-
tage of the peculiar opportunities these circumstances provided him. This
study does not deny the impact of Chinese culture, but it does attempt to
contextualize and historicize that culture within modern-day Taiwan. It does
not deny even that this culture is very different from the West in numerous
ways, but it also acknowledges that “different” does not mean “Other,” that
like any human culture, Chinese culture, including its Taiwanese version,
grapples with the same fundamental issues of life, death, family, society —
in other words, like any successful culture it is a malleable means of col-
lective survival. Since Taiwan is so central here, this work relies primarily
on Taiwanese sources in Chinese for the reason that the domestic discourse
on Hou and Taiwanese cinema is little understood outside of Taiwan. Most
importantly, however, this study attempts to show how indispensable
Taiwan is in the career of Hou.
The organization here is straightforward and chronological: each chapter
represents a distinctive stage in Hou’s career, sometimes even representing
radical and unexpected breaks. Chapter 1 is entitled “Hou and the Taiwanese
Experience” and it sets out to explain why this catch-all phrase is central to
understanding Hou and his films. While discussing Hou up to 1982, when
he directed his third commercial feature before joining the Taiwanese New
Cinema, this chapter also explores competing historical “claims” made on
Taiwan (including China’s) going back centuries, followed by an overview
of overall development of Taiwan after 1949 when the island became the last
and permanent base of the KMT. (The era of Japanese colonial rule and the
immediate post-war era are both more fully explained in Chapter 3.) With
10 No Man an Island
this larger context in mind, this chapter will explore how Taiwanese cinema
became entangled in all of these larger political, economic, and cultural
developments. All of this will provide a revealing background to Hou’s own
very selective thematic choices once he joins the New Cinema, as well as his
aesthetic ones.
Chapter 2 provides an overview of the dramatic changes that occurred
in Taiwan during the 1980s, and how the rise of the Taiwanese New Cinema
was not a coincidence, nor was Hou’s personal rise to the top of that same
movement. It covers everything from Hou’s growing entourage who offered
him invaluable assistance (including his scriptwriter, Chu Tien-wen, who
introduced him to the writings of Shen Congwen) to his own assistance
to others, to his negotiation through the political and economic minefield
of a local film industry always in crisis, to finally his overcoming that con-
stricting environment through his unexpected mastery of the international
festival realm. The chapter at the same time provides an overview of his
New Cinema films starting with The Sandwich Man (1983) and ending with
the flawed Daughter of the Nile (1987), which came out immediately after the
movement was seen to have officially ended, but which nevertheless also
prepared Hou for his next two groundbreaking films.
The third chapter in a sense covers a “peak” in Hou’s career, since the
primary focus is his next two films City of Sadness (1989) and The Puppetmaster
(1993), arguably Hou’s greatest masterpieces. First, however, some key his-
torical background is given, since these two films deal with the two most
critical eras of Taiwan’s history which together created the present-day
Taiwan conundrum: the era of Japanese colonial rule (1895 to 1945) and
the immediate “return” of Taiwan to China culminating in the bloody 228
Incident of 1947, the darkest stain of the KMT’s checkered rule over the
island. It will analyze how City of Sadness, which deals with that infamous
incident, became the cultural event in Taiwan’s history which extended well
beyond its winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Particular
attention is paid as to how much the film itself was responsible for the film’s
lasting cultural impact. This chapter then explicates how by comparison
relatively little attention was paid to Hou’s next film, The Puppetmaster, and
yet argue that this work may have surpassed its predecessor both in terms
of its aesthetics and its historical sense. The chapter concludes with the
question as to whether these two historical masterworks represent a type of
history unlike any other, cinematic or otherwise.
Chapter 4 covers a crucial period in Hou’s career where his films change
dramatically in several ways. It begins with how and why Good Men, Good
Women represents a radical break in Hou’s career, and how his next film,
Goodbye South, Goodbye confirmed this break. Yet the bulk of the attention is
placed on his 1998 masterpiece, Flowers of Shanghai (1998), a work of visual
density and complexity rivaling Mizoguchi. Moreover, since this film is the
Introduction: The Problem of Hou Hsiao-hsien 11
first work of Hou’s that is not set in Taiwan, and since it takes place in late
nineteenth-century Shanghai, the whole issue of China, and how Hou’s films
deal with this, comes to the fore. More to the point, the question now becomes
as to whether even Hou’s own cinematic style is somehow very “Chinese,”
just as many have suggested, something this analysis casts doubt upon.
Chapter 5 begins with a brief overview of Hou’s career from Millennium
Mambo (2001) to The Flight of the Red Balloon (2007), and how these have only
exacerbated the unpredictable twists and turns of his career since 1995. Yet
this chapter will also try to place Hou’s career in a larger, global context.
In the end the argument is that Hou, as unpredictable as he has become, still
deserves a place in film history as one of the world’s great cinematic masters,
largely because he had the good fortune of living in Taiwan at a particular
time in history, and because he has created a new cinematic tradition in Asia
which now has several practitioners throughout the region.
The conclusion for this revised edition focuses primarily on Hou’s
notable return to the international scene in 2015 with The Assassin, a work
that earned Hou the prize for Best Director at Cannes. The Assassin represents
Hou’s foray into the wuxia genre that has become seemingly obligatory for
most Chinese-language auteurs in recent years. Yet Hou’s peculiar take liter-
ally turns the wuxia genre on its head. This most recent film seemingly raises
more questions about Hou himself. Yet it confirms three lessons found in
the previous edition of this study: an auteur of Hou’s global stature requires
historical luck, sufficient institutional support, and an enabling entourage.
As unexpected as Hou’s latest work is in many ways, there is nothing in it
that invalidates what has been said in the five chapters of this book.
One final word needs to be said here on the question of uniqueness.
While the pages that follow will argue that Hou’s films are unique because
the circumstances he found himself in are unique, the same could be argued
for any director who has distinguished him or herself. Perhaps the under-
lying lesson here is that the local matters for any director, no matter how
globally successful they are in the end. Every director has to begin some-
where; no director from the start knocks on the doors of a festival and says
he or she wants in without some sort of resume. In the case of Hou, some
seem puzzled that he is from Taiwan, but this study aims to solve that
particular puzzle, to explore thoroughly how the tortuous path of Hou’s
career only seems strange until one looks carefully at Taiwan itself over
the last three decades, most of all the convoluted, interlocking paths taken
by both Taiwanese cinema and Taiwanese society as a whole. Instead of an
inexplicable puzzle, the story becomes a timely symbiotic dance of various
historical moments, a story replete with specific geopolitical and economic
factors, many of them purely domestic. This is in the end a very Taiwanese
story, one that should be taken more seriously than it has been.
No Man an Island
Udden, James
Udden, James.
No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Second Edition.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, HKU, 2018.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
vast majority in Taiwan are deeply committed to avoiding all solutions, even
labels — calling themselves both Chinese and Taiwanese, favoring neither
reunification nor independence.5 Of two minds, the Taiwanese as a whole
have doggedly pursued a middling status quo — for perpetuity if at all
possible — as if they are forever holding their cards to their chest, never
laying them down for the world to see, never allowing the hand to be played.
Taiwan is an island based on the ongoing art of collective ambivalence.
Who is to blame for this? Just about everyone: the KMT government
which ruled Taiwan for over a half a century, the Ming and Qing dynas-
ties, the Europeans, the Japanese, the Americans, certainly the mainland
Communists, not to mention indigenous politicians presently calling for
independence. Together all of these parties have made experience itself into
a capricious teacher on Taiwan. Never allowed to exist on its own, this is
an island literally caught in between, always subject to a historical preju-
dice where Taiwan is nothing more than a strategic, geopolitical tool, a mere
appendage of something purportedly greater. A virtual ice palace created
by the Cold War, Taiwan today somehow has not “melted” into oblivion as
often predicted. Instead it has survived, even thrived, against all odds.
Not coincidently Hou rose to prominence in the 1980s. He translates this
larger state of affairs in indelible cinematic terms which capture, convey,
perhaps even embody, the elusive, slippery contours of that collective expe-
rience, with no fixed identities, no rhetorical clarities, no balmy certitudes.
At first, Hou focuses exclusively on Taiwan’s experience from the late 1950s
onwards, since he experienced this firsthand. The roots of that strange state
of affairs, however, go back centuries. Nevertheless, Hou’s later career
belies a Wittgenstein-like art of historical selection and omission: instead
of focusing on the standard historical claims made on Taiwan, Hou’s his-
torical films focus mostly on those eras that most complicate these claims.
We shall explore briefly what these “claims” are and how they affect Taiwan
to this day.
via the impetus provided by the Dutch colony set up on the island in the sev-
enteenth century.6 Eerily similar to what happened in the twentieth century,
soon unsolicited political events in China spilled over onto the island. As the
Ming dynasty deteriorated, a Ming general (Zheng Chenggung, also known
as “Koxinga”) came over and drove out the Dutch, a feat that today earns
him the title as “the Father of Taiwan.” Yet Zheng’s eyes were set on return-
ing to China, a cause continued by his successors. Only the failure of Zheng’s
son to drive out the Qing dynasty led to the formal annexation of Taiwan by
the Chinese government in 1684, merely for security reasons.7
What follows is the 200-plus-year rule of the island by the last Chinese
dynasty. The Qing treated Taiwan with a great deal of reluctance and ambiv-
alence, finding it more trouble than it was worth. (In fact, initially the Qing
offered the Dutch to buy the island back, which was declined.)8 Seemingly
stuck with Taiwan, the Qing rulers made almost no effort to develop it.
Emigration to Taiwan remained either illegal or greatly restricted for many
of those years, and it seemed as if the most corrupt and inept governors
were sent there. Each governor served short, three-year terms, and none
made Taiwan their home. During these 211 years of Qing rule, the locals —
whether of Chinese descent or the aboriginals — protested against the Qing
government no fewer than seventy-three times, and resorted to violence no
less than sixty other times.9 Taiwan remained a place of unruly character,
attracting Chinese of pioneering stock who desired to escape conditions
in China, most of all the rampant poverty and scarce land in nearby Fujian
province. These independent-minded immigrants in turn were looked down
upon by those who remained in China. Already the economic, social, political
and cultural developments in Taiwan had diverged from China as a whole.
The Qing did nothing to mitigate this; in fact, their policies only widened
this split.10
Even with ten thousand troops on the island,11 evidence of nominal rule,
if not misrule, indicated to foreign colonial powers that China had little effec-
tive control over Taiwan. Only in the nineteenth century, when Qing rulers
noticed foreign designs on Taiwan, did they begin to pay the island more
heed. First, the government in Beijing lifted all bans on emigration.12 After a
brief conflict with the French, the Qing government decided to make Taiwan
a full-fledged province in 1885 instead of a mere part of Fujian. For the first
time Taiwan had a competent ruler with foresight named Liu Mingchuan,
who not only established a stable administration, but also began to build
an infrastructure that included railroads and electricity. However, Liu left
in 1891, and inexplicably all of his plans for modernization were dropped.
Taiwan fell once more into a state of gross neglect.13
In 1895, when the Qing dynasty lost a war with the Japanese over
Korea, China’s historical attitude towards Taiwan became clear. The Chinese
government signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki and ceded Taiwan and the
Hou and the Taiwanese Experience 15
After all these capricious historical turns, what does this term “Taiwanese”
really mean? It depends. “Taiwan” and “Taiwanese” have been terms of con-
venience reflecting certain geopolitical realities, but not terms readily embraced
by those who once ruled the island, or those across the straits who desire to
rule it one day. In the murky semantic border between the words “Chinese”
and “Taiwanese” is addled a further, domestic complication, one that is dif-
ficult to clarify in English. Ever since the late 1940s, a differentiation is made
by those known as benshengren (“original province people”) and those called
waishengren (“outer province people”). The former are multi-generational
Taiwanese with mainland ancestry but whose roots on the island go back
centuries. Historically this was not a unified group because they included
a significant Hakka minority which has its own dialect and customs, and
which often has come into conflict with the Hoklo majority. The Hoklo are
comprised mostly of Fujianese immigrants who speak the Taiwanese dialect
similar to the Fujianese dialect spoken directly across the Straits of Taiwan.
By contrast, the waishengren are recent arrivals, those mainlanders who came
over after 1945, the majority of whom came in 1949 when the KMT lost
China to the Communists. Roughly speaking, the benshengren make up 85%
of the population on the island today, while the “mainlander” waishengren
comprise close to 14%. The remaining 1% of the current population is mostly
made up of a declining aboriginal population. In ethnic terms, this means
that close to 99% of the population on Taiwan is of Chinese descent, but this
does not make them any more “Chinese” than Canadians of English descent
are “English,” or Mexicans of Spanish descent are “Spanish.” Moreover, with
each passing day it becomes more and more accurate to call all residents on the
island (including waishengren) Taiwanese, not Chinese, given how radically
different the historical experiences on Taiwan have been from mainland China.
In any case, after 1949 both the benshengren and the waishengren on the
island were cut off from China, forced to live together with quietly fester-
ing historical wounds which have never completely healed. After initially
trying to justify their actions, for nearly forty years officials simply denied
the massacre in 1947 had ever happened. Yet when Taiwan, with bitter irony,
became the last bastion of the Nationalists, the government was forced to
modify its stance in radical ways if it was to survive. The KMT lacked real
legitimacy after the 228 Incident, a key factor in the reforms it eventually
undertook, resulting in a checkered record like that of the previous Japanese
administration. The Taiwanese benshengren would be at first the recipients of
change, later the beneficiaries of change, and finally the masters of change,
changes which first manifested themselves on the economic front, and even-
tually bore fruit on both the political and cultural fronts. These created the
Taiwan we know today: an economic dynamo and one of the most demo-
cratic “nations” on earth with a vibrant culture to boot, including a particu-
lar film director now of world renown.
Hou and the Taiwanese Experience 17
background of daily life. Perhaps not surprisingly, the same is true of Hou’s
films, at least those which do make some political references: A Time to Live,
A Time to Die (1985), City of Sadness (1989) and Good Men, Good Women (1995).
Hou has often been criticized for his political ambivalence and evasion. Few
can even locate him on Taiwan’s true political spectrum, which is not “Right
versus Left” (a distinction with little meaning in Taiwan), but “Independence
versus Reunification.” What people fail to realize is how typical Hou’s
politics are in Taiwan. Most residents there hold both politics and politicians
in low esteem, a direct result of a half century of oppressive KMT rule. The
benshengren majority even had a common saying that “getting involved in
politics is like eating dog shit.”20
In hindsight, it seems clear enough that the KMT government could not
have kept this up forever: despite its basic ideological premise as a govern-
ment of the “Republic of China,” which purportedly represents all of China,
no amount of propaganda could disguise the fact that it ruled only Taiwan
and a few other smaller islands. On the other hand, there was some historical
luck in their favor. When Chiang Kai-shek and what remained of the KMT
retreated to Taiwan in 1949, it seemed on its last legs. The party had lost so
much credibility that it was cut off even from U.S. support. The mainland
Communists had drawn up plans for an imminent invasion of the island to
finish off the Nationalists once and for all. All this changed with the outbreak
of the Korean War in 1950. Two days after it began, the United States sent the
Seventh Fleet to the Straits of Taiwan. The Korean conflict simultaneously
ended plans by the Communists to attack the island.21 Taiwan had once
again undergone another dramatic metamorphosis: it became a KMT-led
fortress on the front lines of the Cold War.
This tense Cold War atmosphere pervaded the 1950s, and reached its
height in August of 1958 with the so-called “Cannon War” with the PRC over
the islands of Kinmen and Matsu, both within eyesight of Fujian province.
Chiang Kai-shek’s hope was to get the United States directly involved in an
attack against mainland China, but the Americans only offered indirect aid
and even tried unsuccessfully to convince the KMT to relinquish control over
the two islands. Finally a compromise between the two distrustful allies was
reached in October: the ROC would no longer attack the PRC in exchange
for continued control over Kinmen and Matsu. The Chinese Communists
protested, but some have speculated that Mao secretly agreed to Nationalist
control over these two islands. Being so close to the mainland, this would
help mitigate any drive towards Taiwanese independence.22 The result is a
stalemate which persists to this day: Kinmen and Matsu remain under the
control of the ROC, not the PRC.
The tense, paranoid atmosphere of the Cold War was well suited for
Chiang’s quest for absolute power over the island. Smaller, local sections of
the party were all inextricable parts of larger sections leading directly to the
Hou and the Taiwanese Experience 19
candidates who ran, and sometimes won, in local elections despite wide-
spread KMT fraud. Once the United States withdrew recognition of the
ROC government in December of 1978, things came to a head a year later in
southern Taiwan. The so-called “Formosa Incident,” sometimes known as
the “Kaohsiung Incident,” was the first major public protest against the KMT
since the 228 Incident of 1947. The leaders of “the party without a name”
staged a mass human rights rally in Kaohsiung on December 10, 1979, the
International Day for Human Rights. When the police in Kaohsiung came
out in force to intimidate the large crowds, the people did not give in, even
breaking through police lines. Upon seeing this, one witness said, “History
has had a new beginning.”27 This opened the floodgates of the 1980s.
Hou was not involved in any of this. During the 1970s Hou was slowly
working his way up in the Taiwanese film industry, showing no evidence
of taking any political sides along the way. There was no indication during
that time that he would take on the roles and issues and controversies he
would eventually become embroiled in. But things change in Taiwan — even
overnight.
the country “basket case” status in the eyes of foreign economists.28 Yet from
such inauspicious beginnings, the island experienced growth records that
are among the highest in human history. The industrial sector grew 12.2% a
year from 1953 to 1964, during which time Taiwan received ample aid from
the United States. After American aid was dropped, Taiwan’s economic
performance spurted ahead. The industrial sector grew at an annual rate of
16.1% from 1965 to 1975.29 The economy as a whole, including the relatively
stagnant agricultural sector, grew on average 10% a year from 1963 to 1980.
Once the economy had fully matured, the island still recorded an annual rate
of growth of 7.5% from 1981 to 1995.30 Of central importance in this picture
is how the populace at large benefited. The average Taiwanese in 1950 had
the personal income of the average mainland Chinese. By the 1980s, the per
capita income in Taiwan was twenty times that of mainland China.31
Several specific policies by the KMT fostered this astronomical growth.
A thoroughgoing land reform turned land capital into business capital,
laying the groundwork for economic development. Local landowners on the
island did not resist, since the 228 Incident was still fresh in their memories.
At the same time, however, the KMT government gave these landless land-
owners a stake in major government industries, effectively ending a feudal
system by transforming its primary beneficiaries into capitalists.32 Another
key to Taiwan’s economic development was privatization.33 Overall the
government held back publicly owned industries while allowing privately
owned ones to thrive. By 1959, the percentage of industrial enterprises that
were privately run exceeded those run by the government.34 From only 43%
of industrial production being privately owned in 1954, the percentage had
jumped to 80% in 1972, and 90% by the mid-1980s, making Taiwan, by any
standard, one of the most privately owned economies in the world.35 The
economy became highly decentralized, dominated by small- and medium-
sized enterprises to an extent not found elsewhere. In 1981, 45% of the manu-
facturing was done by small- and medium-sized businesses. In the most
successful and dynamic part of Taiwan’s economy, manufacturing for export,
the percentage jumped to 68% of the total.36 Moreover, the main beneficiar-
ies of this policy were the benshengren, not the “elite” of recent mainland
descent. Stringent educational, political and cultural policies notwithstand-
ing, the mainlanders had neither the gall nor the wherewithal to stand in the
way of a hostile majority as they had done in 1947.
The government also steered the economy towards export. Taiwan is
heavily trade-oriented: by the 1980s, exports and imports accounted for
over 85% of its economy, a startling figure when you realize that in Japan
the figure is only 30%.37 Back in the 1950s, the government utilized the so-
called “import-substitution policy” common to many newly industrialized
nations. This focused on developing the domestic market through protec-
tionist measures. In Taiwan this policy was unusually successful, largely
22 No Man an Island
because this was a temporary measure restricted mostly to the capital goods
industry. For consumer goods, unfinished goods and manufacturing as a
whole, almost all the growth came from filling domestic demand and almost
none from import substitution per se. In the Philippines, by contrast, nearly
one quarter to one-third of the growth in all four of these areas was due to
import-substitution, and only 60–70% to filling domestic demand. This in
the long run weakened industries in the Philippines.38 Soon the ROC govern-
ment steered Taiwan towards an outward-looking economy by encouraging
export over import. In 1959, they abolished a dual currency exchange-rate
system, devalued the currency, reduced tariffs and set up laws, regulations
and tax rates that all encouraged exporting.39 Perhaps no other decision
made by the KMT-led government has so markedly improved the lives of
the Taiwanese.
In short, while denied a political stake for decades, the Taiwanese ben-
shengren were already given a strong stake in the economy even at the height
of the Cold War. The Taiwanese majority took advantage of this economic
leeway to the fullest, even to the point of flouting its often poorly enforced
legal boundaries. As a result, Taiwan has been much like an underground
economy that operates above ground. The government did retain strict
control in banking, and getting a loan was difficult for the average Taiwanese.
To get around this, the Taiwanese set up thousands of ad hoc private credit
associations (biaohui) to raise their own capital, a remarkably risky venture
that pays off handsomely if all the members in any one group are trustwor-
thy.40 Many businesses would openly operate without licenses, and most
would keep two account books, one for themselves, and a diminutive version
for tax collectors. The population in general tends to under-report its income
to the government, making the true per capita income hard to measure.
By the 1980s, wealth in Taiwan was to be found everywhere, largely the result
of both hard work and disdain for government interference. The KMT-led
government observed this collective civil disobedience, and understood that
its only choice was mostly to look the other way. Meanwhile Hou and others
of the New Cinema in the 1980s, when this Economic Miracle was now an
established fact, began to explore what this all meant for the people actually
living on the island. Their answers reveal a great deal of ambivalence.
However, for those already aware of the film festival scene in the last two
decades, the opposite is true: when they think of Taiwan, they are likely to
think of Hou first, plus others such as Edward Yang and Tsai Ming-liang.
What they often miss is how inextricably linked Hou the cultural phenom-
enon is to these larger political and economic forces within Taiwan.
Since 1949, Taiwanese culture has been caught between these political
and economic forces described above. Taiwan’s culture began as a centrip-
etal force under the tight control of the KMT government, only to eventu-
ally become a centrifugal force which now plays unofficial diplomatic roles
denied to the government itself. In addition, the unsettled nature of the
Taiwanese situation has made Taiwanese culture even more dynamic and
inventive. Hou is not the only evidence of that, but he is one of the best.
Once again, this cultural dynamic originated in some of the most inaus-
picious conditions imaginable. Among the émigrés to Taiwan in 1949 were
some of China’s best and brightest, many who came not out of loyalty
toward the KMT as out of fear of the Communists. A motley group, circum-
stances forced them to live and raise their children on the island, only slowly
realizing there was no going back. Still, for quite some time there were strict
limits as to what they could express about this strange, new world. By dint
of a government monopoly over culture, education and the media, there
was a concerted effort to foist a Chinese identity on the local population
and suppress anything distinctively Taiwanese.41 The prevailing feeling at
the time was that the KMT’s loss on the mainland was due to a failure of
propaganda, not policy. In Taiwan, the party was not about to make the same
mistake again. Culture was a key component in what the KMT saw as a fight
to the death.
Government control pervaded all cultural areas, but it was particularly
stringent in the education of young people. “The Three Principles of the
People,” the official ideology of the state, permeated every area of academic
life. A key organization was a China Youth Anti-Communist Salvation League
started in 1952. This organization established political activities and military
training for young people.42 Designed to focus attention on the “communist
bandits” a mere hundred miles away, it was also part of a large-scale effort to
eradicate anything specifically “Taiwanese.” Other educational policies were
at the forefront of this tacit strategy as well: starting in 1951, all classes had
to be taught in Mandarin, and native Taiwanese children were punished by
harsh fines every time they spoke a word of the Taiwanese dialect in the
classroom.43 Such practices survived up to the 1970s. (Hou’s own fluency
in the Taiwanese dialect came not from the classroom, but from the streets.)
The government also provided direct guidance over literature and
cinema. In 1950, the China Association for Literature and the Arts was set
up with ten members, one of whose responsibility was to oversee film.
This resulted in heavily propagandistic art imbued with anti-communist
24 No Man an Island
themes while extolling the virtues of Sun Yat-sen’s “Three Principles of the
People.”44 The stranglehold was further tightened in 1954 when this asso-
ciation announced a government policy called “The Cultural Cleansing
Movement.” This campaign had the expressed goal of ridding the culture
of all “Red” (communistic), “Black” (pessimistic views of the underside
of society) and “Yellow” (licentious, pornographic) elements. The three
undesirable “colors” in turn formed the sweeping basis for all subsequent
government censorship which was taken over by the all-important GIO
(Government Information Office) in 1955.45 In 1960, the tenth anniversary of
the supreme cultural body from which the GIO took its cues reiterated these
anti-“Red,” “Black” and “Yellow” principles.46
Still, this was authoritarian control, not totalitarian. Cracks began to
appear early on in various cultural arenas, and eventually in cinema as
well. Despite such stringent government controls, even in the early years
there were real debates over issues relevant to Taiwan, so long as they fell
short of openly espousing Leftist ideas or Taiwanese independence. There
were debates between “East” versus “West,” “indigenous culture” versus
“modern culture.” A common theme in such debates was the relation of
Chinese culture with modernization, most of all dealing with the relevance
of Confucianism in the modern world. Many intellectuals in Taiwan became
interested in what they called “Modern neo-Confucianism.” The point of
agreement for these intellectuals was that Confucianism would have to be
remade for modern times, and to do so required drawing from other tradi-
tions, including Buddhism and Western philosophy. Of particular impor-
tance in this regards was Mo Zongsan who tried to find a link between
Confucianism and the ethics of Kant.47 Many others, however, envisioned a
very different type of modernization, one that had little room for tradition
altogether. The modern Confucians found themselves at odds with the Free
China group and the growing popularity of existentialism in Taiwan, most of
all the ideas of Sartre.48
Before the 1980s, the true cultural vanguard in Taiwan was undoubtedly
literature, something best seen in the bitter disputes between two significant
movements: the Modernists (Xiandai wenxue) versus the so-called Nativists
(Xiangtu wenxue). When restricted to philosophers and other scholars, the
above mentioned debates seemingly stuck to the divide of East versus West.
Once the debates spilled over into literature, however, other messages began
to creep in almost imperceptibly, including early suggestions of a peculiarly
Taiwanese political spectrum which now openly dominates the island today.
This began with the advent of the Modernist literary movement in
the 1960s, directly linked to the rising popularity of Sartre at the time.49
The Modernist movement in Taiwan stood apart from all previous lit-
erature movements in Chinese history. By delving into psychological and
Hou and the Taiwanese Experience 25
anxiety and a thinly veiled urgency to their words. Says one writer: “There
will never be an international morality; one has to struggle for one’s own
survival, using the most realistic means possible.”59
But there was more than an anti-Western stance. While opponents of the
time attacked the Nativist movement either on literary or anti-communist
grounds, none of them clarified the movement’s defining term. Translated
literally, xiangtu means “native soil.” But which native soil does this refer to?
One writer broaches the question as follows: “Our native soil is good; add to
our sense of the native soil; allow us to recognize our native soil; be proud of
our native soil. This will make us not easily tempted by things foreign, or be
polluted by foreign culture.” Nevertheless, when he asks whether this native
soil is China or Taiwan, he never answers one way or another.60 In hindsight,
that was the central question. Later many declared that the ultimate criterion
used by the Nativists was how much their literature exhibited a “Taiwanese
consciousness.”61 At the time, however, the Nativists as a whole were evasive
on the issue of Taiwan versus China, perhaps because this was still a taboo
subject: some of those identified as Nativists favored a “Greater China” idea;
others implicitly favored Taiwan instead of China.62 Where various people
stood on this all-important question was not clarified until the “Formosa
Incident” of 1979 brought this issue of Taiwan versus China to the fore. After
1979, as both the cultural and political climate began to open up, many of
the old divisions quickly became irrelevant, most of all the division between
East versus West. Taiwan was now the cultural centerpiece.
Still, all of these debates were intellectual debates, not popular ones.
That they were even allowed to occur was largely because they had little
encroachment in the lives of the average resident on the island. What was
happening with the populace at large? Perhaps the best way to answer this
is to look at how popular religion has developed in Taiwan. During the first
two decades after 1949, the numbers of Christians increased steadily in
Taiwan. Hou’s own mother became a Christian after the death of his father,
and she had a Christian burial, as seen in A Time to Live, A Time to Die. There
was a large number of Christians in the ruling classes, and the KMT govern-
ment in the 1960s and 1970s brought in famous evangelists and broadcast
their religious rallies on local television.63 Still, the Christian Church in Taiwan
was on both ends of the political spectrum. The largest protestant denomina-
tion in Taiwan, the Presbyterians, has played a key role in the Taiwanese
Independence Movement, basing their challenge to the KMT on the example
of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany.64 Yet given the average Taiwanese’s
distrust of politics, the number of Christians in Taiwan has declined, propor-
tionally speaking, starting as early as 1965.65 By stark contrast, the number of
Buddhists and Daoists has exponentially exploded since that time. In 1960,
there were just over 800 temples registered as Buddhist in Taiwan; by 1989
there were over 4,000. In 1960, there were close to 3,000 Daoist temples;
Hou and the Taiwanese Experience 27
by 1989 there were nearly 8,000.66 (This trend has not abated since: in the mid-
1980s there were 800,000 declared Buddhists, whereas by the year 2000 the
number had exceeded 5,000,000.)67 There appears to be a direct link between
increasing wealth for the average Taiwanese and an increasing support of
indigenous religions: often a steep rise in new temples follows an increase in
average income by two or three years.68 Once again, this is in stark contrast
to mainland China — in fact, it is currently the exact opposite.69 By this
religious standard, the putatively more Westernized island is in fact more
“native” — more “Chinese” even — than the behemoth across the straits. Yet
these trends among the general population mesh seamlessly with their rapid
modernization and adaptation of many Western practices as well.
There is one other aspect of Taiwanese culture worth noting. Whether
under the Japanese or at the height of the KMT’s control, Taiwan has always
needed to reach out to the world to survive. Today, however, the unsettled
political status of Taiwan has dried up the normal avenues of diplomacy.
This gives new meaning, even urgency, to cultural outreach and exchange,
or what would be better termed as “cultural diplomacy.” In this regards film
has come to the forefront, with Hou the leading cinematic ambassador of
Taiwan. But the real pioneer in this regards is the Cloud Gate Dance Company,
founded in 1973 by Lin Huaimin. Cloud Gate was the first modern dance
company in Asia. Every year the company puts out a new performance, and
they range from specific themes like Chinese emigrants to Taiwan (Legacy in
1978), to famous works in Chinese tradition (Nine Songs and Bamboo Dream
in 2001), to works that exist in a purely abstract realm (Moonwater in 1999).
Lin does draw from traditional elements, most of all Daoism and Buddhism.
Yet its mélange of audacious acrobatics coupled with Cloud Gate’s signature
movements of almost ghost-like calm, all accompanied by the music ranging
from Bach to Arvo Part, speak to something much greater than the sum of
its component parts of East and West.70 Such performances have proven to
be an exportable commodity, making Lin the first Taiwanese artist of inter-
national standing, but not the last. As a native benshengren, Lin Huaimin’s
domestic cultural impact has been stupendous. As a teacher he had students
like Peggy Chiao, who would later become one of the leading figures on the
Taiwanese film scene. Chiao avers that it was Lin that got her generation
(including waishengren such as herself) to think about having a distinctive
culture of their own. This idea filtered down into many other cultural realms,
including cinema.71
only one year after the ROC lost its UN seat, he joined the Taiwanese com-
mercial film industry, and began what first promised to be an unremarkable
career in an unremarkable cinema. A mere decade-plus later, Hou became
Taiwan’s leading cultural ambassador abroad. This only makes sense after
understanding the transformations of Taiwanese cinema which went hand
in hand with larger transformations in Taiwan. Taiwan’s cinema has not
simply reflected and/or refracted these historical oddities discussed above;
it has also played contrary roles in abetting them. In the past, cinema served
as a tool for a historical and political whitewash. Then suddenly it came to
play the opposite role in revealing long suppressed realities, not just on the
screens on the island, but more importantly in the world at large. Hou in
particular played a key role in this historical unearthing.
Still, the film industry Hou joined in 1973 was then ill-equipped for such
a task. Cinema anywhere is a conspicuous and pervasive entity, an artistic
medium requiring a high level of institutional support whether private or
public, or both. As a result, it cannot avoid circumspection from society at
large. Certainly, Taiwanese cinema could hardly have hoped to steer clear of
these political, economic and cultural forces shaping the island over the last
few decades. Yet despite the dramatic changes in Taiwanese cinema during
the course of Hou’s career, the one constant is that the Taiwanese govern-
ment, whether old or new, set policies that benefited others cinemas — most
of all Hong Kong and Hollywood — at the expense of local production.
Ironically, this would also be to Hou’s personal benefit.
A bona fide commercial film industry in Taiwan took a long time to
develop. Despite Japan’s record as one of the greatest national cinemas in
history, despite the thoroughness of Japan’s modernization program which
transformed the island’s infrastructure, medicine, agriculture and culture,
and as much as the island provided a wide variety of potential settings for
filming, Taiwan did not become a production base for Japanese cinema as
had occurred in Manchuria after 1931. Instead, Taiwan remained primarily
a market for Japanese films. By 1935, forty-eight theaters exclusively showed
films, thirty-one of which would survive until 1945.72 There was no real
development of cinema between 1945 and 1949, given the tumultuous condi-
tions. Therefore, the true history of Taiwanese cinema begins in 1949 when
Taiwan becomes the KMT’s last theater of political operations. Still, it devel-
oped at a snail’s pace. Even when the government would try to nourish the
film industry with one hand, it would be strangling it with the other.
By stark contrast, Hong Kong was developing a viable and eventually
powerful commercial cinema, a fact which has goaded many in Taiwanese
film circles who often say, “If Hong Kong can do it, why not Taiwan?” After
all, for a relatively small island, Taiwan has varied scenery with spectacular
mountains, bountiful forests, beautiful coastlines, and even large plains on
the western side of the island — all favorable conditions for filmmaking.
Hou and the Taiwanese Experience 29
Taiwan also has four times the population of the British colony. Once again,
the answer is that the initial political and economic conditions, even up to
the mid-1960s, were not conducive to developing a thriving film industry.73
With the fall of China in 1949, only 5% of the Shanghai film community
moved to Taiwan, while many times that number moved to the greater
freedoms beckoning in Hong Kong. Furthermore, those who did relocate to
Taiwan in 1949 were mostly in the Agricultural Education Film Company,
a government-run studio that mainly engaged in documentary and propa-
ganda work. This meant the arrival of a certain amount of equipment and
technical personnel, but almost no creative talent to speak of.74 It is not
hard to see why any Chinese filmmaker, producer or star not directly con-
nected to the KMT government would either stay in Shanghai, or move to
the stable and free environment of Hong Kong. In 1949, Taiwan held no
prospects for long-term stability; even the KMT saw the island as merely a
temporary base from which they were to one day retake the mainland.
For the first fifteen years, Taiwanese cinema remained more of an itin-
erant roadshow than a real film industry. The ROC government was more
concerned with avoiding a repeat of the scenario of the Shanghai film world
in the 1930s — when the Left gained ascendancy over the Right. Thus, unlike
the colonial government in Hong Kong, the KMT favored strict control of
whatever film “industry” existed, starting with oversight from the China
Association for Literature and the Arts set up in 1950. The KMT government
directly supervised every private film company and film organization in
Taiwan. Any head of a public organization pertaining to film in Taiwan was
invariably a member of the party. The constant prescriptions from the GIO
dictated a strong anti-communist stance, plus the anti-“Red,” “Black” and
“Yellow” principles.
The crux of the matter was that film was not afforded the same respect as
other industries. The film industry was declared a “special” industry and was
squeezed for all it could yield. Never exceeding 30% anywhere else, in Taiwan
entertainment taxes ran up to 60%. Stamp taxes on film tickets were eleven
times higher than those in any other industry. More importantly, customs
duties on imported film equipment, whether for production or exhibition,
were all counted as “luxury items” and thus exceeded that of other indus-
tries by over 50%.75 This latter policy was to have a profound effect on the
industry in the long run, most of all because it forced producers in Taiwan to
cut corners with film stock. Moreover, it would affect even the leading studio,
the Central Motion Picture Company (hereafter the CMPC), which was
formed in 1954 by combining the existing Agricultural Education Film Studio
and the Taiwan Film Company (Tai ying), a holdover from the Japanese era.76
Not surprisingly, the CMPC was under the direct control of the KMT party.
As a result of tight governmental control, many documentaries and prop-
aganda shorts were made, but almost no fictional features. Those that were
30 No Man an Island
ninety films in the local dialect to his credit. According to Xin, the determin-
ing factors were the high cost of film stock and lack of time: “The film we
used for Taiwanese-language movies in those days was generally imported,
or bought on the black market. One movie required 800 shots on average.
With the high cost of film, we could not afford to waste it. Also, we were
making so many movies — around 100 a year — that the time spent filming
each was very short, about two or three days per movie.”93 Even when more
upscale Mandarin-language production emerged in the next decade, there
would still be echoes of these same corner-cutting production practices.
There is no denying that the 1960s saw the beginning of a more bona fide
film industry in Taiwan. Nevertheless, the 1950s laid the groundwork for all
that followed, even the New Cinema in the 1980s. As shoddy as the produc-
tion system was, Taiwanese-dialect films became a training ground for later
industry talent such as Li Xing, who became the godfather of Taiwanese film
directors. In the 1950s, the only healthy economic players in the local film
industry were distributors such as the CMPC and the privately run Union
(Lian bang). Distributors would eventually decide the long-term fate of the
local film industry even in the 1980s. Government policies, Hong Kong’s
early ascendancy in the local market, lagging indigenous film production,
issues surrounding film stock and the burgeoning power of local distribu-
tors — for all the changes that Taiwanese cinema would undergo starting
in the 1960s, this same phalanx of issues would remain pertinent when Hou
and the New Cinema began in the early 1980s. Indeed, the New Cinema
might never have been born without these preconditions.
In 1963, the face of Taiwanese cinema was altered dramatically due to
a confluence of events both within Taiwan and without. The “without,”
once again, was Hong Kong. In that year, Love Eterne was released by the
Shaw Brothers studio. A Mandarin-language opera film of a type known as
huangmeidiao (Yellow Plum Opera), this film achieved monumental success
at the time in Taiwan, and has retained cult status ever since. It played for
a record 186 days in Taipei and took in more than NT$8 million at the box
office, beating all existing records. (Its achievement was not surpassed
until Jackie Chan’s Project A [1983].) Hong Kongers began to call Taipei
“a Crazy Man’s City” as a result.94 Love Eterne’s economic impact on Taiwan
was long-lasting. It highlighted the true importance of the Taiwanese market
for Hong Kong. It also led many theaters in Taiwan to break their contracts
with American companies and begin showing Mandarin films instead.95
Furthermore, it jump-started a full-fledged private film industry when the
director of the film, Li Hanxiang (also known as Li Han-hsiang), suddenly
moved to Taiwan, bringing with him technical and artistic talent plus big
plans. Li was already the best-known Shaw Brothers director at the time,
specializing in period films. Having already directed a large number of box-
office hits for the studio, Li felt he was not being sufficiently rewarded for
Hou and the Taiwanese Experience 33
Love Eterne’s stupendous success. The rival Cathay Group saw its chance
to lure Li away. However, since Li was still under contractual obligations
with Shaw Brothers, he could not work directly for Cathay’s MP & GI studio
without legal complications. Thus, Cathay, via Union in Taiwan, put up the
funding for a major new studio based in Taiwan, and Goulian, or the Grand
Motion Picture Studio, was born. Its head was Li Hanxiang himself.96
The result was a film company of a size never before seen in Taiwan.
Although it only made twenty films over a five-year period, Grand single-
handedly raised production standards to new levels, developed person-
nel, established a star system, helped build better distribution abroad and
encouraged other companies to set up similar studio facilities. It also created
several film classics.97 Indeed, it might have been the beginning of a film
industry that could have overtaken Hong Kong’s, or at least been its equal.
The chief financial backer was the Malaysian Chinese Loke Wan-tho, head
of MP & GI. Loke apparently had plans of investing US$5 million in the
Taiwanese film industry until he died in a plane crash which many have
since claimed altered the course of Taiwanese film history. Huang Zhuohan
says: “If it were not for this crash, Taiwan’s Mandarin filmmaking would
have entered a golden age and have risen to international standards. Instead,
Hong Kong rose up alone.”98
Without its chief backer, Li was now left to his own devices and the
Grand studio soon came to resemble United Artists in the 1920s, where the
artists in charge lacked financial discipline. There is no better example of
Li’s wastefulness than his 1965 production, The Beauty of Beauties, a historical
costume picture of such extravagance that it took Li a year and three months
to make, and devoured a NT$23 million budget. The numbers on this film are
staggering: 42 sets, 6,000 costumes, 30,000 props, 8,000 horses, 120,000 extras
(provided by the military), 334 working days, 800 chariots and 120,000 feet
of film stock. It was the local box-office champ of 1965, yet it only made back
about NT$5 million in its first run, since tickets were still quite cheap.99 The
Grand Motion Picture Studio never recovered from this financial blow. Still,
a bona fide private industry in Mandarin filmmaking was sparked by all
this activity. Union, the distributor of films from Grand, began producing
films itself, starting with King Hu’s Dragon Gate Inn.100 The coup of enticing
King Hu to Taiwan would eventually result in his 1970 classic, Touch of Zen,
the only Chinese-language film to make a mark on the highest arenas of the
international film festival scene before the 1980s.
But nagging questions emerge: is this truly a chapter in Taiwanese film
history, or merely an extension of Hong Kong’s? The simple fact is that the
private film industry in Taiwan almost from the start became entangled with
Hong Kong’s. Huang Zhuohan, for example, straddled both places through-
out his career. He established The First Film Company (Diyi) in Hong Kong,
but had the production wing set up in Taiwan to make swordplay films
34 No Man an Island
starting in 1967.101 So intertwined were the finances, talent pools and politi-
cal connections (even government-run studios engaged in numerous co-
productions with Hong Kong companies), that it is often impossible to make
a distinction between a truly “Hong Kong” film and a truly “Taiwanese”
film during the 1960s and 1970s. That all of them were classified as guopian
naturally did not help, and Western observers were confused, too.102 Even to
this day Taiwan and Hong Kong do not see eye to eye on this issue. Every
history of Taiwanese cinema in Taiwan will mention the made-in-Taiwan
classics of this era — The Winter (1967), Touch of Zen (1970), and Four Moods
(1970) — and speak of them as Taiwanese films. At the same time, however,
Stephen Teo’s history of Hong Kong cinema discusses all three films as if
they were Hong Kong productions, which is the common view there. Teo
discusses Li Hanxiang, Loke and Grand as part of Hong Kong’s cinematic
history as well.103 Touch of Zen, given its success at Cannes in 1975 with its
special technical award, is particularly contentious.
To find truly “Taiwanese” films distinctive from Hong Kong, we mostly
have to look at the government-run studios which also changed dramatically
during this same period. In 1963, Henry Kong was chosen from the GIO as
the new head of the CMPC. Kong’s unexpectedly visionary tenure lasted
nine and a half years, during which time he upgraded the studio’s man-
agement structures, production facilities and theatrical chains. As a result
of these changes, the CMPC became one of the leaders in the Taiwanese
film industry. In 1963, Kong also saw a privately made, low-budget, half
Mandarin, half Taiwanese-language film, Our Neighbor, directed by Li Xing.
This inspired Gong to hire Li to direct a new type of policy film which
would be called “Healthy Realism.” The films in this trend were not numeri-
cally significant, but the three most significant works — Oyster Girl (1963),
Beautiful Duckling (1965) (figure 1) and The Road (1967) — obtained box-office
Figure 1
Images from Beautiful Duckling (1965) being screened outdoors in Hou’s Dust in the
Wind (1986).
Hou and the Taiwanese Experience 35
on theatrical directing and nothing more.107 But at least he saw more films,
although less than one would expect at a “film school.”
Most of the films Hou saw were either from Hollywood or Hong Kong.
The only film he has ever mentioned from this time was a British film he
saw while in the service around 1967, the name of which in English is uncer-
tain.108 This obscure film got Hou more seriously interested in cinema, but
according to him, it did not help him understand the medium any better.109
When attending the Art Academy, Hou recalls his surprise when a teacher
analyzed the visual motifs of a lesser work from Elia Kazan called The
Arrangement.110 Thereafter, he says, he began to look at films differently, but
still not as what one would expect. He remained steeped in popular culture,
and remained ignorant of cinema in its more artistic and cultural manifes-
tations. Only when he was about to become a director himself in the late
1970s did he finally begin to see more works from outside of Hollywood or
Hong Kong. Once again, however, this was to minimal effect. When he saw
Antonioni and other more experimental films, he could not really appreciate
any of them.111 Hou even claims that he fell asleep while watching Fellini
during his early days as a commercial director.112
In truth, the real film education of Hou was not an education, but an
apprenticeship which began the day he joined the film industry. Although
it was not immediately evident, the best days of the commercial industry
were already behind it by 1973, and a period of slow decline was already
in progress. The signs were already there by the beginning of the 1970s
with Grand no longer on the scene. Union would soon cease its produc-
tion arm in 1974, leaving the CMPC as the only steady producer of feature
films in Mandarin. Starting in 1973, Taiwan-based Mandarin films slipped to
between forty-five and sixty-six per year until 1977, while Taiwanese dialect
films had disappeared altogether. Meanwhile, Hong Kong was still produc-
ing three times as many feature films as Taiwan was.113 Taiwan discovered
it could not match the budgets, quality and marketing of Hong Kong, espe-
cially now that Bruce Lee had come onto the scene. Furthermore, the ROC
government once again had made it much cheaper for Hong Kong compa-
nies to acquire and process film stock than it had for indigenous production
companies.114
Generic classifications clarify this widening gulf. Hong Kong made
many more actions films than Taiwan (or anyone for that matter). In Taiwan
these were considered more expensive to produce as well as morally
dubious by conservative elites. Lu Feiyi notes how over a third of the films
made in Taiwan were instead classified as wenyi pictures.115 Wenyi has been
translated as “romance” or “literary films,” and sometimes seems to include
any kind of drama. Still, it is significant that Taiwan made a large number of
wenyi films since they were much cheaper to produce than action pictures.116
Nobody better personified this trend than the prolific director, Liu Jiachang,
Hou and the Taiwanese Experience 37
who made nearly thirty films during the 1970s, including eight for the
CMPC studio. Liu’s films tended to be quickly and crudely shot, and very
stereotypical in their characterizations. Yet he transformed the wenyi genre
by including many musical numbers, making these films even somewhat
exportable.117
Central to the Taiwanese commercial industry was a sub-category of
wenyi films that were known as simply “Qiong Yao films,” named after the
author of the romance novels on which most of these were based. The trend
seems to have begun with two successful Li Xing films made at the CMPC in
the mid-1960s.118 By 1983, a total of forty-nine films were based on a Qiong
Yao novel, and there were several Qiong Yao clones as well. Qiong Yao even
set up her own production company in 1976, making, of course, only Qiong
Yao films.119 Easily exportable to markets such as Singapore or Malaysia,
these films are considered by many today grotesquely escapist. Healthy
Realism made at least a failed attempt to deal with the realities of life in
Taiwan; Qiong Yao films made no attempt whatsoever. If these films are to
be believed, then everybody in Taiwan lived in spacious mountain retreats
in Yangming Shan (a playground of the very rich in Taipei), everybody spent
their time in Western-style living rooms, dining rooms and coffee shops,
everybody aspired to be married in a Christian church, and everybody
was so Westernized that the only trace of native culture was the occasional
appearance of chopsticks, which in itself seems to be nothing more than an
oversight by the continuity person. Brigitte Lin, who became a major star in
Qiong Yao films before she defected to Hong Kong, bluntly said that these
films were powerful precisely because they served as necessary illusions in
a time when life was hard. In other words, they reflected not the realities of
Taiwan, but an alternate universe everybody desired to escape to.120
Yet another factor increased the economic pressures faced by the
Taiwanese film industry over the 1970s. The diplomatic setbacks of the
decade once more accented the importance of propaganda for the govern-
ment. These political crises resulted in big-budgeted propaganda features
sponsored by two successive heads of the CMPC during the decade,
Mei Changling and Ming Ji. The father of Healthy Realism, Henry Kong, was
replaced by a new head of the CMPC, Mei Changling. Mei promptly steered
the party-run studio onto this path of expensive film projects.121 This included
a wave of virulent anti-Japanese films that came out after Japan broke ties
with the ROC in 1972. The definitive work was Victory, released in 1975. This
film became number one at the box office and won best picture at the Golden
Horse Awards, Taiwan’s version of the Oscars. Its success was largely due
to its open promotion by Chiang Ching-kuo himself.122 (In a sense this film
was Taiwan’s equivalent to the mainland’s The Red Detachment of Women.)
Victory exemplifies the government’s hope to tap into popular culture for
political ends. Its director, the never-sleeping Liu Jiachang, brought his
38 No Man an Island
pop proclivities to the aid of government propaganda. The film starred not
only the godfather of Taiwanese policy films, Ke Junxiong, but also a very
young Sylvia Chang (Zhang Aijia). Liu’s main song “Mei Hua” (also the title
of the film in Chinese) became a major hit both in Taiwan and mainland
China. The song could be sung at any time in the plot, most tellingly by a
young Taiwanese boy who witnesses his father being harshly mistreated by
the Japanese during World War II. “Chinese kids never cry,” the father —
shackled, beaten, bloodied, patriotic — admonishes his son. “I’m sorry,” the
tearful son replies. His father then suggests, ”Sorry? Then just sing!” By a
miraculous glossolalia only possible under propagandistic expediency, the
Taiwanese break out in song in perfect Mandarin, showing their undying
aspiration to be Chinese by singing praises of China’s national flower.
This tendency towards big-budgeted propaganda films reached its
zenith after the loss of U.S. recognition and the Formosa Incident in late
1979. A number of films reflected fears of Taiwanese Independence, most of
all a trio of films called “searching for roots” (Xun gen). The 1979 example
of this trend, The Source, spends most of its energy on a nineteenth-century
attempt at oil exploration in Taiwan (combined with a few carefully inter-
spersed shots of the bubbly, bosomy persona of the wife of a Texan who is
helping them). Yet the key message is a flashback at the beginning when the
protagonist as a young boy first arrives in Taiwan: standing on the shore,
he is reminded by his father that they came from China and they are there
in Taiwan to help expand the frontiers of the great Chinese race. Other films
were clearly government responses to the loss of U.S. recognition. Li Xing
got into the act with his star-studded Land of the Brave (1981), which he
made at the CMPC studio. This has an opening documentary-like montage
showing on-the-street reactions to the American withdrawal, culminating in
a staged sequence where locals glare at a young curly-haired, blond male
walking happily with two nubile local women. He sees their reactions and
pulls out a sign that says, in Chinese, “I am Australian!” The theme song of
this film, “We Are Descendants of the Dragon,” became an officially spon-
sored rallying cry across the island, and once again, it was even popular in
mainland China. The most notoriously expensive of these films, however,
was The Battle for the Republic of China (1981). This film featured hyperbolic
heroism, a large number of extras, some kung-fu by Ti Lung and a fire at the
climax that rivals the burning of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind. Most audi-
ences saw films such as this for free at public showings in schools or clubs;
few, however, would think of paying to see them. As a result, such films were
now putting even the CMPC deep in the red. Moreover, some have argued
that the anti-communist/anti-Japanese genres had exhausted themselves by
this point, calling into question such exorbitant financial outlays. From both
a propagandistic and economic standpoint, such films faced rapidly dimin-
ishing returns.123
Hou and the Taiwanese Experience 39
It seems strange, if not impossible, that this is where Hou really learned
the craft of filmmaking. It is even more mind-boggling that the lessons Hou
learned in this land of low-budgeted Qiong Yao films, saccharine music, and
hyperbolic and over-priced propaganda would have a lasting impact on his
career, evidence of which is still visible in even his most recent films. Yet this
is the case.
The long take is arguably the most definitive feature of Hou’s aesthetic.
This is not, however, something he would have just learned from his early
commercial days; rather, it is something he developed over time. The mean
average shot length (ASL) for Taiwanese films from this period shows some
differences from elsewhere, but not significant ones. The films sampled from
the 1960s average out to around 10 seconds per shot. Using Barry Salt’s exten-
sive analysis of ASL’s in other countries as a benchmark, Taiwanese films
during this period were generally cut slower than American films, but were
quite close to the mean in Europe.124 In the Taiwanese films sampled from
1970 to 1977, the average shot length has come down to around 8 seconds
per shot, thus coinciding with a trend towards faster cutting lengths else-
where.125 For the period 1978 to 1982, the ASL of the films remained almost
identical at exactly 8 seconds per shot.
These averages do seem to reflect where directors first learned their
craft. Even when operating in Taiwan, the two famed Hong Kong émigrés
into the Taiwanese industry — Li Hanxiang and King Hu — cut their films
more rapidly than their Taiwanese counterparts. For example, Li’s Beauty
of Beauties comes in at 7 seconds per shot, while King Hu’s Touch of Zen is
around 5 seconds. Li Hanxiang’s 1967 classic, The Winter, is a dramatic film
in the vein of Taiwanese “Healthy Realism,” yet the mean shot length was
under 7 seconds. Two of the most prominent Taiwanese directors, Li Xing
and Bai Jingrui, tended to use longer takes on average. Two of Li’s works
have an ASL of 12 seconds, seven are between 10 and 11.5 seconds, and four
are between 9 and 10 seconds per shot. Bai Jingrui is even more consistent:
of the six films of his sampled, five were between 9 to 10.5 seconds, and
the only real change was The Coldest Winter in Peking, which had an ASL
of 11.5 seconds per shot. In 1970, all four of these directors collaborated to
co-direct Four Moods in a last-ditch effort to revive the Grand Motion Picture
Company. The longest ASL’s among these four chapters belonged to the
two Taiwanese directors, with Bai leading the way with over 10 seconds,
and Li Xing coming in second at around 8 seconds per shot. The chapters by
King Hu and Li Hanxiang, on the other hand, both came in under 6 seconds
per shot.
This sampling from the 1960s to the early 1980s reveals an editing-
based commercial cinema whose films were cut just a little slower than
Hollywood’s, and much slower than Hong Kong’s. The Taiwanese com-
mercial film industry was following worldwide trends in commercial
40 No Man an Island
Figure 2
Hard, unmotivated lighting on both walls in The Ripening (1970).
Hou and the Taiwanese Experience 41
so time-consuming to begin with, and little time was available for these low-
budgeted films, this comes as little surprise, especially since it was common
in Hong Kong as well.
To compensate, directors in Taiwan resorted to a set of visual gimmicks,
some of which apparently have Hong Kong origins. Consider the overuse of
quick zooms. A 1980 Taiwanese-made kung fu film, The Orientation, features
long stretches where nearly every shot contains a quick zoom. Zooms are not
unusual in kung fu films, but zooms dominate Taiwanese non–martial arts
films as well, whether one of the so-called “student films” by Lin Chingjie
(i.e. A Student’s Love [1981]), a military propaganda film (Teacher of Great
Soldiers [1978]) or a dramatic love story such as Goodbye, My Love (1970, dir.
Bai Jingrui). Often the purpose of these zooms is to punctuate key dramatic
moments so that they cannot be missed by audiences. In Bai’s Love in a Cabin
(1974), for example, a series of quick zooms is used on both a father figure
and the female star (Zhen Zhen) at the very moment he implores her to
not date his son any more. In general, one would be hard-pressed to find
a Taiwan-made film from this era that does not include at least a few quick
zooms. Even Li Xing, known for his relative restraint, employs them for
affective emphasis. In Beautiful Duckling, a rapid zoom-in occurs at the key
moment an adopted daughter grabs her father and says she is still his real
daughter. In Rhythm of the Wave (1974), a quick zoom leads to a flashback to
emphasize a woman’s shameful past as a show girl. In Story of a Small Town,
zooms stress a budding romance.
Another visual gimmick, however, seems to distinguish the Taiwanese
even from Hong Kong. The wide anamorphic formats meant a much shal-
lower depth-of-field. Rather than avoiding this, Taiwanese directors often
flaunted this by including in the extreme foreground out-of-focus objects
such as lamps, lights, vases, plants or tree branches. Sometimes these blurred
objects would even partially obscure the view of the actor(s) in the mid-
ground area. Examples of this practice are too numerous to count. A 1980
film, Taipei, My Love, includes a banquet scene where the lights are made to
streak to an extreme in order to emphasize the romantic ambience. In the
same year, Love Comes from the Sea includes a dancing scene where lights
in the extreme foreground are out of focus. Qiong Yao films in particular
display this tendency, most of all in the romantic scenes. In the 1977 Cloud
of Romance, for example, Brigitte Lin first declares her love for Chin Han in
a coffee shop, with the foreground accented by the shining brass of table
lamps, all blurred for a “romantic” effect. In Love in a Cabin this practice
becomes “polymorphously perverse”: there are a plethora of objects ranging
from neon lights, grates, fountains, candles and hanging beads, out of focus
in the extreme foreground. A dance scene involving the star-crossed lovers in
the namesake cabin features blurred-out candles in the extreme foreground
that take up more space on the screen than the actors, nearly blocking the
42 No Man an Island
Figure 3
Gimmicky, shallow depth of field in
Love in a Cabin (1974).
audience’s view of them (figure 3). The motivations for this widespread
practice were also primarily economic: anamorphic formats resulted in wide
compositions begging to be filled. Blurred objects in the foreground was a
much cheaper and less time-consuming way to “beautify” or enhance the
images than using expensive and time-consuming lighting of high quality,
or more carefully wrought compositions and staging.
One other practice, however, best exemplifies what working in this
industry meant for a director, one which in particular frustrated Hou. The
Li Xing film, The Heart with a Million Knots (1973), is Hou’s first screen credit
as he is listed as the continuity person. One scene illustrates a method of
scene breakdown which epitomizes the Taiwanese film industry at this time.
This takes place in a dining room. During dinner, a live-in nurse tries to
convince her elder patient that his son is very filial, not disobedient as he
believes. Despite having twenty-one shots, and despite so many of them
being tied up with shot/reverse shots, only seven shots are from a repeated
camera set-up used earlier in this scene. Whenever a new shot is “wide” —
meaning farther away and often showing multiple characters — it is always
from an entirely new angle than the previous wide shot, somewhere else
around this same dinner table.
This is unlike Hollywood where it has been common practice to shoot a
master shot of a scene. This entails shooting the scene in its entirety from a
wide angle that captures all of the action. Often several takes of this master
shot are completed to ensure there is always one good take to use. After a
master shot is done, the camera is then moved to several other places for all
the cut-ins, close-ups, reactions shots, detail shots and so forth, a practice
commonly known as “coverage.” The key is that, no matter what other shots
are used in the final edit, there is always a master shot to fall back on which
can be used for any re-establishing shot at any point in the scene. In Taiwan,
however, there was never a master shot of an entire scene to begin with. For
this reason, whenever there is a return to a wider shot, the crew could just as
easily make it from a new camera set-up as from the original position since
the two takes were being filmed independently in the first place. This would
ensure some visual variety in the finished product as well. Furthermore, the
Hou and the Taiwanese Experience 43
lighting was so uniform that there appears to have been little, if any, tweaking
of the lighting from one camera set-up to the next as would be the case in
Hollywood, where directors of photography are notorious for “cheating” for
each particular placement. This, in effect, would make a Hollywood director
less inclined to use more set-ups, but poses no hindrance to Taiwanese direc-
tors who were satisfied with purely functional, flat lighting designs.
Once again, this shows the impact that Hong Kong had on the Taiwanese
film industry. In Hong Kong they also did minimal tweaking of the lighting
from shot to shot, and were just as apt to put the camera in just about every
conceivable location in any one scene. David Bordwell has called this the
“segment shooting” method of Hong Kong, where scenes are done from shot
to shot from a variety of angles, and then edited together afterwards into a
single scene without recourse to a master shot. The result is a wider variety
of camera set-ups than is the norm in Hollywood where there is more of a
tendency to return to the master shot during editing.126 Why Hong Kong shot
differently from Hollywood is clear: this was the most efficient way to create
dynamic action scenes in a labor-intensive industry. In Taiwan, however,
often this was being done for non-action scenes. Clearly demands for frugal-
ity with film stock determined why there was no master shot: it was just too
expensive. In Taiwan, every effort was made to keep the shooting ratios to a
bare minimum. 4-to-1 was considered extravagant, 3-to-1 to 2-to-1 was the
norm. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was getting even lower yet. Hou
himself was taught by another producer-director, Guo Qingjiang, how to get
the shooting ratio under 2-to-1. He says that in one film (which he did not
specify) he was able to get 11,000 feet of stock for the finished film out of a
paltry 18,000 feet of exposed stock — a shooting ratio of 1.6-to-1.127 Indeed,
the ideal in this industry would have been a perfect 1-to-1 shooting ratio.
What you would see is what they shot — and not a second more!
This ubiquitous modus operandi did not mean longer average shot
lengths for these films as one might expect. In the early 1980s, for example,
three films from Guo Qingjiang — according to Hou, the master of the low
shooting ratio — had an ASL ranging from 5 to 7 seconds. However, given
there was so little for the editor to work with, it is easy to see why these
films for the most part were quite stilted in their pacing, or rough around
the edges. One could find an occasional Taiwanese-produced film that was
edited as quickly as early 1980s hits from Hong Kong like Aces Go Places
(1982) and All the Wrong Clues (for the Right Solution) (1982), both of which
average around 5 seconds per shot. But one cannot find any Taiwanese coun-
terparts that are edited quite as crisply and dynamically. This was simply
because Taiwanese producers did not have the luxury to leave much of
anything on the editing room floor since no film stock could be wasted. It
was precisely such hidebound methods which made Taiwanese-produced
films so vulnerable to Hong Kong by the early 1980s.
44 No Man an Island
What this meant for these films went well beyond simply their rhythm
or pacing. Having their best moments left on the editing room floor was the
least of an actor’s concern in Taiwan. In fact, it was no small miracle if any of
their best moments got recorded on film in the first place. According to Hou
himself, who had ample experience with this practice, whenever closer shots
were done for one character, the actor would not be talking to the other actor,
but always to the clenched fist of the assistant director standing in front of
him or her.128 They never did a scene from beginning to end in a master shot;
they only did this a shot at a time, with no real flow. Theoretically, what
appeared in the finished product could very well be the only moments
captured on film to begin with, although inevitable mistakes still would bring
the shooting ratio to higher than one-to-one. Stopping and starting, halting
in mid-emotion and emoting to clenched fists all stopped performances cold.
Even Li Xing rarely got memorable performances, which is not surprising
given the shooting methods employed: the piecemeal practice of shooting
one line at a time leaves a sense that his films are but overwrought nodes of
melodrama strung together on a perfunctory narrative chain. Perhaps as a
means of disguising all this, Li Xing and others always had a steady supply
of tears on hand. Beautiful Duckling ends with a young hooligan crying alone
on the streets, realizing the error of his ways; The Road ends with a father
full of tears of paternal pride for his filial and successful son. An archetypal
ending in a Li Xing film (The Sun Rises and Sets, He Never Gives Up, My Native
Land) is a bawling family surrounding a dying father as he delivers the req-
uisite last words in between measured last breaths. The facile recourse to
tears was not made by Li alone. Perhaps no cinema anywhere has had so
many films end in a blubbering vale of tears.
In 1973, Hou started as a continuity person, but soon became an assis-
tant director, and finally a screenwriter, first writing three works with his
closest associate during the bulk of the 1970s, the director Lai Chengying.
In Taiwan, directors rarely did the actual directing; it was the assistant direc-
tors who actually faced the day-to-day problems on the set, and they were in
charge of keeping film stock use to a bare minimum. Hou is listed as the
assistant director for at least eleven films in the 1970s, and that experience
drove home for him the limitations of current filmmaking practices. All of
these practices mentioned earlier — functional editing, functional lighting,
compositional gimmicks, minimal shooting ratios, start and stop perfor-
mances — Hou would one day reject, but not on day one, nor even on day
ten. Indeed, for years Hou would bear some personal responsibility for per-
petuating these practices. (It was his livelihood after all.) Yet as strange as it
may seem, his experience with these practices would have a profound and
lasting impact on him even after he would no longer rely on this industry
for work. He would learn many things from this largely negative experi-
ence, but two invaluable lessons stand out: the importance of lighting and
Hou and the Taiwanese Experience 45
the importance of performance, two areas today that form the cornerstones
of his own aesthetic.
A key moment occurs when Hou scripted Li Xing’s Good Morning Taipei
(1980). The cinematographer was Chen Kunhou. Thereafter Chen and Hou
formed a directing/writing/cinematography team. In the years before joining
the New Cinema (1980–1982), the pair completed seven films together, with
Chen officially directing four and Hou officially directing three (Cute Girl
[1980], Cheerful Wind [1981] and The Green, Green Grass of Home [1982]). Hou
was always the screenwriter, and Chen always the cinematographer, yet so
close was their working relationship that critics at the time saw these films
as co-directed projects. Therefore, unlike most New Cinema directors, Hou
and Chen brought with them a wealth of experience from the commercial
film industry. Chen and Hou shared ideas about reforming the production
practices in the Taiwanese film industry which led to their reputations as
mavericks. Some of their reforms would eventually have a direct impact on
the New Cinema, most of all their collaborative relationship. They were the
first to begin solving what they saw as inter-related problems: the paucity
of film stock and the staleness of performances. In their first joint project,
the Chen-directed Riding a Wave (1980), they reportedly used a “whopping”
35,000 feet of film stock at a time when nobody would dare go over 30,000.129
For Hou’s The Green, Green Grass of Home, they used between 40,000 to
50,000 feet of film stock, which was considered wasteful.130 In time, this quest
for higher shooting ratios became a joint crusade among New Cinema direc-
tors. Hou and Chen, however, had already pushed the envelope before the
New Cinema existed.
Even the long take, which today most defines Hou, has direct links to his
early experiences in the industry. Hou initially was not pursuing long takes
as a conscious aesthetic strategy. They were a by-product of his quest for
better performances. As an assistant director, Hou knew that existing prac-
tices needed to be changed. Nevertheless, he was bound to those methods in
that position. Once he became a director himself, he began with the “novel”
idea that a director should actually direct on the set. Then he began to experi-
ment with various ways of tweaking performances. Since neither Chen nor
Hou had yet heard of any master-shot system, they found that performances
in the existing segment-shooting method would be better served if each shot
was longer to begin with. On occasion, relatively long takes seemed to Hou a
practical way to give his actors more breathing room to perform. This was the
very humble beginnings of one of the greatest long-take stylists in world history.
The early films bear this out. By the standards of the industry at the time,
Chen was a long-take director, and Hou was even more so. For the twenty-
five films sampled between 1980 and 1982, the average shot length comes out
at 8.3 seconds per shot. However, Chen’s 1982 film Six Is Company averages
10.3 seconds per shot, while Hou’s Cute Girl is at 11.3 seconds, Cheerful Wind
46 No Man an Island
at 12.7 seconds and The Green, Green Grass of Home at 11.3 again.131 During
this same three-year period, only Li Xing’s My Native Land and Bai Jingrui’s
The Coldest Winter in Peking showed similar figures.
The style of these early works reveal the haphazard probes of a young
director still searching for a new aesthetic within existing conditions. All
three works were shot in the anamorphic format; all include a large number of
zooms. In Cheerful Wind the two lovers (played by Kenny B and Feng Feifei)
are out in a field in a single take of two minutes in length: the shot begins
as a long shot and then zooms out to an even more distanced shot to show
terraced fields and mountains behind them. By contrast, a restaurant scene
of the Feng Feifei character talking with her aunt in Cute Girl suggests things
to come: also around two minutes in length, this time the camera does not
move at all. These examples notwithstanding, Hou was not yet consciously
pursuing a long-take aesthetic. According to him, he would still shoot from
other angles, but when a particular take was good from a wider angle,
he saw no reason to use other shots from other set-ups. This would gradu-
ally become a habit.132
This quest for better performances did not just affect how Hou shot
scenes, it eventually had an impact on how he scripted and structured his
films. After all, in his early days as a commercial director Hou still faced one
nearly insurmountable obstacle: stars — or as Hou describes them, popular
singers who could not act. These singer-actor wannabes were so image-con-
scious that Hou could do very little with them.
In his third commercial film, The Green, Green Grass of Home, however,
Hou would have a major breakthrough with the children who perform with
ease and aplomb. The most notable moment is when a young boy gets upset
at his father for killing his pet owl. The composition in this fifty-five-second
shot is quite striking, using strong staging in depth, with the father in the
foreground while the young boy moves diagonally in the distance, kicking
vegetables and yelling in a convincing fit of anger (figure 4). These child
performances got Hou notice among critics for the first time. One described
this film as a “warm tender depiction of the world of children done in a quiet
way to appeal to the emotions, making the film refreshing and elegant and
not at all following recent trends.”133 Hou says that he found it easy to direct
children. He would never tell them when they made a mistake, but would
always pretend that something was wrong with the lights, or that some crew
member was at fault. (The crew members, in turn, all understood what Hou
was after and would feign guilt.) The result was usually that the child actor
would be even better on the second or third take.134 The most important
development was not the notoriety, however, but a new modus operandi
Hou has refined to the present day: improvisation. Hou would only tell these
children the situation and would otherwise let them improvise the actual
lines of dialogue, something he could never do with stars such as Kenny B or
Hou and the Taiwanese Experience 47
Figure 4
Hou’s complex staging in depth in The Green, Green Grass of Home (1982).
Feng Feifei.135 This method of directing, initially reserved only for children in
The Green, Green Grass of Home, is today Hou’s method with every actor: Hou
usually provides situations, moods and a sense of the atmosphere — but no
precise lines of dialogue or strict blocking instructions.136
Given their innovations within the commercial cinema, it is easy to see
why Hou and Chen Kunhou would be such a good match for the budding
New Cinema movement. The Green, Green Grass of Home would prove to be
their ticket in. Zhan Hongzhi, who would become one of Hou’s closest col-
laborators, says that film was one of the sources of the New Cinema because
of its ground-breaking, free-flowing narrative.137 Edmond Wong claims that
the success of this film encouraged the CMPC to try its new low-budget/
more-artistic-freedom approach with In Our Times.138 Before long, Hou and
Chen would be called the “spiritual leaders” of the New Cinema.139 Within
this movement, Hou would forge a whole new set of relationships, some of
which remain crucial for him to this day. What is so shocking about Hou’s
background is the dearth of outside influences, showing how thoroughly
home-grown he is. Unlike other members of the New Cinema movement,
he never went to a film school abroad, and he was woefully ignorant of many
trends in world cinema, including those many mistakenly have thought
influenced him. Nowhere is this more clear than in the early comparisons
often made between Hou and Ozu: contrary to what was already commonly
assumed, Hou claims that he did not even see an Ozu film until after he had
shot A Time to Live, A Time to Die.140 And yet Hou, not these Western-trained
filmmakers, not even Edward Yang, would end up being the true center of
the New Cinema. His films would come to define the movement. Ultimately,
this is because Hou had one thing more than any other: experience in every
sense of the term. He had not only firsthand experience with a Taiwan which
48 No Man an Island
was changing before his eyes; he also had that day-to-day experience in
the grind of the Taiwanese film industry. Together these gave birth to his
illustrious career. Yet Hou could not do this without a lot of luck and help.
He needed both friends and institutions to come to his aid. Fortunately,
he became a director at just the right time: everything — Taiwanese society
and Taiwanese cinema — would change even more dramatically in the
1980s. By the end of the decade both the man and the island were nothing
like their 1980 selves. Sometimes timing is everything.
No Man an Island
Udden, James
Udden, James.
No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Second Edition.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, HKU, 2018.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
greater scrutiny from abroad. Chiang Ching-kuo may have wanted to retain
power for as long as possible, but soon more major embarrassments emerged
for the Nationalists. The most important of these was the “Jiangnan Incident”
of 1984, when a biographer of Chiang Kai-shek was found murdered in
the United States. The FBI determined that the ROC’s secret police was
involved, including possibly one of Chiang’s own sons. According to some,
this incident, which was reported on CBS’s 60 Minutes, shook Chiang to the
core, and was the true precipitator of the general openness and burgeoning
democracy that soon followed.3
Meanwhile, all the myriad elements of the dangwai finally came together
in September of 1986 to form a bona fide opposition party, the Democratic
Progressive Party (DPP). Ironically, the official founding was held at the
Grand Hotel, long a pet project of Madame Chiang Kai-shek. Since martial
law was still in place, at least on paper, this was technically an illegal action.
Yet Chiang Ching-kuo’s response was to not harass.4 Then in July of 1987,
thirty-eight years of martial law, a world’s record to this day, was lifted.5
There were other signs of changes afoot. Chiang Ching-kuo announced
that his successor would not be from the Chiang family. A few months
before he passed away he also significantly declared, “I am Taiwanese.”6
This statement was not a repudiation of his roots on mainland China, but it
was Chiang’s acknowledgement that half of his life had been spent on the
island. For this he is fondly remembered by many in Taiwan today, unlike his
father. Furthermore, it signaled a phenomenon that by the 1980s became an
ineluctable force: the KMT was being conquered from within, by Taiwan itself.
As both the cultural and political climate began to open up, many of the
old divisions became irrelevant, most of all the grand divide of “East versus
West.” The scholar Li Minghui sums up this new cultural dexterity: “For most
intellectuals at the present time the issue is no longer whether tradition and
the modern, Nativism and westernization, are able to mix or not, but how
to blend them properly.”7 In political literature there were numerous shades
during the 1980s: leftists like Chen Yingzhen who favored China; rightists
also favoring China; political skeptics like Huang Fan; post-Nativists; and
those who openly advocated political independence for Taiwan. Of these
groups perhaps the most similar to the New Cinema were the post-Nativists,
given their attempt to combine modernist experimentation with realistic
subject matter.8 Before long feminist literature, gay literature and aboriginal
literature also appeared, signs of a new experience in Taiwan that is not so
much postmodern as it is post-colonial, according to one view, since all of
these followed the lifting of martial law.9 The decade of the 1980s has been
described as the “Defeat of the Father” in popular culture.10 Novel musical
forms emerged, most of all by Luo Dayu, a new voice of the young, and
more significantly, a voice that no longer imitated Western popular musical
norms, nor did it look to China either.11 This was all modern and indigenous.
Hou and the Taiwanese New Cinema 51
and had no idea how to answer them.22 Thereafter Chiao offered valuable
intellectual assistance to Hou when needed, introducing him to films she
felt he needed to see, and even filmmakers when they both visited film
festivals abroad.
only at finished films.30 Yet Soong was not concerned only with the govern-
ment’s attitude towards the film industry, he was also concerned with the
image of the industry itself. Soong’s vexation, unprecedented for a head of
the GIO, became well-known after a famous open letter to the industry in
June of 1981. According to Soong, the government had now opened things
up and loosened control in order to give producers breathing room, but the
industry had not taken advantage. Instead, there was the usual short-sight-
edness looking for quick returns at the expense of long-term investment.
More importantly, film was to be of artistic and cultural significance and able
to perform not just domestically, but also on the international stage.31 This
marked a new direction and status for cinema. Soong’s three principles —
professionalism, artistry and internationalism32 — were now given official
sanction.
The new head of the CMPC, Ming Ji, took this sanction seriously. He also
apparently liked dinosaurs. Because of the severe financial crisis looming
for the CMPC, Ming Ji announced a new “Low Budget/Low Risk” policy in
1982. However, he was at first uncertain as to how to implement this policy,
and even contemplated making an anthology film about dinosaurs after
seeing a public display about them on the CMPC lot. Young Turks within
the CMPC, especially the writers Xiao Ye and Wu Nien-jen, saw their chance.
Solicited for advice, Xiao Ye offered another suggestion: why not let four
young directors, each freshly returned from film schools abroad, have their
own chapter in an anthology film? After all, this would really save money.33
Ming Ji agreed. Soon thereafter the portmanteau film, In Our Times, was
released in August of 1982. Xiao Ye suggests this was all the result of sheer
luck: “I have asked myself what if at that time the CMPC had not had the
dinosaur exhibit . . . and company management had not been tolerant of a
few youngsters with no experience in commercial cinema, allowing them
to work — how long would the New Cinema have had to wait?”34 In truth,
however, Ming Ji was responding to economic pressures and calls for reform
from his superiors. In any case, this was the humble economic beginnings of
the Taiwanese New Cinema, the unexpected child born of decades of govern-
ment strangulation coupled with the commercial prowess of the Hong Kong
film industry.
Nobody expected much from these films. Private producers viewed the
CMPC’s new policy as tentative since the studio was investing less than a
quarter on these compared to its big war pictures.35 Soon, however, many
came to an opposite and equally mistaken conclusion: this new trend just
might salvage the floundering industry. In Our Times, marketed as the first
art film ever in Taiwan, did well at the box office simply as a novelty. The
key breakthrough was Growing Up (1983). Based on a short story by a young
writer named Chu Tien-wen, Hou, and Chen Kunhou not only wanted to
buy the film rights to the story, they also asked Chu to work on the script.
Hou and the Taiwanese New Cinema 55
According to Chu, the script she wrote for Growing Up was a disaster. But
the finished film, directed by Chen and scripted by Hou and Chu, was an
unexpected success at the box office, and led many in the private industry
to believe that “nativist” films (as they called them) were now the way to
go. Soon the controversy surrounding the next portmanteau film, The
Sandwich Man, yielded yet another box-office success for a New Cinema
film. Thereafter the movement took off in production numbers, but not in
box-office returns. The distributors gave these films “dead runs” they would
never give to other films. When a rare New Cinema film did succeed despite
such handicaps (such as with Growing Up), it was usually because there was
no other new competition.36 Add novelty and some controversy, and these
works became unexpected successes, but not saviors of a film industry.
Hou already had three films under his belt before all this, all of which
did well at the box office when most films did not. Had the commercial film
industry remained relatively healthy in Taiwan, Hou would have likely
enjoyed a long career as a successful commercial director who made interest-
ing, quirky and yet mostly conventional films. Hou did not need the CMPC
so much as the CMPC needed him. Still, he signed on with the second port-
manteau work to come from the studio, named after the chapter he directed.
That choice changed his life, and it changed Taiwanese cinema.
The Sandwich Man (also known as The Son’s Big Doll) (1983)
Two things to keep in mind about the first official New Cinema film directed
by Hou Hsiao-hsien: James Soong had lifted the censorship of scripts the
year before, but not the GIO’s right to review finished films; moreover,
in 1983 martial law was still in effect in Taiwan, even if it was starting to
totter. This made for an uncertain climate: how open was this system really?
The uncertainties came to a head with the first cinematic litmus test, the
portmanteau film, The Sandwich Man. In retrospect, this film seems an excep-
tionally bold move, especially for one produced by Sunny Pictures, a pro-
duction subsidiary of the CMPC. All three chapters are based on the stories
of the famed Nativist writer, Huang Chunming, a major reason why people
often associate the New Cinema with Nativism. Merely basing a film on
Huang’s stories was bound to elicit strong reactions.
Hou was the known entity of the three directors, so his is the eponymous
opening chapter. The controversy raged around the third chapter directed
by Wan Ren and entitled “The Taste of Apples.” This became known as the
“Apple Peeling Incident.” Before the release of the film, rumors circulated
that Wan Ren’s section gave a less than favorable depiction of everyday
reality in Taiwan. The sources for these rumors were the conservative
members of the Film Critics Association, rumors powerful enough to get
the CMPC to initially exercise some self-censorship. This excision might have
56 No Man an Island
occurred in secret had it not been leaked by Yang Shiqi at The United Daily
News and further fueled by others like Peggy Chiao.37 Together, these young
critics gave a black eye to both the government and the Critics Association,
and the controversy, now surprisingly being played out openly in the daily
newspapers, not only got the film released, uncut, it also made The Sandwich
Man a box-office success. Edmond Wong says that the eventual 1989 release
of Hou’s City of Sadness, unaltered, was the upshot of the Apple Incident
six years before.38 Peggy Chiao, on the other hand, feels that the impact of
one incident like this can be easily over-estimated — things were changing
regardless.39 The incident did bring to the forefront reformist elements
who were more open-minded, more aware of public opinion, and most
of all, more aware of how Taiwan’s isolation on the world stage made its
cultural products even more important.40 Hou himself escaped this incident
unscathed, and now had more room to breathe, at least politically speaking.
He also had a group of young critics who would defend him in the media,
if the need should arise. Soon enough it did.
One might question how “new” Hou’s chapter is. One of the hallmarks
of the New Cinema is its collective focus on the Taiwanese Experience,
a political statement without being directly political. In a sense Hou was
already attempting this within generic boundaries in his commercial trilogy.
All three of those films dealt with the countryside often in contrast to the city,
a theme he develops further in the New Cinema. Stylistically, Hou already
had displayed, on occasion, slightly longer takes than his peers for the sake
of better performances. Moreover, his chapter here was the most muted of
the three in terms of possible political overtones, even if it does have an
ambivalent ending encapsulated in a freeze-frame. So was Hou’s first official
entry in the New Cinema a breakthrough?
One key breakthrough was language. The hoary national imaginary
proffered by the KMT establishment held up linguistic unity as a cor-
nerstone. There were barely disguised hopes for the slow death of the
Taiwanese dialect, a death which never came. (Today even most waisheng
ren have learned a certain amount of Taiwanese.) Taiwanese had sporadi-
cally graced Hou’s commercial trilogy, but Mandarin was still the lingua
franca, even in the scenes in the countryside. In The Sandwich Man, for the
first time Hou displays an obsession with linguistic exactness in any situa-
tion, no matter how polyglottal the results, no matter how at odds with the
official government policy at the time. Huang Ren argues that the real bone
of contention by those criticizing the film in 1983 was that the CMPC was
producing a film using mostly the Taiwanese dialect, which was seen as a
step backwards in terms of the official ideology.41 Yet only Hou’s chapter is
done almost exclusively in the Taiwanese dialect, which is justified given the
story’s rural backdrop. Wan Ren’s chapter, by contrast, carries a mishmash
of English, Mandarin and Taiwanese which is no less accurate given the
Hou and the Taiwanese New Cinema 57
The Boys from Fengkuei (also known as All the Youthful Days)
(1983)
In Hou’s office at Sinomovie, there hangs a poster of The Boys from Fengkuei,
his personal favorite. Yet it is hard to know if it is the film or the moment
which most pleases him. This film is significant since it caught the eyes of
people outside of Taiwan. In 1984, Olivier Assayas from Cahiers du Cinéma
was on assignment in Hong Kong. There he met the Taiwanese critic,
Chen Guofu, who encouraged Assayas to take a side-trip to Taiwan and
check out new developments in Taiwanese cinema. Assayas was impressed
by what he saw, but he was most impressed by The Boys from Fengkuei. Back
in France he began to tell everyone about Hou’s latest film. By the end of the
year, Cahiers had an edition that focused on the New Cinema in Taiwan. Ever
since then, France has been a major market for Hou and other Taiwanese
directors.42 Yet for Hou himself the making of this film appears to have been
the most endearing memory of his entire career. According to him, there
was a “feeling of balance” between “knowing” and “not knowing.” Before
this film Hou did not really know what he was doing; after this film he at
times became “too clear about what he was doing.”43
Either way, Hou was now part of a new youthful movement within an
existing film industry. During these halcyon days the members of the New
Cinema willingly cooperated with each other. Hou had a reputation for
being magnanimous with his own time and support. He fulfilled a lifetime
dream to be an actor with the lead role in Edward Yang’s Taipei Story (1984).
He was also one of the writers for Wan Ren’s Ah Fei (1983). Edward Yang
returned the favor by helping Hou with the musical selections for his early
New Cinema films, and by playing a small role as the father in A Summer
at Grandpa’s.
Yet from the beginning Hou stood out in contradictory ways. Yang
and others had gone to film school abroad. Hou had not. Young writers
such as Xiao Ye and Wu Nien-jen, maverick critics such as Peggy Chiao,
Edmond Wong and Chen Guofu, and new filmmakers such as Edward Yang
and Wan Ren, often congregated to discuss cinema. Hou was often intimi-
dated by these “strange” ideas being tossed about. Yang’s and Wan’s discus-
sions of the “master shot,” something never done in Taiwan, left a particular
impression. Hou decided to try this “novel” idea himself. According to him,
over time he would come to realize that the master shot was in some cases
sufficient, yet another key precipitant for his burgeoning long-take style.44
These discussions also made Hou aware of numerous trends in world
cinema he had known very little about. Hou consistently mentions Godard’s
Breathless and Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex as being eye-opening experiences at the
time.45 Given that the latter was introduced to him by Yang, Hou seemed
less like a leader than a student in dire need of a remedial film education.
Hou and the Taiwanese New Cinema 59
Yet while others had concepts and principles, Hou had ample experience.
He also seemed to possess something else, which one member of this group
recognized.
Chu Tien-wen had already worked with Hou on the script for Growing
Up, based on her own short story. Now she was working with Hou again on
The Boys from Fengkuei. From this point forward she will be the most important
collaborator to work with Hou. Chu and Hou usually bounce ideas off each
other and jot down any notes needed. Once shooting is about to commence,
Chu gathers these notes and writes out a semblance of a script. Only the
technical crew, however, receives this version of the script to help with pre-
production planning. Hou himself never uses a script while shooting, nor
do the actors, who are asked to improvise according to the general scenario
Hou provides them on the set.46 (As we have seen, this originates from his
days as a commercial director.) Hou openly wonders in interviews what his
films would have been like without Chu. (He even jokes that he is certain
that were it not for her, he would have made a lot more money.)47 Yeh and
Davis note the deeper significance of the autobiographical/biographical
elements which come out of this collaboration, where “private selfhood” is
“entwined within the social and cultural history of post-war Taiwan,” thus
severing these works from the film traditions of Shanghai and Hong Kong.48
Still, nothing rivals Chu’s sudden afterthought of lending Hou a book
during the making of The Boys from Fengkuei. Witnessing Hou seemingly
out of place in these informal gatherings of the New Cinema group, Chu
was reminded of a famous Chinese writer from the early twentieth century,
Shen Congwen, who had faced a similar situation when he came from the
countryside to the city. Seeing the parallels, she decided to give Hou a copy
of Shen’s autobiography. Chu only intended to encourage Hou as she feared
that he would become overwhelmed by these intellectual discussions, losing
sight of his true uniqueness. She never expected that one book would change
everything.49 Why was Shen so important? Yeh and Davis have already
explained this in detail in their study of Taiwanese directors.50 Nevertheless,
there is a need to explore briefly a number of uncanny similarities between
Shen and Hou. Shen, like Hou, is not easy to classify. David Wang notes that
in the 1930s Shen was considered a “lyrical stylist, a vanguard regionalist and
a political conservative.” Yet these terms are misleading, according to him,
since they “tend to simplify, if not obliterate, the liberal and even avant-garde
sides of Shen Congwen’s character and writing.”51 Jeff Kinkley explains that
Shen Congwen also had a great deal of ambivalence about Chinese tradition.
Shen himself loved the Chuangzi as literature, yet he deplored Daoism as a
tradition as much as he deplored any tradition.52 Shen as a child also loved
to go outside and roam that world. He was “sensitive and curious about this
world around him, and his eye for detail is part of his artistic genius.”53 Then
there is Shen’s style, idiosyncratic and unprecedented in his own culture:
60 No Man an Island
“throughout the 1920s, the unorthodox syntax of his long sentences was
itself sufficient to keep his prose in a state of rebellion against all of China’s
literary traditions.”54 His works of the 1930s tend to create “plotless, still
landscapes of vivid sensory impressions.”55 Like Hou, what Shen loved most
of all was a particular place. Shen tended to see West Hunan as an earlier,
vital, more primitive China that existed before the Han became decadent,
and he “grapples most profoundly with the meaning of his personal past
and his people’s history.”56 Replace “West Hunan” with “Taiwan” and we
have a concise description of Hou’s underlying vision.
What Hou learned most from Shen’s autobiography, however, was a new
way of viewing the world. At one point in his autobiography, Shen explains:
I am also this sort who leans towards the phenomenal and has little interest
in understanding the reasons behind them . . . What I will never tire of is
“observing” everything . . . When I am close to life my feeling is that of an
artist, not that of a moralist.57
Hou here captures a key aspect of Shen’s writing: whether the events
depicted are “significant” or “pedestrian,” Shen never sermonizes, nor
casts judgment, nor restricts them to the requisite moral tones demanded
of the Chinese intellectual of his day. Instead, he often becomes lost in the
rhapsodic details of life, such as a store with its “frozen candies and red
candies,” its “large and small sesame pancakes,” its “hibiscus cakes and
walnut cakes,” its “huge ceramic jugs with golden characters that say either
‘fortune’ or ‘life.’”59 Shen does not steer clear from the ravages of history so
much as he puts them on the same plane as everyday life and then refusing
judgment, at least in the traditional sense of the term. For example, in Shen’s
autobiography, he describes quite frankly horrific events he witnessed
when quite young (i.e. many of the massacres following the fall of the Qing
dynasty). Yet he would not try to explain these atrocities, leaving these events
in an uncomfortably raw form. Whenever such “significant” events are
depicted, they are almost invariably followed by yet more detailed descrip-
tions of everyday life that serve no larger, metaphoric economy, but gain
equal stature by their sheer weight. David Wang describes this tendency as
follows: “Major and negative forces that make history, such as war, violence,
and death, are self-consciously repressed as extraneous to the main narra-
tive; instead, marginal and aleatory incidents . . . become crucial.”60
Hou and the Taiwanese New Cinema 61
Of course, Hou works in a different medium, yet The Boys from Fengkuei
shows the direct influence of Shen Congwen, an effect that would persist
in his subsequent works. Enamored of what he saw as Shen’s distanced,
detached perspective, Hou literally tried to capture that same feeling on
film by constantly requesting that the camera be moved further and further
back.61 Of the three hundred plus shots in this film, no less than one fifth of
them have an extreme long shot as the primary shot scale. Almost another
fifth are roughly a long shot. Taken together, this means that, in almost 40%
of the shots in the film, the figures are full-framed (meaning characters are
visible from head to toe). Often the human figures are dwarfed by their sur-
roundings to the point where their facial expressions have to be guessed at.
Since a good forty minutes of this film take place on Penghu islands, with
its open land and seascapes that remind one of Ireland, this is not entirely
unexpected. But even in the densely packed urban jungle of Kaohsiung, Hou
found ways to hold his distance, most of all by using the open courtyard
of an apartment complex where most of the major characters lived. Often
shooting from the second level, across the way, snippets of a young, troubled
relationship are framed in an understated manner due to this distance.
In short, Shen’s perspective, as Hou saw it, gets a literal translation in the
distanced framing in Boys.
The summary of the storyline suggests nothing remarkable. A group of
young boys living on the island group of Penghu are at a crossroads between
youth and adulthood, wondering what to do with their time as they wait
to be drafted. They decide to move to the port city of Kaohsiung and get
jobs in the now bustling export economy. There A-ching meets his neighbor,
Hsiao-hsiang, and he secretly falls in love with her without ever saying so,
not even to his friends. In any case, she appears to still be in love with A-ho
despite his shady dealings at the factory where they all work, and despite
his being forced to go to sea after getting in trouble with the law. Only at
the very end does Hsiao-hsiang reveal that she no longer wants to have
anything to do with A-ho. However, rather than falling into the arms of her
secret admirer, she unexpectedly leaves for Taipei. End of story.
The entire film hangs on this skeletal thread of a narrative. Yet it is all
the “excess” material, and how it is handled via long takes and a distanced
camera, which makes this a remarkable work. There are several narrative
subplots that never amount to much of anything in the traditional sense of
the term: the fights with a rival “gang” on Penghu, the flirtations of the four
with Yang Chin-hua, A-ching’s ambivalent relationship with his own family
members, the long-term effects of his father’s death on him, the unexplained
reasons for Hsiao-hsiang’s arrival in Kaohsiung, his friend (“A-jung”)’s sister
and “brother-in-law,” and the loss of NT$1,000 for a fake movie theater. Even
the main narrative thread remains open-ended. Despite all of the attention
A-ching has paid to her, and despite the time they spend together, we, like
62 No Man an Island
him, are clueless as to her deepest thoughts and feelings. A late montage
sequence (using Vivaldi) implies that she is warming up to him, even visibly
enjoying a game with a billiard ball and a coin. However, immediately after
this she is dolefully standing on the wharf, apparently in tears and inconsol-
able, not even by food. We assume she misses A-ho despite everything that
has happened, only to find out in the end that things are hardly that simple:
she is leaving him instead. A-ching, like us, misreads everything. Should he
have expressed his own feelings for her? Would she have requited? We will
never know.
As audience members we are subjected to the limited perspective of the
characters themselves — we only grasp fragments of life, lingering oddments
of a much vaster world nobody can grasp in total. No doubt many will be
frustrated by this denial of omniscience that most popular films deliver to a
great degree. But a film like this is not about knowing, it is about experienc-
ing. Willingly forgo knowledge and closure, and the world suddenly opens
up. It breathes. It lives. When taken from this perspective, the film becomes
a dreamlike flow of memories — indelible, vivid moments such as when
four free-spirited boys wrestle on the beach, or when they dance in front of
Yang Chin-hua in the front of the glowing backdrop of crashing waves.
While episodic, The Boys from Fengkuei is not simply a random collec-
tion of episodes, but has a deeper structure underlying it. First, there is an
overall trajectory to the film, albeit not a traditional “character arc.” Not only
does the film progress from the open countryside to the crowded city, the
funeral in Penghu notwithstanding, but its characters evolve from a youthful
lightness of being to a growing awareness of burgeoning adulthood. The
namesake “boys” are adrift in a transitional period just before the dreaded
but unavoidable draft, a vaguely defined temporal cusp lodged between
adolescence and adulthood. During this period they start to become aware
of both the world and themselves, but are not yet fully aware. In this sense
the film serves as an almost uncanny, unconscious metaphor for the process
Hou was himself undergoing as a director while making it.
Then there is the sandwiching effect of the opening shots during the
credits and the closing shots of the market in Kaohsiung. Hou begins the
film with a flow of images of life in Fengkuei with an equal focus on both
the denizens and the surroundings. Only three of the first eight shots are
in the pool hall where the eponymous boys are simply enjoying billiards.
Yet the framing of even these three does not really focus on them except
for brief moments, and the surroundings and peripheral characters take on
equal importance. Outside, the five additional shots show a bus stop, a bus
arriving in the distance, boats lazily floating on the sea, a child strolling up an
empty street and a neighborhood dispute in the distance involving a motor-
cycle. Only the ninth shot reveals who the “boys” actually are. The ending of
the film reverses this. After Hsiao-hsiang has left for Taipei, A-ching goes to
Hou and the Taiwanese New Cinema 63
the market where the others are selling tapes before going back to report for
the draft. A-ching suddenly decides to hawk their wares from a stool. For the
last six shots of the film, only his voice is heard, and we see six documentary-
like images of people in the market, apparently all going on with their lives,
all oblivious to his calls. Even A-ching’s voice slowly fades away, blending
back into that larger world, taken over by the music. (Bach’s “Air,” appro-
priately enough.) In other words, at the beginning they emerged from that
world, and in the end they simply flow back into it. These last shots imply
that there are a thousand experiences like this, each typical, and yet each
unique, each equally worthy of representing the “Taiwanese Experience,”
the unstated project at hand. The result is one of the most moving endings
in Hou’s career.
Finally, there is a clear strategy to structure both the main narrative
and all the “needless” subplots around sudden, unexpected changes which
neither the characters nor the viewers are quite prepared for. The Boys from
Fengkuei is the first Hou film where eating scenes take on a prominent role
as disguised nodal points for such irruptions. Early on, the four boys and
Yang Chin-hua gather around to innocently enjoy a meal of chicken they
managed to slaughter. For the first minute of this long take, they make small
talk, engage in drinking games and act in a generally carefree manner. Then
the father of one of the boys enters and suddenly beats his son without
explanation. As it turns out, this was punishment for the earlier beating of
a rival, which now has been brought up to the police. Other eating scenes
similarly extract unexpected undertones from the mundane surface. When
Hsiao-hsiang and the boys eat together, she suddenly becomes sullen and
walks off when innocently asked why she came to Kaohsiung in the first
place. After his father’s funeral, A-ching’s sister suggests that he stay in
Fengkuei — and thus out of trouble. A-ching seems to not react until he
unexpectedly smashes his rice bowl and storms out.
These other tendencies provide some perspective on the pronounced
distancing and how it makes this film feel different from the norm. During
key moments in the narrative, there is just as likely to be a plethora of long
shots and extreme long shots in lieu of the expected closer shots that would
normally guide an audience. One of the most memorable shots in the apart-
ment courtyard is seen through an opening in the vines in the foreground,
where A-ching apparently is washing some clothes. A perfectly still, extreme
long shot is equally divided by the ground level and the balcony where his
neighbors live. The male, Huang Chin-ho, is about to leave for work casually
on a Vespa motorcycle down below, still oblivious to how his own indiscre-
tions on the job could get him fired or even arrested. Hsiao-hsiang, who had
just tried to warn him of this, emerges from the apartment above to throw
down a booklet of some sorts. However, even after he leaves on his motorcy-
cle through the door in the far distance, she continues to stand there rigidly
64 No Man an Island
Figure 5
Seeing life from a Shen-like distance in the courtyard in The Boys from Fengkuei (1983).
(figure 5). Here Hou offers only subtle suggestions: her posture suggests her
unease, whereas A-ho’s nonchalance reveals his indifference to her warnings
about stealing from his job, an indifference that will eventually destroy their
relationship. This example shows how Hou can now get by with the bare
minimum to communicate the situation without the usual recourse to cut-ins
and close-ups that would have made this all palpably obvious. The master
shot suffices after all. Yet he also presents a deeper philosophical message of
a larger world engulfing these human actions with its own rhythm, and its
own cool indifference.
Nevertheless, there is clearly one thing Hou is not yet conscious of: still-
ness. The Boys from Fengkuei is certainly another advance in Hou’s mastery
of the long take: now the average shot length is nearly 19 seconds per shot
rather than the “mere” 16 seconds in The Sandwich Man. Given its unusual
distancing, one might expect a higher percentage of perfectly still shots. This,
however, is not quite the case: 30% of the shots in this film still have overt
camera movements, while another 15% contain at least a slight reframing
or two. While these figures seem low, they are nothing compared to what
Hou will do in subsequent films. Hou does use a lot of pans, a modicum of
tilts, and by my count, close to twenty zooms. (Even stranger yet, by Hou
standards, are stretches of elliptical editing used when they chase the chicken,
or wait for the correct bus in Kaohsiung.) Yet somehow this odd mixture is
not so odd, and all blends together quite well with the indelible composi-
tions of unforgettable landscapes. In the context of the film as a whole, these
camera movements are almost like unforced breaths, done without calcula-
tion or reason — a part of the rhythm of life itself.
Ultimately, all of these traits operate in tandem to convey an attitude
towards his subject matter that is undeniably Hou Hsiao-hsien. Hou’s
Hou and the Taiwanese New Cinema 65
uncle backs up until he is perfectly placed in the gap between the two trees,
making him still visible to the viewer. A careful viewer will have time to
notice how the uncle reacts when the grandfather beats a motorcycle. Once
again, this is a distanced long take in lieu of close-ups and more editing.
Then there is the first of no less than a half dozen shots in this film which
emphasize the stairwell landing inside the clinic. (These are Hou’s most
Ozu-like shots, yet without the graphic matching with subsequent shots.)
After the swimming incident, a mother of one of the boys arrives to ask
where her son might have gone. In the foreground of this shot is the landing
with wood stairs and some slippers on the left. Soon Tung-tung’s and his
aunt’s legs appear on that stairwell. Tung-tung stops halfway down the
lower steps with his back to the camera. Now perfectly placed on either
side of them are the worried mother, just to the left, and Tung-tung’s grand-
mother, just to the right. Later on, when the uncle appears and asks what is
happening, he appears a little further back and yet is also perfectly placed
between Tung-tung and the grandmother (figure 6).
Significantly, both of these long takes just discussed are completely
static. A Summer at Grandpa’s is not on the whole more distanced than The
Boys from Fengkuei, nor are its shots longer in duration on average, as already
noted. Yet clearly a higher percentage of these shots are also absolutely static.
Recall that in Boys around 30% of the shots have overt camera movements.
By contrast, in Summer only about 17% of the shots have noticeable camera
movements. Even the percentage of shots with only slight reframings has
decreased slightly from 15% to about 12.5%. This means that in seven out of
every ten shots of this film the camera remains utterly immobile.
The static camera and the long take together are apparently done for a
reason: for the first fifty-three and a half minutes, the ASL is 17.3 seconds
Figure 6
The stairwell landing in A Summer at Grandpa’s (1984).
Hou and the Taiwanese New Cinema 69
per shot, and 23% of the shots have overt camera movements, while another
14% have just slight reframings. Once the uncle is banished from the house,
however, the film takes on a more somber feel due to some stylistic changes:
for the next twenty-two minutes the ASL is 20.1 seconds per shot, and yet
an even lower percentage of those shots contain movement (20% overt;
9% only slight reframing). Even more striking is what happens at the
“climax” of the film. During “Ghost Month,” the family receives the call from
Taipei (yet another shot with the same stairwell landing in the foreground)
indicating that the mother has gone into a coma due to an allergic reaction to
anesthetics. A muted crisis ensues. Hou’s style draws out this tense, somber
mood in a subtle and contemplative way. The ASL for the last twenty-two
minutes is 20.6 seconds per shot, yet the percentage of those shots with
any movement defies the normal “logic” of film language, since now fewer
than 10% of these shots in this last section have overt camera movements,
and just over 12% have slight reframing. In other words, over three quarters
of these shots in the last part of this film are completely still.
Why does he do this? There are two ways to explain this. One common
trope among critics and filmmakers in Taiwan is that the style of Taiwanese
films is the result of the concrete conditions of filmmaking in Taiwan. Many
have noted that limited equipment and budgets forced these filmmakers to
use such “innovations” as natural lighting, fewer camera set-ups and, yes,
even a static camera. Zhang Yi had this to say about his own films: “I am
most dissatisfied with how I have handled my own images. I would love for
my shots to move freely about just like Bernardo Bertolucci’s and bring the
audience into the deeper layers of reality. But given the present conditions
of production, is this even possible?”66 Hou, on other hand, apparently had
no desire to be a Bertolucci; he did not restrict his camera movements out of
necessity, but out of conscious choice. Once again, the grandfather’s clinic
played a key role, since the octogenarian doctor still lived there and was
still practicing medicine when this film was in production. As a result of
these logistical hassles, Hou and his crew had to work around the doctor’s
schedule which always included a long siesta around noon during which
time the film crew had to be absolutely quiet. Those imposed siestas, with
their resonating stillness and tranquility, profoundly affected Hou. He says
he fell in love with that certain atmospheric quality. Thus, for the first time
he purposefully kept the camera still in an attempt to capture that feeling on
film.67 As a result, another piece of the aesthetic puzzle fell in place, and a
crucial one at that. Duration seemed to have crept up on Hou, distancing he
seemed more aware of. But the static camera was almost a happy accident,
except it was the accident of a director becoming ever more aware of what he
was doing. Now he could apply this awareness even closer to home.
70 No Man an Island
an uncanny knack for making dubbed films sound more and more like they
were recorded in sync sound, and often deceived unsuspecting ears.70 Hou
himself notes admiringly how Du would spend hours upon hours recording
nearly every possible sound he came across, carefully compiling and catalog-
ing them in a rich sound library. He says that same of Liao Qingsong, who in
his early days would take home prints from the CMPC and study carefully
how films are put together. Likewise Mark Lee would take meticulous notes
on every light source in any scene he ever shot.71
As much as the CMPC provided Hou with some stability and person-
nel, it could not shield him from a viscous wave of attacks resulting from
this film. In 1985, the split of new versus old was reconfigured as the “pro-
Hou” and “anti-Hou” camps. What is surprising, however, is that the latter
used another New Cinema director as their “favorite” against Hou, Zhang
Yi. Zhang was no stranger to controversy: his film from the year before,
Jade Love, was subject to severe reprobation in the Minsheng Daily which
blamed the “excesses” of the New Cinema for all that ailed the indigenous
film industry.72 This reversal from charlatan to luminary was based on the
unexpected box-office success of Zhang’s next film, Kuei-mei, A Woman. This
success, more than anything, was due to publicity concerning its female star,
Yang Huishan, putting on a lot of weight over the course of the production to
more accurately play the entire life of a woman.73 This disingenuous support
for Zhang was merely a convenient means of attacking Hou’s A Time to Live,
A Time to Die (1985), which was deemed a failure at home, like his previous
two films, even though in reality it had at least broken even at the box office.
(Edward Yang’s Taipei Story, in which Hou acted, did much worse.)74 One
critic, Liang Liang, notes that Time and Kuei-mei both use long takes, but only
Zhang Yi’s film also uses drama to appeal to a general audience. Hou, on the
other hand, is reproached for how little “concern” he shows for either his
audience or for the storyline.75 As a result of this anti-Hou campaign, A Time
to Live, A Time to Die, despite winning numerous awards abroad (includ-
ing at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival), lost out to Kuei-mei, A Woman at
Taiwan’s own Golden Horse Awards. (For Hou, this would not be the only
time this would happen.)
This controversy illustrates that the core issue was not politics, but
economics. Blaming Hou and the New Cinema for what ailed the domestic
film industry was baseless. Films that could be classified as New Cinema
works never exceeded 10% of the total produced in Taiwan over those years.
Furthermore, New Cinema films appealed to a specialized audience that is
not sizeable in any country. One writer called this “the equiva1ent of blaming
a decline in the sales of popular music on those who produce records of clas-
sical music.”76 The driving force behind the “anti-Hou faction” was artistic
personnel from the old school whose failures in the 1980s were much more
glaring than those of the New Cinema. These people and their films now had
72 No Man an Island
neither a domestic nor a festival audience, and they could not accept their
own creeping irrelevance.77
It seems strange today that such a battle ever occurred. Zhang Yi is
now all but forgotten as a director since his film career did survive beyond
the New Cinema movement itself. Why did he in the long run pass into
oblivion, unlike Hou? Certainly it was not from lack of trying to be an “art”
director. Besides Hou, Zhang Yi was the only other New Cinema director
in the 1980s whose films together averaged more than 20 seconds per
shot. Hou’s films from The Sandwich Man to Daughter of the Nile average
23.5 seconds per shot. Zhang Yi’s four works during this period surpris-
ingly average 32 seconds per shot. However, compared to Hou, Zhang Yi’s
narratives are much more conventional. Despite having more camera move-
ments, Zhang Yi’s images are conspicuously lifeless compared to Hou.
The compositions for the most part are functional in nature, going little
beyond the requirements of visibility. While much more natural-looking
than Taiwanese films of the 1970s, the lighting is inexpressive and flat when
compared to Hou’s. Most striking, however, is how Zhang Yi will have long
stretches where his characters do not move at all, demonstrating none of the
dexterity and intricacy of staging that Hou utilizes. In short, while Zhang
Yi’s visual design serves the basic need to make things visible, Hou’s com-
positions demonstrate an imaginative play with the parameters of visibil-
ity. Without the immediate relevance of its waist-shifting star, Kuei-mei has
faded over the years and is largely forgotten. Time, if anything, is the exact
opposite.
A Time to Live, A Time to Die is certainly another step forward in Hou’s
long take/static camera aesthetic. The average shot length for the film as
a whole is now nearly 24 seconds per shot. Moreover, the takes get longer
on average as the film progresses: for the first hour until his father’s death,
the average shot length is around 21 seconds; for the next hour or so until
his mother’s funeral, the figure is 25 seconds per shot; for the last eleven
plus minutes until his grandmother’s death, the average is now just over
31 seconds per shot. Despite longer takes on average, now less than a
quarter of the shots in the film as a whole have any movement whatsoever,
and this figure includes those with only slight reframing at best. Despite
increasingly long takes in the second half of this film, once again that odd
tendency emerges to have an even greater number of completely static shots.
(Including those shots with only the slightest reframings, only 22–23% of the
shots in the last two sections move, versus 26% for the first hour.) It is clear
that Hou wanted to go even further with the long take. However, with Time
he now reached the technical limits of equipment then commonly used in
Taiwan. The Arri II camera magazines could hold only 400 feet of film stock.
In one crucial scene, right after the death of the father, Hou had hoped to
capture the mother leading the rest of the family in mourning in one long
Hou and the Taiwanese New Cinema 73
take. However, the camera ran out of film stock just before what he claims
was the best part of that performance, and this forced him to do cut-ins.78
More notable in this film, and just as important in the long term, is the
full consideration paid to lighting for the first time in Hou’s career.79 It is no
coincidence that this is where his longstanding working relationship with
Mark Lee began. It appears that each man had to adjust to the other. Lee
says that working with Hou was different from working with other direc-
tors, because Hou would not break scenes down into discrete shots. This
forced Lee himself to consider successive shots and the problems of light
and shadow in ways he had never faced before. When he finished shooting
this film, he felt exhausted emotionally.80 For Hou, Lee’s relative inexpe-
rience was to his advantage. Previously all of his films had been shot by
Chen Kunhou. Nevertheless, Hou felt that the Japanese-style house in this
film had a certain “flowing, expansive” feeling that would best be captured
using only natural light. This required opening up the aperture and allowing
a much shallower depth of field, something Chen would have resisted.
The only lighting instruments used here were some Japanese-style HMI
reflecting lights.81 This was yet another marked break from existing practice
in Taiwan.
So the details are all there, intricately wrought, exquisitely arranged,
even more so than in his previous works. Yet it seems as if these details are
just cobbled together into episodes even more loosely connected than Hou’s
previous two films. To be sure, the charge that this film lacks “drama” in the
conventional meaning of the term is entirely correct. Yet expecting drama in
this sense once more misses how A Time to Live, A Time to Die is a film to be
first experienced as a flow of memories. In truth, this is a much more sophis-
ticated work compared to his previous films, even structurally speaking.
One way Hou structures this film is through a disruptive and sometimes
retroactive strategy of narrative exposition. In a sense, he has been doing this
all along. Hou’s earliest films are structured around richly drawn quotidian
moments in which suddenly an unexpected, and unexplained, irruption will
occur. For example, in The Boys from Fengkuei there were sudden outbursts
of violence only later explained; in A Summer at Grandpa’s, after having so
long forgotten that somebody was even in the hospital, a sudden phone
call informs those at the grandfather’s house that the mother is in a coma.
Now Hou speaks openly about delayed exposition, such as when the chalk
mark on the young boy’s desk is not explained until a later scene.82 By itself
delayed exposition is not an uncommon practice, not even in Hollywood.
(Suspense is built on this.) But Hou’s eventual originality lies in his peculiar
handling of delayed exposition: since the incidental and the significant are
intermixed on an even playing field, we are less prepared for the latter when
it occurs. This becomes clearer once we note how this film is structured
74 No Man an Island
around three key deaths in Hou’s life: that of the father, the mother and
finally the grandmother at the end of the film.
If there is any trait that distinguishes the New Cinema from the “old,”
it is their respective treatments of death. Li Xing’s He Never Gives Up (1978)
ends with the death of the father figure surrounded by his entire family, one
of many such endings over his career. The purpose of this scene is to proffer
highly moralistic messages in measured, calculated strokes, each designed
to increase the requisite Confucian catharsis. This death is drawn out to
give the protagonist ample time to prepare for his final end, and plenty of
time for others to say goodbye and remind him that he led a good, proper
life. By stark contrast, in New Cinema films death comes without warning,
and in the most unheroic of circumstances. In Ah Fei, for example, the death
of the maternal grandfather is utterly pedestrian, occurring in the middle
of one of the most mundane moments of a person’s life: a man is getting
a shave and nothing more. In Reunion (1986), a picnic of growing students
with their beloved teacher from the past proceeds leisurely and unevent-
fully, until suddenly some students in a boat capsize. Yet nothing prepares
us for the drowning of the teacher’s fiancé, who swam out to rescue them,
seemingly without any problem at first.
Like these two other New Cinema examples, death arrives unexpectedly
in Hou’s A Time to Live, A Time to Die, not once, but thrice. Likewise, these
occur in the most ordinary of circumstances, and without warning. Most
striking is the death of Hou’s father. Although three minutes long, the scene
is completed in only eight shots. Despite averaging 22.5 seconds per shot,
not once does the camera move even an inch, largely because it is often
kept at a great distance from the action. More importantly, there is nothing
in the scene — no closer shots, no anticipatory music — to prepare one for
the death itself. Instead, what is accentuated here, even more than in our
examples from Ah Fei and Reunion, is a family caught up, not in the drama
of life, but in the ordinary routines of life unexpectedly disrupted by the
ultimate demise of the father.
The first four shots merely highlight familiar incidental details of
the family’s life at night. The fifth shot, however, is over a minute long. The
foreground is a darker room, yet one can see a smaller room in the distance
exposed by a Japanese panel door that is half open. An electrical blackout
for more than a half a minute shrouds the room in darkness except for some
candles lit. Nearly a minute into the shot the lights come back on and the
room is empty. Then a female voice shrilly cries out to the mother, and A-ha’s
(Hou as a boy) head peers around the edge of the Japanese-style panel. The
next two shots cut to the left side of the front room, showing an already dead
father in profile as the female members of the family try to draw breath out of
him, crying desperately (figure 7). The final shot returns to the street outside
the house, now showing neighbors as they slowly gather around, wondering
Hou and the Taiwanese New Cinema 75
Figure 7
The unexpected, pedestrian death of the father in A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985).
what has just occurred. There are tears in this scene and in the following two,
but these tears are nothing like those found in Li Xing. They do not make the
death ordered, cathartic, sentimental — they make it palpably real. Seeing
the actors respond as they do makes one almost uncomfortable, like one is
intruding on a most private moment and should not even be there.
A Time to Live, A Time to Die represents the death of something more
than three family members. Just before the father dies, the grandmother gets
lost trying to “go back to the mainland,” something she does repeatedly.
(Somehow she thinks it is within walking distance.) This time, however,
she takes A-ha with her. Supposedly on their way back to the mainland, the
grandmother and grandson become distracted by a tree full of guavas. The
very last scene of the film is the death of this same grandmother, and the final
lines of Hou’s own voice-over remind us of this incident, “I still often think
about Grandma’s road back to the mainland. Perhaps I was the only one
who ever walked with her down that road. I remember that afternoon we
picked a lot of guavas home.” With those lines, the film ends. The guava
incident is something more than just another detail: it symbolizes the entire
arc of this film. Hou’s previous films follow a growing arc of awareness by
its youngest characters. Here it is the opposite: this is an arc of forgetting, the
fading away of thoughts about the mainland. The grandmother wants to go
home, but even she gets distracted by local delicacies such as shaved ice and
guavas. That Hou invented the details about the grandmother wanting to go
back, plus the wicker furniture, shows that he was after a deeper message of
how a new home came to be the only home he has ever known.
This arc of forgetting also informs the historical sense of the film. For
Hou’s family, only personal, familial history matters. With radio broadcasts
of air battles in the background, the family almost indifferently eats sugar
cane, discussing only how this affects them as a family and no more. Later
they receive a letter with news of a relative who could not leave China,
76 No Man an Island
The ROC government was not the key institution behind this success.
Rather it was what is best known as the international festival circuit, an insti-
tution which sustains Hou’s career to the present day. The government
understood soon enough that these festival awards were diplomatic coups,
yet their own promotion of these films was lackluster compared to other
nations. Instead these films were most forcefully promoted at festivals by
Peggy Chiao.86 Chiao’s prowess as a promoter notwithstanding, the reasons
for the receptiveness of these film festivals in the 1980s are quite complex,
especially given the peculiar geopolitical status of Taiwan. Chia-chi Wu
notes that “upper middle-rank” festivals such as Nantes were in tune with
the economic boom in East Asia during that time, and they used films from
the region as a form of product differentiation.87 Taiwanese films, however,
were handicapped by the political marginalization of the ROC. No festival at
first would label these as films from “Taiwan.” At Berlin in 1986, for example,
A Time to Live, A Time to Die was affixed with the Olympic-sounding label,
“Taiwan/China.”88 Edward Yang at the Locarno Film Festival was told that
The Terrorizers would likely become sacrificed due to political pressures.
Even though the film still managed a second prize there, the incident only
brought into sharp relief how Taiwan’s diplomatic isolation worked against
its films as well.89
And yet, these films kept on winning award after award. Why? Because
these films were arguably the most original in East Asia at the time, and it
was incumbent upon them to be so to get any notice at all. Xiao Ye explains
how both The Boys from Fengkuei and A Summer at Grandpa’s were to be shown
at the Berlin Film Festival despite pressure from the PRC to keep them out.
As he puts it: “Were it not for the excellence of the films themselves, these
would have never found their destiny in Berlin.”90 And this would have an
effect. Chia-chi Wu notes that Hou’s earlier entries at Nantes had the label
“Taiwan, Chine” foisted on them, but with Dust the official label became
“Taiwan.” To him this is an indication that the organizers’ political qualms
were eventually overridden by Hou’s “artistic difference.”91
Still, Hou was uncertain at first as to what this particular film should be
about, a result of the controversies surrounding his previous work. Finally
he decided to base this on the experiences of Wu Nien-jen on the advice of
Zhan Hongzhi.92 Dust in the Wind would be the last film Hou made at the
CMPC. The heads of the studio tried to dock nine days’ pay due to delays
caused by three typhoons, a sign of how much they still adhered to a low-
budget mentality.93 Nevertheless, Hou describes this as the film where he
finally overcame all of the particular problems he had faced in his previous
films, most of all at the technical level.94 A major technical breakthrough was
the Arri III camera, used for the first time instead of the Arri II, offering eve-
rything from a better sensitivity to light, a greater ability to focus, broader
color gradation, not to mention having a much larger film magazine.95 Yet
78 No Man an Island
this camera posed its own challenges. This was the first film Hou made with
Li Tianlu, the famous puppeteer who plays the grandfather. Hou found that
using dubbing, which was standard practice in both Taiwan and Hong Kong,
was out of the question given Li’s age. However, given how noisy the Arri III
was, they had to improvise with a blimp by wrapping the camera in black
blankets.96 That Li’s lines were recorded on the set was yet another impor-
tant technical step taken by Hou and company, which would bear full fruit
in City of Sadness.
Still, it is hard to imagine Hou pitching this film. A boy (Wan) from a
small Northern mining town decides to go to Taipei to look for work in the
early 1970s. He finds a job in a print shop, then another job. He also goes to
night school. About two years later his longtime girlfriend (Huen) comes to
Taipei from the same town and looks for work as well. She gets a job as a
seamstress. They have their ups and downs. Suddenly Wan receives his draft
notice. Stationed in Kinmen, Wan gets letters from Huen for about the first
year, then he does not. Finally his brother writes to him to tell him that Huen
married somebody else, a postman. Wan goes home. His grandfather talks
about the weather. The credits roll. Nobody dies in this film, and nobody is
quite near death; even his father’s injury is hardly life-threatening, unlike
the mother’s coma in A Summer at Grandpa’s. This seemingly is Hou’s lightest
film in some time.
Nevertheless, one writer in Taiwan stated this about Dust in the Wind:
“With this film Taiwan finally has a work of art that can compare with the
‘economic miracle.’”97 Hou’s handling of this seemingly threadbare storyline
results in an extraordinarily deep work. Not only has he now consolidated
all of the steps taken as a New Cinema director in sure-footed fashion, he has
taken yet another facet of the Taiwanese Experience and gone well beyond
that, to something more universal, almost primal. Dust in the Wind is proof
enough that sometimes it is not the story that is told, but how it is told, which
is most important.
With talent and technology in tow, Hou now pushes the envelope with
every aesthetic step hitherto taken. First, in terms of duration, the average
shot length now jumps to 33 seconds, a figure that exceeds most of Renoir’s
films and matches many of Mizoguzhi’s famous works. Second, the camera
in this film overall is more distanced than ever. By my count, there are 196
shots in this film, yet 35 have no people in them at all. Of these, almost half
are establishing shots of particular locales, or detail shots, most of all of
letters sent to and fro, a major motif in this film. Another 7 are shots of either
clocks or train signals, markers of another key motif — the train — which
connects the city and the countryside. Another dozen shots in this film can
be said to be “pure” landscape shots, meaning there are no people visible
in them, and nature, whether the sea, the sky or mountains, becomes the
main focal point. Of the 161 remaining shots with people in them, by my
Hou and the Taiwanese New Cinema 79
calculations almost one quarter of these shots (38 to be exact) are done in an
extreme long shot, many being landscape shots where the human figures are
mere dots. Most of these are taken at the mining village, such as the three
long takes of the grandfather sending Wan off to the military. Even shots in
the crowded city of Taipei will show the characters literally dwarfed by the
surroundings, such as when Huen is on the balcony at Wan’s place. Add 31
other shots which are primarily a long shot, 45% of all the shots with people
in them are a long shot or wider. In addition, the number of static shots is
simply astounding given how long these shots last on average. Less than
one-fifth of the shots (18.4%) in this film have camera movement, and when
they are there, they are used to a very calculated effect as we shall see. Almost
half of those shots which do move are at best very slight reframings which
represent no significant change in composition. Most of the overt camera
movements are only slight pans and tilts, often only for a few seconds. The
compositions are often of such intricate design requiring longer shot dura-
tions to allow all of the details to sink in. (Think of the print shop in which
Wan first works in.) The staging in some of these shots now become auda-
cious. None of this is haphazard; everything finds its place.
Despite such a simple storyline, Dust in the Wind is certainly Hou’s most
challenging film up to that time. Still, it does not require intellect so much as
openness and a different frame of mind to be appreciated and experienced.
It is a much deeper and more rewarding film than one could ever expect from
a simple tale of unrequited love. Ultimately, this depth lies not in simply
longer, more distanced, more static and more intricate shots, but in how they
are tied together in an ingenious, and arguably unprecedented fashion. With
its veiled structure, Dust in the Wind may be one of Hou’s greatest feats.
Once again, Dust in the Wind appears at first but a randomly chosen set
of details drawn from everyday life. But many of these details now become
carefully crafted motifs which act as a resonant glue melding things together.
The very first shot and last shot introduce and reiterate two core motifs: the
train and the verdant landscapes which are characters in their own right.
The last shot of the film is of clouds and sea mingling with mountain peaks,
and yet in the distance, off-screen, one hears a train whistle. Shots of clocks
at the train station in turn connect to the all-important watch which Wan
received from his father. Letters in turn are connections bridging distances,
just like trains; but at the end of the film letters also signal severances such as
when Wan’s letters to Huen are inexplicably returned, and explained only in
a letter from his brother. (And to add motivic insult to injury, Huen married
a postman no less!) This break-up connects with another motif: movies. The
countryside and the city are connected by trains, yet are contrasted between
open-air and indoor movie screens. In her letter to Wan while he is in the
service, Huen includes ticket stubs after going to a movie with their mutual
friends and a certain postman, a meaningless detail at the time. The most
80 No Man an Island
ubiquitous motif, one found even strewn on the train tracks, or when a
mainland fishing family is stranded at his post, is food. Charles Tesson’s
essay on this film captures perfectly the symbolic significance of food in Dust
in the Wind, encapsulated in the last scene when Wan listens to his grand-
father speak of failed crops and capricious weather. “The boy, in returning
home, has also returned to the source of food and is once again joined
together with nature.”98 For Hou, these are inescapable realities — food,
landscapes, nature — dwarfing our histories, forming the fundaments of
human experience, whether in Taiwan or elsewhere. With food, Hou reaches
for a primal core.
Yet this is more than an intricate mesh of motifs replacing the usual
direct chains of cause and effect. In Dust in the Wind there is cause and effect,
but often one only gets the effects, and learns of the causes later on. Take
for example, the break-up which comes almost out of the blue. When their
mutual friend, Chun, is in the hospital for a work-related injury, he talks
about his injury, his dreams and that the porridge is a little salty. (Food yet
again.) So mundane is the conversation that most viewers do not recognize
the set-up for another Hou-like disruption: for the entire shot Huen is seated
in a chair in the foreground with her back to the camera, offering us no clues
as to what she might be thinking. Only when Chun asks why the porridge is
so salty, and she does not respond, does Chun ask Wan, “What’s wrong with
her?” Wan answers sullenly that he just got his draft notice.
Once he is in the service, the two lovers exchange letters relaying the
mundane details of daily life. However, in Huen’s letter to Wan, two contra-
dictory details emerge, although only in retrospect: on the one hand she gives
him the label of a brand of underwear. In Taiwan at that time, such a gesture
by a young woman indicated total devotion forever. On the other hand, she
shows him ticket stubs for the movies. Only later, since the postman has
gone with them to the movie, does this have life-changing implications.
Simply put, like Wan, we as viewers are utterly unprepared for this sudden
reversal of events. In a film nearly two hours long, here is a series of scenes
with numerous ellipses — all spanning a mere five minutes — where Huen
goes from counting the days before Wan will return from the military, to her
marrying somebody else. And the person she married? He was seen in
exactly two shots before this brief appearance in the flashback: when he was
delivering mail to her place of work, at which point he did not even know
who Huen was.
Even before this climax there are scant clues drowned out by the plethora
of quotidian details yet again. The published script is a revelation, since it
contains many more scenes than the finished film. Hou elides events which
he felt would make the drama too forceful or too direct.99 In the case of Wan
and Huen, Hou excised a couple of scenes penned by Wu Nien-jen where
Wan sees Huen at work possibly flirting with other young men. Had this
Hou and the Taiwanese New Cinema 81
been left in the film, we would have been much better prepared for what
happens. Instead, we get only the slightest and momentary hints: barely
scandalous behavior such as “drinking with men” and taking her outer
shirt off to be painted by Chun. But soon these two moments are forgotten
in the onrushing floes of time when she makes Wan a shirt (which he wears
at the end of the film) and when she takes care of him during his bout with
bronchitis.
Such surprises are everywhere in the film, and do not just involve Wan
and Huen. One only has to look at the first half hour of this film to see how
ingeniously Hou now uses sudden disruptions with his retroactive strategy,
resulting in full-blown experience before explanation. Think of what we
learn in the first twenty-plus minutes: we are introduced to various details
of Wan’s life in the mining town — his girlfriend, the train, his grandfather
trying to get his grandson to eat, his father’s injury, his own decision to go to
Taipei and a humorous incident revolving around his brother being punished
for eating medicine from the medicine cabinet. These seem like mere details
of the quotidian and nothing more. That is, until later on in Taipei when
Wan and the newly arrived Huen gather together to eat with his friends.
This is a long eating scene five minutes in length, done in only two shots.
It proceeds innocently enough. Huen soon gets up to retrieve a watch that
Wan’s father wants to give him. Everybody admires the watch, talking about
it and praising its automatic and waterproof qualities to no end. During the
second shot, the camera pans to the right slightly to focus attention on the
people admiring it. In fact, however, this rare camera movement serves to
distract the viewer from a significant detail. One person in the scene is not
talking, or even eating: Wan (figure 8). Instead of being happy about having
received this expensive watch, he suddenly storms out of the room (figure 9).
Everybody else, including the audience, is startled. Nothing, including the
Figure 8
A meal in Dust in the Wind (1986) where everyone admires a watch and ignores the
sullen state of its recipient.
82 No Man an Island
Figure 9
Then Wan suddenly storms out.
style, prepared us for this. Only two scenes later, when he writes a letter
home, do we realize the reason: Wan is afraid that his father cannot afford
such an expensive watch. Now we slowly come to realize something deeper
is at stake for Wan and his family — sheer survival. This changes the com-
plexion of all the previous scenes, casting them with a darker tint in retro-
spect: the father’s injury means he cannot work, and cannot provide; the
grandfather wants his grandson to eat now, because perhaps there will not
be food later; the brother eats stomach medicine because he is hungry. There
are shades of survival throughout the film, in passing references made to
strikes, injuries and beatings. Dust in the Wind is not just about surviving a
lost love; it is about surviving life itself. Ultimately this means surviving the
caprices of nature. In this way the last speech by the grandfather, as ordinary
as it seems, connects with everything else.
Dust in the Wind is something more than a playground for aesthetes.
It is a primal return to the very basic qualities of human life, qualities which
somehow are brought into stark relief when undergoing the Taiwanese
Experience. Despite his youth, Hou has already developed a complex style
coupled with densely layered narratives. Still, this is not so surprising when
you consider where he is from, and what he has been through. With such a
rich depository of personal and collective experiences to draw from, when
Hou did join the New Cinema in 1983, he was already an old soul. Yet the
New Cinema period is but the opening chapter of a tortuous odyssey.
ended with the movement had he relied on that alone. What allowed his
career to persist to this day is the mastery of a market outside of Taiwan.
It is for this reason that his transitional film of 1987, Daughter of the Nile,
is significant.
Leaving the CMPC for good in 1986 meant Hou needed to find money
elsewhere. In 1987, Edward Yang announced he was going to make a film
for Hong Kong’s D & B Company without any Taiwanese support. The
prospect of one of Taiwan’s finest turning to Hong Kong for investors caused
a major uproar in the local media. Soon thereafter an acceptable alternative
was found as Hou, Yang, Chen Guofu, Zhan Hongzhi and others joined with
Qiu Fusheng, the head of ERA International (a powerful Taiwanese video
distributor), to form The Film Cooperative.106 In one sense, this small firm
was like Wannianqing in that it sought co-productions with other compa-
nies. In reality, however, Hou would now find new ways of doing business.
The key person in this group was Zhan Hongzhi, a marketing and financial
wizard who is credited with giving lessons in what became known as “Hou
economics.” Hou rejected a joint venture with Golden Harvest to make City
of Sadness since Golden Harvest wanted the film to be a gangster story that
would take place in Macao. Zhan then came up with a new plan for film
financing. Rather than relying on a few large investors, money could be raised
by pre-selling the distribution rights abroad one region at a time, enough to
finance the film as a whole.107 While this resembled Hong Kong’s practice of
pre-selling rights to such markets as Taiwan, the acknowledged model was
Godard’s more incremental and global method of raising funds for overtly
non-commercial works. In retrospect this was the only way to go. It is easy
to forget that Hou’s films, while clearly not commercial fare, do make some
money in the long run. So strong was Hou’s cachet in the European market
that he personally got half of the 230,000 Marks paid by Channel One in
Germany for the television rights to show A Time to Live, A Time to Die. Due
to the success of both Time and Dust in the Wind in Europe, Hou was thus
able to negotiate 40% of the distribution fees for City of Sadness, guaranteeing
millions of NT dollars in return before the film’s release.108
Meanwhile, Hou made a film that is somewhat of an oddity: Daughter of
the Nile (1987). It proves there were some elements in the private industry in
Taiwan who still were willing to take a risk on Hou. (One of the subsidiaries
of Scholar films distributed it.) Yet the film itself is in many ways a disap-
pointing step back after the consistent quality of his New Cinema works.
Hou himself was not happy with the result. According to him, Daughter was
really a star vehicle for Yang Ling, a popular singer in Taiwan, who was
too old to be playing a junior high girl. Moreover, it was a film her record
company wanted more than Hou did.109 Lacking any historical distance,
this work exemplifies how Hou finds portraying temporary life in the city
more difficult than either the city or countryside of the past. Not that there
Hou and the Taiwanese New Cinema 85
is nothing of interest here, aesthetically speaking. The film does have long
takes at 29 seconds per shot, and it is the most static film in Hou’s entire
career, since only about 10% of them have even a modicum of camera move-
ments. Yet somehow the staging of the actors and the compositions seem flat
after the subtle vibrancy of his New Cinema works. The film does have its
defenders: Alvin Lu says this work provides Hou’s unique perspective on
popular culture in Taiwan, not to mention being a harbinger of the contem-
porary urban films of the 1990s by the likes of Tsai Ming-liang.110
Yet arguably the greatest significance of Daughter of the Nile is that it
emboldened Hou since his stature abroad gave him clout at home. Hou had
a run-in with the censors at the GIO over the ending of Daughter, which
contains a voice-over reciting the comic book from which the film derives its
name. It quotes Jeremiah’s biblical prophecy that someday Babylon would
become desolate. In the original Hou was going to show images of Taipei,
but in the finished version he was forced to use images from the comic book
itself. Hou did not take this sitting down. He threatened the GIO with an
international scandal, even declaring in the local press that the film inspec-
tion system was “unconstitutional” now that martial law was lifted.111
It proved to be a crucial lesson. Two years later, Hou and company would
manage to get City of Sadness released in Taiwan without any government
excisions or modifications, even though that film touched on the ultimate
taboo: the 228 Incident.
Had Hou not made another film after 1987, he would likely still be
remembered today for his New Cinema works alone. After all, he came to
practically define the movement, even more so than Edward Yang. Chen
Ruxiu has attempted to define this movement in aesthetic terms, yet many
of the traits he lists — most of all long takes, static camera, history filtered
through the personal memories of ordinary people112 — are better used to
describe Hou’s films than the movement as a whole. These are choices Hou
made, and these are exceptionally audacious choices: to use long takes and
a static camera, intricate staging and composition, all coupled with increas-
ingly fragmentary, episodic narratives which cleverly disguise deeper con-
nections, meanings and feelings. Yet these choices were also a product of
a particular time and place. It is remarkable that no producer or financier
ordered the requisite cut-ins, or those clearer causal connections one would
expect in a commercial film industry. But Hou had too much clout when he
joined the New Cinema, and the industry was too much in crisis to say oth-
erwise — nothing else, not even the more commercial fare made in Taiwan,
was working either. Moreover, these films won awards abroad, a diplomatic
golden egg which allowed the goose to continue producing. Yet only for so
long. Sooner or later, Hou had to rely on outside sources for money. All the
while he dealt delicately with the deeper political implications of his films,
encasing them with a dense and brilliant aesthetic cast. He carefully tested
86 No Man an Island
the turbulent, changing waters of the 1980s. Only when all of the economic,
institutional and aesthetic pieces were in place by the end of the decade
did Hou really put everything to the test. The results of his next two films
were something beyond what anybody could have ever imagined, even by
Hou himself.
No Man an Island
Udden, James
Udden, James.
No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Second Edition.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, HKU, 2018.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
native art forms such as opera and puppetry, all of which hitherto had been
tolerated. The locals even began to adopt Japanese names.9
In truth, the Japanese failed to make the Taiwanese into Japanese — eight
years was hardly sufficient. Yet the KMT fared no better in trying to make the
Taiwanese Chinese, despite forty years of strident efforts. It is little wonder
why today many older benshengren still look back at the Japanese era with
post-colonial nostalgia. It is easy enough for them to forgive the many faults
of Japanese rule when compared to how egregiously the KMT ruled Taiwan
immediately afterwards. Moreover, under the Japanese the Taiwanese did
not suffer declining living standards and brutal repression the Koreans had
endured at the same time, nor anything quite like the Rape of Nanjing in
China in 1937, arguably the darkest chapter in Japanese colonial history.
Still, Taiwan remained a somewhat malleable tabla rasa, culturally speaking,
even under the Japanese. Indeed, it appears many Taiwanese would have
accepted being a part of China as well — but only as equals. This is where
the KMT failed miserably in remarkably short order.
the very phrase “Three Principles of the People” became a running joke for
mediocrity and ineffectiveness.33 One commentator did not mince words
when he says that Chen Yi should be executed for losing the love of country
from 6.2 million Taiwanese in such a short time.34
As ill-prepared Chen Yi was to rule Taiwan, he was even less prepared
for the uprising he suddenly met in early 1947. Once again, miscalculations
combined with his unbridled brutality transformed an already horrendous
situation into an unmitigated nightmare. On the evening of the February 27,
1947, several Taiwanese in Taipei witnessed government inspectors beating
mercilessly a widow selling smuggled cigarettes. Crowds became incensed
at their denying a poor woman the only means left for her and her children
to survive. In a panic, one of the inspectors, despite orders to not carry
weapons, fired a gun and killed an innocent bystander. The next day large
crowds appeared before the government offices in Taipei. Eventually they
were met also with a spray of bullets from the troops.35 There was no turning
back after that moment. The date was February 28, 1947, a date which has
given this incident its enduring numerical resonance.
Since the KMT had stationed so few troops on the island, the unarmed
Taiwanese were able to seize most local organs of government and mass
media. Thugs also went out to beat and kill several mainlanders. After a
couple of days, the violence subsided as local leaders, hitherto without real
power in Chen Yi’s government, set up a committee in Taipei for the resolu-
tion of the 228 Incident. Branch “228 Committees” soon cropped up across
the island. If the Taiwanese had wanted to oust the government during that
first week in March, they could have easily done so and declared independ-
ence. But they merely wanted reform.36 By March 8 a comprehensive list
of forty-two demands by the main 228 Committee in Taipei included a call
for abolishing the government monopolies and the bureau of trade. Other
demands called for the inclusion of locals in various representative bodies
and in management positions.37 These were, in effect, a repudiation of eve-
rything Chen Yi had tried in Taiwan. Many of the demands may have been
planted by Chen’s own secret agents as part of a Machiavellian ploy to create
an excuse to respond in no uncertain terms.38 Respond they did. Controlling
only government offices, a couple of airports and a couple of fortresses,
Chen Yi initially appeared conciliatory, even making radio addresses prom-
ising reform. On March 8, however, suddenly Chen’s once conciliatory
demeanor was revealed as posturing. When given these forty-two demands
he stormed back: “What corruption? What shady dealings? What proof do
you have?”39 Chen Yi had just been buying time.
On March 5, Chen Yi received word that the troops of the 21st Division
were on their way to Jilong harbor in the north.40 They arrived as promised
on the afternoon of March 8 and began firing from the moment they got
to shore. The soldiers had orders to shoot anybody who happened to be
History in Its Place 95
by the military from their mountain hideout, during which some are shot.61
Rumors exploded everywhere. Some opined that the military had seen the
film when it first passed through customs and had recommended the cuts
to the GIO before showing it to the panel of seventeen.62 However, neither
the military nor the GIO had yet seen the scene, or knew that it existed. Qiu
Fusheng at Era International made the sensitive cut before the print was
sent to the GIO, apparently without Hou’s prior knowledge. New rumors
circulated that the head of Era had engineered everything — from the com-
pleted version first appearing in Venice, to the delay of the print from Japan
to Taiwan, to the omitted two minutes. Given the precedence of the “Apple
Peeling Incident” of 1983, Qiu must have anticipated the inevitable outcry
forcing a second review by the GIO, which would have to release the film
without any cuts whatsoever. Furthermore, this also was a publicity coup
that could only reap benefits at the box office.63 Whether this was the intent
of Qiu Fusheng or not, this is exactly what resulted. The complete version of
City of Sadness, including the controversial two minutes, was now cleared for
the domestic screens in Taiwan.
Despite the hullabaloo in the media, nobody was quite prepared for
what happened next. Before the film’s release, the published script had
already sold 10,000 copies, the fastest-selling in Taiwan’s history.64 Despite
higher ticket prices than was the norm for Chinese-language films, the first
showings of the film were so packed that it was beating its American and
Hong Kong competition, forcing many Taipei theaters to add an additional
early screening at 9 a.m.65 Eleven days after its release in Taipei, it had
already made NT$40 million in the city alone.66 By year’s end, the Taipei
box-office figure was estimated at around NT$66,000,000 (or roughly over
US$2,000,000), more than twice the film’s supposedly bloated budget.67
There is no telling how many people actually saw the film island-wide, for
the audiences were reportedly even larger outside of Taipei, especially in the
south, where theaters were notorious for inaccurately reporting their box-
office figures. Still, it has been said that ten million people saw the film in the
end, or roughly half the entire population of the island.68
City of Sadness became the cultural event for the ages. Certainly the
Golden Lion at Venice played a role, as did the controversy over the missing
two minutes. However, marketing and controversy could not disguise two
and a half hours running time, nor could it change an exhibition system
known for its unkindness to longer films not predicated on either action or
comedy coming from Hong Kong. It was a film that likely stumped those
who first saw it, and whose word of mouth about its difficulty should have
dissuaded others — and yet they still came in droves. These mind-boggling
numbers indicate how deeply the 228 Incident resonated in Taiwan, how
forty years of attempted erasure by the KMT had utterly failed. With City of
Sadness, the 228 Incident was now in the public domain for good.
History in Its Place 99
Yet Hou’s success both at home and abroad did not unify Taiwan so
much as expose politically charged fissures both within the film industry
and without. The former becomes evident in the snub the film received in
December of 1989 at Taiwan’s own Golden Horse Awards. Despite receiv-
ing the highest award ever received by any Chinese-language film, despite
setting a domestic box-office record for a Taiwanese-made film not surpassed
to this day, City of Sadness received only two Golden Horse awards: for best
director and best male actor for Chen Songyong as the eldest brother, each
by a narrow seven-to-six margin on the voting panel. The judges gave eight
awards, including best picture, to Stanley Kwan’s Full Moon over New York
from Hong Kong. The political nature of this result was clear to everyone even
then, and yet another media maelstrom ensued. Stanley Kwan himself was
clearly embarrassed as he repeatedly declared that his film was no match for
the artistry of City of Sadness.69 Only the head of the GIO, Shou Yuming, tried
to publicly defend the decision by saying that those on the judging panel
were looking out for the tastes of the “little people” as opposed to “elitist
film aficionados,”70 conveniently ignoring, of course, that even in terms of
box-office numbers, Stanley Kwan’s film paled in comparison to Hou’s. Hou
himself did not mince words. He said he won best director only because
the Golden Horse needed to save face. What irked him most of all was the
fact that his technical crew, Chen Huaien (cinematography), Liao Qingsong
(editing) and Du Duzhi (sound), were shut out completely.71
Even this paled compared to the political vehemence the film aroused
outside of the film industry. At stake was not only the long-term identity of
Taiwan, but more immediately a set of elections for key posts in Taiwan in
December of 1989. The timing of the film was seen as critical by everyone.
Hou and those working closely with him engaged in a concerted campaign
to present the film as belonging to a “transcendent” realm of art which
should not be tainted by partisan politics. Even one of the screenwriters,
Wu Nien-jen, a native Taiwanese who has always leaned more towards
independence (and would eventually make ads for the DPP), was quoted
as saying that the purpose of the film was to bring the incident out into the
open without letting it become a political tool.72 But nobody quite believed
Hou and company. Moreover, people at opposite ends of Taiwan’s political
divide were certain Hou was in cahoots with the enemy.
On the side of the KMT none better represented the traditional, con-
servative, Greater China view than the infamous general, Hao Bocun, who at
the time was the President Lee Teng-hui’s chief of staff. Just before the film’s
general release in Taiwan, Hao and others were given a private screening of
City of Sadness. His reaction, written in his diary, is worth quoting at length:
Clearly City of Sadness is meant to put both the party [the KMT] and the
government in a very ugly light, and stir up the passions between native
Taiwanese and mainlanders. Even though some claim its meanings are all
100 No Man an Island
concealed, its purpose is most evident. The scene of the soldiers arresting
the communists shows only the violence to disgrace the soldiers without
explaining why they had to do what they did. Although the film won the
award at Venice, it is suffocating and slow, and most likely will not do well
at the box office. The only thing I can really say is that the opposition clearly
has its own plans, and this is why just before year-end elections releasing a
film like this will help the cause of Taiwanese independence.73
That Hao could have so badly predicted the film’s box-office success evinces
a gross underestimation of the long-term effects of the 228 Incident in Taiwan.
How much this film actually hurt the KMT in these December elections
is open to debate. The KMT has always relied on the trump card of possible
attack by the PRC if a party like the DPP ever takes over. Nevertheless, these
elections were a major defeat for the ruling party, which lost several may-
orships and county commissioner seats, a key position in Taiwan’s politi-
cal structure which greatly aided the DPP in the 1990s. Yet the DPP and its
supporters expected much more than this, some even thinking that perhaps
the KMT would collapse outright now that the 228 Incident was part of the
everyday discourse in Taiwan.74 With such charged and perhaps unrealistic
expectations, some started to look for answers when things did not quite pan
out. New rumors came out accusing Hou of making the film in secret col-
lusion with the KMT to help mitigate the potential damage of bringing 228
out into the open. Xiao Ye, a veteran well-versed on how the KMT has dealt
with cinema from his years in the CMPC, dismissed this accusation rather
brusquely: “the KMT is not that smart.”75 Nevertheless, this idea persisted.
In time, such criticisms of Hou coalesced in an anthology entitled Death
of a New Cinema, which was first published in 1991. These political writings
based their analysis not on Hou’s personal failure, but on a systemic failure
that is indicative of a political and economic system — including the film
industry embedded within it — that has remained unchanged, all the
while swallowing up even “progressive” cultural elements such as Hou.76
One critic suggested that the Golden Lion, like its box-office success at
home, was more the result of timing and clever marketing than artistry.77
Most troubling for these politically minded critics was the aesthetics of City
of Sadness. Most blamed Hou’s idiosyncratic style for obfuscating what oth-
erwise should have been a clear, condemnatory film of the most egregious
misdeeds perpetrated by the KMT government. One writer, for example,
says that having so many people coming in and out of the frame diminishes
the potential of explaining the situation these characters are in, especially
since most of the key events, including the primary causes of their suffering,
are left off-screen.78 Liao Binghui criticizes as follows: “Every time a political
problem is about to appear, the shot immediately changes its position from
real political oppression and violence to the mountains, the sea and fishing
boats, utilizing beautiful mountain and sea scenery to displace and misplace
real problems.”79
History in Its Place 101
Over the last two decades there has been an accretion of academic
defenses of Hou which have become increasingly sophisticated. Yet these
are also surprisingly uniform on one point: City of Sadness is a different
sort of history. In the introduction was quoted Chris Berry and Mary Ann
Farquhar’s view that this film represents a subaltern “historiology.” June Yip,
a Western-trained scholar living in Los Angeles, defends the film’s historical
representation as part of a general process of “decolonization” of Taiwan in
the late 1980s:
Hou’s film is noteworthy not only because it dared to bring its retelling of
the controversial event to the big screen but also because it attempted to
undermine official interpretations of the incident by deliberately telling
history “from below.” . . . City of Sadness explicitly denies the KMT govern-
ment representation and subjectivity by giving it no visual presence.80
it best: despite being about one of the most traumatic episodes in Taiwanese
history, this film has an unusual “present tense” quality to it.85
City of Sadness focuses on the Lin family in Northern Taiwan during the
years 1945–1949. At the core are four brothers, all of whom in one way or
another are victims of larger historical events. The second brother, a doctor,
is already missing when the film begins, being lost in action during the war
and never to return. The first and third brothers, Wen-heung (played by
Chen Songyong) and Wen-leung (played by Jack Kao), are victims of a lethal
combination of political and economic forces as a result of their underworld
activities. The youngest of the four sons, the deaf mute Wen-ching (played
by Tony Leung), is the symbolical center of the film since he is the most
unexpected victim of the new political order due to his initially innocent
involvement with a group of intellectuals.
Some cast doubt on the historical plausibility of this family’s motley
make-up;86 some dislike how it focuses on intellectuals who initially
espoused a “Greater China” idea, only to become victims themselves.87 Still,
one can defend this along the lines of Robert A. Rosenstone, a historian who
notes how both written history and filmed history are textual operations
that reflect historical reality in complicated, and more importantly, distinc-
tive ways. To judge historical films, according to him, one must get beyond
strictly factual questions to note how films involve the processes of com-
pression, condensation, alteration and metaphor to convey history in a way
suitable to cinema.88 From this perspective, the Lin family being comprised
not only of gangsters, but also of doctors and intellectuals, serves well both
the cinematic requirements of metaphor and condensation by providing a
cross-section of post-war Taiwanese society. Noted earlier is how members
of the medical profession formed the core of indigenous political and cultural
movements in Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule. Likewise, since the
Taiwanese were excluded both economically and politically after 1945, many
Taiwanese did in fact resort to illegal means to survive. Furthermore, the
film overall reveals how the idea of “Greater China” became lost in Taiwan.
As such, the Lin family perhaps better represents the pre-war and post-war
Taiwanese socio-economic situation than the Corleones in The Godfather rep-
resent the United States after World War II.
Through these brothers are filtered larger socio-historical forces. These
congeal around two intertwining narrative strands: one involving gang-
sters and one involving the intellectuals. Wen-leung, who returns from the
mainland in a mentally troubled state, eventually gets involved in drug-
smuggling with some Shanghai underworld connections he developed
during the war. The oldest brother, Wen-heung, discovers that his own boats
are being used for transporting contraband without his approval, and con-
fiscates some drugs being smuggled in. This eventually leads to Wen-leung
104 No Man an Island
being arrested and tortured due to the political connections the Shanghai
gangsters have, not to mention the ultimate demise of Wen-heung, even after
he surrendered the contraband to ensure Wen-leung’s release. Meanwhile,
the other narrative strand involves a group of intellectuals who are
acquainted with Wen-ching, the deaf-mute photographer. Wen-ching is not
only good friends with Hinoe, he falls in love with Hinoe’s sister, Hinomi
(a nurse, significantly). Late in the film they marry. However, Wen-ching,
because of his connection of Hinoe and other intellectuals, joins them as a
victim of the oppression following the 228 Incident. While these two narra-
tive strands intersect at points, the gangster storyline, being more economic
in nature, predominates in the first half of the film, while the intellectual
storyline, being more political in nature, predominates in the second half
once the 228 Incident occurs.
This skeletal outline implies a simple trajectory of mainland economic
exploitation followed by political domination. The “problem” is the arrange-
ment of these storylines into an almost perversely elliptical plot padded with
a seeming welter of “superfluous” details and subplots making it difficult to
distinguish the significant from the incidental. The most telling example is
the prolonged sequence involving Wen-leung’s friend, Red Monkey. There
are several scenes of unexplained outbursts and reprisals resulting from
Red Monkey’s death, but no real explanation of the underlying causes until
the mediation session with A-kio, a local matriarch. (As it turns out, Red
Monkey was trying to skim off the counterfeiting scheme without sharing
with others.) For a viewer unable to distinguish between the different
dialects, this sequence is particularly challenging. Yet even then the nego-
tiations in Taiwanese imply that this is merely a local squabble among local
gangs. Only much later in the film are there oblique hints that the Shanghai
gangsters are exploiting these local divisions.
Hou received a lot of flak for this sort of narrative structure, and even
those who defend him have called this loose and disorganized. Li Tuo
has described the film’s editing as “non-logical” since scenes are picked
at “random” with little concern for “cause and effect.”89 City of Sadness,
however, does not deny causality so much as it disguises it. Comparing the
published script to the finished film reveals this indelible mark of Hou. The
script for City called for more scenes of the actual violence of the 228 Incident;
there were also to be explicit political slogans freshly painted on public
walls that would be in obvious contrast to the bitter realities of KMT rule.
There is even one scene in the script of the police beating a woman selling
cigarettes — the main spark for the 228 Incident itself. In the finished
film, by contrast, one catches only brief glimpses and muted references to
government malfeasance, often in passing, or from a great distance. Most
interesting is the script’s treatment of Wen-leung who is a victim of both the
mainland gangsters and the government. The reader of the script is much
History in Its Place 105
better prepared for his initial appearance in the hospital as a lunatic, pro-
viding some clues as to what happened to him on the mainland. Likewise,
his return to insanity later on is explicated by a subjective shot where he
remembers his own arrest and torture at the hands of the Nationalists.90
In the film, however, the third brother’s initial return is sudden and unan-
nounced: Wen-leung appears like a haunting specter, an eerie effect with no
evident cause. We are never shown Wen-leung’s own perspective of being
tortured either, as the script called for; as usual we only see the effect: he has
been made a lunatic once more by events left off-screen.
It is difficult to know what to make of any ellipsis between any two
scenes. This is especially evident at the “climax” of the film, for lack of a better
term. After getting married at the Lin family altar, a montage sequence of
sorts shows Hinomi and Wen-ching in brief vignettes of everyday, domestic
life: Hinomi, now visibly pregnant, shops on the street; Wen-ching touches
up photographs; Hinomi and Wen-ching eat together; Wen-ching brings
Hinomi to the hospital to give birth; and finally Hinomi is writing in her
diary of her satisfaction in life, while her young son — already able to walk
around the table — is playing with the tea cups. Without dissolves, without
any clear markings, the actual temporal gaps creep up on the viewer. This
sequence is done in such a flowing manner as to lull us into a false sense that
this serene domesticity will continue. This, however, turns out to be a cruel
ruse. The next scene begins with a knock on their door at night. Wen-ching
goes to answer while Hinomi tries to feed her son. Wen-ching reads a note
given to him, and seemingly freezes. He hands it to Hinomi, who reads,
and then freezes as well. Saying nothing, she visibly is upset, barely able to
continue feeding her son. At this moment a flashback explains the contents of
the note — the infamous “missing” two minutes which had created a media
storm before the film’s release. In the midst of the mountains Nationalist
troops are raiding Hinoe’s mountain hideout. Hinoe is captured; some of his
absconding colleagues are shot down.
After receiving news of Hinoe’s arrest, Wen-ching and Hinomi are seen
on a train platform as a train whisks by in front. Then there is a long quiet
scene of them taking a family photo together. After the camera clicks and
the image freezes, a voice-over of Hinomi finally retroactively explains these
two images in her letter to the Lins: they had tried to flee, but realized they
had nowhere to go. The photo was taken three days before Wen-ching’s
arrest, and now she does not know where he is. As this voice-over begins,
so does the epilogue, almost imperceptibly. Hinomi’s letter segues to one
final scene at the Lin home where two women are reading the letter, others
are gambling, ending with the Lin family eating at the table. On the surface,
this return to the Lin home seems like another finely wrought vignette of
domestic life. Only a final title lets the viewer understand that it is now 1949
and the KMT government made Taiwan its final home. Without any further
106 No Man an Island
Figure 10
The first scene at the Lin family table in
City of Sadness (1989).
Figure 11
City of Sadness’s penultimate shot:
the last eating scene at the Lin table
from the same framing as
the first.
108 No Man an Island
Figure 12
The initial festive eating scene among the intellectuals in City of Sadness (1989).
History in Its Place 109
Figure 13
The second, more serious eating scene among the intellectuals (the longest take in
City of Sadness).
An unusual scene even for Hou, the end result is arguably one of the
richest and most densely layered scenes he has ever done. Following the
longest take in the entire film, Hou now counterpoints it with a remarkably
different yet free-flowing rhythm of intertitles intercut with shots of slightly
varying shot scales and set-ups of Wen-ching and Hinomi. Even while
admitting that Hou’s cinematic style overall is a hybrid of Chinese tradi-
tional aesthetics and modernism, Berenice Reynaud finds that these inter-
titles are partially inspired by the calligraphy found in traditional Chinese
painting, which conjoined images and words.99 If this were the case, then
why not superimpose these titles on either the right and left side, since that
would allow his long takes to be longer as well? A better explanation is the
overall purpose of this scene. This change from an extended take to editing
represents a remarkable shift in tone from the grave conversation of the intel-
lectuals, to a song and written conversation seemingly unrelated to politics.
The second half of this scene produces an almost dream-like sense of hope
that counterbalances the gravity of what has just been discussed. Had this
scene been only the first long take, its abstract political issues would have
been its only purpose. Instead Hou does not belittle what is said, so much as
dovetail these words with his deeper project: to render a palpable version of
that quotidian world that will be affected in a very real way by what is being
discussed in the abstract.
There is also a retroactive significance to this scene: this will be the last
time this group will ever be together. Thereafter, one by one these men dis-
appear, all off-camera. Hinoe before long will be in hiding in the mountains
and Wen-ching seeks him out. Unlike the past gatherings, this setting is
110 No Man an Island
Figure 14
The last “eating” scene with only Wen-ching and Hinoe, who is in hiding.
as Chinese culture itself.”100 Another states, “Chinese use food to mark eth-
nicity, culture change, calendric and family events, and social transactions.
No business deal is complete without a dinner. No family visit is complete
without sharing a meal. No major religious event is correctly done without
offering up special foods proper to the ritual context.”101 Food acts as both
a social lubricant and bonding material, something literally symbolized by
how everyone draws from centrally placed dishes, not individual plates.
According to one observer, when the Chinese gather together to eat, often
the goal is to find mutually shared interests rather than to engage in conten-
tious debate as would be more likely in the West.102 Here Hou is seemingly
pinned into a cultural corner, yet he explains his way out of it in pedestrian
terms. According to him, eating scenes are the best way to get his actors to be
their most natural selves. Hou waits until mealtime so his actors are actually
having their lunch or dinner on the set while acting out the scene. According
to him, actors become lost in the “business” of eating, handling everything
with greater naturalness, including their improvised dialogue.103 (Hou may
be the only major director in the world for whom craft service is an integral
part of his mise-en-scène.)
The large number of scenes in the hospital corridor, all along the same
axis, provides glimpses of larger historical change. This corridor makes its
first appearance about fourteen minutes into the film, perfectly encapsulating
the initial transition from Japanese to Chinese rule. We are introduced to the
basic layout of the corridor itself and several adjacent rooms. Significantly,
in one room in this scene we see Hinomi writing in her diary, the origins of a
private record of what will become tumultuous historical events. In another
adjacent room, various nurses are learning Mandarin Chinese, a linguistic
indicator of the new regime change. In yet another room, Wen-heung sum-
marizes to the doctor what has happened to his family: one brother is missing
from the war, and the other (Wen-leung) has returned insane. The scene ends
with a shot in the room of Wen-leung, and we see his crazed yet unexplained
state, so severe that he is sedated and bound to the bed posts.
When the corridor returns a second time, it marks the final departure of
the Japanese. This somewhat long take down the corridor shows the arrival
of the Japanese woman, Shizuko, who has come to give Hinomi some
things before she herself leaves for Japan. Initially it might be difficult to see
Shizuko: she is extremely far away in the shot and partially obscured by a
nurse wheeling a cart much closer to the camera. As Shizuko approaches,
however, she is highlighted by being frontal, centered, increasing in size and
by carrying a bundle wrapped in gold — the brightest object in the mise-en-
scène.104 At the same time, however, there is a lot of incidental movement in
the shot, including an old man who stands up and walks across the hallway,
occluding Shizuko momentarily. From a door on the right, a nurse first
emerges, then a doctor. While both temporarily block our view of Shizuko,
112 No Man an Island
neither stops directly between her and the camera. Instead, they are to the
right and left of her, creating a perfect visual sieve directing our attention
once more to Shizuko (figure 15). In this case Hou does admit a certain
design, since he had the nurse count to ten before coming out, and the doctor
count to twenty.105 Still, without a single cut-in, the end result is immaculate.
The same can be said for later events in the corridor such as the spillover
from the 228 Incident itself, or the arrival of Hinomi to give birth which is
perfectly accented by the subtle shifting movements of a janitor mopping
the floor.
Figure 15
Hou’s intricate blocking of his actors along the hospital corridor in City of Sadness.
If the hospital corridor does not produce any specific cultural meaning,
it is more difficult to ignore this possibility with the large number of land-
scape shots in City of Sadness. In these shots, one is reminded of Chinese
landscape paintings which often dwarf their human figures (when they
are present) who are often mere minuscule specks. However, there are also
specific uses for landscapes in City related directly to the difficulties Hou
faced in dealing with one of the most violent periods of Taiwanese history,
subject matter which ran against the grain of his poetic, indirect narration.
One strategy is simple elision of the actual violence, such as the disappear-
ance of many of the intellectuals, or the return of Wen-leung to a state of
madness. In the latter case we see his arrest and his return, but not the actual
torture at the hands of the government — we see the effects, but not the direct
cause. Another strategy is to show the violence, but only at a pronounced
distance. More than once there is a cut after violence has commenced to a
much greater distance along the same axis. This occurs, for example, during
the Red Monkey sequence when A-ga attacks another gangster in the field,
History in Its Place 113
Figure 16
The infamous “missing” two minutes in City of Sadness. The white speck in the lower
right hand corner is a falling victim of Nationalist oppression.
114 No Man an Island
local box office, whose films are often indistinguishable from Hong Kong’s,
got into the historical act with A Home Too Far, a condemnatory exploration
of the KMT’s exploitation, and eventual abandonment, of soldiers along the
Burmese-Chinese border after the mainland was lost. More conspicuous is
how much Hou now defines the “Taiwanese style,” even for veterans like
Yang and Wang. Yang never averaged over 15 seconds per shot in his earlier
films, but in A Brighter Summer Day the average shot length is nearly double
that at just over 27 seconds per shot. He also now utilizes more complex
staging techniques compared to his previously sparse compositions. The first
scene in the pool hall uses three shots from deep inside the elongated room.
Yang is careful to keep the principal action in the foreground, unlike Hou,
but at one point a platoon of troops slowly walks by in the distance, a subtle
reminder of the White Terror. Wang Tong had made films that averaged less
than 8 seconds per shot (i.e. Runaway averages 7.8 seconds per shot), but in
The Hill of No Return the ASL shoots up to 20 seconds per shot, including a
shot at the end of the film that lasts nearly six minutes without a cut. Young
directors could not seem to avoid Hou’s now elongated stylistic shadows,
including a key newcomer, Tsai Ming-liang, who eventually will take some
of Hou’s aesthetic lessons literally. Before long this influence will extend
beyond Taiwan.
Not everyone saw this as a positive development, but further signs of
deepening crisis. Some initially thought Hou’s success with City of Sadness
might save the film industry. Sober heads, however, knew otherwise.
Edmond Wong correctly predicted that City would be a one-off success
simply because it was the first to bring 228 to the screen. The industry as a
whole, however, remained essentially unchanged.109 Others felt Hou was
leading Taiwanese cinema down an untenable path. Huang Yingfen notes
how everyone now followed Hou’s lead in pursuing a “festival style” of
long takes and the static camera because with no local market open to them,
the film festival route is the most viable.110 In any case, by 1993 the island
produced half the number of features it had in 1989; it would produce only
a quarter that number in 1994. By contrast, Hong Kong released more than
3.5 times that number on the island in 1993, the year this film came out.111
Box-office shares in this same year reveal an even worse state of affairs:
in 1993, foreign films (most from Hollywood) had 67% of the box office in
Taiwan, while Hong Kong had 29%, and Taiwan-made films had just over
4%.112 In a few years’ time, even these paltry figures will elicit nostalgia.
Another “giant” loomed over Taiwanese cinema in 1993: this was the year
of the unprecedented box-office success of Jurassic Park. This meant that not
only would these percentages continue to decline hereafter for Taiwanese
films, but also for Hong Kong films as well. From here on out Taiwanese
cinema will remain mostly a cottage industry of a few notable art films and
the rare commercial hit, but not a film industry in any true sense of the term.
116 No Man an Island
camera. (At one point Li Zhu literally does pose for a still photograph.) Such
stasis and quietude, however, only further distracts one from the radical
gaps between these images, or the dramatic shifts and turnabouts that often
occur off-screen in the intervening ellipses.
There are also familiar editing patterns. Yeh and Nornes have pointed
out that the linchpin of Hou’s editing aesthetic is his tendency to cut along
the same camera axis.147 While not completely accurate with respect to City
of Sadness, this claim is better justified with respect to The Puppetmaster. Here
Hou tends to restrict himself by cutting from an already distanced shot to
an even more distanced shot along the same axis. This strategy, established
in the first scene of Li’s birthday, is repeated when the camera cuts back to
an image of Li’s father waiting for Li to finish his class at school and other
scenes thereafter. Some of the cuts to the real Li Tianlu (where he usually
continues his initially off-screen monologue) are either done with the same
set-up as the previous shot, or from a more distanced set-up along that same
axis. Here Hou ingeniously blurs another potentially disruptive dichotomy
between the diegetic and non-diegetic worlds in a fluid fashion: having Li
always appear in either the same camera set-up, or at least along the same
camera axis as the previous shot, further aids this smooth transition from the
“story” realm to the “documentary” realm, much in the same way that this
film blends together “life,” the “stage” and “dreams.” Thus, even editing
strangely plays a role in blurring boundaries in The Puppetmaster rather than
calling attention to them.
In his previous films we have already seen how Hou tends to use
landscape shots which often achieve their own autonomy. Here there are
numerous distanced shots in which key narrative details are dwarfed by
landscapes. The arrival of the stepmother offers one prime instance of this.
On-screen a carriage moves away from the camera, almost swallowed up by
the surroundings. (So diminutive is this detail that only the published script
can clarify that it is the stepmother arriving.) Such oblique narrative exposi-
tion, often made more indirect by the overwhelming expanse of the natural
world itself, means the narrative has become almost secondary to nature
itself. Some controversies have revolved around this issue. Nick Browne
describes these shots as not just beautiful, but also “sublime.” In his own
words: “They [the landscape shots] are moments of the narratively unrepre-
sentable and stand as points of stasis in the narrative system of Hou’s films.”
Clearly what left the most indelible impression on Browne are the final two
shots of the crowd dismantling Japanese planes, which he calls “one of the
most incongruous and beautiful images of world cinema.”148 Shen Xiaoying
disputes Browne’s contention that certain shots defy narration.149 Li Zhenya
disputes Browne’s conclusions about The Puppetmaster by avering that
there is no sense of time and space in the film that is outside of politics and
history.150 At the core of this dispute is the shared assumption that there is a
History in Its Place 123
dialectical opposition between the natural and the human worlds, between
nature and history, or between nature and narration. In the case of The
Puppetmaster, however, terms like “dialectical” seems to me acutely foreign
to how this film operates as a whole, and therefore misguided.
These familiar Hou traits, many now pushed to a new level, are con-
joined with traits which seem rather novel for Hou. Mark Lee returned to
work with Hou for the first time since 1986. Unlike in City of Sadness, with
its often somber diffusion of the interiors, The Puppetmaster consistently
employs very directional lighting, in some cases even using backlighting
that completely silhouettes the main figures on the screen. The scenes with
Li Zhu in her room involve either strong top-lighting for the night scenes,
or strong side-lighting for the daytime. Even when the interior lighting more
resembles that of past films, they often still use strong chiaroscuro in any
case, leaving the characters — themselves illuminated — surrounded by rich
gradations of light and shadow never seen before in a Hou film. Given Hou’s
goal of increasing subtlety and indirectness for his narration, this was the
next logical step to take. Even if such lighting challenges the viewer in some
respects, these interior views are hauntingly and exquisitely beautiful on
the big screen.
Of course, one of the most potentially jarring features of this film is
its half-documentary, half-fictional quality. Hou’s interest in documentary
should come as no surprise, given his interest in showing Taiwan as he
sees it. Still, to start this particular film as a narrative and then to suddenly
insert the real Li Tianlu on the screen — and not do this until at least fifty
minutes into the film — is an audacious move. Nevertheless, it is not as dis-
ruptive as one might expect. Documentary and narrative here are combined
effortlessly, and without any overt stabs at reflexivity that one might expect.
Furthermore, Li’s own appearances on-screen, coupled with his voice-
overs, play a deeper role than merely combining two distinctive cinematic
forms. They also allow distinct temporal time frames to meld together. Li’s
voice-overs are just as often anticipatory as retroactive: sometimes certain
key moments are introduced abstractly through his words first, after which
what has been said will be presented visually on-screen. Consider the death
of Li’s grandmother, which prompts the initial, unexpected appearance of
the present-day Li. We first see the young Li and a woman eating together,
but there is no way of discerning who she is. Over the next three shots
(a landscape of a field followed by two distanced images of men building
an addition to a house), Li’s voice-over explains that she is his grandmother
who was brought to his house because other relatives thought she was
bad luck. Thus far the voice-over has been retroactive, explaining all of the
events seen, including the addition to the house (figure 17). Li then goes on
to say that they lived together without incident, and soon enough the camera
cuts along the same camera axis placing the actual Li seated in a medium
124 No Man an Island
Figure 17
The shot right before Li Tianlu’s first appearance in The Puppetmaster (1993).
Figure 18
Li appears along the same axis in the same setting.
shot, directly addressing the audience (figure 18). Significantly, Li’s com-
mentary deftly segues into future events not seen, events that culminate in
the death of his grandmother, who has barely been introduced to begin with.
Throughout the film Hou uses these on-screen appearances to link past and
future events, once again almost imperceptibly. For example, when the film
jumps to 1937, we see an indoor opera performance. At first, Li’s voice-over
explains the greater significance of an indoor opera performance already
seen, a visible effect of larger yet unseen events (the war and the subse-
quent ban on outdoor puppet performances). Yet after he appears on-screen,
Li begins to talk about how he met his most memorable amour while
performing in this opera troupe, thus seguing easily into the prolonged,
upcoming sequence involving Li Zhu.
Considering this film’s long, static and distanced takes, either intricate
or static staging, landscapes which often dwarf human actions, lighting
History in Its Place 125
distance, the muted sounds of which can be heard in the background. While
seeing this image, Li’s voice-over continues to describe how his mother died.
Soon enough the subtle strains of Chen Mingzhan’s guitar music chimes
in as well, only to slowly segue into the next scene where the children are
introduced to the stepmother. Certainly such sonic layering in itself is not
that unusual and can be found in Hollywood films. What is unusual is that
in this case one can hardly pick out the actual narrative ellipsis due to the
continuous sound, nor the temporal disruption at work in this last image:
the script makes very clear that those carriages, which appear on the screen
before Li even gets to talking about his mother’s actual death, are actually
transporting his new stepmother to their house. Thus, while we hear from
Li an accounting of an event already past and never seen, the visuals on
screen are already well into the future since the carriages indicate that Li’s
father has already remarried. Sound here not only lets past and future
flow into each other without any clear borderlines, it hides its stratagems
under a guise of spontaneity and unforced naturalism, the hallmarks of the
film’s creator.
Even music is handled in such unusual ways to wash over potentially
jarring gaps. Music figures prominently in the all-important five-scene
sequence between Li and his mistress. The first eating scene of Li and Li Zhu
is followed by a brief scene of her having her portrait taken. Yet laid over
both scenes is a single, continuous song heard in the background at varying
levels. In the initial scene the sound has a timbre of coming from the radio
behind them after Li Zhu tunes to it. (Therefore it is clearly diegetic.) As the
image fades to black, the music becomes much fuller when the image fades
in to the photography session. (Now the music is non-diegetic.) Only very
slowly and gradually (stretching nearly twenty seconds), does this song
finally fade away in the third scene when they look at the photographs and
then eat noodles in her room (figures 19, 20, and 21). After a long interlude
where only dialogue and ambient sounds are heard, the sounds of an opera
performance slowly fade in. This seems to be diegetic, yet the music segues
to the fourth scene that follows. Since in part this involves an opera perfor-
mance, now we realize the music is motivated by this scene, not the one
previous. This music in turn bleeds over into the fifth and final scene of the
sequence where Li is tested by Li Zhu. In short, over these five scenes two
different pieces of music each tie together three scenes each, with the middle
scene being connected by both pieces. In this way, there is a sonic flow
created over the entire sequence, once again smoothing over the otherwise
jarring ellipses.
The sound in the sequence involving the pubescent Li and his grand-
mother carries over three successive scenes, and is emblematic of the
construction of the film as a whole. The sound of firecrackers and music
slowly fades in with the opening shot, the aforementioned outdoor puppet
Figure 19
First night of the Li Zhu
sequence, with pronounced
top lighting.
Figure 20
Li Zhu being photo-
graphed, the music
continues.
Figure 21
Li Zhu and Li Tianlu as
a young man looking at
the photos; pronounced
side lighting.
128 No Man an Island
performance after he left home. Li’s voice-over soon explains that he was
now on the road performing as a young boy. The second shot, a cut-in to
the young Li performing from backstage, clearly reveals that the music is
diegetic, originating from his performance. This shot fades to black, and
the next image fades in showing a restaurant on a street. This appears to be
in a proximate area, given that the sound, seemingly following the rules of
the audio proximity effect, is more distanced due to a noticeably reduced
volume. The last two shots of this second scene now show Li eating with his
grandmother in a restaurant, a clear indication of a temporal gap — except
that the sound of that performance by this same Li, now eating, has contin-
ued uninterrupted in the background, seemingly mixing naturally with the
ambient murmurs in the restaurant itself. And if that were not enough, the
music from that same performance, now long completed in the visual realm,
carries over even into the next shot, an extreme long shot of a landscape
that includes Li leading his grandmother along a path. (Once again, only the
script clarifies this.) Only then does that sound of the performance fade out
in an excruciatingly slow fashion, taking nearly another half minute to do
so. This in turn segues into the return of Li’s adult voice-over explaining this
episode concerning the grandmother who would soon die.
If there is an underlying structure to The Puppetmaster, it is how imper-
ceptibly past, present and future flow into each other. Sound in particular
plays the primary role in smoothing over what would otherwise be very
rough elliptical divisions, and yet it does something more than that. Li in the
present reflects on the past: yet that past seen on screen itself has an almost
magical temporal structure whereby past, present and future seem to occur
simultaneously. With the help of Du Duzhi, Hou disguises his almost devious
manipulations under the veil of realism, resulting in a cinematic experience
that is very much a part of the world it depicts, and yet at the same time is
markedly different from it. Most viewers will not consciously reflect on the
disparity between sound and image — but they will experience it on some
level, perhaps sensing that there is something uncanny going on, even if they
cannot quite place their finger on it. Because of the sound design most of all,
The Puppetmaster is like a dream that seems utterly real. The question only
remains as to what this dream is telling us.
these on the surface are mere chronicles of the quotidian lives of little
people. That is usually what people mean when calling these a “subaltern”
history, or a “history from below.” These are unofficial histories par excel-
lence, yet they almost seem to be anti-histories, most of all City of Sadness and
The Puppetmaster.
Yet these are not just historical deconstructions. For starters, both films
seem calculated according to a peculiar position Taiwan finds itself both
domestically and internationally. Of the two films, City of Sadness posed
the greatest challenge given how it implicated the ruling party by touching
upon the greatest historical taboo of them all. Yet it also had implications
for China, since the underlying message is about how China has historically
treated Taiwan. Few historical eras anywhere are this explosive or sensitive.
How to best proceed was anyone’s guess. In this climate, Hou was arguably
the best man for this job, a job which had no consensus. Another Taiwanese
director at the time, Ye Hongwei, said this about Hou’s handling of the
228 Incident: “If I had shot this subject matter, I would have done so in a
much more political way, but it would have been banned as a result. The
current censorship system will not allow such a risk.”151 If this accurately
describes the late 1980s in Taiwan, then perhaps Hou’s peculiar treatment
of such touchy subject matter was the only way to bring this incident to the
light of day at that particular time, or any time thereafter for that matter.
Of all the comments made by Hou concerning City of Sadness, none is
more confounding than his personal belief that this film is “too direct.”152
Hardliners like Hao Bocun would agree, but not those in the opposite camp.
In truth, this is a history with rhetoric. But like everything else — such as
causality, or its underlying structure — this rhetoric is buried behind a cal-
culated pretense of having no rhetoric at all. Close inspection does reveal a
decided imbalance of voices in the film which favors the Taiwanese, not the
mainland newcomers. These multifaceted voices include not only Hinomi’s
diary, but also the first two meals among the intellectuals, which air out the
grievances against the new ruling party. In the first of these meals, there is
even a rare cut-in to Hinoe right when he makes a pointed remark against
Chen Yi. In the second meal, a visual democracy allows everyone to catalog
the grievances of the Taiwanese against their new overlords. Who speaks
for the mainlanders or the KMT? Only the disembodied voice of Chen Yi
in the speeches made after the Incident began. Chen Yi is perhaps one the
most irredeemable figures in the history of the KMT. That Chen Yi is the
only voice of the mainlanders in the entire film is tantamount to having
Hitler speak for all conservatives, or having Pol Pot speak for all liberals.
Moreover, these announcements are chilling, displaying that invisible nature
of power that Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh notes. No other mainlander speaks in this
film unless talking business; there are no cut-ins, no gatherings of mainland
gangsters where they complain about the Taiwanese. Moreover, when the
130 No Man an Island
soldiers appear in the film, such as the arrest of Wen-leung, or later of Hinoe,
the soldiers have their backs mostly to the camera, almost as if they were
an impersonal, inhuman force. Hou’s handling of these issues is almost
devious, and more damning of the KMT than it first appears
The problem is that Hou then lacquers this with profuse details such as
food, song, laughter — the stuff of everyday life. Most telling is how both
eating scenes with the intellectuals end in song, not calls to action. The politi-
cal in Hou’s cinematic world, like its human subjects, like history, like even art
itself, are all engulfed in a deeper world view. In the script for City of Sadness
Hou explains as such: “What I hope to capture on film is all the activities of
human beings under the laws of nature.”153 This seemingly vague statement
is seen by many as indicative of Hou’s political evasiveness, but it accurately
reflects how he sees politics in his own terms. The problem for Hou is not the
political undertones, but how many in 1989 attempted to reduce the film to
its politics, or to further their own immediate political aims.
This becomes much clearer in The Puppetmaster, where the historical
controversies were more remote and muted, allowing Hou to present his
historical vision more fully. Unlike City of Sadness and the 228 Incident, this
was not the first film to deal with the Japanese era in Taiwan. Yet never have
the Japanese been depicted as such — one does not see much of either their
vices or virtues. They are but one of many people in Li’s life and nothing
more. They are neither especially good nor bad; despite their real power,
they hardly seem of any consequence. They came, and then they went.
No longer is anything privileged. History is but a smaller part of a larger
picture. History has now been put in its place. In fact, everything, includ-
ing narrative, art, history, food, life and death, to name a few, has its place;
nothing is given greater weight than anything else. Furthermore, the flowing
“cloud-like quality” allows these elements to intermix freely, even to mingle
at points, and then quietly part ways, often for good. Even the episode with
Li Zhu, the most arresting in the entire film, simply comes and goes, and
she is never heard from again. People are born, people die, and that is that.
In The Puppetmaster, nature is everywhere, the canopy under which all else
occurs, dwarfing even the grandeurs of art and history. Everything changes,
even art, according to the whims of an unseen fate.
Hou now fully realizes the vision he first had when he was shooting The
Boys from Fengkuei and reading Shen Congwen’s autobiography: to render a
world where what matters is not the prattle of pundits and politicians, but
life as it is, and as it is lived, and most of all, as it is remembered by its sur-
vivors. The Puppetmaster is perhaps as episodic in the true sense of the word
as any feature film ever made, yet it is not episodic for the sake of being
episodic. These episodes are part of a much deeper project than anybody
can ever possibly realize after a single viewing. Were it not for its decep-
tive simplicity, the ease by which it ebbs and flows, its abiding quiescence,
History in Its Place 131
this film would be noted as one of the most radical ever made compared
with most every other cinematic foray into history and philosophy. Without
dint of logic or argumentation, without the usual trappings of intellectual
fervor or sophisticated nattering, The Puppetmaster, by the very fabric of its
cinematic being, is one of the most understated yet profound philosophical
statements to ever grace the screen. One wonders what Hou had left to say.
No Man an Island
Udden, James
Udden, James.
No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Second Edition.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, HKU, 2018.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
sure, or a dazzling “turn” if you prefer, but nobody can deny that this film
marks a vexing complication. For the first and only time in his career, Hou
produces a film which is set entirely in mainland China, making no reference
to Taiwan whatsoever. For that reason alone it was near treason for some,
representing an abandonment of Taiwan and the realism that had formed
the cornerstones of his previous films, even including the two most recent,
less certain efforts. For others, on the other hand, it was nothing short of
the greatest film of the year (if not the decade) the world over, a mesmer-
izing mise-en-scene masterpiece so delicately wrought, so finely paced,
and so wondrously lit that it mattered little what it was about, or where it
took place. Few in 1998 could dispute that Hou was still the master of the
medium: Flowers of Shanghai rivals the best of Mizoguchi, not just in terms of
beauty and subtlety, but also sheer visual complexity. Yet in doing so, Hou
raises new questions, even bringing us back to square one with the trouble-
some issue of China. Has Hou Hsiao-hsien, the director hailing from Taiwan,
made the most Chinese film ever? If so, is this film also a major break, maybe
even more significant than the one putatively made in 1995?
It would be a mistake to see these changes as resulting from changes in
Taiwan or Taiwanese cinema during the mid-1990s. If any person defined the
decade for Taiwan, it was Lee Teng-hui, the president from the KMT and yet
who was a benshengren. Many now feel that Lee intended to make the KMT
implode from within. After retiring, he even declared that he only joined
the KMT in the 1970s because “the most dangerous place to be was also the
safest place to be.”3 Nevertheless, seen at first as a temporary solution after
the death of Chiang Ching-kuo, he managed twelve years as the president
(1988–2000). During that time Lee implemented sweeping changes, includ-
ing constitutional ones that made it possible for the next president, Chen
Shui-bian, to rule without being the head of a political party. In 1996, there
was the first direct presidential election ever in Taiwan which prompted
threatening missile tests by mainland China, a strategy which backfired. Lee
won 54% of the vote. The DPP candidate, Peng Mingmin, a veteran advocate
of Taiwanese independence, came in second with 21% of the popular vote.
Members from both the KMT and the DPP slung mud in the opposition’s
faces, but Lee and Peng never exchanged a negative word about each
other. They were old friends.4 Yet during his last term, Lee’s approval rating
plummeted from 80% to 40% for a number of reasons: corruption in the
KMT, relatively declining economic competitiveness and numerous diplo-
matic failures.5 Popular or not, Lee still the pushed the cause of Taiwanese
sovereignty as far as it could go. In 1999, Lee Teng-hui made a bold statement
on German television where he declared that ever since the constitutional
changes in 1991, the relations between China and Taiwan have been on an
equal “State-to-State” basis.6 Not only did this provoke the ire of the PRC,
it caused unease among many in Taiwan who feared such provocations.
134 No Man an Island
Hou’s cachet abroad did not cause this change either. All three films he
made from 1995–1998 were entered into the competition at Cannes despite
less than 1% acceptance rate. And Hou certainly did not need to rely on gov-
ernment funds to make these films: he easily found investors from abroad
(most of all Shochiku in Japan) just as he had with City of Sadness and The
Puppetmaster. In other words, it is hard to pinpoint any specific contextual
causes, industrial or otherwise, for these undeniable and seemingly perma-
nent changes. We must look at the films themselves and speculate.
as a whole finds it difficult to face up to the public traumas of its long sup-
pressed history.15
As enlightening as this interpretation is, this does not explain why
Good Men, Good Women feels so different from the previous two films of a
putative historical trilogy. As we have seen, both City of Sadness and The
Puppetmaster are highly fragmentary films, but obliquely so; Good Men, Good
Women, by contrast, flaunts its fragmentariness. The film almost announces
its purposes to the point of being somewhat didactic. This does not entail a
complete thematic or stylistic divorce from the past. For example, in the inter-
rogation scene on the mainland, both the interrogators and the Taiwanese
who have arrived to fight the Japanese struggle to find a common language
since they speak different dialects, a reminder of the linguistic grapevine
when Wen-heung surrenders the drugs to the Shanghai gangsters in City.
It further reinforces Hou’s ongoing subversion of the KMT’s desired linguis-
tic unity ever since he used Taiwanese in The Sandwich Man. Likewise this
film seems like another step forward in Hou’s ongoing pursuit of ever longer
takes, since the average length is now up to 108 seconds per shot, a “logical”
progression from 42 seconds and 83 seconds per shot respectively. David
Bordwell also notes how this film’s use of both chiaroscuro and staging are a
continuance of strategies found in the other two films.16
Two other things, however, indicate a very different Hou from before.
The first is the tripartite narrative structure revolving around the actress
Liang Jing in the present day, Liang Jing three years earlier up to Ah-wei’s
death, and the historical past of Jiang Biyu and Zhong Haodong, which may
be read either as Liang Jing’s imaging of a film not yet made about these
historical figures, or it may be read as the actual images of that same film
within a film. Either way, the contrast between the latter narrative strand, set
in the 1940s and 1950s, and the first two, both set in contemporary Taiwan,
are literally as different as black and white versus color. Sylvia Lin takes
issue with the common interpretation of this tripartite structure to contrast
the past replete with idealism versus a crass present full of only indulgence
and material comfort.17 However, not only has Hou said this was one of his
intentions on more than one occasion,18 the film’s color schemes lends itself to
such an interpretation. Liang Jing of the present day is depicted in color, but
often in murky, cramped interior settings; Liang Jing of three years earlier is
distinguished with a slightly harsh bluish wash. All the scenes of the histori-
cal past, however, are represented in soft black and white with almost a tint
of sepia. Moreover, the film replicates what Lin found to be a shortcoming
of the original short story: Zhong remains an idealized, heroic figure in what
amounts to a political hagiography.19 Not only does the Zhong in this film
display none of the unabashed yet humanizing foibles of the Lin brothers in
City of Sadness, or of Li Tianlu in The Puppetmaster, the images in black and
white so idealize his past that Zhong and others appear to be shrouded in a
Goodbye to All That 137
diffused, cinematic nimbus. Hou has said that Good Men, Good Women is his
least favorite film.20 Perhaps the reason is because in this respect it is most
unlike Hou, so far removed from his spiritual mentor, Shen Congwen. It is
certainly his most overtly reflexive film, yet it is also his “coldest.”
The more permanent and significant change, however, lies elsewhere.
For those familiar with Hou’s films up to that time, the opening shot of Good
Men, Good Women seems like Hou: lasting 84 seconds, an extremely dis-
tanced landscape shot shows people singing crossing a field, and the camera
does not move even a fraction of an inch (figure 22). This is the Hou we
have always known. As it turns out, this opening is but a prolonged mirage.
Right at the cut to the second scene, a ringing phone chimes in. Without an
extended sound bridge to smooth over this sudden rupture, one is almost
jarred into this brave new cinematic world unlike any previously created by
Hou. The camera tilts, pans, tracks and arcs, moving continuously within
a plan sequence nearly four minutes long (figures 23–25). It represents the
most elaborate use of camera movements in any Hou shot up to that time.
More importantly, this long yet moving take is hardly a one-off device in this
film: instead it establishes a major stylistic pattern for the entire work since
around 72% of the shots contain camera movements, and most of these are
overt, not just slight reframings. By contrast, every Hou film since A Summer
at Grandpa’s in 1984 had camera movements in less than one-third of their
shots, and usually about half of those are only slight reframings. The newly
moving camera in Hou became the hot topic of conversation in Taiwan when
the film was released. One astute Taiwanese critic notes that Hou seems to
move his camera like a reticent child just learning this technique.21 The best
evidence for this is a scene with Liang Jing and Ah-Wei, arguably the most
intimate moment in the film. In one of the longest takes lasting well over
four minutes, shot from behind, but with their faces visible in the mirror,
Ah-wei hugs Liang Jing from the left side while she applies make-up and
Figure 22
The opening landscape shot in Good Men, Good Women (1995).
Figure 23
The beginning of the second shot — a new Hou in the making.
Figure 24
The framing midway through the second shot.
Figure 25
The framing at the end of the second shot.
Goodbye to All That 139
discusses their future. For most of the four minutes, however, the camera
pans to the left in a painstakingly slow fashion, so slow that it is barely
noticeable.
Hou and crew do not offer satisfactory explanations for this startling
change. Chu Tien-wen was the first to call attention to it, but she does not
offer any explanations beyond Hou having already reached a “peak.” Hou
sometimes attributes this to Annie Shizuko Inoh, the actress who posed new
challenges for him.22 At other times, however, he suggests that the stationary
camera is the best way to capture the feeling of the past, but not the present.
He says he first learned this lesson from watching Bertolucci’s The Last
Emperor where he felt the moving camera was much at odds with the histori-
cal subject matter. Since he had lost interest in the past with this film (at least
in part), he had also lost interest in the stationary camera.23 However, the cin-
ematographer, Chen Huaien, offers alternative explanations. Chen attributes
this change to the new camera operator, Han Yunzhong, who was oftentimes
unsteady. It was decided that this unsteadiness would be better exploited
than eradicated.24
Most significant, however, is how this dramatic change in Hou’s style
has persisted ever since — hence the “break.” While Hou’s films from the
early 1980s all the way up to 1993 display an increasingly static camera,
from 1995 onwards we see instead the predominance of the mobile camera.
I have already discussed many of the ramifications of this change elsewhere,
including extra-cinematic ones.25 For now, suffice to say that Hou was aban-
doning what had been his aesthetic calling card on the international festival
scene: his unusual long-take, static-camera style. More importantly, he was
abandoning what was about to become a new Pan-Asian style on the festival
circuit. It would soon become apparent that the changes went even deeper
than this.
Goodbye does confirm the rupture half announced by Good Men, Good
Women: not only is the ASL almost identical (105 seconds per shot), now
roughly 80% of the shots have camera movements, most of which are con-
tinuous and overt. While simpler in story and structure than its predeces-
sor, it features unfamiliar devices for Hou as if he was now willing to try
anything. For example, Hou uses overt POV shots through the green visors
of a motorcycle helmet, or the red wash of sunglasses. He also uses the hand-
held camera with near abandon in certain scenes, most of all in the KTV
(karaoke night club) settings toward the end. The longest take of the film,
where underworld and political figures decide the case of Flatty and Kao in
the shadowy interstices of a KTV, is 8.5 minutes of a handheld camera con-
stantly trying to keep up with the complex negotiations through panning.
Yet while Goodbye South, Goodbye is arguably the most overlooked Hou
film since Daughter of the Nile, it should not be dismissed. One of the most
interesting scenes takes place in an apartment where the three protagonists
talk and argue between their shooting of a small basketball, a sign that Hou
had not lost interest in complex staging in depth (figure 26). More interest-
ing, however, is the film’s underlying thematics. Kent Jones suggests that no
“film since Warhol has given a better sense of just hanging out.”27 However,
Goodbye is better described as a road movie traversing Taiwan’s economic
terrain. This is not new. Hou’s New Cinema films provide indications of how
Taiwan’s economy has operated at a day-to-day level: the special economic
export zone in Kaohsiung seen in The Boys from Fengkuei; Hou’s own unwill-
ingness to collect on money owed to a private biaohui in A Time to Live, A Time
to Die after seeing the poverty of the debtor; the small businesses such as the
print shop in Dust in the Wind; and the archetypal move from country to city
so central to the Taiwanese economic experience in multiple films. Goodbye
South, Goodbye, on the other hand, provides a more complete overview of
how the Taiwanese economy operates.
Figure 26
Staging along multiple planes of depth in Goodbye South, Goodbye.
Goodbye to All That 141
More than anything, Goodbye South, Goodbye illustrates the thorny nature
of many economic deals in Taiwan, which are usually relational (based on
guanxi), not contractual. Westerners would be shocked at how such deals
transpire, especially when they often involve family members. Central in this
film are the deals involving public buyouts of land (including a pig farm)
for Taiwan Electric, the apparent origins of which are certain unused scenes
found in the published script of Good Men, Good Women.28 In Goodbye, both
male protagonists find themselves cheated out of their shares of such deals,
and yet when they seek restitution they run against a tangled web involving
the underworld, politicians and the police. Moreover, Flatty fights his own
uncle and then is arrested by his own cousin, a police officer, further illustra-
tion of how much these are family affairs. All parties concerned join together
in the shadows of the KTV at night (in the longest take mentioned above),
after which they make an extralegal gentleman’s agreement to release the
two, but only after the police throw their keys into a field at night. Few films
from Taiwan have more succinctly illustrated how much economic activity
in Taiwan can toy with legal boundaries, which historically were not well-
enforced by the KMT. In a typically subtle and indirect way, Hou is address-
ing an issue which concerned many at the time, what Peggy Chiao bluntly
described as “Money Politics, Underworld Rule.”29
Even more significant, arguably, is the aspiration of the three protago-
nists to move to China and open a restaurant and disco. By the mid-1990s
there was no denying the economic impact this small island was having on
its hefty neighbor across the Straits of Taiwan. Mentioned in chapter 2 is how
Taiwanese investment into China, despite being illegal, increased fifty-seven
times over the 1980s until it reached US$2.7 billion in 1988. In 1990, this
figure jumped to US$4 billion; in 1991 it was US$5.5 billion; in 1992, it rose
to US$7.4 billion; by 1993 the figure has cracked the US$10 billion mark.30
This has not subsided since. Not only has Taiwanese investment in mainland
China now likely exceeded US$60 billion, the Taiwanese themselves are
moving many of their factories from Taiwan to the mainland, and providing
the mainland with much needed managerial skills. Today it is commonly esti-
mated that over 300,000 Taiwanese live in Shanghai alone, and the real figure
is likely higher than that. In this way, these three protagonists, as marginal
and shady as they appear, ultimately aspire to a Taiwanese norm.
This is where the title of the film matters. The literal title of the film in
Chinese is “South Country Goodbye, South Country,” an inversion of the
English title in more ways than one. Hou says this represents how Taiwan
in the past always belonged to someone else, called China’s or Japan’s
“South Country.” Only now does Taiwan have a modicum of independence.
However, even now many in Taiwan cannot quite accept Taiwan’s situation.
Thus they often aspire to leave, only to find they cannot, and are stuck in
their own internal contradictions as a result.31 This commentary elucidates
142 No Man an Island
the final scene of the film: after being adrift the entire time, after failing at
every turn to find their financial ticket to the “greener pastures” of China,
they suddenly crash on a desolate field at the crack of dawn, somewhere in
the middle of the “South Country.” With Hou, there is no escaping Taiwan —
at least not yet.
written down, but in what is unseen, and inferred, by the reader.34 Ah Cheng
became a literary star in Taiwan in the mid-1980s with his King of Chess, rep-
resenting a generation of mainland writers on a “nativist” search for cultural
roots in the face of modernization.35 With Flowers, Ah Cheng had a palpable
impact on the look of the film by advising the art director, Huang Wenying,
to use not only functional props, but “useless” props as well (including
apparently Chanel lipstick). As he explains it, “Functional items are decora-
tions for space; useless items are traces of life.”36
The strongest tie here, however, would have to be Eileen Chang, who
translated Han’s novel into Mandarin in the 1970s, the version which
inspired Hou to make the film.37 Once again, this apparently occurred via
Chu Tien-wen, who comes from a literary family that revered Eileen Chang.38
Descriptions of Chu’s own writings often resemble those used for Chang’s.
For example, Yvonne Chang describes Chu as falling back on a “senti-
mental-lyrical tradition” that pays more attention to “subjective, private
sentiment with a posture of complacency in regard to sociopolitical issues.”39
In a long interview published in Film Appreciation, Hou hardly mentions
Han Bangqing, but talks at length about Eileen Chang.40 This is not surpris-
ing since both Hou and Eileen Chang share a similar historical sense by
focusing on the mundane and the quotidian over the officially significant.
In one famous essay she writes: “Rigid and unswerving world views, be they
political or philosophical, cannot help provoking the antipathy of others.
What one calls joie de vivre is to be found entirely in trivial things.”41 This
personalized historical vision, focusing on the irrelevancies in the midst of
the larger structures of history, bears an uncanny resemblance to Hou’s own
renditions of history. For both Hou and Chang, seemingly irrelevant details
become the center of the universe.
So the evidence seems overwhelming: set entirely in China during the
waning years of the last Chinese dynasty, aided and abetted by an impres-
sive trio of Chinese literary talent, Flowers of Shanghai seemingly represents
nothing more than Hou’s sudden exodus away from the island he had long
been partial towards. Some even welcomed this development: Taiwanese
critic Liang Liang says that Hou finally abandons the Taiwanese conscious-
ness that has long dominated Taiwanese cinema, and thus reestablishes
links with China not seen since the days of Li Hanxiang and King Hu.42 For
Alain Bergala, such a beautiful film is a complete departure for Hou since
for the first time he had to close his eyes to the world in front of him and
penetrate a “classical China” he can only imagine.43 Kent Jones likens its
aesthetic techniques to an ancient Chinese concept of liu bai, allowing what
is visible to suggest something beyond its parameters.44 The most frequent
point of comparison is with classic Chinese novels, most of all Dream of
the Red Chamber, something noted by both indigenous critics45 and foreign
sources such as Richard Pena, who equates the detailed settings of Flowers of
144 No Man an Island
Shanghai with those of classic Chinese novels and “their maddening lists of
foods prepared for banquets or minutely detailed descriptions of gifts . . .”46
Hou further reinforces this sense of Chineseness with some of his comments.
In one interview in 2001, he says that he became enthralled with the novel’s
descriptions of Chinese everyday life, which he feels to be very political in
nature. Furthermore, he always loved the extended families and the com-
plicated banquets in novels such as Dream of the Red Chamber.47 Everywhere
you turn, even with Hou’s own words, Flowers of Shanghai seems to come
up China.
Yet we should take pause with some qualifications before jumping on
the China bandwagon. First, if this is an indulgence in chinoiserie, it certainly
does not follow the Zhang Yimou model with easily accessible films for a
Western audience. In fact, Nick Kaldis argues that its challenges undercut its
potential as “exoticized images of China for Western consumption.” As he
explains:
For, instead of falling into the trap of conservative cultural essentialism,
reactionary nationalism, or joyous capitulation to global capitalization,
Flowers of Shanghai actually embraces exotic images of China, multiples
them, reproduces them, and fixates on them, smothering the (Western)
viewer in an excess of Orientalist fantasy.48
This may seem an overly clever defense, but it does raise a key point: the
very obliqueness of the narration, coupled with a surfeit of visual details,
could very well drown or “smother” a viewer used to the more straightfor-
ward and marketable visions of China’s past by the likes of Zhang Yimou
and Chen Kaige.
Second, even without references to Taiwan, this is still a Taiwanese
vision of Chinese culture. Hou makes very clear that Flowers of Shanghai is
not about China over a hundred years ago, but about how he, a present-day
Taiwanese, imagines that China to be. During an interview at Cannes, Hou
qualifies the cultural meaning of this film:
As far as I am concerned, the source of Taiwanese culture is China. But this
is not the mainland China of today, and this is not the political reality of a
China separated from Taiwan. Instead this is the Classics and the poetry
I was exposed to in school, followed by the swordplay novels and classic
novels I loved to read, all of which became a deep part of my background
and the basis of my creativity. Of course I grew up in Taiwan and that is the
environment I am most familiar with. But the China of a hundred years ago
that I am now shooting on film is that China read, imagined and understood
by me from all those books. This imaginary China and the China of today
are perhaps two entirely different things.49
In other words, this film’s “Chineseness” is not China per se, but how
a Taiwanese today envisions an earlier China that no longer exists, if it
ever did.
Goodbye to All That 145
Third, even Hou suggests that China is not central to this film. Flowers of
Shanghai evolved out of an original plan for a film about the so-called “Father
of Taiwan,” Zheng Chenggung (also known as “Koxinga”), who drove the
Dutch out of Taiwan back in the seventeenth century. While collecting mate-
rials with Ah Cheng, Hou discovered that one of Zheng’s favorite pastimes
was to frequent brothels, and that led him to read Flowers of Shanghai as
background reading. Soon enough Hou fell in love with both the novel’s
ambience and the complexity of its characters, and he decided to make a
film based on the book instead.50 In one interview, Hou says the real focus
of the film is male/female relationships and how women really do make the
decisions despite all appearances. He adds that although it is set in late Qing
China, it could really be set at any place and at any time, even in the present
day, since there are always those who control, and those who are controlled.
Flowers simply reveals how such power relationships play out when civiliza-
tion is at its most refined and delicate.51
A fourth qualification is that this is Shanghai in the late nineteenth
century, a situation very unlike how Chinese society normally operated at
that time. During the Qing era, men and women normally did not interact
in public, marriages were arranged, and romantic love was almost nonexist-
ent. But in the foreign concessions in Shanghai, an alternative universe arose
where Chinese men could behave in a very un-Chinese manner, where dif-
ferent classes (i.e. officials and merchants) gathered together as they would
not outside, drinking, eating and carousing together, pursuing women
romantically (and not just pay for sex). The women in turn had the right of
refusal, and could obtain a certain amount of economic independence, not to
mention exercise some power in the process.52 Huang Wenying, the produc-
tion designer, notes that even the furnishings and décor in this film represent
a mixture of styles which are not completely Chinese, but which are very
appropriate for Shanghai at the time. (She adds that their use of Vietnamese
carpenters was serendipitous since their work still carried a French influ-
ence.)53 To wit, this faux world is literally the Chinese equivalent of a fantasy
camp, a carefully constructed utopia where normal rules of decorum and
social rank need not apply.
Then there is the question of Hou’s modus operandi. For a filmmaker
who relies so much on either his own experiences or of those he knows
well, it is surprising that Hou could render so successfully something that is
largely fictional and ostensibly alien to his own experience, including a
dialect he does not understand — unless, of course, Hou is able to capture
this world because in some ways it is so familiar. Hou notes that Shanghai
during the last years of the nineteeneth century was a thriving port city built
on three decades of international trade, a place he imagines to be lively,
flourishing, prosperous and free. Then, significantly enough, Hou adds that
in many ways it resembles Taiwan.54 Some scholars have echoed this view.
146 No Man an Island
Gang Gary Xu argues that the absence of colonial authority in this film makes
it all the more present, and extends this idea to how Taiwan likewise is absent
but present in Flowers of Shanghai, since this film was made in Taiwan.55 The
metaphor for Taiwan may be even more concrete than Xu lets on, since this
brothel has a decidedly ambivalent status within the world at large. In the
middle of the film, the outside world makes its only palpable intrusion, and
only on the soundtrack. Most of the revellers go to the window to see what
the commotion outside is. They then reassure themselves that this police
arrest outside does not affect them and return to their festivities. This one
scene informs us that this world, which seems to float on its own, exist on
its own, follow its own rules, and even seems to thrive in its own politi-
cal economy, is in fact at the mercy of the larger world outside, subject to
the whims of foreign powers who tolerate its existence, but who grant it an
ambivalent status at best. That is a situation Hou is most familiar with —
that is Taiwan as well. Whether Hou is conscious of this metaphor or not is
irrelevant. This is merely to suggest that Hou became comfortable capturing
this environment since it is not as alien to him as one would expect.
One can dispute Taiwan as metaphor in this film, but there is one unde-
niable fact: Flowers of Shanghai is MIT — “Made in Taiwan.” Hou originally
intended to shoot at least part of this film in mainland China. Yet the PRC
government would not approve since they did not like its “decadent” subject
matter. In the end, the entire film was shot on sets built in Taiwan, in Yang
Mei.56 With his usual Taiwanese crew being forced to shoot only in Taiwan,
the entire film moved indoors — another anomaly in Hou’s career. Yet all of
Hou’s films exhibit a claustrophobic density rife with the details of everyday
life, those “irrelevancies” which take center stage. Even his landscape shots
often seem claustrophobic, with several planes of mottled clouds, roaming
mists, edges of mountain slopes, houses littering the countryside, angled
according to dictates of feng shui, among which are the people living their
incidental lives, all competing for the audience’s eyes. In lieu of these land-
scapes, now there are cosseted, cloistered sets, and yet a familiar sensibility
seeps through, as though Hou, without knowing or intending it, has created
a faux China as if it too were an island. Even in this mise-en-scène, the
shadow of China remains just that — a shadow.
Nevertheless, there is no denying that this film seems very Chinese to
many viewers. Yet so accomplished is this film formally, and so distract-
ing is its aesthetic surfaces, that one can easily overlook whether this film
is about anything at all. An initial viewing may induce a dream-like state,
but it may also leave the impression of being nothing more than empty for-
malism, or perhaps a pretentious, elitist soap opera at best, or an egregious
indulgence in chinoiserie at worst. The primary culprit would have to be its
mise-en-scène. According to one report at the time, the film’s budget was
around NT$80 million (roughly US$2.6 million), half of which was spent
Goodbye to All That 147
on the sets, props and costumes.57 Huang Wenying was crucial to the visual
success of this film. Huang grew up in Taiwan admiring Hou’s work. She
got a MA in theatrical production at the University of Pittsburgh after which
she had a Heinz Fellowship for three years at Carnegie Mellon University.
In 1993, she went to New York and worked with several famous theater
designers. However, she always desired to work with Hou and first did
so in 1995 with Good Men, Good Women. Starting with Flowers, she moved
back to Taiwan to work full-time as Hou’s production designer, and now
as his producer and managing director of the Sinomovie Company, which
opened in 2001. According to her, they spent up to a year researching Flowers
of Shanghai, during which time Ah Cheng guided them to antique markets all
over China. She estimates that the set design, props and costumes alone cost
about US$1.8 to US$2.0 million.58 (Given the stars involved, this implies that
the reported NT$70–80 million figure is too low.)
Such meticulous preparations and financial outlays led to further com-
plications. Flowers became the most star-studded work of Hou’s career. Not
only was Tony Leung working with Hou once more, but other Hong Kong
stars joined in such as Carina Lau (Pearl) and Michelle Reis (Emerald).
According to Hou, this was necessitated by the mounting budget, and
Hong Kong stars allowed them to raise more funds. Yet Hou’s insistence
on the Shanghai dialect created yet more problems: both Lau and Reis at
least knew a little of the dialect; Tony Leung, on the other hand, did not
know a word of it and nearly quit due to the difficulty of trying to learn it.59
Meanwhile, the role of Crimson was originally slated for Maggie Cheung,
but obligations with Wong Kar-wai, and her fear of having to speak the
Shanghai dialect, prevented this. Since the main backer of this film was
Shochiku, a Japanese actress, Michiko Hada, was suggested instead in order to
increase the film’s marketability in the Japanese market.60 For Hada, learning
the Shanghai dialect was impossible. Thus she did her lines in Japanese,
and had her lines dubbed in post-production.61 According to Hou, using
Mandarin would have been too familiar and monotonous for the rest of these
actors, and would have interfered with the settings themselves. Using the
Shanghai dialect, by contrast, would “brew” a desired atmosphere (but not
necessarily a historically accurate one). More importantly, it would create a
“distancing” effect.62
Adapting from a novel with hundreds of viable characters proved to be
especially difficult and time-consuming. In the end, Hou and Chu decided on
three sets of characters representing a cross-section of varying situations in
this environment.63 The first set involves Wang Liansheng (Master Wang) and
his relationship with two “flowers girls” (courtesans), Crimson and Jasmin.
The second involves Pearl and Master Hong, plus two other younger flower
girls under Pearl’s direction, Jade and Treasure. The third involves Emerald
and Luo Zifu (Master Luo), but also includes actions revolving around her
148 No Man an Island
madam, “Auntie Huang,” and other junior flower girls. (There are other
characters as well, such as A-Chu and Shuren, who play relatively minor, but
not insignificant, roles.) These three character sets interact in complex ways.
They come together most conspicuously in four separate banquet scenes
that are interspersed throughout the film and help anchor this otherwise
unwieldy web of relationships. These stories also interact elsewhere, since
Pearl and Master Hong frequently act as power brokers in this labyrinthine
human world. Master Hong, for example, often makes appearances with
Wang Liansheng to help resolve some of his personal issues, while Pearl
often acts as a behind-the-scenes mediator. Only Emerald and Master Luo
operate with relative independence from the other narrative strands, a fact
befitting the character of Emerald, who represents a woman who knows
how to win and exercise her independence with calculating boldness. The
film overall is structured around an inverse hierarchy that favors those who
have the least control, much like Hou’s earlier films. Clearly at the top of this
narrative hierarchy is the reticent Wang Liansheng, played by Tony Leung.
Wang either appears or is heard in over half of the scenes in this film, more
than any other character. Despite being the main character, he speaks very
little, a reminder of his mute role in City of Sadness.
The first thirty-five minutes establish the film’s basic architectural frame-
work. After a prolonged opening banquet scene, the film breaks off into four
enclaves: Crimson and Master Wang in the Huifang Enclave; the Gongyang
Enclave with Pearl and Master Hong; the Shangren Enclave, where we are
introduced to Emerald and Master Luo; finally, the East Hexing Enclave,
where we see Master Wang once more, only now with Jasmin. The appear-
ance of Master Wang in two of the four enclaves already suggests that he
is the central character. On the other hand, the relative equal weight given
to the four enclaves, something bolstered by how all four are introduced
with an intertitle, suggests that each will have relatively equal weight in the
narrative. As it turns out, however, this is not quite the case, and a serpentine
complexity emerges instead. Of the four enclaves, the last is the least sig-
nificant, serving merely as a catalyst to the main narrative strand involving
Wang and Crimson. The two middle enclaves serve as both counterpoints,
and at some points as distractions, which hide numerous elliptical gaps in the
film. Furthermore, the storylines from these two enclaves come to dominate
the last half hour of the film, during which there are only two brief remind-
ers of what ultimately became of Wang and Crimson after their relationship
completely disintegrates.
This unusual structure is further abetted by takes of exceptional length
and particular editing strategies. Hou speaks of this film having thirty-
nine shots, one for each scene.64 However, the DVD version in the USA has
only thirty-seven discernible shots, or forty-two if including the film’s title
and the four intertitles. Either way, Flowers of Shanghai has a phenomenal
Goodbye to All That 149
average shot length — the longest in Hou’s career, and one of the longest
ever in the history of feature-length narrative films. Even if the title and
the four intertitles are included, the average shot length comes out to just
over 2.5 minutes — or 154.5 seconds per shot to be exact. If you exclude the
titles and intertitles, and only count the duration of actual shots, the average
is nearly 3 minutes each. It is not strictly true that there are thirty-seven
scenes to go along with thirty-seven shots (or thirty-nine if referring to the
version Hou speaks of). The opening four sections in each enclave follow
a similar pattern: a fade in to the action, a continuous long take, a fade to
black covering an ellipsis, then another fade in to the same space later on,
followed by another uninterrupted long take, until this shot also ends with
a fade to black.
Given the extraordinary length of these takes, it comes as little surprise
that the vast majority of them have camera movement. Of the thirty-seven
shots, only two (or a mere 5%), can be called completely static, and both
of these are under 20 seconds in length. Two other shots have only slight
reframing at best. All of the remaining shots in the film have overt camera
movements, in many cases for much of the shot’s duration. Yet it is not
so much shot length that seems to affect camera movements in Flowers of
Shanghai as it is shot scale, which is predominantly the medium shot. Given
his career up to that time, this is an unusual move on Hou’s part. Certainly
the crowded sets was a practical reason for the camera being closer in, yet
doing so would seem to mitigate against his longstanding habit of distanc-
ing. Only Hou found this to not be the case, as he explains:
The biggest change from Boys from Fengkuei to Flowers of Shanghai is that
I had always thought that I had to keep the camera farther away in order to
achieve an overarching, detached perspective. But with Flowers of Shanghai
I discovered that this was not necessarily the case, that where you can place
your camera also depends on how you develop your characters. If you
are present with them, and yet are both quiet and cool yourself, and you
like and even love your characters, then you can stand right next to them
and observe them with both eyes. Thus, even if the camera is closer, you
can still achieve the same effect. The camera becomes just like a person
next to the action. Sometimes this person looks one way at a group of
people or a person, then will shift to the other side when he or she hears
something there.65
to the right or to the left, although not in every case. Each time the camera
returns to a general area it had been to previously, it will offer a slightly
different perspective, usually by arcing just a little further to the right or the
left than before. Not only does this add to the visual variety of the long take
overall, sometimes these camera movements will also surprise you with new
information, often revealing that someone else is in the room, and has likely
been there all along. Perhaps most important, however, is how these larger
movements carry a measured, floating quality, almost as if the camera itself
is in the initial states of inebriation. This, as much as the décor, lighting and
acting, profoundly affects the overall mood of the film. Tony Rayns notes
how often time seems to stand still in Flowers of Shanghai, only to later reveal
how much time has actually elapsed.66 In part this can be explained by how
seamless it all is: no matter what any particular section accomplishes alone,
these large-scale and small-scale movements blend into each other so effort-
lessly that sometimes one is surprised to note that a different movement has
commenced. The slowness overall allows one to soak in numerous details,
much like a static long take in earlier Hou films. But the hundreds of minute
shifts produce a visual field more fecund and more protean than those found
in previous Hou films, resulting in an overall, dream-like effect.
In terms of staging, this film may mark one of two pinnacles of Hou’s
career. Not since City of Sadness has he employed such dense staging tech-
niques, most of all in the banquet scenes. (As always, table gatherings and
eating scenes seem to bring out the best in Hou.) In many cases, it is hard to
know how much is pre-planned, and how much just happened, especially
given how the camera moves back and forth. Yet there are multiple layers of
actions and shifts in perspective: servants enter and occlude principals, fans
open and close. Most prominent are indelible oil lamps on the tables which
are seen together in ever-shifting, ephemeral configurations, yet which seem
to anchor everything else, guiding our shifting visual forays into multiple
planes of depth.
Yet if anything marks this film as the classic it should become, it is the
lighting. Flowers of Shanghai is arguably one of the most beautifully lit films
ever made anywhere, and could be the crowning achievement of Mark Lee’s
illustrious career. It literally has left people breathless, and it is so distract-
ingly beautiful that one might not notice anything else. (This assumes
one is seeing this on the big screen, not on the DVD.) Almost all of the light
is soft and diffused, usually in a golden glow motivated by late-nineteenth-
century oil lamps. Yet nearly every shot is carefully sculpted into endless
gradations of light and shadow; along with a dozen planes created by people
and objects, there are a hundred gossamer planes created by the lighting.
How Lee accomplished this is nothing short of a miracle. Huang Wenying
reports that they had very little time to prepare for actual shooting days.
They always start with a basic plan but then have to work very fast: she will
Goodbye to All That 151
get the sets ready in the morning, and Lee will then come in at 2 or 3 in the
afternoon and set up the camera and lighting, which are decided on the spot.
Yet everything is so well-coordinated. Even the different colors in different
enclaves were matched to the wood according to what Lee thought would
work best in terms of lighting. Meanwhile Hou, as much as he tampers,
trusts both Huang and Lee to come up with the best overall result.67
Space will not allow the detailed analysis that every scene in this film
deserves. The opening shot of the film, however, merits special considera-
tion. For a director who at one time had never heard of the term “master
shot,” this is not just a master shot for the opening scene — it is the opening
scene, in fact. (In a sense, it is the “master shot” for the entire film, if not Hou’s
career.) Although it appears first in the finished film, the take actually used
was a re-shot on the final day of production.68 The end result is a tour de force.
At eight minutes, it is by far the longest take, and its visual complexity indel-
ibly establishes the atmosphere for the film as a whole. Moreover, its subtle
arrangement of the characters suggests the hidden web of relationships
underlying this seemingly spontaneous camaraderie. Master Wang does
almost nothing in this scene, yet he is given a degree of visual prominence
for much of it; Master Hong and Pearl seem but one of many revelers, but
they too offer brief glimpses into their behind-the-scenes manipulations. Yet
since so much else is also visible, and so much else occurs, a single viewing
does not easily lead to such inferences.
After an intertitle explains the basic situation of the flower houses in
late-nineteenth-century China, the sounds of the banquet begin well before
a slow fade in, revealing that the camera is already moving in a slow arc
to the left. The density of detail is almost overwhelming, but there are
three distinct planes competing for the viewers’ attention, two more hori-
zontal in relation to the screen, the third more vertical. In the foreground are
moving hands engaged in a drinking game, coming from two actors barely
visible on the right and left edges of the frame. In the middle of the frame are
the two oil lamps lined up diagonally and in depth on the table itself. Due
to their lustrous glow, these may draw attention to themselves and away
from the moving hands in the foreground, providing — in conjunction with
the slowly moving camera — the strongest depth cues. At the same time,
however, these lamps potentially bring attention to the three characters who
stand out prominently at the end of the table: to the right of the lamp is
Master Hong, who is holding a pipe and frontal to the camera; to the left of
the lamp is seated Pearl; to the left of her, seated just around the corner of
the table is Master Wang. Even here, however, there is a slight “hierarchy”
among the three characters. Despite Hong’s more active involvement in
the action, Master Wang is more highlighted by the lighting. This makes
Wang stand out since he is brooding and detached from the revelry more
152 No Man an Island
Figure 27
The dense mise-en-scène in the opening “master shot” of Flowers of Shanghai (1998).
A maid calls our attention to a taciturn Master Wang by pouring a drink.
Hong explains the conflict between Crimson and Jasmin over Wang, the first
indication that Hong plays a power role as well.
Still, these hints become nearly lost as this concocted world increases
in human and physical complexity by the minute. The camera continues its
back-and-forth arcs and pans as others react to the story of Crimson sending
her maids to beat Jasmin. At one point the arcs reveal even more of the left
side of the table, exposing another adjacent chamber with lamps on tables
in the background. At this point a flower girl, speaking to a man seated in
front of her, drops a hint as to Master Hong’s actual position of power: “Are
you just saying this to try to impress Master Hong?” (Embarrassed, the man
quickly dismisses all this talk as ridiculous.) But soon this too is lost in the
resumption of the drinking game. The camera continues its arcs and pans
until finally it returns almost to its original position, moving just as it was
moving as the shot opened. Master Hong now leads yet another round of
frivolous drinking games, and the image fades slowly to black.
In effect, this opening long take introduces just as much a world as a nar-
rative. While three key characters are given at least a degree of prominence
(Wang, Pearl and Hong), these principals are once again embossed in a larger
environment of innumerable incidental details. Only in retrospect can one
pick out the few truly significant moments. The staging, the lighting, various
comments and even the camera movements all provide clues, but not clues
everyone could possibly pick up on. (Subsequent viewings, however, make
one wonder how one could have missed all this!) The film never makes clear
what Pearl got Wang to do at this point; nor is it made clear whether he went
straightaway to Crimson’s enclave. No indication is given as to how much
time has elapsed between this banquet and the subsequent scene in that
enclave, since Hong is already there as well. The settings, the camera move-
ments and shot scales may all be radically new for Hou, but the stylistic
154 No Man an Island
When Hong and Pearl hash out an agreement for Shuren and Jade, the
daylight is almost blinding compared to the rest of the film, coming through
the windows on the left.
By contrast, the two most powerless figures in the film — Master Wang
and Crimson — receive all the privileges of Hou’s style. For starters, the
first two long takes with Crimson and Wang are much longer than the paired
long takes found in the other three enclaves. Then there are fine-tuned dis-
tinctions created by the lighting: compared to the other three enclaves and the
opening banquet scene, the lighting in Crimson’s enclave literally does have
an almost reddish glow to it, delicately counterpointed with a spot of gold
to be found coming from the lamp on the middle table. After the introduc-
tory scenes in the four enclaves, Hou first returns to Crimson and Wang in a
long take of over 4.5 minutes, which opens and closes with fades. However,
he introduces this scene with a one-off stylistic device in the film as a whole:
a “brief,” nineteen-second close-up of a precious hair pin on a table, also
bracketed by fades (figure 28). This being the only close-up in the entire film
is significant when considering Hou’s original plan to use several close-ups
of inanimate objects, something he claims would have provided necessary
“ventilation” to an otherwise enclosed setting. While editing, however, Hou
instead opted for fades to allow the film to “breath” — the only exception,
of course, being this close-up of this hairpiece.70 Camera movements form a
stylistic cornerstone in this film, but the most prominent movements tend to
be more lateral in nature, often pans which metamorphose into arcs, whether
to the right or to the left, as we saw in the opening shot. When we return
to Crimson’s enclave for a third time, however, the predominant camera
movement is a track-in, not lateral movement. Moreover, the framing, along
with the staging and lighting, create a visual game of hide-and-go-seek
with Crimson through three wooden doors opened in the same direction in
striking angles in the foreground, and a fourth door on the right opened in
Figure 28
A “breath” in Flowers of Shanghai, the lone close-up in the film.
156 No Man an Island
Figure 29
Privileges of style from Crimson and Master Wang: a slow track in towards three
half-opened doors.
the opposite direction (figure 29). The prominence of these doors is further
enhanced by a low-angle light coming from off-screen right, which illumi-
nates certain parts of the doors, but leaves shadows on other sections. Later
Wang and Hong arrive, and their subtle movements occlude and reveal her
languid changes in position in the background. There is a wide range of
shifting moods, as Crimson goes from sullen, to angry, to accommodating.
By the end of this long take, Wang says he has something to tell her, but the
image then fades to black, and the next shot shows them later on, happily
eating ham congee together. (Food, as always, covers a multitude of sins.)
Once again the camera slowly tracks in on them. No other scene in the film
uses multiple doors, track-ins and staging in this manner. Thus, this scene
stands out as much as the previous one introduced by the hairpiece. Yet like
everything in this film, these are whispers, not shouts — there are no close-
ups, no analytical editing to make everything patently clear; the style only
provides hints, suggestions and seductive allusions.
Thereafter the film seems to get “sidetracked” for the next fifteen
minutes by two more banquets, and a two-shot sequence of Emerald and
Luo sandwiched in between. The first of these banquets implies that all is
well since Master Wang and Crimson seem to happily participate. The
second is entirely another matter. This is the aforementioned scene where
the outside world intervenes briefly. The table clears out as most everyone
walks to the window to see what the outside commotion is about — everyone
except Wang, who remains seated there sullenly. (The camera remains
with him as well.) Clearly something unspecified in the preceding ellipsis
has returned Wang to his earlier, dour state. After this third banquet, the
film returns again to Crimson’s enclave. Once more this narrative strand is
privileged by stylistic techniques not used in the film otherwise, in this case
multiple shots that retain temporal continuity, a point-of-view shot and a
Goodbye to All That 157
Figure 30
An inebriated Master Wang gets up to look under the door.
Figure 31
What Master Wang sees (the lone POV shot in Flowers of Shanghai).
158 No Man an Island
Figure 32
Master Wang violently reacts to what he saw beneath the door.
Two scenes later is the final scene with Wang and Crimson together.
Wang has been advised to settle matters with Crimson, since he has obliga-
tions. For this reason, Master Wang pays a final visit to her. Two significant
details emerge: for the first time with these two characters, this scene occurs
during daytime; in addition, Crimson is dressed in white unlike her more
colorful costumes previously. A fade out and fade in leads to the next shot,
which shows them together later on in the same room, only now in the
evening. Crimson is seated at the table whereas he is behind her smoking a
pipe. Dishes on the table indicate that they have just finished eating. That the
two cannot speak to each other or even look at each other shows how frosty
this meal has been. Wang is visibly cold and indifferent. Crimson is visibly
depressed. As the music stops and the oil lamp passes off-screen left due to
the arc, the camera stops and she finally speaks, trying to convince him that
she did not have an affair as he thinks. He says it does not matter either way.
She finally says that everything she has she owes to him, and if he is going
to abandon her, then she may as well die. The image fades to black. Their
relationship effectively over, the film continues for another thirty minutes,
and the detritus of that affair still can be found. Master Wang is given a
send-off for his return to Guangdong in the final banquet scene. He appears
happy. Yet in the next two scenes we discover from offhand comments that,
not only has Crimson been reduced to humble means, but even Jasmin has
been unfaithful to Wang. Thereafter Master Wang is simply gone for the last
twelve minutes of the film. Meanwhile, the film seems to forget Crimson
until the final shot where she is alone with the actor she had an affair with.
They have just finished a meal and she is preparing a pipe. He comes over
and sits next to her, looking at her significantly as if wanting to ask her what
is wrong. But she never looks back at him, and not a word is exchanged. She
expresses the same cold indifference to her lover that Wang had shown to
her the last time they had met. For one last time, the image fades to black and
the final credits roll.
Goodbye to All That 159
Hou’s “Chineseness”
If one were to survey film critics and scholars as to who is the “most Chinese”
director in the world today, no doubt Hou’s name would come up frequently.
However, this is much easier assumed than demonstrated. How exactly do
we define a Chinese director, or a Chinese film style? Even if that is possible,
how much do the most commonly accepted traits of a Chinese cinematic
style fit Hou’s stylistic and narrative proclivities? Moreover, what do we do
with the diverse periods of Hou’s career, each which show some dramatic
differences? Can any definition of a Chinese style account for these dramatic
changes? I have already addressed these issues elsewhere in some detail.71
Still, so central is this question to this study that many of those points need
to be reiterated. After all, this is not a pedantic question of formalism; this
is fraught with profound political and cultural implications. We should not
treat this lightly, nor answer too quickly.
Let us start with what Hou will always be most known for: the long take.
Hou himself has never claimed that his long takes are very Chinese. (As we
have seen, the humble origin of this tendency was initially to overcome the
limitations of performance in a parsimonious film industry.) Nevertheless,
others have implied that somehow the long take is a very Chinese trait,
even though this assumption has never been put to any real test. Certainly
the most famous, and arguably the most accomplished, classical Chinese
film, Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town (1948), is a long-take film (somewhat),
measuring at just over 22 seconds per shot. Yet this was hardly exclusive
to Chinese cinema of the 1940s, given the worldwide propensity towards
longer takes even in more commercial contexts than is the case today. Even
the American master of forceful montage, Alfred Hitchcock, got into the
act with his audacious long takes in Rope (1948), averaging 7.3 minutes per
160 No Man an Island
shot (!) and Under Capricorn (1949), at 44 seconds per shot,72 numbers which
Fei Mu never came close to.
Given how widely long takes have been used throughout history, not
only in European art cinema, but even in rare recent Hollywood examples
such as Children of Men and There Will Be Blood, the long take alone cannot
prove Hou’s “Chineseness” — it has to be long takes of certain distinctive
qualities. This is where the problems really emerge. What has distinguished
Hou’s long takes above all else? Without a doubt it is his pronounced
tendency to couple his long takes with a mostly static camera, at least up to
1993. This truly does defy what most long-take directors have done through-
out history, where often camera movements and long takes become insepa-
rable. Unfortunately, most who have tried to pin down a Chinese-style long
take have said that the mobile camera is particularly Chinese, ignoring how
much this is a transcultural norm. There is little doubt that this idea became
established with Lin Niantong, who bases this on a Chinese aesthetic concept
used to describe the Chinese handscroll: “you,”73 which means “to swim,”
“to float,” “to waft” or “to drift.” According to Lin, you is one of the highest,
most central concepts of traditional Chinese aesthetics. When translated into
film, the clearest expression of this concept is ample camera movement.74
If there is any candidate for ‘you,’ or the idea of a floating or drifting camera,
they are the long takes in Flowers of Shanghai. The quality of the camera
movements in this case (especially their fluidity and slowness) truly are dif-
ferent from that found in most other films. Once again, however, this cannot
be strictly based on tradition. The visual tradition in China with the most
cinematic qualities is the handscroll. The camera movement that would
most replicate viewing this art form would be a lateral track from right to
left. (The Chinese hanging scroll, which is more vertical in orientation, would
seem to imply a tilt, or perhaps a vertical crane or pedestal shot.) As we have
seen, the predominant camera movement in Flowers of Shanghai is arcing in
both directions, which produces distinctive visual effects not to be found in
either a Chinese handscroll or a hanging scroll.
Many scholars echo Lin’s stance on the mobile long take, suggesting
that this is similar to Chinese painting with its “multiple perspectives” and
“elastic framing.”75 To be fair, however, there is a minority which has sug-
gested that somehow “stillness” could be a Chinese aesthetic concept as
well.76 However, this only compounds our problems, since this would mean
not only excluding Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town, it also means we have to
exclude Hou from 1995 onwards, including Flowers of Shanghai. Was Hou a
very Chinese director from roughly 1983 to 1993, only to suddenly stop being
Chinese in 1995? Or if we side with the majority view, does this mean we
have to dispense with Hou at his most distinctive: namely his New Cinema
films, plus City of Sadness and The Puppetmaster?
Goodbye to All That 161
expand it. According to the definitions of a Chinese style, this makes him a
virtual traitor to his own culture.
While the most salient traits of Hou’s aesthetic seem to defy all attempts
at defining a Chinese style, there are other traits such as distancing, the pre-
ponderance of eating scenes, or even the lyrical-poetic overriding the narra-
tive in his films which should remind us that in some ways he may in fact be
Chinese. But all of these still have to be qualified. First, Hou has varied his
distancing over the course of his career, and moved his camera in closer for
Flowers of Shanghai. Second, even the large number of eating scenes, arguably
the most universal distinguishing trait of all Chinese-language cinemas,
is not explained by Hou in cultural terms, as we saw in our discussion of
City of Sadness. Finally, Hou has hardly been alone in world cinema with
his poetic qualities. One can find numerous examples in the West which
have also emphasized the poetic over the narrative, something even those
trying to isolate the Chineseness of Hou have admitted.80 What stands out is
Hou’s peculiar manner of imposing the poetic on the narrative: this is a bold,
personal move on his part, one that makes most other Chinese filmmakers
(including Fei Mu and Chen Kaige) quite conventional by comparison. More
importantly, no matter how poetic Hou is, he continues to make feature-
length narrative films in a poetic fashion. A more strict application of tradi-
tional Chinese poetry would arguably be to make shorter visual poems — in
other words, short experimental pieces. Once again, however, Hou does not
allow his aesthetic to be hemmed in by such cultural strictures.
In the end, to deconstruct the question about Hou’s “Chineseness” is not
to eradicate the question of culture, nor is it to impose a universal, humanist
paradigm on a unique body of work. Nor does it mean we have to conclude
with Berenice Reynaud that somehow “there is an essential contradiction
between cinema and the Chinese pictorial tradition” (emphasis mine).81
Not only do all cultures find ways of using cinema for their own ends, all
cultures also deal with the same basic questions of food, sex, marriage,
survival, and so forth. On the other hand, each culture also reflects a peculiar
set of circumstances which change with time. Cultures either adapt, or resist,
or do both. Thus, the problem with saying that a film or a director’s style
is very “Chinese” is that it is not culturally specific enough: there are many
Chinese cultures scattered across history, and there is no less than four
distinct Chinese cultures today: mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and
the Chinese Diaspora communities. In other words, a film like Flowers of
Shanghai, so unexpected, so exquisite, is not merely a testament to individual
genius, it is a testament to the possibilities of a culture when all bets are off,
all former fetters and certitudes are lifted. Moreover, it is a testament not so
much to traditional Chinese culture, but to an island always living under
the shadow of China, creating yet another version of China, a version less
predictable, but infinitely more interesting.
No Man an Island
Udden, James
Udden, James.
No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Second Edition.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, HKU, 2018.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
is that Hou owes just about everything to Taiwan and the “Taiwanese
Experience.” Consider where Hou could have ended up. Being born in
southern China, and moving to Taiwan when not even two years old, Hou’s
story is but one small footnote of the Chinese Diaspora, a phenomenon
which has profoundly affected large sectors of the globe. One cannot see
quite the same opportunities for Hou had his family moved instead to the
Chinese communities of Malaysia, Indonesia or even Singapore. Not only
would the thematic issues in such situations be radically different for Hou,
there would not have been the same level of institutional support to nurture
a career such as this.
Of course, Hou’s father could have remained in mainland China. What
would the chances of Hou’s career being the same had he grown up there?
First, assuming that he survived such crises such as the Great Leap Forward
and the Great Cultural Revolution, Hou would have still missed out on the
wealth of experience he accrued in the 1970s in the Taiwanese film industry.
To be sure this was a very constrictive commercial environment in Taiwan,
with added political constraints, but it was also an industry that more often
than not made over a hundred films per annum. Many of the traits of Hou’s
now widely revered aesthetic, most of all the use of loose outline scripting,
improvisation, daring lighting schemes — and of course the long take —
have their humble origins in his trying to overcome the practical limitations
these conditions entailed. One could certainly imagine Hou as being of the
same tenor of many of the Fifth Generation in the 1980s in China — after all,
Ah Cheng’s novel became Chen Kaige’s The King of Children (1987). But since
Chinese film production came to a virtual standstill for such a long time
under Mao, Hou would have faced a different set of problems to overcome,
most of all the question of which models to follow after the long interreg-
num. He would have had to start almost from scratch much like everyone
else did in the late 1970s. Since he would have to come out of something
like the Beijing Film Academy, his education would have been more formal,
more abstract. Hou certainly would have heard of the “master shot” by the
time he had directed his first feature film. On the other hand, he would not
have already been the assistant director for well over a dozen films by that
point; in other words, he would have lacked the crucial, and entirely home-
grown daily grind, that hands-on experience upon which he was able even-
tually to forge his own path.
Admittedly there was one other place where Hou could have gotten just
as much day-to-day filmmaking experience, if not more so, virtually situated
in the backyard of his birthplace: Hong Kong. Once again, however, not only
would the thematic concerns have been different, so would the aesthetic
parameters Hou would have encountered. Unlike in Taiwan, Hong Kong’s
film industry was not on the verge of a commercial crisis in the early 1980s.
It was the opposite, which only added to the woes of Taiwanese cinema.
Hou in the New Millennium 165
Hou could have learned his craft on Hong Kong sets, not in the classroom,
just as he did in Taiwan. But within a healthy film industry Hou would not
likely have been able to experiment with long takes and distancing the way
he did. It appears that, no matter what culture or continent, whenever an
industry is in crisis directors tend to gain more ascendancy since produc-
ers are more willing to try anything until some “formula” works. (Even
Hollywood underwent such a period in the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, until
the blockbuster formula became well established.) Of course, many will
bring up one counter-example: Wong Kar-wai. Yet it has been argued that
even Wong Kar-wai, as innovative as he became, is just as much a product of
the commercial milieu in Hong Kong as a rebel against it.1 Hong Kong could
have made room for a Hou of certain distinction, but likely a very different
Hou than we know today.
Still, “experience” has been the operative term in this study in just about
every sense of the term, including the experience of living in a particular
place at a particular time. In this sense of the term, no place provided experi-
ences quite like post-war Taiwan. As Chu Tien-wen described in chapter 1,
the Taiwanese Experience was especially acute for the children of recently
arrived mainland parents. The Taiwan they experienced firsthand was
diametrically at odds with both the China their parents spoke of and the
official propaganda spewed forth by the KMT government, that the island
became almost forbidden fruit right before their eyes, a source of endless
fascination which eventually filled volumes of fiction and endless reels of
film. Hou became especially immersed in that world due to a number of
additional factors: coming from a family both waishengren and Hakka, living
in the south surrounded by benshengren speaking a strange dialect, Hou from
an early age mastered that dialect so well that many in Taiwan mistakenly
have identified him as a benshengren. Hou’s mastery of Taiwanese is no small
matter. First off, this was done simply as a means for survival, arguably the
most consistent theme of his films. More importantly, language becomes his
first major thematic breakthrough in the New Cinema. The exclusive use of
Taiwanese in his chapter of The Sandwich Man, done four years before the
lifting of martial law, was proof enough that Taiwan — as it is, not how it
somehow “should” be — was now the centerpiece. Hou’s and other New
Cinema films thereafter all confirmed this remarkable cultural shift.
Of course, Hou was not alone. The importance of the New Cinema also
lies in a remarkable coalescence of talent which aided and abetted Hou’s
career, and eventually got him on a more permanent path of festival cinema.
At the top is Chu Tien-wen, who deepened Hou’s work to no end, starting
with her introduction of Shen Congwen. Yet there is also the long-term
impact of the likes of Du Duzhi and Mark Lee, arguably the best sound
man and best cinematographer in Asia respectively. With talent like this at
his side, there is little wonder why these films are often so exquisitely shot
166 No Man an Island
coupled with richly layered sound designs. Such quality became imperative
for filmmakers from Taiwan, who otherwise would not have garnered so
much attention abroad.
Still, cinema is too above the radar for such trends to occur without
some official sanction. For decades the government stridently attempted to
squelch any sense of Taiwan being unique or distinct. Conceivably the KMT
could have kept this fiction going even longer — had the ROC somehow kept
its UN seat, had the US not withdrawn recognition, had incidents like the
Jiangnan Incident of 1984 not occurred, or if martial law had been extended
even a few more years. Equally important is the government which in the
long run undercut its own film industry in favor of Hong Kong. Change
any of these contingencies, and Hou himself might have missed out on his
chance to become the leader of a movement which indirectly communicated
to the world that there is a place such as Taiwan, a place not to be confused
or conflated with its ancestral homeland across the straits. Hou was just the
right age at the right time.
Nevertheless, Hou and company had to contend not only with the gov-
ernment, but also with the world at large. These films did not announce their
underlying messages, taking every step imaginable to not appear as propa-
ganda with their oblique and unvarnished portrayals of Taiwanese reality.
Given the precarious status Taiwan still finds itself in to this day, where the
official line for most is that this is still Chinese soil, this was a task particu-
larly suited for one of Hou’s temperament, not someone more direct and
“critical.” This becomes even more apparent after the lifting of martial law
in 1987, which allowed an unearthing of historical taboos that even many
Taiwanese were only dimly aware of. That Hou handled the Japanese Era,
the 228 Incident and the White Terror so delicately, and so carefully, indicates
not so much concerns about how the KMT might react, but how everyone
might react.
There is one other aspect of Hou’s career which belies his Taiwanese
roots: his ability to reinvent himself more than once. Hou has changed in
startling ways over his career — a comparison of his commercial trilogy
with his later historical works is astounding enough. Even comparing City
of Sadness and The Puppetmaster with Good Men, Good Women and Flowers of
Shanghai shows how unpredictable he can be. Hou has an uncanny ability
to change in ways that shocks even those who think they know him best —
except there is nothing uncanny about it. Asia in general has shown a
remarkable ability to change in the last few decades in ways without com-
parison in the history of the West. Taiwan is almost the Asian avant garde of
change, not due to any special collective talent, but to the especial historical
conditions we have discussed in the previous chapters. Considering all of
the regime changes, the traumatic and abrupt overnight shifts in power, the
forced ambivalence which continues to this day, Taiwan should be properly
Hou in the New Millennium 167
recognized and commended for its continued ability to adapt and survive in
what should have been impossible conditions. This was true in the 1970s and
1980s. This is still true even in the new millennium.
Within Taiwan, Hou of the new millennium is an extra-cinematic media
figure, not a director everyone still talks about. This directly ties in with all
the twists and complications to be found in Taiwan during the last decade.
In the year 2000, there was a monumental regime change with the election of
the DPP candidate, Chen Shui-bian, as president of the ROC. This officially
ended over five decades of KMT rule, and was widely welcomed across the
island. Before long, however, many soured on the new government, finding
it incapable of breaking the impasse with mainland China, and arguably
more likely to provoke the PRC. Many felt that the new government was
blocking closer economic ties across the straits, something many Taiwanese
supported. Moreover, many have found the DPP administration no less sus-
ceptible to the egregious corruption so commonplace among the old guard
of the Nationalists. Chen was re-elected in 2004 by a razor-thin margin,
which was abetted by an assassination attempt on his life which many feel
was staged. Not long after, President Chen’s approval ratings plummeted to
levels which would have made President Bush in his second term seem all
the political rage. Some have polled this rating at less than 10%, while even
the DPP admitted that it is at most only at 33%.2 The first clear evidence of a
dramatic shift among the electorate was elections at the local level in 2005,
where the DPP fared badly. This was a bad omen for the party, since ironi-
cally these were the same sort of elections that initiated the rise of the DPP in
1989, not long after the release of City of Sadness.
The elections in early 2008 only confirmed how badly most Taiwanese
viewed the DPP, including the majority of benshengren. By a 58%-to-41%
margin, the KMT candidate, Ma Ying-jeou, returned the old Nationalists
to their former role as the ruling party. This was bolstered even more by a
roughly three-quarter majority in the legislative yuan. Outsiders not familiar
with Taiwan might find this result shocking, given the KMT’s checkered and
sometimes brutal past. But this is not the KMT of old. Starting in the 1970s, the
composition of the party changed dramatically when it opened its doors to
the benshengren majority. And nobody further pushed the cause of Taiwanese
Independence than Lee Teng-hui, the Taiwanese-born president — and head
of the KMT — from 1988–2000. When Ma Ying-jeou was mayor of Taipei,
he openly sanctioned “Comrade Day” in the capital city, an odd phrase to
the uninitiated, yet even odder when you realize that “comrade” is the local
slang for gays. (So much for the Confucian patriarchal certitudes the old
KMT had once enforced, even through films directed by the likes of Li Xing.)
In today’s Taiwan, such an “outlandish” action is a non-issue. What does
matter to everyone is still Taiwan’s future vis-à-vis mainland China. The
KMT in 2008 made a convincing case that they can deal with the mainland
168 No Man an Island
that of the old, mainly in the form of ineffectual subsidies. One incident
illustrates how the “new” Taiwanese government believed everything could
be solved by money alone, and much less than what is actually required.
Upon the international success of Zhang Yimou’s Hero in 2003, the prime
minister in Taiwan met with Ang Lee and asked him to make the Taiwanese
equivalent to Hero: a biopic about the Ming general, Koxinga, who is con-
sidered the father of Taiwan. He offered Lee an unprecedented sum of
NT$100 million, or a little over US$3 million. Ang Lee answered that to
produce something similar to Hero would require four times that amount,
or well over US$10 million. The prime minister was aghast: such a proposed
budget would have exceeded all the money put into the Assistance and
Guidance grant system over the last decade and a half.8 Needless to say, the
project never got off the ground.
This incident exposes how little any administration has understood the
actual economies of scale involved in filmmaking, or about the amount of
institutional support that is necessary. Meanwhile, Taiwan is now arguably
the most Hollywood-dominated market in all of Asia, albeit for multiple
reasons which cannot be blamed on the government alone.9 Still, some
note the recent success of South Korea in protecting its domestic market
while creating a system of large-scale investment and market savvy that
has appealed to audiences throughout Asia. The government in Taiwan,
however, perpetuates a calculated, do-nothing policy based on Taiwan’s
peculiar geopolitical situation. In 2001, Taiwan was officially admitted to the
WTO, a major diplomatic coup for a country with such dubious international
status. Most WTO members still claim a “cultural exception” for cinema
to some extent, France most of all. However, the Taiwanese film industry
apparently was a sacrificial lamb in order to curry the favor of the Americans
during the negotiations. In order to honor these tacit agreements, the new
Taiwanese government soon lifted all restrictions on the number of prints
per film in Taiwan.10 This only further aided Hollywood and its multiplexes,
something that became evident when an unprecedented number of prints
for Lord of the Rings entered Taiwan, underselling every local theater with
prices the latter could not compete with.11 By 2004, Hollywood distributors
were pulling in close to 90% of the total box office in Taiwan.12 Meanwhile,
building on the success of the state-of-the-art Warner Village which opened
in eastern Taipei in 1998 (at the time the single largest movie complex in
all of Asia), today there are Warner Villages all over the island, dominating
exhibition in each locale.
Hou clearly does not make his own films to suit the commercial dictates
of the Warner Villages now peppered across his home island. Nevertheless,
he has on occasion stated that he does not make films for film festivals
either.13 The timing suggests otherwise. Since 1998, Hou has released four
films at roughly two-year intervals, and always getting a completed version
170 No Man an Island
done by May, just in time for Cannes. Cannes has always escaped Hou’s
grasp, whether the prize for best director or the Palme d’Or. (Hou did
receive a Special Jury Prize in 1993 for The Puppetmaster, largely due to the
singular efforts of Abbas Kiarostami.) In addition, Hou has a new company,
Sinomovie, which in part is designed to give young people a chance at
making their own work. Meanwhile he was the driving force in a new art
theater opened in the former residence of the American ambassador in
Taipei. But one theater and a couple of small production/distribution com-
panies do not an industry make, continued evidence of how much cinema
remains a cottage industry in Taiwan today. Even Taiwan’s most celebrated
director is little seen in his own market.
But what of his most recent films? If anything, Chu Tien-wen’s prediction
of “twist and turns” has only intensified. Two of the four films, Café Lumiere
(2003) and Le Ballon Rouge (2007), do not take place in Taiwan, but in two of
Hou’s most favorable markets: Japan and France respectively. Only two of
the four, Millennium Mambo (2001) and Three Times (2005), were accepted into
the competition at Cannes, which is no small feat, but still not the top prize
Hou seems to pursue. Only one of the four, Three Times, delves into historical
material. Hou’s films are still highly elliptical, and rather challenging even
for the seasoned viewer of art cinema, but they do not seem to break as much
strikingly new ground. We should analyze each of these works briefly.
shoot it in digital on the advice of Mark Lee who argued that the transfer of
digital to film stock in the end would be too expensive.18 Then there is how
Hou compiled his material. Two years before the film came out he began to
join Jack Kao and Lim Giong in the actual night life seen in the film. In these
settings Kao really did come off as a noble older brother who would guide
these seemingly aimless youth,19 much like Kao’s character in the film. Hou
claims he kept his distance, simply observing this supposedly alien world,
listening to the life stories of young people as they struck up conversations
with him.20 On the other hand, he also admits to trying Ecstasy in order to
understand what they were experiencing,21 casting doubt on how much
requisite “distance” Hou actually achieved. Chu Tien-wen admits as much
in the interview with Michael Berry, conducted shortly before the premiere
at Cannes: “Hou Hsiao-hsien has always had an easier time filming subject
matter in which there is a historical distance. But when it comes to contem-
porary Taiwan, he is too close and has trouble finding the right perspective
to capture his story.”22
In this case, his perspective, along with his purpose, appears muddled.
Even the attempt at a faux history, having the voice-over of a “future” Vicky
in 2011 speak of her “past” in 2001, referring to herself in the third person,
fails to ameliorate this seeming lack of distance. Certain stylistic changes
reflect this. This film affirms the continued commitment to the mobile long
take evident since Good Men, Good Women. At just over 97 seconds per shot,
more than 80% have overt camera movements. However, these are more
random and haphazard than its immediate predecessor; none of these move-
ments rival the slow arcing game of revealing a larger world such as seen in
Flowers of Shanghai. Many noted the use of close-ups in this film, yet these
are often only brief moments of longer takes. The more consistent new trait
is an abnormally shallow depth of field, to the point where out-of-focus fore-
ground elements resemble the visual gimmicks of the Qiong Yao films in
the 1970s. Most striking is a scene of Vicky and Hao-hao making love about
eighteen minutes into the film, where much of their faces and bodies are
obscured by surreal colors and flashing lights (figure 33). This trait seems
almost a tacit admission that Hou, along with his camera, are so close as if
lost in this world.
Perhaps the greatest difference between this film and Hou’s previous
ones, including Flowers of Shanghai, is that in this case these are not people
trying to survive the twists of fate they have no control over; instead it is
merely lifestyle choices. Hou has for most of his career avoided even a hint
of villainy in his characters. Now he has Hao-hao, a stalking, violent, abusive
boyfriend who intentionally disrupted Vicky’s education so they would stay
together, who refuses to work, who steals and pawns his father’s Rolex,
and generally does nothing even slightly redeeming in any scenes in which
he appears. Vicky, played by Shu Qi, does not garner much sympathy
172 No Man an Island
Figure 33
Millennium Mambo (2001): the return of Qiong Yao gimmicks?
either: she is clearly unhappy being with Hao-hao, yet inexplicably is “hyp-
notized” by him as if “under a spell,” for some reason staying in the rela-
tionship until she spends NT$500,000 of her own money. (To her credit, she
does eventually leave Hao-hao for someone who genuinely cares for her,
yet one wonders what took her so long.) Millennium Mambo also repeats the
tendency seen in Good Men, Good Women: to create stark contrasts which are
almost didactic, in this case generational and cultural in nature. The older
Kao seemingly is the only one with any sense of direction despite his mem-
bership in the underworld, as if he were a stand-in for Hou’s self-appointed
role. Meanwhile, Taipei is starkly contrasted to the pristine, snow-swept
landscapes of Hokkaido, Japan. Even the apartment in Taipei is like the
nightclubs: its lighting is surreal, enhanced by an overly warm glow clashing
with the intentionally blue color temperature seen through the windows.
Japan is depicted both naturalistically and nostalgically, from the old woman
at the food stall to the movie billboards in Yubari. Hou claims that he likes
Taipei,23 yet he seems to like Yubari more because it is so much like Fengshan,
the village he grew up in.24
At best, this film represents an ambitious, abortive project stopped in its
first stage, which was too rushed as it was. Had the larger plan panned out,
this would have been only the first of up to ten films all trying to capture
changes in Taiwan as they happened, all of which would be re-edited once
more in the year 2011.25 This is an understandable project considering how
central change is to the contemporary Taiwanese experience, but it is not
surprising that it was not realized. Instead, Millennium Mambo is forced to
stand alone as confirmation that the present continues to elude Hou’s effec-
tive capture on film. This is Hou at his most uncertain.
Hou in the New Millennium 173
Figure 34
Ozu-like subtlety via different stylistic
means in Café Lumiere (2003).
in his youth. The literal Chinese title is “the best times,” yet Hou qualifies
the superlative: “‘the best’ not because we can’t forget them, because they
are things that have now been lost. The reason they’re the best is that they
exist only in our memories. I have the feeling that this is not the last film I’ll
make in this vein.”29 This arguably explains the successful first third of this
film which takes place in southern Taiwan in 1966, taken directly from Hou’s
own youth. However, it does not quite explain whose memories are invoked
in the second or third parts of this cinematic triptych, which take place in
Taiwan in 1911 and 2005 respectively. At best, Hou can only imagine what
comprises the patchy memories of generations not his own: the last third in
particular do not feel like memories at all.
It is understandable why many have tried to decipher the deeper
meanings of this tripartite structure. One Taiwanese writer suggests a deeper
cultural meaning to the three sections: the first represents the American
influence on Taiwan’s culture, seen most of all in the choice of music; the
second instead focuses on Chinese culture in Taiwan; the third, by contrast,
is a Japanese interpretation of contemporary Taiwanese youth culture since
they seem obsessed with death.30 While suggestive of the first two sections
(but not without some qualifications), this use of Japanese culture appears
too schematic in trying to explain the last portion of the film. More consist-
ently, observers have noted how the first third of the film offers reminders of
The Boys from Fengkuei, the second of Flowers of Shanghai, while the third of
Millennium Mambo.31 Yet even this may be too schematic. It would be more
accurate to describe the three disparate parts as Hou’s reprisals and reflec-
tions on three distinct types of subject matter he has long grappled with:
the largely autobiographical material predominating in the New Cinema
period, followed by the more distant historical backdrops of City of Sadness,
The Puppetmaster, Good Men, Good Women (in part) and Flowers of Shanghai,
and ending with the always elusive subject matter of contemporary Taiwan
previously attempted in Daughter of the Nile, Good Men, Good Women (in part),
Goodbye South, Goodbye and Millennium Mambo. Consciously or not, Hou is
seemingly taking stock of his entire career, as if this was intended to be his
last film.
The first third of the film, in 1966, does conjure up memories of Hou’s
New Cinema period. Nearly every thematic element can be traced to his
feature-length works between 1983 and 1986. Most prominent are the ample
images of pool halls, which can be found in all four of these earlier films. The
looming draft plays a role in more than one of Hou’s New Cinema films as
well. The boat on Kaohsiung harbor reminds one of similar shots in Boys; the
role of letters reminds us of a key motif in Dust in the Wind; the early image
of Chang Chen on a bicycle is very similar to images of the young Hou in
A Time to Live, A Time to Die. The final two scenes involve food and trains
176 No Man an Island
much like Dust. Even the female boss of the pool hall is a faint reminder of
the female boss of the print shop in the same film.
Yet this is not strictly a return to an earlier Hou; it is more like Hou’s
idealization of his own cinematic past. This time he uses recognizable stars
(Chang Chen and Shu Qi), not non-professionals. The ASL for this portion
of the film is just over 39 seconds per shot, yet the camera cannot stay still
in over 85% of them — an inverse of his New Cinema style. Even more sig-
nificant is how little dialogue is used. The soundtrack instead is dominated
by the music of the era, mostly American, but also includes one popular
tune in Taiwanese. Moreover, unlike the abortive romances in earlier New
Cinema films, this time the protagonist persists in his dogged pursuit of a
young woman until he wins her. This is not realism; this is a creative and
nostalgic reconfiguration of the past. Hou admits as much in the comment
quoted above.
Much the same can be said for the other two parts. The second section
amalgamates the films which dealt with more distant historical eras
(figure 35). Like City of Sadness and the The Puppetmaster, it deals with the
domestic realm in historically significant times — in this case the Chinese
revolution of 1911, which did not change anything in Taiwan. Over forty
dialogue titles were used to overcome the difficulties of speaking an older
version of Taiwanese, a reminder of the dreamlike flow of certain sections of
City involving the deaf-mute Wen-ching. Likewise, Shu Qi’s world as a cour-
tesan do not just resemble Flowers of Shanghai, her playing of a traditional
instrument connects obliquely to the traditional arts seen in The Puppetmaster.
Meanwhile, the present-day Taiwan of 2005 still reprises the same aimless
youth of Daughter of the Nile; Good Men, Good Women; Goodbye South, Goodbye
Figure 35
This image from Three Times (2005) is a seeming amalgamation of images from both
City of Sadness and Flowers of Shanghai.
Hou in the New Millennium 177
from a Chinese master, played in the film by Li Tianlu’s real-life son. Then
there is the food, and the marked ellipses falling between mere glimpses of
life fragments which together make up a much larger picture imagined by
us, but not seen . . . all unmistakably Hou.
One can safely speculate that had Andre Bazin lived long enough, he
would have championed Hou as he championed Jean Renoir, Orson Welles
or the Italian neo-realists. But how Bazinian is Hou? Moreover, what would
Bazin have said about Hou’s remake of the 1956 original, a film Bazin once
wrote about? Even as late as 1989, Hou apparently was unaware of who
Bazin was, forced to consult with Chu Tien-wen when asked about possible
connections between his films and the famed French film theorist.34 There
is no denying that Hou is arguably the most Bazinian filmmaker today
in his dogged pursuit of the long take, but there is one point where Hou
diverges from Bazin, and that is the role of the filmmaker. Bazin called the
original Red Balloon “a documentary of the imagination” because it did not
rely on montage, but on the “spatial density of something real” to create
the imaginary — in this case a seemingly sentient balloon which follows a
young boy through Paris.35 This is consistent with Bazin’s underlying onto-
logical assumptions about cinema, where the best filmmakers, according to
him, do not undercut the cinema’s uncanny ability to record phenomeno-
logical reality in all of its ambiguity. Here, however, Hou demonstrates his
own awareness that there is always that intervening creative force even
when one avoids the machinations of montage. Hou employs a stand-in for
himself in the form of Song, a real-life Chinese film student in Paris who is
not only a film student in the film, but also a nanny to Simon, Suzanne’s son.
There is no back story to Song in this film other than that she is involved
in certain projects, including a current remake of the Red Balloon. She never
is really involved in the muted dramas of Suzanne’s life, only observing as
an outsider. The film also suggests there are limits to what she (or Hou) can
observe: despite its seeming omnipresence, Song never notices the crimson
balloon even when it reflects on glass outside the flat. (She is too busy looking
at her footage on the computer screen.) More significantly, Song reveals to
Suzanne how the medium itself does not just record, but manipulates, such
as the digital erasure of those who maneuver the balloon for the camera.
Bazin likely would not have been so comfortable with these reflexive
acknowledgements. Nevertheless, unlike in Good Men, Good Women, in this
case the self-reflexivity is done with great subtlety, and without didacticism
or blunt forcefulness. Moreover, the film succeeds because Hou once more
finds that requisite distance, in this case, cultural. As Hoberman notes, “Hou
appears to have accepted his distance from the material — and worked with
it. Flight of the Red Balloon is explicitly an outsider’s movie, full of odd per-
spectives and founded on dislocation.”36 Hou has always worked best from
Hou in the New Millennium 179
to avoid individual characters, he finds ways of staging his long takes that
at times can be quite close, but at other points be spectacular extreme long
shots with a vast array of human figures. In The Red and the White, a single
shot can show the white oppression and a red counterattack, all captured
in a sweeping camera that constantly shifts the focus of attention from one
group of players to the next, or from one series of actions to the next, all
the while allowing enough to be seen to understand the progression of the
events conveyed. Angelopoulos may not move the camera as much as his
Hungarian counterpart, yet he is no less prone towards the spectacular.
Typically, Angelopoulos will coordinate a large number of actors who move
in accordance with wherever the camera will be at any one moment. This
means the camera will suddenly shift from following one character to follow-
ing another, sometimes with a 360° arc in a single shot. One notable example
is in Traveling Players where a new year’s celebration in 1946 becomes an
elaborately staged interplay of song and dance that expresses the political
Hou in the New Millennium 181
conflicts of the time in Greece. In Landscape in the Mist, likewise, the camera
utilizes a 360° pan plus a half arc to follow various members of a troupe of
actors who, one at a time, recite different episodes of Greek history while
walking on a beach. Both Jancsó and Angelopoulos, then, tend to utilize this
expansive, mobile long-take style for didactic ends, often conveying political
conflict in dialectical terms within single takes.
Mizoguchi is more complicated and less didactic that his European
analogs. Yet Mizoguchi also has his own flair for the expansive and the
spectacular, often having shots that seem to expand endlessly along a lateral
plane, only to suddenly expose enclaves in great depth as well. Much of
Mizoguchi’s staging is determined by the architecture in which he shoots.
(Perhaps no director in history has ever mastered such large sets the way
he has.) In 47 Ronin, Mizoguchi constantly plays with visibility by means
of both flatness and depth, often having a flat panel open to reveal a deep
space behind it. Furthermore, despite so many camera movements, there are
still prolonged stretches of stillness, not only for the camera, by also for a
large array of characters as well. All of this, however, is much more than a
play with the parameters of the long-take style: Mizoguchi tends to focus
on individuals who often find themselves at odds with the stringent social
labyrinth that literally inhabits these intricate spaces that seem to stretch
to infinity. In many scenes, the principal players involved will be talking
nearby in the foreground, and yet in the background someone else might
be eavesdropping. The very tension in his style — between movement and
stasis, flatness and depth, sudden violence and serenity — renders the situ-
ations of his characters eminently palpable, all of them bounded by a clearly
proscribed social space. In doing so, Mizoguchi in this case provides not so
much a diachronic history of the Japanese past as he provides a synchronic,
idealized depiction of a social structure underpinning that history.
Hou most differs in that his relatively static long takes provide a very
compact historical space instead. Densely staging countless human figures,
many of whom move in and out of the frame, compounding this with
innumerable inanimate objects, Hou’s shots tend to be quite claustrophobic,
almost suffocating. (Even Hou’s landscape shots tend to feel closed rather
than open.) As a result, Hou presents a cached, domestic version of history
witnessed from the vantage point of the home, putatively the safest refuge.
This reveals characters, not at their most heroic or most historically con-
scious, but in their most intimate, even vulnerable moments. Even with its
ever-moving camera, Flowers of Shanghai continues this tendency by other
means: swaying back and forth, the camera in this film can only go so far,
and it is forever closed in by settings arguably the densest of Hou’s entire
career. Once again, Hou offers a history as it is lived and experienced, for
the first time, in very immediate terms. All of his other choices, including his
highly elliptical narratives, conspire towards this effect.
182 No Man an Island
No matter how much the two differ overall, Hou perhaps most closely
resembles Andrei Tarkovsky’s historical sense in The Mirror (1974). This work
covers two of the most tumultuous eras in Russia’s history: Stalinism and
World War II. The only evidence of the former, however, is a sequence where
a mother fears for her life over a possible misprint in an article she wrote.
World War II is seen not from the battlefield, but from the home front, and
by means of intense childhood memories and dreams — of a red-haired girl,
a burning house, spilt milk on a wooden floor, and a mother mysteriously
gallivanting amongst decaying walls showered by both fire and water. Even
more striking are the newsreel shots. Newsreel footage is the epitome of
historical records in visual form, yet Tarkovsky intentionally chooses the for-
gotten, intimate moments. At one point we see disheveled soldiers plodding
their way through water and muck. Suddenly they and the horse cart with
them slide helplessly down a river bank. Such an unheroic, human moment
would never have appeared in an official Soviet newsreel of the time, but
it fits perfectly in Tarkovsky’s world. And so would it fit in Hou’s world
as well. Although he uses no rejected archival footage as such, Hou makes
every painstaking effort to find those moments that standard, official histo-
ries run roughshod over. These are the outtakes of history, those moments of
the mundane, the neglected instances serving no purpose in official histories.
Hou defiantly suggests that in history, everything — every little thing —
matters. For this reason, his historical films are not merely representations of
history; they comprise a philosophy of history.
The historical vision created by Hou may be inimitable, and thus his own
personal legacy. The most noticeable aspects of his style are another matter.
Over a quarter century ago it was hard to find anyone who would so consist-
ently employ a static camera and the long take — not even Andy Warhol
or Chantal Akerman did so quite this consistently over a ten-year period.
Today, however, it has become almost cliché in Asia among aspirants towards
festival cinema. Unintentionally Hou has helped spawn a pan-Asian style
much as his Hong Kong counterpart, Wong Kar-wai.
Hou himself was never a “purist”; the static camera was never an end in
and of itself. Nevertheless, just as Hou was abandoning his signature static
camera with Good Men, Good Women other Asian directors picked up the
mantle in a more literal fashion. The first evidence was the Japanese director,
Hirokazu Kore-eda, and his 1995 film, Mabarosi, which averaged 25 seconds
per shot and yet has camera movement in only 6% of them. Lee Kwang-mo’s
Springtime in My Hometown (1999), from South Korea, averages nearly
50 seconds per shot, and yet only 2% of them have any camera movement
whatsoever. More recently is Syndromes and a Century (2006) from the Thai
director, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul. At roughly 38 seconds per shot, less
than 20% have any movement, and those that do move are often calcu-
lated arcs and lateral tracks which move at an almost excruciatingly slow
Hou in the New Millennium 183
pace. Almost identical figures can be found in the 2004 work, The Beautiful
Washing Machine, from Malaysian director of Chinese descent, James Lee —
at just over 43 second per shot, less than a fifth have any camera move-
ments. The most consistent in pursuing this unusual long-take style have
been the Malaysian-born Taiwanese director, Tsai Ming-liang, and the South
Korean director, Hong Sang-soo. Both directors have even made long-take
films where literally every single shot is perfectly still. Hong’s The Power of
Kangwon Province (1998) does not contain a single camera movement despite
an average shot length of just over 33 seconds per shot. Tsai’s What Time Is
It There? (2001) averages more than a minute per shot and yet once again
there is not even the slightest movement in any of them. Even in mainland
China there is Jia Zhangke, who acknowledges Hou’s influence. Jia is not a
literal disciple of Hou’s once static camera: the monumental Platform (2000)
captures the vagaries of a peripatetic musical troupe from the end of the
Maoist era through the dramatic changes of the 1980s. Clocking in at just over
68 seconds per shot, Jia still manages to move the camera in roughly half of
them. Yet Jia remain true to Hou’s historical sensibilities, steeped in the same
quotidian spirit in historically turbulent times with such memorable shots as
that of a boiling tea kettle towards the end. Once again, Hou’s presence was
being felt everywhere in Asian cinema, even in “enemy” territory.
This conscious appropriation by Asian directors is not merely an aes-
thetic phenomenon of concern only to pedantic film scholars; this is but one
indication of a much larger cultural phenomenon in East Asia. One of the
more unexpected results of globalization is regional counterflows which run
against the supposed one-way street of Westernization. Asians today are just
as likely to consume and borrow from other Asians as from the West, if not
more so. Asian popular culture in particular is now rife with trends defying
longstanding geopolitical animosities. Despite tensions across the Straits of
Taiwan, for example, Taiwanese popular music has been the rage in mainland
China for quite some time, while Chinese serial dramas are watched by many
Taiwanese. The Japanese may be generally despised throughout Asia, but
this has done nothing to stem the popularity of Japanese pop music, clothing
styles and animation throughout the region. Most recently there has been a
“Korean Wave” as seen in the regional popularity of its movies, television
programs and music. All these trends indicate the emergence of a new pan-
Asian identity in popular culture. This particular pan-Asian style in cinema
inspired by Hou shows how this is occurring even outside of the mainstream
in the festival realm.
This suggests that modernization does not automatically mean
Westernization in Asia — indeed, as globalization accelerates, Westernization
is ironically on the wane in certain cultural realms. This is not to deny that
intellectuals at a certain stage (such as those of the May Fourth movement in
China) felt compelled to reject their own traditions and emulate the West
184 No Man an Island
in order to compete; nor does this deny that these cultures at large appear
to be more Westernized at certain stages. But even that seems to give way
to a more dynamic and protean mix which neither tradition nor the West
can fully account for, suggesting that we are no longer talking about clearly
defined oppositions, or a “clash of civilizations.” Moreover, it suggests
that we should proceed with caution when trying to foist fixed, timeless
definitions of “Asian culture,” or better yet — Asian cultures. What is most
notable about East Asia is not the tenacity by which they hold onto “timeless
values,” but their dynamic flexibility, their willing cultural impurity, their
unflinching adaptability. Furthermore, this is a cultural manifestation of a
repeated record of breathtaking change which suggests why Asia overall has
fared better than either Latin America or Africa in weathering the very real
challenge of the West. No wonder then, that the most successful commercial
cinemas outside of Hollywood in history — namely India, Japan, Hong Kong
and Korea — are all Asian. This does not mean they do not treat their own
modernization with a great deal of ambivalence or concern — Hou’s largely
negative portrayal of the present is evidence enough of deep misgivings. Yet
in the process of modernizing, the Asians are creating new traditions entirely
modern in form — a modernization all their own, for better or for worse.
Taiwan in particular shows how unpredictable the Asian situation is.
Consider how Taiwan has changed in such dramatic ways. The KMT almost
completely reversed its economic policies after the 228 disaster in 1947, the
upshot of which was an economic miracle that spread the wealth better than
any Western country ever has. Politics took much longer, but Taiwan went
from a place under strict martial law to one of the most democratic places
on earth, wreaking havoc with the once commonplace assumption that a
Confucian society and democracy are incompatible. Consider the religious
revival in Taiwan of indigenous religions, and consider how much Taiwan
has preserved certain aspects of traditional culture which became lost in the
Cultural Revolution in China, and the realization sets in that much of the
past is still a part of the present on the island. Yet this does not mitigate how
modernized Taiwan is as well. Hou clearly understands these larger social
and cultural dynamics at work. In a 1993 interview, he declares that just
as once Buddhism (a foreign religion from India) slowly became a part of
indigenous Chinese tradition, beginning with the impressive carvings at the
Dun Huang caves, so will Western culture someday become a part of Chinese
tradition, even if it takes hundreds of years. Significantly, he calls Taiwan
the contemporary Dun Huang of this future cultural transformation.37
In short, Taiwan offers a model of modernization which China seems
poised to follow. Some in Taiwan see their entire island as a socio-political
avant-garde of sorts. The Taiwanese are not rejecting China outright — they
are just not accepting China in its present form. They are taking a wait-and-
see attitude because they feel since they are able to do it, why not China?
Hou in the New Millennium 185
China going the way of Taiwan, and not vice versa, is arguably not the worst
scenario in this world’s uncertain future. For this reason alone, we should no
longer dismiss Taiwan because it is not an officially recognized nation state.
We should instead take it very seriously.
So we return to square one: that an island like Taiwan could produce
a director like Hou Hsiao-hsien should no longer come as a surprise, but
is almost to be expected given that Hou is both Asian and Taiwanese. Hou
and the island of Taiwan are inseparable and inconceivable without each
other. As a result of an unusual historical confluence, Hou becomes one of
the oddest yet most significant stories in the history of world cinema. Often
misconstrued as beacons of tradition, Hou’s films up to 1995 are anything
but that; what struck many as inexplicable changes in his more recent works,
including his audacious toying even with his own stylistic identity on the
festival scene, make perfect sense when we remember that Hou is Taiwanese.
At some point we have to dispense with our preconceptions, our prognos-
tications, even our ready-made prejudices. Moreover, we have to recognize
there are also convergences among all these very real cultural and historical
differences, that the Taiwanese Experience is different and unique, but not
an incomprehensible, collective “Other.” After all, we all share something
which the films of Hou remind us of — we are all partakers of experience
at this very moment, those moments of everyday life which will never enter
into the annals of “History” proper. Even if the pundits and their tomes do
not pay heed, that does not render these moments any less important. Maybe
what is most important is not when one lives, or why one lives, but that one
simply lives.
No Man an Island
Udden, James
Udden, James.
No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Second Edition.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, HKU, 2018.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
When this study first appeared in 2009, The Flight of the Red Balloon had
premiered at Cannes two years earlier. Of the three films Hou made after
Millennium Mambo in 2001, only Three Times in 2005 had been entered into
the actual competition for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Three Times was also the
only of these three films that had been shot in Taiwan: produced entirely in
Japan, Café Lumiere (2003) came away empty-handed at Venice; despite being
shot entirely in Paris, The Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) was “relegated” to the
Cannes sidebar, Un Certain Regard, where it also received no awards. It was
almost as if the more “global” Hou had become, the less global notoriety he
received. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s career now seemed to be in partial eclipse.
Global film culture played a small role in preventing a total eclipse from
occurring. Conferences and screenings at University of California, Berkeley
(2010), University of Toronto (2010), and even the Toronto International
Film Festival’s Lightbox (2013), all helped maintain some visibility. Hou and
Chu Tien-wen personally attended conferences dedicated to him in Nagoya,
Japan (2011), and most recently in Belgium (2015), immediately after the
premiere of The Assassin at Cannes. Hou and his entourage also generously
gave time to be interviewed in a recent anthology, Hou Hsiao-hsien, edited by
Richard Suchenski (which complements this study well).1 That anthology is
associated with a retrospective (“Also Like Life”: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien)
that has been traveling globally, also curated by Suchenski through Bard
College’s recently founded Center for Moving Image Arts. The timing of
this retrospective, coupled with the recent conference in Belgium, belies a
healthy academic cottage industry offering ancillary support to Hou’s more
rarified festival career, something Hou recognizes.
Nevertheless, there remained a creeping sense that a partial eclipse
might turn into a total one. Questions abounded about whether Hou’s next
film, The Assassin, would ever materialize: the scripting phase had only
commenced in September of 2009; test shooting only began in September of
2010 in the ancient Japanese capital of Nara. Yet principal shooting would
be delayed for another two years until October of 2012. Even then there
was multiple reports of problems and delays: production stopped twice in
Updated Conclusion: Hou Hsiao-hsien and The Assassin 187
2013, and it was rumored that money had run dry, which Hou and company
denied.2 The shooting of The Assassin only concluded in January of 2014, yet
even this was soon followed by yet another year plus of post-production,
which meant Hou’s long-awaited wuxia film would not premiere until May
of 2015 at Cannes.
The end result is nothing short of astonishing, if not breathtaking:
a wuxia film unlike any before it, a Hou film unlike any before it. For many,
the premiere at Cannes marked the glorious return of a master to the global
festival stage. Competing at Cannes alone defies the odds: for the 2015
edition, 1,854 films from around the world were submitted for the Cannes
competition.3 Out of that mass of films, a mere nineteen were selected. This
not only means that roughly a third of the world’s output is submitted to
Cannes every year, it also means that, all things being equal, one has roughly
a 1/100 chance of even being selected. Hou has never won the top prize, that
elusive Palme d’Or, but this marks the seventh Hou film to be entered into the
competition at Cannes, a world record Hou shares only with Robert Altman.
(In all likelihood, Hou is going to break that record.)
Festival prizes, on the other hand, are a crapshoot, since they always
depend on the maddeningly unpredictable dynamics of any jury’s composi-
tion. If anybody knows this firsthand, it is the late Iranian director, Abbas
Kiarostami, who happened to be on the Cannes jury in 1993, and whose
dogged persistence was the only reason The Puppetmaster won the Jury
Prize. In one interview, Kiarostami expresses how unsatisfying it is to be on
a festival jury even though he has done it multiple times. For starters, no
award can truly measure how well a film will stand the test of time. More
importantly, often the top prizewinner is a compromise because nobody
could convince others of their own personal favorites.4 Had it been up to
the critics, in all likelihood The Assassin easily would have won the coveted
Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2015. The day before the awards were announced,
Liberacion even wrote that in their minds The Assassin was their Palme d’Or
winner. Moreover, if it does not win, the jury better sneak out the back
way!5 While recognizing the utter unpredictability of festival awards, even
industry-oriented Variety speculated that the film might win the top prize
towards the end of the festival.6 This is not to say that many understood
the film: most Chinese report it being difficult to follow in terms of plot,
even language; most non-Chinese report it being impossible to comprehend.
Thus, the actual 2015 jury at Cannes did not bode well for Hou: led by the
Coen brothers, among the stars were Sienna Miller and Jake Gyllenhaal,7
that latter who said during a festival interview, “It’s the story that counts.”8
By that criteria Hou did not stand a chance of winning the Palme d’Or, since
“story” is often the least of his concerns. Yet even this star-studded, narra-
tive-bound jury could not deny this work represents something extraordi-
nary—whatever this film was. They awarded Hou the prize for best director
188 No Man an Island
instead, the highest honor Hou has won at Cannes since the Jury Prize for
The Puppetmster in 1993. The prolonged eclipse was finally over.
Even more important, however, is the actual film. The 200-plus shots
that make up The Assassin are not only arguably among the most beauti-
ful that Hou and his team have ever created, they are also among the most
beautiful ever seen anywhere. The Assassin is the acme of audacity by one of
the most audacious directors in the history of world cinema. Although now
in his sixties, Hou intentionally presented himself the ultimate directorial
challenge, to prove that he is still one of cinema’s true masters willing to go
out on a limb that few dare. The Assassin is also the most expensive Hou film
to date by a wide margin. Furthermore, it was shot in some of the remotest
locations imaginable for a story that takes place during the Tang dynasty
(AD 618–907) over a thousand years ago. Few directors have dared touch the
Tang dynasty, Hou explains: “the historical and cultural background of the
Tang dynasty is very complex, which is why traditionally a lot of filmmakers
stayed from portraying this period.”9 Hou, on the other hand, is not one to
shy away from challenges; he clearly relished this particular challenge and
pursued it tirelessly.
Still, what does The Assassin tells us about Hou or Taiwanese cinema?
Does this film force us to reassess or revise what has already been said in
previous pages of this book? Despite some surprises, and certain appearances
to the contrary, The Assassin largely confirms what had been said in the first
edition of this book. For starters, the title of this book remains apt. No Man
an Island is an abbreviated reference to the poem by John Donne (1572–1632)
that has come to mean no one ever goes it alone. This is a metaphor too
good to pass up in the case of Hou Hsiao-hsien, and not merely because he is
from the island of Taiwan. Rather than a traditional auteurist study, this has
been a contextual analysis of one of the most renowned cinematic directors in
the world today. The implicit argument is that if one wants to understand any
“auteur,” it is not sufficient to look at the works, the accomplishments or the
“man” or “woman,” so to speak. One must further delineate what confluence
of contextual factors made any of that possible, that is, we must lay out how
much historical luck is inevitably involved. That we can no longer isolate
monocausal factors (i.e. the auteur) is now uncontroversial in both film and
cultural studies: anything is now fair game — culture, politics, economics,
industry, ideology, and so on — all examined from a historical perspective. For
any auteur such as Hou, global or not, there seem to be three indispensa-
ble ingredients: (1) historical luck; (2) sufficient institutional support; and
(3) an enabling entourage. None of that has changed for Hou since this book
first appeared; The Assassin in fact reaffirms this.
That notwithstanding, the core question of national identity has to be
addressed since this is arguably the most vexing issue for any director from
Taiwan, Hou most of all. Some might be tempted to argue that Hou has finally
Updated Conclusion: Hou Hsiao-hsien and The Assassin 189
abandoned Taiwan in favor of China with The Assassin; after all, Hou is now
exploring the Tang dynasty no less, often considered the pinnacle of Chinese
civilization. Moreover, Hou is now delving into the quintessential Chinese
genre — if there ever was one — the wuxia pian (often inadequately trans-
lated as “swordplay” in English). In truth, however, there is no “essence,”
no definitive “Chineseness” to be found. This is a film that purposely situates
itself on the margins, something to be expected from a Taiwanese director.
Hou himself makes this very clear in recent interviews in Chinese:
Taiwan cannot escape the inevitability of having the face up to China. Thus,
if we want our own special trait, in the end that has to be that the Taiwanese
perspective is a perspective from the margins, the frontier. And in having
a very different perspective, we can see some things about China more
clearly. That is the very important direction Taiwanese cinema will provide
in the future.10
and these institutions both enable choices and yet constrain them as well.
No director can escape this fact, including Hou Hsiao-hsien.
Hou, however, is a special case in many ways, because directors rarely
have as much freedom as he has to make the films that he truly wants to
make. This special luxury afforded to him is largely a fortuitous historical
accident, as the previous pages of this book have shown. Hou’s constant
since the mid-1980s has been the international film festival, since Hou
Hsiao-hsien is a “festival director” par excellence. It was historical anomalies
that begat Hou’s career as a festival director starting in the 1980s. The New
Cinema was a direct result of institutional changes in Taiwan, but it was
never a planned movement. It was a desperate “try anything” policy in the
midst of a growing industrial crisis. It most certainly was not designed with
film festivals in mind, something confirmed recently by Hou, Chu Tien-wen,
Peggy Chiao, and even Winston Lee, who was in charge of cinema affairs
in the GIO at the time.11 Moreover, while institutions in Taiwan may have
jump-started Hou’s career, they simply could not sustain it. Thus, for Hou
the core institution has always been a global network of film festivals.
Film festivals themselves are largely a historical accident. Marco Mueller
(who was crucial for Hou back in the 1980s) notes how the film festival was
“born in the original sin of fascism” in Venice in the early 1930s, in part
as a way to extend the tourist season.12 Festivals evolved into something
very different over the decades, serving both art and commerce equally.
Today, they have spread globally with no end in sight. Key for Taiwan were
newcomers that emerged in the late 1970s, most of all the Festival des 3
Continents in Nantes, France. In retrospect, everybody now recognizes that
the key breakthrough occurred in 1984 at Nantes when Hou won the Golden
Montgolfiere — the top prize. Yet the appearance of The Boys from Fengkuei
at Nantes in 1984 was the result of a chance meeting that occurred earlier
that year in Hong Kong; there, Chen Guofu convinced Olivier Assayas, then
writing for Cahiers du cinema, to also see some films from Taiwan. Assayas was
impressed by what he saw — The Boys from Fengkuei most of all — and
wrote about it in Cahiers not long afterwards. This in turn led the Jalladeau
brothers, founders of the Festival des 3 Continents, to include Boys in the
festival in November of that same year, where it then won the top prize.13
Hardly anybody at the time, not even Hou, fully realized what a pivotal
moment that was. Three decades later, however, right after the best director
prize at Cannes, Hou and Chu Tien-wen would be in front of a packed house
at the CINEMATEK in Brussels for a master class conducted by none other
than Assayas himself. It was a fitting homage to a still living history, one
largely sustained by the institutional bedrock of international film festivals.
The Assassin, however, is unique in Hou’s career because this film could
not afford to rely on film festivals alone. Moreover, since Hou’s previous film
came out in 2007, there were two very profound changes that the director
Updated Conclusion: Hou Hsiao-hsien and The Assassin 191
had to face head on at the time, one more local (or regional) in nature, the
other truly global in scope. On the one hand, Hou had to recognize the
exponential growth of the mainland Chinese market between 2007 and 2015,
a consideration for every Taiwanese filmmaker today. On the other hand,
Hou had to face up to the fact that not only were most films still shot on
analog film stock back in 2007, they were also exhibited in celluloid as well.
By 2015 the digital age was already in near full global swing — the most sig-
nificant technological shift since the coming of sound in the late 1920s. These
two monumental changes loomed large over every choice Hou made with
The Assassin. In the end, Hou responded with a deft mixture of audacious
defiance and compromise.
The sheer size of the mainland market has grown exponentially in recent
years and now appears to have exceeded the size of the North American
market.14 This became a decisive factor in how this film would be made.
In early 2013, Stephen Cremin wrote an article in Film Business Asia in which
he argues Taiwanese filmmakers are at a crossroads that requires them to go
either “north” or “south.” In effect, this means that every Taiwanese film-
maker faces a Hobson’s choice: either remain “south” in Taiwan and make
very low-budget films that have only local flavor and limited box office
appeal, or go “north” and aim for bigger budgets and audiences in China
proper via co-productions.15 Small budgeted films such as Night Market Hero
(2011) can afford to remain “south,” but Hou clearly could not afford to not
include China in this film, given its US$15 million budget. Thus, he unsur-
prisingly went “north.” Of course, this inevitably raises political issues in
Taiwan, especially since doing co-productions with China requires abiding
by the PRC’s own rules. Hou in turn defends himself on economic grounds,
pointing out that the size of Taiwan’s market is less than half the size of
France’s, but the size of France only equals that of Fujian Province in China.
He credits Hollywood for long having a head start in a well-coordinated
banking and financial infrastructure coupled with a large unified market. But
should China ever do the same, he adds, it could one day match Hollywood
given the sheer size of that market.16 In the end, the economic risk involved
forced Hou to bank on mainland China, not just for locations, but also for
money: half of the budget came from Chinese sources while the rest came
from Taiwan, South Korea, Canada, and Europe.17
At the Cannes press conference, Hou noted that having US$15 million
was a real luxury he might never have again, especially if this film could
not recoup its investments for multiple sources around the world.18 As a
result, the key linchpin is not film festivals, but the actual commercial market
in mainland China. This was the first Hou film to be released in mainland
theaters since it was a co-production with China. It remains to be seen whether
he will ever have such a luxury again. The incomplete figures from Box
Office Mojo.com indicate that The Assassin has made nearly US$9.5 million
192 No Man an Island
in the mainland market and another US$1 Million in the Taiwanese market.
These are impressive figures for an art film, but not for a genre film, which
this film technically is as well. The film made a mere US$600,000 in the
North American market in a very limited release. The combined figures
indicate that the film has made just under US$12 million worldwide to date,
or roughly 80% of its production budget.19 It is still possible that The Assassin
will at least make back it production budget and break even since Japan
and France — two countries in which traditionally Hou’s films have fared
best — are not included in these statistics. (There are no figures from those
two markets or from several others as well.) Still, given the vagaries and
complexities of financing and distribution deals, in all likelihood the film
will need to far exceed its production budget before all of those investors can
be paid off. Hou may be one of the world’s greatest living art cinema direc-
tors; yet clearly he has to keep his eye on the bottom line regardless, taking
an economic risk unlike any he has ever taken before. He may never quite go
“north” in this same manner ever again, and already he is planning a much
lower budgeted film for his next project.
The ascendancy of the Chinese market was not the only new factor at
play, however. The Assassin marks the first Hou film to be released in the
brave new digital era. Inevitably, this meant this film would be projected
in digital form via a DCP (Digital Cinema Package). Even today, there are
still outliers around the world who resist digital on the production end, and
Hou proved to be no exception. However, the greatest resistance to digital
was not necessarily coming from Hou, but from his director of photography,
Mark Lee, who had personally said on the set of the film in 2012: “Being
asked to shoot in digital is just like being asked to paint with a ball point
pen.” Hou exhibited more ambivalence on this issue, even though this was
largely because he thought the digital takeover was inevitable. Since it had
to be scanned into digital form anyway for post-production, which cost a lot
of money, Hou even said it was likely his next film would simply be shot in
digital to begin with.20
The biggest surprise with this film is not the choice of film stock per se,
since others have made similar choices in recent years. Most striking is the
original plan to use only a 16 mm Bolex camera. As a director, Hou has been
given more freedom, and he often feels that he has to impose limitations on
himself for the sake of creativity. Long known for the long take, Hou felt that
he had already reached the limits of the long take with Flowers of Shanghai
in 1998. (The crude numbers bear this out.) This is why the Bolex appealed
to him. A wind-up Bolex not only limits one to 16 mm film stock, it also
limits one to shooting only 20 to 30 seconds at a time.21 One can only imagine
how different this film would have been had they stuck to this original plan
of shooting with three Bolexes running simultaneously. According to Hou
himself, the Bolex proved unworkable as an actual production method, most
Updated Conclusion: Hou Hsiao-hsien and The Assassin 193
of all for Mark Lee who had trouble seeing through the eyepiece during early
test shooting. Since it was difficult to find others who could use the camera
(and they needed three operators), the idea was scrapped in favor of 35 mm
instead, of which Hou and crew shot a whopping 500,000 feet by the end.22
Tao Hungyi, the cinematographer who had introduced Hou to the Bolex,
offers another explanation for why the Bolex was not used: investors simply
found it unacceptable. Even then, the Bolex left a legacy on the finished
result since the film resists using a wide-screen format in favor of the Bolex’s
1.37:1 ratio.23 To wit, Hou was willing to compromise only so far.
way, yet somehow they have to meet Hou’s exacting standards in the end.
Huang Wenying describes working with Hou as follows:
When it comes to work, Hou happily respects professionalism. Therefore,
when building sets, designing or preparing costumes for the actors, he will
almost always trust you, and will never interfere too much. But that is the
inevitable heavy burden of working with him. Because if he knows it is
not good enough, he will not shoot it; even if he does shoot it, he will still
not use it in the end.26
details of the interior settings had to sacrifice historical accuracy in order not
to appear “too Japanese” to a modern audience.40
By accident, I had the good fortune of being on the Taipei set of The
Assassin for two days in December 2012. I was given full access to the set
and was allowed to take pictures of everything and everyone except Shu Qi.
Being able to see Hou actually working on a set for the first time, I realized
that what I witnessed was entirely typical, based on all the accounts I have
read by others (most of all, the detailed record published by Xie Haimeng
about The Assassin).
The second day of my visit was the first day of actual shooting in Taipei.
The actors, including Shu Qi, had an 8:30 a.m. call time, but there was no way
of telling when shooting would actually begin. It was clear from everyone’s
behavior that prolonged waiting was the norm on a Hou set. Xie Haimeng
notes in her book that Hou never sits in the director’s chair because, to him,
the chair always creates a hierarchal divide between the director and the
crew, which he dislikes.41 In truth, however, it was also because Hou con-
stantly observed things from multiple angles and at times quietly instructed
Huang and the crew to work on the minutest detail here and there. He was
meticulous to a fault with the mise-en-scène since there seemed to be no end
to the adjustments. Meanwhile, Mark Lee repeatedly looked through the
camera eyepiece, often pointing to something with the continuity person.
Liao Ching-sung was merely observing while Tu Duu-Chih was waiting
calmly as if he had been through this a hundred times before. Shu Qi made
a brief appearance (in black costume). Having realized that it would still
be awhile, she calmly returned to the dressing room. Hou said very little to
me on that second day since I made certain to remain in the background. Yet
in passing he did make one very telling comment: “It is always like this.”
It was hard to say what exactly he was waiting for: Was it the perfect ray of
light, or the perfect configuration of the minutest details? One would expect
any film set to be hectic, but a Hou set is pure Zen; one could have easily
meditated on the premises. (Xie Xinying was struck by this quality as well,
noting that on a Hou set it was almost as if whoever spoke first lost.)42 The
only time Hou ever shouted was when it was time to break for lunch. The
first take still had not commenced. Since I had to leave for home, I bid my
farewell before the camera ever began rolling. Lightning-fast efficiency is not
the first word that comes to mind when describing how Hou shoots — it is
more like prolonged and persistent patience that few are capable of. How
these films are made are very much like the films themselves.
It would still be another thirteen months before shooting was com-
pleted. Then post-production, arguably the most mysterious phase of a
Hou film, began. There are no detailed descriptions of the editing process
as a whole for Hou Hsiao-hsien, because almost no one is able to observe
it from beginning to end. Hou himself talks about editing, not in terms of
Updated Conclusion: Hou Hsiao-hsien and The Assassin 197
plot or narration, but mostly in vague, general terms of why certain scenes
are rejected because they lack that certain “something.” As Chu Tien-wen
notes, Hou often refers to the words of Robert Bresson when talking about
the convoluted process of making a film: a film lives in one’s mind during
pre-production, but then it dies once it has been written down in script
form; the film comes back to life again on the set, yet it dies once more when
placed on film stock. The film then undergoes a second resurrection when it
is being edited.43 Yet the second “resurrection” proved particularly arduous
in this case, since post-production took almost a year and a half to complete.
In Brussels, Chu pointed out that the film had gone through four major edits
before something resembling the original idea or flavor was finally found.44
The final result is nothing short of astonishing, even overwhelming. Yet it
also defies easy comprehension or analysis.
like breaking things down into shots, does not like overly designed things,
does not like the interfering hand . . . This always comes back to the same
point: being so unwilling to be dramatic, perhaps it is impossible to ever
make him shoot a commercial film.46
film) — will arrive to kill him. Nie Yinniang kills Jing Jing Er, but she knows
Kong Kong Er is too strong. Thus she devises a way to make Kong Kong
Er think he has killed Liu Changyi when the opposite is true. Part of this
plan includes a fantastical Kafkaesque transformation by Nie Yinniang into a
beetle that hides inside of the body of Liu Changyi.47
The script for the film virtually turns this original short tale on its head.
Of particular importance now is Princess Jiacheng, Tian Ji’an’s mother who
is dead when the film begins, and is only seen in flashbacks in which she
plays the zither and tells the story of the melancholy bluebird (a story that
Nie Yinniang repeats much later on). Princess Jiacheng is the daughter of the
eighth Tang emperor; she was married off to Tian Xu (Tian Ji’an’s father) in
an attempt to forge stronger ties between the court and Weibo. In the film,
Nie Yinniang is taken away by a Daoist nun, rather than a Buddhist nun,
since Daoism is stronger in court circles. The nun happens to be Princess
Jiaxin, twin sister of Princess Jiacheng. (Both roles are played by the dancer,
Sheu Fang-yi.) In order to protect the young Nie Yinniang, Princess Jiacheng
and the Nie family ask the nun to take her away. The reason for this is that
Princess Jiacheng has practically raised Nie Yinniang as one of her own, and
has even planned for Yinniang and her own son, Tian Ji’an, to be married.
However, political considerations prevail and Tian Ji’an is instead married
to Tian Yuanshi, the daughter of another garrison commander. Tian Yuanshi,
however, proves to be a Trojan horse for the Yuan family, as she is trying to
slowly take over Weibo. Moreover, she — not Tian Ji’an — is the one who
in the film commands the assassin, Jing Jing Er, and the hoary warlock,
Kong Kong Er, who implants curses on people by using paper cutouts.
Of particular importance to Tian Yuanshi (as Tian Ji’an’s wife) and Kong Kong
Er is the fact that Tian Ji’an’s favorite concubine, Huji, is secretly pregnant.
This poses a threat to the succession of Tian Yuanshi’s own children to lead
Weibo in the future. Meanwhile, in a fit of anger, Tian Ji’an forces his own
uncle, Tian Xing, into exile for advising too much caution in dealing with the
court. Yet he seems to know that his own wife and the Yuans will try to take
advantage of this situation; he therefore also sends Nie Feng, Nie Yinniang’s
own father, along for protection. Sure enough, Tian Yuanshi does send the
assassin Jing Jing Er to try to take down Tian Xing. The assassination forces
Nie Yinniang to leave the city to protect her own father and Tian Xing. There
she receives help from a Japanese stranger known simply as the Mirror
Polisher, who becomes her friend. Meanwhile, Kong Kong Er tries to deal
with the pregnant Huji with a magic spell. Nie Yinniang returns to save Huji
as well and informs her once betrothed Tian Ji’an that Huji is pregnant.
It is a complicated story, but it is not impossible to follow provided each
character’s situations and motivations are adequately explained — which
the published script does for the most part. Moreover, it is a linear story
with a clear chain of cause and effect, one that is anchored by the journey
200 No Man an Island
of Nie Yinniang back to Weibo, then away from the Weibo court to save her
father, then back to Weibo again to save Huji, and finally leaving Weibo to
help her true friend, the Mirror Polisher, on another journey. This is not a
mere journey of an assassin on a mission, however. Hers is a journey into the
inner life of Tian Ji’an: she first sees him in a public setting with his advisors,
but she manages to penetrate Tian Ji’an’s most intimate setting when he
visits Huji — the woman he has true affection for — at night. Yet even here,
the divide between Tian’s political life and private life is blurred: he confides
with Huji about the exile of Tian Xing, and at that same time they discover
the jade pendant which is a reminder that another personal relationship has
been disrupted by political expediency. That pivotal moment motivates not
only Nie Yinniang’s journey to protect her own father, since she overhears
this, but also her return to save Huji, whom she comes to admire.
Despite being much more elliptical than the script, the completed film
is surprisingly linear for the most part. The only shifts in the story order
are the flashbacks of Princess Jiacheng’s zither playing, which takes place
when Nie Yinniang first returns home to her family after a thirteen-year
absence. But such a flashback is not so unusual even in a more conventional
film. So what is the “problem”? Why do so many viewers express total
bewilderment when watching this film for the first time? The answer lies
not in the lack of linearity per se, but in the extreme use of ellipses. Hou
claims that such elliptical obliqueness was not by design, but was the result
of having shot over 500,000 feet of film stock.48 The published script includes
sixty-eight scenes plus three introductory segments before the credits. The
finished film includes only forty-one of those scenes plus the three in the
pre-credit sequence, which are all in black and white. It is not entirely clear
how many of those sixty-eight scenes were shot. In any case, Hou deemed
nearly 40% of these scripted scenes unworthy of the finished product. In a
joint interview, Xie Haimeng describes two scenes that were shot and which
would have better explained character motives, including most of the Daoist
nun’s and why she sent Nie Yinniang to Weibo to assassinate her own cousin.
One of these scenes includes an argument between her and her twin sister
Princess Jiacheng over the best way to deal with a rebellious garrison like
Weibo. Princess Jiacheng argues that it can be controlled from within, and
she is able to do so while she is still alive. The nun, on the other hand, argues
that it is better to kill one man than to allow a thousand to die. Hou simply
says in the interview that these scenes were taken out because they were
no good.49
Given the difficulties in developing film stock to a certain standard in
the digital era, it is possible that some scenes simply failed to make the visual
grade. But if there is anything to be learned from this study, it is that Hou is a
director who loathes explaining much of anything. Even many of the scenes
included were heavily whittled down in terms of dialogue when compared
Updated Conclusion: Hou Hsiao-hsien and The Assassin 201
to the script. (This is especially true of scenes involving Nie Yinniang and her
father, or of the underlying political machinations discussed in the Weibo
court.) Hou is a cinematic sculptor-poet who whittles plot and narrative
down to something that hardly qualifies as the bare essentials: explanations
become mere whispered suggestions and hints; cause and effect give way
to cryptic poeticism; understanding surrenders to pure atmosphere. In this
way, a simple tale from the Tang era gives way to a most oblique cinematic
epic. Once more, basic understanding was sacrificed in the name of pure
experience.
what truly makes him special as a director is not measurable; it is even dif-
ficult to analyze adequately. The only thing that the numbers tell us about
The Assassin is how little time in this wuxia film is spent on actual action.
In the classic wuxia films, action scenes can be interminable and continue for
several minutes. In The Assassin there are seven separate battles involving
Nie Yinniang; the combined action in those seven scenes barely fills out five
minutes and twenty seconds out of the entire film, which is only a few seconds
more than a single battle in King Hu’s Touch of Zen, the famed fight in the
bamboo grove.
Hou has repeatedly said that he is making a wuxia film that respects
“gravity.” While he adores King Hu, his true inspiration is the realism in
Japanese samurai films instead, not the fantastical antics that are usually
abetted by wire work.50 The action in this film, however little there is, is much
closer to samurai films than the classic wuxia films. The classic one-on-one
duels in samurai films are often based on a prolonged stasis, a quick burst
of action, followed by more stasis in the immediate aftermath. The brief
encounter between Nie Yinniang and Jing Jing Er in the woods is closest to
that model, but most of the fights are over rather quickly. The seven battles
in which Nie Yinniang engages are the most quickly edited sequences in
Hou’s entire career — when combined, they average about four seconds
per shot. They are also among the most “conventional” in Hou’s career.
These scenes include most of all the series of shot/reverse shot used in the
rooftop encounter between Nie Yinniang and Tian Ji’an. The total end result,
however, is anything but conventional — not as a film, not as a wuxia genre
piece, not even as a work by Hou Hsiao-hsien.
If the action itself is not the main feature of The Assassin, unlike the
typical wuxia film, then who or what is? Hou repeatedly suggests that what
he most likes to capture is people. Moreover, he sings praises to no end about
Shu Qi as the star of this particular film. Yet Shu Qi has but nine lines in the
entire film, a shockingly low number for an eponymous character. Shu Qi
herself said it best at the press conference in Cannes that Hou did not just
want to capture people on film, but also “clouds, wind, fire, water, and even
air,” all of which made it difficult for actors to know what he was after.51
In other words, for Hou it is not so much people that he is after, as people in
a particular milieu, existing in a certain environment. Thus, in this film it is
not people who are stars per se: mise-en-scène itself is the true star.
A question arises as to how much this mise-en-scène owes to traditional
Chinese painting, since Hou, Mark Lee, and Huang Wenying employed
exhaustive research and tried to find out what the Tang era looked like.
There are two opposing strains in traditional Chinese painting: the court
painters who used vibrant colors and rendered most human actions from
a particular angle, mostly in urban settings; and the scholarly painters who
used subdued colors and monochrome schemes of lonely hermits engaging
Updated Conclusion: Hou Hsiao-hsien and The Assassin 203
in Daoist refuge in nature itself. By contrast, the interiors in this film look
nothing like those court paintings of the past; the exteriors do not look like
anything that any painter — or cinematographer — has ever captured before.
In Hou’s films of the past, the landscapes, while beautiful, are all undeni-
ably real. These particular landscapes are almost hyperreal, perhaps because
such remote landscapes have been rarely used before. To invoke Chinese
landscape painting is not misguided to be sure: Mark Lee talks about inspi-
ration from a more recent landscape painter name Fu Baoshi (1904–1965) in
relation to this film.52 But inspiration by a painting tradition should not be
conflated with imitation. Yes, there are the cragged rocks, the mists, and the
human forms dwarfed by nature. But the most famous landscape shot in this
film comes at the end when Nie Yinniang returns to see the Daoist nun on the
top of a mountain. Remarkably towards the end of this long take, white mist
emerges from the mountain valley below. Lee reports that people think that
the crew just waited for such moments to occur and shoot. In truth, however,
they could not afford to wait; the shot was a fortuitous accident because
Hou tacitly trusted Lee to capture the right image.53
However, it is difficult to argue that the spectacular landscapes surpass
the interiors in The Assassin which, combined with the costumes, props, and
music, expose a deeper cultural undercurrent that neither the plot nor the
dialogue reveals. As was the case with Flowers of Shanghai, the role played
by the novelist Ah Cheng is of particular significance. He makes clear
that during the Tang there was a real cultural admixture between the Han
Chinese and the “Hu” (the non-Han people mostly from the north who
interacted and intermarried with the Han extensively). Therefore, there
were “Han-like Hu” and “Hu-like Han,” especially in an area such as Weibo
on the northern frontier.54 The Assassin seemingly relishes in such cultural
hybridity by placing it at the center. The most privileged scenes in the film
in terms of style all involve Tian Ji’an and Huji, his favorite concubine of
Hu origin. Two scenes involving this supposedly “minor” character are par-
ticularly unforgettable. The first occurs just before and after Tian’s rooftop
encounter with Nie Yinniang, both sections comprised of long takes of
roughly three minutes in duration. In the foreground are layers upon layers
of diaphanous veils that sometimes open up with the aid of soft winds, while
at other times the veils almost obscure our view of Tian and Huji. In addition,
these veils seemingly reflect some flickering candles nearby off-screen,
creating an otherworldly feel. Meanwhile Nie Yinniang herself is hidden in
yet more veils close by, at which point she leaves the jade pendant to make
Tian Ji’an aware of her identity. Equally unforgettable is the dance scene of
Huji and Tian Ji’an just before Huji is attacked by the spell of Kong Kong Er.
One of the few Hou scenes that ever required rehearsal, the dance and the
music by Lim Giong is decidedly exotic by current Chinese standards, since
it is much closer to Middle Eastern tones and rhythms than purely “Han
204 No Man an Island
Udden, James.
No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Second Edition.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, HKU, 2018.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
Foreword
1. 春日在天涯,天涯日又斜,鶯啼如有淚,為濕最高花。“The sun on the horizon,
the horizon sun is oblique; the bird call is like a tear, the highest wet flower.”
2. Michael Berry (interviewer), and Tianwen Zhu (editor), Zhu hai shi guang《煮
海時光》: Hou Xiaoxian de guang ying ji yi [Boiling the sea: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s
memories of shadows and light] (Xinbei Shi: INK, 2014).
Introduction
1. Godfrey Cheshire, “Time Span: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien,” Film Comment
vol. 29, no. 6 (November/December 1993): 56–62.
2. Jean-Michel Frodon, “On a Mango Tree in Feng-shan, Perceiving the Time
and Space around Him,” in Hou Hsiao-hsien 侯孝賢 (Chinese Edition of French
Original by Cahiers du Cinéma) (Taipei: Chinese Film Archive, 2000): 22–25.
3. Jacques Pimpaneau, “The Light of Motion Pictures,” Cahiers (Chinese Edition):
65–68.
4. James Udden, “Hou Hsiao-hsien and the Poetics of History,” Cinemascope 3
(Spring, 2000): 51.
5. Ni Zhen, “Classical Chinese Painting and Cinematographic Signification,”
Douglas Wilkerson, trans., in Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts
and Cinema of China and Japan, Linda Ehrlich and David Desser, eds. (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1994): 75.
6. Li Tuo, “Narratives of History in the Cinematography of Hou Xiaoxian,”
Positions 1:3 (1993): 805–14.
7. Meng Hungfeng 孟洪峰, “A Discussion of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Style,” in Passionate
Detachment: Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien 戲戀人生:侯孝賢電影研究, Lin Wenchi
林文淇, Shen Xiaoying 沈曉茵, Li Zhenya 李振亞, eds. (Taipei: Maitian, 2000):
48–49.
8. J. Hoberman, “The Edge of the World,” Village Voice (July 14, 1987): 62.
9. Peggy Chiao 焦雄屏, “When Will Taiwan Keep Step with Taiwanese Cinema?”
Commonwealth Magazine 天下雜誌 (January 1, 2000): 123.
10. “First Annual ‘Village Voice’ Film Critics Poll,” Village Voice (January 4, 2000): 41.
11. Yeh Yueh-yu, “Politics and Poetics of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Films,” Post Script
vol. 20, nos. 2 & 3 (Winter/Spring & Summer, 2001): 68.
206 Notes to pages 4–8
12. The best summary of this critical paradigm is still Roy Armes’s Third World Film
Making and the West, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
13. Yeh Yueh-yu 葉月瑜, “Taiwanese New Cinema: Nativism’s ‘Other’,” Chung-wai
Literary Monthly 中外文學 27: 8 (January, 1999): 60.
14. Wilt Idema and Lloyd Haft, A Guide to Chinese Literature (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1997): 85.
15. Idema and Haft feel that “Neo-Daoism” is a misleading term, and think it better
to call this a reworking of Confucianism that occurred with the now widespread
availability of the Daoist classic the Zhuangzi and the Yijing (better known as
the I-Ching, or “The Book of Changes”) (Idema and Haft, 26). Arthur F. Wright,
in his Buddhism in Chinese History, on the other hand, says Confucianism was
“utterly discredited” with the fall of the Han, and from AD 250 on Daoism was
the dominant philosophy. See Wright, Buddhism in Chinese History (New York:
Atheneum, 1969): 17–24. Either way, it is clear that Confucianism had to make
radical adjustments to new historical conditions in order to eventually reassert
its ideological supremacy.
16. Wright, 67–70.
17. John Fairbank, Edwin Reischauer and Albert Craig, East Asia: Tradition and
Transformation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978): 149–50.
18. Arthur F. Wright says for this system to work it was imperative that these
scholars drew from more than just the writings of Confucius to develop a cosmic
system of relationships — human and otherwise — that formed an all-encom-
passing system by which one could rule (Wright, 11–15).
19. Craig Clunas, Art in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997): 136.
20. Patricia Ebrey, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (Cambridge: University
of Cambridge Press, 1996): 89.
21. Ibid., 88.
22. Clunas, 54–56.
23. Li Zehou, The Path of Beauty: A Study of Chinese Aesthetics (Hong Kong: Oxford
University Press, 1994): 154.
24. Ibid., 142. And yet Li Bai does follow one very longstanding tradition in Chinese
art: an affinity to alcohol, even saying once, according to Du Fu, that he was
“a genius at wine.” (See ibid., 141.) It should be noted that Hou is an adept
perpetrator of this tradition as well, albeit he often adds the modern touch of
karaoke singing.
25. Ye Xie, “The Origins of Poetry,” in Readings in Chinese Literary Thought,
Stephen Owen, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992): 511.
26. Hsieh Ho, in Early Chinese Texts on Painting, Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih, eds.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985): 30.
27. Su Shih, in ibid., 224.
28. Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1997): 13–16.
29. Peggy Chiao 焦雄屏, in introduction to Passionate Detachment: 26; “Great
Changes in a Vast Ocean: Neither Tragedy nor Joy,” Performing Arts Journal
vol. 17, no. 50/51 (May/September, 1995): 52.
30. Peggy Chiao, interview by author, March 10, 2002, Middleton, Wisconsin.
31. Chu Tien-wen 朱天文, interview by author, June 2, 2001, Sogo Department Store
Coffee Shop, Taipei, Taiwan.
Notes to pages 8–18 207
32. Hou Hsiao-hsien, HHH: A Portrait of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, prod. by Peggy Chiao and
Hsu Hsiao-ming, dir. by Olivier Assayas, 96 min., Arc Light Films, 1997.
33. Hou Hsiao-hsien 侯孝賢, interview by author, June 20, 2001, Sinomovie
Company Office, Taipei, Taiwan.
34. Abe Mark Nornes and Yeh Yueh-yu, A City of Sadness, website at http://
cienmaspace.berkeley.edu/Papers/CityOfSadness.
35. Yeh Yueh-yu and Darrell Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005): 133–76.
36. Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, China on Screen (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2006): 29–38.
37. David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005): 186–237.
Chapter 1
1. Song Guangyu 宋光宇, ed. The Taiwan Experience 台灣經驗, 2 vols. (Taipei:
Tung Ta, 1994).
2. Chen Ruxiu 陳儒修, Taiwanese New Cinema’s History, Culture and Experience 台灣
新電影的歷史文化經驗, 2nd ed. (Taipei: Wanxiang, 1997).
3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, revised ed. (New York: Verso, 1983,
1991).
4. Melissa J. Brown, Is Taiwan Chinese? (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004): 2.
5. Ibid., 5; Denny Roy, Taiwan: A Political History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2003): 242–45.
6. Li Xiaofeng 李筱峰, The Hundred Biggest Incidents of Taiwanese History 台灣史
100 件大事, vol. 1 (Taipei: Yushan, 1999): 30–31.
7. Ibid., 39–45.
8. Roy, 18.
9. Li, 57.
10. Roy, 31.
11. Ibid., 20.
12. Li, 91.
13. Ibid., 94–96.
14. John Copper, Taiwan: Nation-State or Province? (Taipei: SMC Publishing, 1997):
29.
15. Xiao Xinyi 蕭欣義, “The Sudden Change of Sino-American Views of Taiwan’s
Status in the 1940’s,” in Collection of Studies on the 228 Incident 二二八事件研究
論文集, Zhang Yanxian 張炎憲, Chen Meirong 陳美蓉, Yang Yahui 楊雅慧, eds.
(hereafter cited as 228 Studies) (Taipei: Wu Sanlien Foundation, 1998): 293.
16. George H. Kerr, Formosa Betrayed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965): 25.
17. Ibid., 20.
18. What is even more remarkable is that Hou and Edward Yang were born the
same year in the same county in Guangdong province, a Hakka enclave.
19. Chu Tien-wen 朱天文, interview by author, June 2, 2001, Sogo Department Store
Coffee Shop, Taipei, Taiwan.
20. Li Qiao 李喬, “The Significance of 228 in the Taiwanese Psyche,” 228 Studies, 403.
208 Notes to pages 18–24
21. Li Xiaofeng, vol. 2, 35; Xu Jielin 許介鱗, The Post-War Historical Records of Taiwan
戰後台灣史記 (Taipei: Wenying Tang, 1996), vol. 2, 4.
22. Ibid., 57–59.
23. Xu, 15–16.
24. Ibid., 25.
25. Xiong Zijian 熊自健, “Post-War Taiwanese Liberalism and the Thought of
Hayek,” in The Taiwan Experience, vol. 2, 27–65.
26. Li Xiaofeng, vol. 2, 91–92.
27. Chen Zhongxin 陳忠信, recorded in Violence and Song: The Kaohsiung Incident
and the Formosa Judgment 暴力與詩歌:高雄事件與美麗島他大審, Part 3 of the
Oral History of the Formosa Incident 珍藏美麗島口述史 (Taipei: Times Publishing,
1999): 98.
28. Copper, 115.
29. Shi Mingxiung 施敏雄 and Li Yungsan 李庸三, “The Directions and Structural
Changes of Taiwan’s Industrial Development,” in A Collection of Treatises on
Taiwan’s Industrial Development 台灣工業發展論文集, Ma Kai 馬凱, ed. (hereafter
cited as Industrial Development) (Taipei: Lianjing, 1994): 3.
30. Yu Tzong-shian, The Story of Taiwan: Economy (Taipei: Government Information
Office, 1999): 8.
31. Copper, 139.
32. Li Xiaofeng, vol. 2, 31–34; Xu, vol. 2, 95–98.
33. Xu, 118.
34. Shi and Li, 22, 24.
35. Copper, 122.
36. Ma Kai, “The Evolution of Taiwan’s Industrial Policies,” in Industrial Development,
97.
37. Copper, 135.
38. Chen Zhengxun 陳正順, “Import-Substitution Industrialization: Discussion of
Conclusions and Research of Taiwan’s Situation,” Industrial Development, 84–85.
39. Copper, 126–27.
40. Ma, 147.
41. Lin Zonggang 林宗光, “The Taiwanese Identity Problem and 228,” in 228 Studies,
363.
42. Xu, vol. 2, 69–71.
43. Li Xiaofeng, vol. 2, 14–15. Of course, the government did allow the Taiwanese
dialect films to be made, which may seem surprising. The fact is, the Mandarin
education was the cornerstone of the government’s attempt to suppress the
Taiwanese dialect. It was not at all averse in the meantime to using Taiwanese
for propaganda purposes as it knew many were already out of school and would
not learn Mandarin well. So long as the films did not violate any political taboos,
these films could still use Taiwanese as the chief language.
44. Liu Xiancheng 劉現成, Taiwanese Cinema, Society and State 台灣電影:社會與國家
(Taipei: Yangzhi, 1997): 34–36.
45. Ibid., 37; Lu Feiyi 盧非易, Taiwanese Cinema: Politics, Economics, Aesthetics (1949–
1994) 台灣電影:政治,經濟,美學,1949–1994 (Taipei: Yuanliu, 1998): 69–71.
46. Liu, 38.
47. Li Minghui 李明輝, “Confucianism and Kant in the Thought of Mo Zongsan,”
in The Taiwan Experience, vol. 2, 91–97.
Notes to pages 24–27 209
48. Jiang Nianfeng 蔣年豐, “The Existentialist Wave in the Post-War Taiwan
Experience: Sartre at the Center,” in The Taiwan Experience, vol. 2, 1.
49. Ibid., 2.
50. Chang Sung-sheng, Yvonne, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary
Chinese Fiction from Taiwan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993): 12.
51. Ibid., 100.
52. Xu, vol. 2, 64–65.
53. Wang Jing, “Taiwan’s Hsiang-tu Literature: Perspectives in the Evolution of a
Literary Movement,” Chinese Fiction from Taiwan: Critical Perspectives, Jeannette L.
Faurot, ed. (hereafter Fiction from Taiwan) (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1980): 61–62.
54. Chang Shi-kuo, “Realism in Taiwan Fiction: Two Directions,” in Fiction from
Taiwan, 31.
55. Wu Mingren, “From Worship of the West to a Popular Consciousness,”
A Collection of Discussions about Nativist Literature 鄉土文學討論集, Yu Tianzong
尉天驄, ed. (hereafter Nativist Discussions) (Taipei: Yuanliu & Zhangqiao, 1978):
3–6.
56. Wang Fan 汪帆, “Speaking of Modern People and Modernization,” in Nativist
Discussions, 37.
57. Jiang Xun 蔣勳, “To Irrigate a Cultural Flowering,” in Nativist Discussions, 49.
58. Chen Yingzhen 陳映真, “Literature Both Reflects and Comes from Society,”
in Nativist Discussions, 64.
59. Li Zhuo 李拙, “Directions of the Development of Twentieth Century Taiwanese
Literature,” in Nativist Discussions, 126.
60. Zhang Zhongdong 張忠棟, “Native Soil, the People, and Strengthening Oneself,”
in Nativist Discussions, 496.
61. Peng Xiaoyan 彭小妍, “The Nativist Debate in 1970’s Taiwan,” in The Taiwan
Experience, vol. 2, 68–69.
62. Xiang Yang 向陽, “Opening the Map to Consciousness: A Look Back at
Post-War Taiwanese Literary and Broadcast Media Movements,” in Discussions
of Contemporary Taiwanese Political Literature 當代台灣政治文學論, Zheng Mingli
鄭明娳, ed. (Taipei: Times Publishing, 1994): 88.
63. Song Guangyu 宋光宇, “A Discussion of the Development of Religion in Taiwan
over the Last Forty Years,” in The Taiwan Experience, vol. 2, 194.
64. Ibid., 200.
65. Ibid., 175.
66. Ibid., 184.
67. Hsiao, Hsin-huang Michael, “Coexistence and Synthesis: Cultural Globalization
and Localization in Contemporary Taiwan,” in Many Globalizations: Cultural
Diversity in the Contemporary World, Peter Berger, Samuel Huntington, eds.
(London: Oxford University Press, 2002): 63.
68. Sung, 188–89.
69. Brown, 239.
70. I owe these insights not to myself, but to fellow Fulbright scholar Sansan Kwan,
who was doing research for her dissertation on Cloud Gate the same year I was
doing research on Hou Hsiao-hsien. Many thanks to her for introducing me
to a key component in the Taiwanese cultural puzzle. Any naive or ignorant
comments here about modern dance and Cloud Gate found here are totally
my own.
210 Notes to pages 27–35
71. Peggy Chiao 焦雄屏, interview by author, March 10, 2002, Middleton, Wisconsin.
72. Li Tianduo 李天鐸, Taiwanese Cinema, Society and History 台灣電影:社會與歷史
(Taipei: Yatai, 1997): 42–45.
73. Ibid., 60–61.
74. Ibid., 106; Lu, 35–37.
75. Huang Ren 黃仁, The Film Era of Union 聯邦電影時代 (hereafter cited as Union)
(Taipei: National Film Archives, 2001): 35–36.
76. Li Tianduo, 109; Lu, 64–66.
77. Lin Zanting 林贊庭, Cinematography in Taiwan 1945–1970: History and
Technical Development 台灣電影攝影技術發展概述 1945–1970 (Taipei: Cultural
Development Office, 2003): 37.
78. Peggy Chiao 焦雄屏, Generational Reflections 時代顯影 (Taipei: Yuanliu, 1998):
154.
79. Li Yongchuan 李泳泉, Taiwanese Cinema: An Illustrated History 台灣電影閱覽
(Taipei: Yushan, 1998): 17.
80. Huang Ren 黃仁, Film and Government Propaganda 電影與政治宣傳 (hereafter
cited as Government Propaganda) (Taipei: Wanxiang, 1994): 27.
81. Ibid., 8.
82. Ibid., 9.
83. Lu, 155.
84. Ibid., 163.
85. Liang Liang 梁良, Studies on the Three Chinese Cinemas 論兩岸三地電影 (Taipei:
Maolin, 1998): 133–34.
86. Lu, 76; Liang, 135.
87. Lu, 206.
88. Huang Zhuohan 黃卓漢, A Life in Cinema: Recollections by Huang Zhuohan 電影
人生:黃卓漢回憶錄 (Taipei: Wanxiang, 1994): 85–86.
89. Huang Ren, Union, 37–38; Lu, 77.
90. Lu, 79.
91. Ibid., 80.
92. Lin, 93.
93. Quoted in Wu Ling-chu (Sharon Wu), “Director Hsin Chi and the Golden Age
of Taiwanese Cinema,” Sinorama (February, 2001): 87–88.
94. Peggy Chiao 焦雄屏, Five Years That Changed History: A Study of the Grand Studio
改變歷史的五年:國聯電影研究 (hereafter cited as Grand) (Taipei: Wanxiang,
1993): 16–18.
95. Li Tianduo, 117.
96. Chiao, Grand, 18–19; Huang Ren, Union, 32; Liang, 19.
97. Lu, 120.
98. Huang Zhuohan, 121–22.
99. Chiao, Grand, 117–18.
100. Ibid., 57–59.
101. Huang Zhuohan, 154.
102. Liu Chenghan 劉成漢, Dianying fubixing ji 電影賦比興集 (Taipei: Yuanliu, 1992):
275. Liu notes that the 1976 International Film Guide grouped Hong Kong and
Taiwan together.
103. Stephen Teo, Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: BFI Publishing,
1997).
104. Lu, 113–14.
Notes to pages 35–47 211
105. Hou Hsiao-hsien 侯孝賢, interview by author, June 20, 2001, Sinomovie
Company Office, Taipei, Taiwan.
106. Ibid.
107. Ibid.
108. The title in Chinese literally translates as Intersection. From Hou’s own descrip-
tion of this film, it sounds like a British “Kitchen Sink” film. Nevertheless, Hou
has even discussed this with Tony Rayns and neither can figure out exactly
which film this is. (Interview with author, 2001.)
109. Hou, interview by author; Hou, interview by Emmanuel Burdeau in Hou
Hsiao-hsien 侯孝賢 (Chinese Edition of French Original by Cahiers du Cinéma)
(Taipei: Chinese Film Archive, 2000): 85.
110. Hou, interview by author; Burdeau, 85.
111. Ibid., 86.
112. Ibid., 89.
113. Lu, appendix 2a.
114. Ibid., 196–98.
115. Ibid., appendix 12.
116. Ibid., 137, 139.
117. Ibid., 189.
118. Ibid., 131.
119. Li Tianduo, 150–53.
120. Lu, 134.
121. Huang Ren, Government Propaganda, 176–77.
122. Ibid., 169.
123. Li Tianduo, 185.
124. Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, 2nd edition (London:
Starword, 1992): 265–66.
125. Ibid., 283. Salt, however, divides this up chronologically in a different manner
than I do here. From 1970 to 1975 he finds an average ASL of 7.0 for American
films, whereas from 1976–1981 it jumped up to 8.4 seconds.
126. David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000): 129–31.
127. Hou, interview by author.
128. Ibid.
129. Edmond Wong 黃建業, In Search of Humanist Films 人文電影的追尋 (Taipei:
Yuanliu, 1990): 61.
130. Hou, interview by Tony Rayns, Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 55, no. 653: 163–64.
131. Unfortunately the other three Chen films from this period are not currently
available in Taiwan, so these conclusions are tentative at best.
132. Hou, interview by author.
133. Kang Tianyi 康典穎, in Cinema in the Republic of China Yearbook, 1983 中華民國
七十二年電影年鑑 (Taipei: National Film Archives, 1983): 12.
134. Hou, interview by author.
135. Hou, interview by Rayns, 163–64.
136. Hou, interview by author.
137. Zhan Hongzhi 詹宏志, “The Past and Future of the New Cinema,” in
Peggy Chiao 焦雄屏, ed., The New Taiwanese Cinema 台灣新電影 (Taipei: China
Times Publications, 1988): 29.
138. Edmond Wong 黃建業, “A Look Back at the Cinema of 1983,” in Chen, 55.
212 Notes to pages 47–52
Chapter 2
1. Yeh Yueh-yu and Darrell Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005): 7. This book provides an excel-
lent overview of many directors and films not covered in this study, both
before, during and after the New Cinema, making it a must read.
2. Li Xiaofeng 李筱峰, The Hundred Biggest Incidents of Taiwanese History 台灣史
100 件大事, vol. 2 (Taipei, Yushan, 1999): 114–16.
3. Lin Bowen 林博文, “After the Death of a Professor,” in The Wild 80’s 狂飆八○,
Yang Ze 楊澤, ed. (Taipei: Times Publishing, 1999): 218; Xu Jielin 許介鱗, The
Post-War Historical Records of Taiwan 戰後台灣史記, vol. 3 (Taipei: Wenying Tang,
1996): 61.
4. Li, 125–27.
5. Ibid., 128–30.
6. Qi Gaoru 漆高儒, A Critical Biography of Chiang Ching-kuo 蔣經國評傳:我是台灣
人 (Taipei: Zhengzhong, 1997): 244.
7. Li Minghui 李明輝, “Confucianism and Kant in the Thought of Mo Zongsan,”
in The Taiwan Experience 台灣經驗, vol. 2, Song Guangyu 宋光宇, ed. (Taipei:
Tung Ta, 1994), 120.
8. Lin Yaode 林燿德, “Political Paths in the Labyrinth of the Novels: The Meaning
of 1980’s Taiwanese Political Novels and Related Issues,” in Discussions of
Contemporary Taiwanese Political Literature 當代台灣政治文學論, Zheng Mingli
鄭明娳, ed. (Taipei: Times Publishing, 1994): 163–79.
9. Chen Fanming 陳芳明, “Post-Modern or Post-Colonial?” in Writing Taiwan 書寫
台灣, Zhou Yingxiong 周英雄, Liu Jihui 劉紀蕙, eds. (Taipei: Maitian, 2000): 57.
10. Xu Shunying 許舜英, “From a Raven Tribe to a Generation of the Norway
Forest,” in The Wild 80’s, 97.
11. Ouyang Xuilei 歐陽水雷, “A Musical Pioneer — Luo Dalo,” in The Wild 80’s,
120–21.
12. Lin Manhong 林滿紅, “Taiwanese Capital and Economic Relations across the
Straits, 1895–1945,” in The Taiwan Experience, vol. 1: 67.
13. Zhan Hongzhi 詹宏志, “The World Has Only One Taiwan,” China Times 中國
時報, Saturday, February 17, 2001: 23.
14. Lu Feiyi 盧非易, Taiwanese Cinema: Politics, Economics, Aesthetics (1949–1994)
台灣電影:政治,經濟,美學,1949–1994 (Taipei: Yuanliu, 1998): 127–28.
15. Zhou Botang 卓伯棠, “Discussion of Chinese Films,” Influence 影響, #2 (February,
1972): 38–45.
16. Huang Chunming 黃春明, “Discussion of Execution of Autumn,” Influence 影響,
#3 (June, 1972): 61.
17. Dan Hanchang 但漢章, “Discussion of Execution in Autumn,” Influence 影響,
#3 (June, 1972): 54–55.
18. “Review of Story of a Small Town,” Influence 影響, #23 (April, 1979): 56.
19. Dan, 51.
20. Edmond Wong 黃建業, interview by author, May 3, 2001, Taipei, Taiwan.
Notes to pages 52–59 213
110. Alvin Lu, “Hou and Pop! Daughter of the Nile,” Cinemascope, 3 (Spring, 2000):
32–35.
111. Independent Evening News 自立晚報, July 29, 1987; United Daily News 聯合報,
July 30, 1987.
112. Chen Ruxiu, 47–52.
Chapter 3
1. Denny Roy, Taiwan: A Political History (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 2003): 20–21.
2. Melissa Brown, Is Taiwan Chinese? The Impact of Culture, Power, and Migration on
Changing Identities (Berkeley: California University Press, 2004): 43.
3. Ibid., 8.
4. Roy, 42.
5. Li Xiaofeng 李筱峰, The Hundred Biggest Incidents of Taiwanese History 台灣史
100 件大事, vol. 1 (Taipei: Yushan, 1999): 113–14.
6. Ibid., 127.
7. Ibid., 115–17.
8. Xu Jielin 許介鱗, The Post-War Historical Records of Taiwan 戰後台灣史記, vol. 1
(Taipei: Wenying, 1997): 1–3.
9. Ibid., 16–17.
10. Told by Li Weiguang 李偉光 in “Taiwan: A Tragic History,” (March 16, 1947),
New Historical Images of 228: Recently Unearthed Literature, Poems, Reports
and Critiques of the Incident 新二二八史像最新出土事件小說,詩,報導,評論,
Zeng Jianmin 曾建民, ed. (hereafter cited as New 228) (Taipei: Taiwan Social
Sciences, 2003): 306.
11. Zeng Jianmin 曾建民, “ For a Progressive Memorial,” in New 228, 8.
12. Ibid., 13–15.
13. Xiao Tie 蕭鐵, “Being in the Midst of the 228 Incident,” in The Truth about 228
二二八真相, Wang Xiaobo 王曉波, ed. (hereafter cited as 228 Truth) (Cross-Straits
Academic Publications, 2003): 75.
14. Zhi Zhi 致知, “Causes of Taiwanese ‘Riots,’” in New 228, 209.
15. Li Chunqing 李純青, “The Stone Ball in the Stone Lion: In Remembrance of the
Second Anniversary of the 228 Incident,” in New 228, 389.
16. Report on the 228 Incident 二二八事件研究報告, Lai Zohan 賴澤涵, chief ed. (here-
after cited as 228 Report) (Taipei: Times Publishing, 1994): 3–4.
17. Wang Xiaobo 王曉波, 228 Truth, 8.
18. George Kerr, Formosa Betrayed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965): 55.
19. 228 Report, 20.
20. Chen Cuilian 陳翠蓮, “The Contractions between the Economies of Greater China
and Lesser Taiwan,” in Collection of Studies on the 228 Incident 二二八事件研究論
文集, Zhang Yenxian 張炎憲, Chen Meirong 陳美蓉, Yang Yahui 楊雅慧, eds.
(Taipei: Wu Sanlien Foundation, 1998): 57–58.
21. 228 Report, 101.
22. Chen, 67.
23. Wang, 10.
24. New 228, 180.
Notes to pages 92–97 217
25. Lin Manhong 林滿紅, “Taiwanese Capital and Cross-Straits Trade (1895–1945),”
in The Taiwan Experience 台灣經驗, vol. 1, Song Guangyu 宋光宇, ed. (Taipei:
Tung Ta, 1994): 137.
26. He Hanwen 何漢文, “Preconditions for Taiwan’s 228 Incident,” in Collection
of Historical Materials for the 228 Incident 二二八事件資料集, Deng Kongzhao
鄧孔昭, ed. (hereafter cited as 228 Historical Materials) (Taipei-Banqiao: Daoxiang,
1991): 10.
27. Ibid., 16–18.
28. Ibid., 7–8.
29. Xu, 77.
30. He, 14.
31. 228 Report, 9.
32. New 228, 177–78.
33. Ibid., 304.
34. Wu Jingfu 吳敬敷, “Execute Chen Yi — Save Taiwan!” in 228 Truth, 148.
35. 228 Report, 54.
36. Kerr, 270.
37. 228 Report, 67–71; “A Statement by the Committee to Clarify the True Nature
of the Incident for Broadcast Networks in China and Abroad,” March 7, 1947,
in 228 Historical Materials, 271–77.
38. 228 Report, 71–72; Yi Shusheng 一書生, “How Taiwanese Speak of Taiwan,”
in 228 Truth, 267.
39. Tang Xianlong 唐賢龍, “An Inside Record of the Taiwan Incident,” in 228
Historical Materials, 94–95.
40. Xu, 88–89.
41. Kerr, 300–301.
42. Tang, 97–98.
43. 228 Report, 117–20.
44. Ibid., 222.
45. Qiu Niantai 丘念台, “My Sense of Shame Due to the 228 Incident,” in 228 Truth,
351–52.
46. 228 Report, 263.
47. Ibid., 315.
48. Roy, n. 35, 73.
49. Liao Jingui 寥錦桂, “How He Shot This Film,” Cinema in the Republic of China
Yearbook, 1990 中華民國七十久年電影年鑑 (hereafter 1990 Yearbook) (Taipei:
National Film Archives, 1990): 30.
50. Hou, quoted in interview with Michael Berry, Speaking in Images: Interviews with
Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005):
698.
51. Liao, 31.
52. Ibid., 32.
53. Minsheng Daily 民生報, September 6, 1989.
54. Independent Evening News 自立晚報, September 12, 1989.
55. Chu Ming-jen, Minsheng Daily 民生報, September 7, 1989.
56. United Daily News 聯合報, September 16, 1989; China Times 中國時報,
September 16, 1989.
57. Huang Ren, Minsheng Daily 民生報, January 4, 1989.
58. United Daily News 聯合報, August 23, 1989.
218 Notes to pages 97–103
88. Robert A. Rosenstone, “The Historical Film: Looking at the Past in a Postliterate
Age,” in Marcia Landy, ed., The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000): 50–66.
89. Li Tuo, “Narratives of History in the Cinematography of Hou Xizoxian,”
Positions, 1:3 (1993): 814.
90. Chu Tien-wen 朱天文 and Wu Nien-jen 吳念真, City of Sadness 悲情城市 (Taipei:
Yuanliu, 1989): 83–198.
91. Surprisingly, these numbers are a higher percentage than Dust in the Wind,
which had movements in less than 20% of its shots, as we saw in the last chapter,
and the main reason is because on the whole the camera is slightly closer in City
of Sadness than in Dust in the Wind.
92. Tony Rayns, “Beiqing Chengshi (A City of Sadness),” Monthly Film Bulletin,
vol. 57, no. 677 (June, 1990): 154.
93. Hou, quoted in Law Kar, “Director’s Note [Daughter of the Nile],” in The 12th
Hong Kong International Film Festival (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1988): 92.
94. Georgia Brown, “Island in the Mainstream,” Village Voice (April 25, 1989): 66.
95. David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005): 213.
96. Ibid., 225–27.
97. Ibid., 186–87.
98. Mi Zo 迷走, “Are Women Unable to Enter History?” in Death of a New Cinema,
135–40.
99. Berenice Reynaud, A City of Sadness (London: BFI, 2002): 83.
100. K. C. Chang, introduction to Food in Chinese Culture, K. C. Chang, ed. (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1977): 11.
101. E. N. Anderson, The Food of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988): 199.
102. Richard W. Hartzell, Harmony in Conflict: Active Adaptation in Present-Day
Chinese Society (Taipei: Caves Books, 1988): 12–13.
103. Hou, interview by author.
104. Once again, David Bordwell is the only scholar to have really tackled such issues
that most have overlooked. In his lengthy final chapter on staging in depth in his
On the History of Film Style, he discusses a large number of strategies that can be
used to direct attention and create a sense of depth, some of which Hou is using
here (brightness, centrality, frontality and increasing size). Bordwell shows how
this is a phenomenon to be found in a variety of cultural contexts, practices
dictated largely by the medium itself and mechanisms of human perception. See
David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1997): 158–271.
105. Hou, interview by author.
106. Xie Jinrong 謝金蓉, “Interview with Xu Xiaoming, Director of Dust of Angels,”
The Journalist 新新文, #19 (June 19, 1992): 20.
107. Roy, 193.
108. Edmond Wong 黃建業, “Youth of a Chaotic Generation, Statues of Dust” in
Cinema in the Republic of China Yearbook, 1993 中華民國八十二年電影年鑑 (Taipei:
National Film Archives, 1993): 13.
109. Wong, “A Look at the Future of Taiwanese Films from the Perspective of City of
Sadness,” 1990 Yearbook, 4.
220 Notes to pages 115–118
110. Huang Yingfen 黃櫻棻, “After the Mobile, Long Take: A Debate on the Aesthetic
Tendencies in Contemporary Taiwanese Cinema,” in Contemporary 當代, #116
(December, 1995): 78–83.
111. Lu Feiyi 盧非易, Taiwanese Cinema: Politics, Economics, Aesthetics (1949–1994)
台灣電影:政治,經濟,美學,1949–1994 (Taipei, Yuanliu, 1998): appendix 3,
chart a.
112. Huang Shikai 黃詩凱, “A Study on the Concentration Ratio of Taiwan’s Film
Market in the 1990s,” in Communication and Management Research 傳播與管理
研究, vol. 2, no. 2 (January, 2003): 161.
113. Hou Hsiao-hsien 侯孝賢, quoted in roundtable discussion, “Literary Film,
Film Literature,” Xu Xiuling 徐秀玲, ed., 1990 Yearbook, 113; Xie Renchang
謝仁昌, “A Report on My Life: Hou Hsiao-hsien Discusses The Puppetmaster,”
Film Appreciation 電影欣賞, no. 64 (July/August, 1993): 46.
114. Peggy Chiao, “History’s Subtle Shadows: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Puppetmaster”
(interview with Hou included), Cinemaya, 21 (Autumn, 1993): 6–7.
115. Hou, interview by author.
116. “1993 Statistics for the Taipei Box Office,” in Cinema in the Republic of China
Yearbook, 1994 中華民國八十三年電影年鑑 (Taipei: National Film Archives, 1994):
266.
117. Independent Evening News 自立晚報, June 15, 1993: 20.
118. Shigehiko Hasumi 蓮實重彥, “Archeological Unconscious: A Discussion of City
of Sadness,” Zhang Changyan 張昌彥, trans., in Film Appreciation 電影欣賞, no. 73
(January/February, 1995): 87.
119. J. Hoberman, “Chinese Connection,” Village Voice (October 12, 1993): 50.
120. Independent Evening News 自立晚報, June 13, 1993: 15.
121. Hoberman, 50.
122. Li Tianlu 李天祿, quoted in The Puppetmaster: An Oral Record of the Memories of
Li Tianlu〔戲夢人生〕李天祿回憶錄, Zeng Yuwen 曾郁雯, ed. (Taipei: Yuanliu,
1991): 31.
123. Ibid., 77.
124. Chen Zhengzhi 陳正之, Taiwan’s Traditional Puppetry 掌中功名:台灣的傳統偶戲
(Taichung: Taiwan Provincial Government Publications, 1991): 253.
125. Li Tianlu, 99.
126. Ibid., 97.
127. Ibid., 118–19.
128. Chen, 193.
129. Ibid., 254–55.
130. Liu Huanyue 劉還月, Taiwanese Hand Puppetry 風華絕代掌中藝:台灣的布袋戲
(Taipei: Tai Yuen, 1990): 130–31.
131. Chen Zhengzhi, 250.
132. Li Tianlu, 230–33.
133. Ibid., 251.
134. Ibid., 252.
135. Ibid., 268.
136. Hou, interview in ibid., 298.
137. Li Tianlu in ibid., 253.
138. Lu Tonglin, Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 109–15.
139. Chen Zhengzhi, 183.
Notes to pages 118–134 221
Chapter 4
1. Chu Tien-wen 朱天文, Good Men, Good Women 好男好女 (Taipei: Maitian, 1995): 8.
2. Ibid., 17–18.
3. Fuyoko Kamisaka 上坂冬子, The President in the Mouth of a Tiger: Li Denghui and
Zeng Wenhui 虎口的總統:李登輝與曾文惠, Luo Wensen 駱文森, Yang Mingzhu
楊明珠, trans. (Taipei: Prophet Press, 2001): 111.
4. Ibid., 243–44.
5. Denny Roy, Taiwan: A Political History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003):
202–9.
6. Li Xiaofeng 李筱峰, The Hundred Biggest Incidents of Taiwanese History 台灣史
100 件大事, vol. 2 (Taipei: Yushan, 1999): 160.
7. Huang Shikai 黃詩凱, “A Study on the Concentration Ratio of Taiwan’s Film
Market in the 1990s,” Communication and Management Research 傳播與管理研究,
vol. 2, no. 2 (January, 2003): 161.
8. Wang Qinghua 王清華, “Distribution Situation for Foreign Films and Guopian
in 1998,” in Cinema in the Republic of China Yearbook, 1999 中華民國八十八年電影
年鑑 (Taipei: National Film Archives, 1999): 61; “Box Office Statistics for Guopian
in Taipei Area in 1998,” in 1999 Yearbook, 65–69.
9. Yang Yiping 楊翌平, “The Interconnections between the Assistance and Guidance
Grant and Guopian,” Dacheng Bao 大成報, September 16, 1998: 4.
10. Wang, 63.
11. Quoted in United Daily News 聯合報, July 21, 1998: 26.
222 Notes to pages 134–143
71. “Hou Hsiao-hsien and the Question of a Chinese Style,” Asian Cinema, vol. 13,
no. 2 (Fall/Winter, 2002): 54–75; Chinese Translation in Film Appreciation 電影欣
賞季刊 (Taipei, Taiwan), no. 124 (June–September, 2005): 44–53.
72. See David Bordwell’s enlightening discussion of Hitchcock’s use of the long take
in Poetics of Cinema (London: Routledge, 2008): 32–43.
73. 游.
74. Lin Niantong 林年同, Chinese Film Aesthetics 中國電影美學 (Taipei: Yunzhen,
1991): 41–49.
75. Douglas Wilkerson, “Film and the Visual Arts in China: Introduction,” in
Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and
Japan, Linda Ehrlich, David Desser, eds. (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1994): 41; Hao Dazheng, “Chinese Visual Representation: Painting and
Cinema,” in Cinematic Landscapes, 52; Ni Zhen, “Classical Chinese Painting
and Cinematographic Signification,” in Cinematic Landscapes, 73.
76. Chris Berry and Mary Ann Farquhar, “Post-Socialist Strategies: An Analysis of
Yellow Earth and Black Cannon Incident,” in Cinematic Landscapes, 85–86; An Jingfu,
“The Pain of a Half Taoist: Taoist Principles, Chinese Landscape, and King of the
Children,” in Cinematic Landscapes, 122.
77. Ni, 69.
78. Hao, 47, 54.
79. Chu, Celeste Reve, 75.
80. Meng Hungfeng 孟洪峰, “A Discussion of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Style,” in Passionate
Detachment: Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien 戲戀人生:侯孝賢電影研究, Lin Wenchi
林文淇, Shen Xiaoying 沈曉茵, Jerome Zhenya Lim 李振亞, eds. (Taipei: Maitian,
2000): 43–45.
81. Berenice Reynaud, A City of Sadness (London: BFI, 2002): 79.
Chapter 5
1. For a more complete discussion see James Udden, “The Stubborn Persistence
of the Local in Wong Kar-wai,” Post Script, vol. 25, no. 2 (Winter/Spring, 2006):
67–79, and chapter 9 in David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and
the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
2. Evelyn Chiang, “Chen’s Approval Rating Drops to Record Low, TSU Poll
Shows,” Taiwan News, May 17, 2006.
3. Gao Yozhi 高有智, “Hou Hsiao-hsien: ‘Tearing Apart Ethnic Groups Summons
Invalidated Ballots,’” China Times 中國時報, January 12, 2004: A6.
4. Hou Hsiao-hsien, quoted in “Hou Hsiao-hsien, Chu Tian-hsin, Tang Nuo,
Hsia Chu-joe: Tensions in Taiwan,” New Left Review, 28 (July/August, 2004): 20.
5. Xu Guogan 徐國淦, Ge Dawei 葛大維, “Hou Hsiao-hsien: ‘Political Parties
Should Be Constantly Changed in Order to Pressure the System,” United Daily
News 聯合報, February 16, 2004: A15.
6. Zhang Shida 張士達, Gao Yozhi 高有智, “Let Them Ridicule and Revile as They
Like,” China Times 中國時報, February 19, 2004: A2.
7. Xiang Yifei 項貽斐, “Hou Hsiao-hsien: ‘I’ll Send Wu Nairen City of Sadness,’”
United Daily News 聯合報, February 19, 2004: A4.
8. Tang Zaiyang 唐在揚, “Saving Guopian by Providing a Golden Goose,” United
Evening News 聯合晚報, December 20, 2003: 15.
Notes to pages 169–178 225
35. Andre Bazin, “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” in Hugh Gray, ed.
and trans., What Is Cinema?, vol. 1 (Berkeley: California University Press, 1967):
45–48.
36. Hoberman, 53.
37. Hou, interview by Xie Renchang 謝仁昌,“A Report on My Life: Hou Hsiao-hsien
Discusses, The Puppetmaster,”Film Appreciation 電影欣賞, #64 (July/August,
1993): 56.
Updated Conclusion
1. Richard Suchenski, ed., Hou Hsiao-hsien (Vienna: Österreichisches Filmmuseum:
SYNEMA – Gesellschaft für Film und Medien, 2014).
2. Stephen Cremin, “Hou’s Assassin Stops Production (Again),” July 31, 2013,
http://www.filmbiz.asia/news/hous-assassin-stops-production-again
(accessed June 27, 2015).
3. Hong Wen 洪文, “Taiwanese Cinema Has Waited 14 Years! May Hou Hsiao-hsien’s
The Assasin Bring back a Prize from Cannes,” ETtoday 東森新聞雲, April 16, 2015,
http://www.ettoday.net/news/20150416/493936.htm (accessed June 27, 2015).
4. Ali Nour-Mousavi, “Judgement Kiarostami Style: An Interview with Abbas
Kiarostami on Judging Films at International Festivals,” Film International 15,
no. 60 (Autumn & Winter, 2009–2010): 104–5.
5. Didier Peron, “The Assassin, sabres emouvants,” Liberation, May 22, 2015: 14.
6. Guy Lodge and Justin Chang, “Cannes: Will ‘The Assasin’ Slay the Competition?”
Variety, May 23, 2015, http://variety.com/2015/film/news/cannes-film-festi-
val-palme-dor-predictions-1201504140/ (accessed June 27, 2015).
7. http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/archives/juryLongFilm.html
8. Charlotte Pavard, “INTERVIEW—Jake Gyllenhaal: ‘It’s the Story that Counts’,”
Festival de Cannes, May 24, 2015, http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/theDaily
Article/61994.html (accessed June 27, 2015).
9. Aliza Ma, “Killer Technique,” Film Comment (September–October, 2015): 28–29.
10. Hou Hsiao-hsien, interview, “Basically You Need Limits before You Can Resist,”
BIOS Monthly 光陰的故事, August 3, 2015, http://www.biosmonthly.com/
contactd.php?id=6324 (accessed August 29, 2015).
11. Hou, interview by author, December 11, 2012, Taipei, Taiwan, CMPC Studio;
Chu Tien-wen, interview by author, December 11, 2012, Taipei, Taiwan, CMPC
Studio; Peggy Chiao, interview by author, December 10, 2012, Taipei, Taiwan;
Winston Lee, 李天礢, interview by author, December 4, 2012, Taipei, Taiwan.
12. Marco Mueller, interview by author, February 17, 2011, Berlin, Germany,
Berlinale.
13. Alain Jalladeau, interview by author, November 23, 2012, Nantes, France,
Festival des 3 Continents.
14. Jacob Kastrenakes, “Movie Theaters in China Are Beating the US for the First Time
Ever,” The Verge, March 2, 2015, http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/2/8133813/
china-box-office-beats-us-first-time (accessed July 16, 2015).
15. Stephen Cremin, “Taiwan Cinema: North or South?” Film Business Asia,
March 20, 2013, http://www.filmbiz.asia/news/taiwan-cinema-north-or-south
(accessed June 27, 2015).
Notes to pages 191–199 227
16. Yin Junjie 尹俊傑, “The Assassin: Hou Hsiao-hsien Hopes Millions Will See It in
the Mainland,” CNA News 中央社新聞網, June 16, 2015, http://www.cna.com.
tw/news/acn/201506160387-1.aspx (accessed June 27, 2015).
17. Pi Kebang 痞客邦, “Hou Hsiao-hsien’s ‘Psychological Wuxia’ Film Receives Best
Director Prize at Cannes,” 4Cbook 元點文創, May 25, 2015, http://wang4cbook.
pixnet.net/blog/post/277855429- (accessed June 27, 2015).
18. Hou Hsiao-hsien, “Cannes 2015 — The Assassin by HOU Hsiao Hsien (Press
Conference).” YouTube. May 21, 2015.
19. Box Office Mojo, The Assassin (2015), http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/
?page=intl&id=theassassin.htm (accessed June 2, 2016).
20. Ma, 33.
21. Xie Haimeng 謝海盟, The Assassin: Xing yun ji 刺客聶隱娘:行雲紀 (Taipei: INK,
2015): 136–37.
22. Ma, 29.
23. Hou Jiran 侯季然, “Finding More Limits for Myself,” INK Literary Monthly 印刻
文學生活誌 no. 143 (July, 2015): 153.
24. Xie Xinying 謝欣穎, “Xie Xinying Talks The Assassin: Huji Has Only Two Lines,
but This Was the Most Difficult Role,” Womany 女人迷, August 29, 2015, http://
womany.net/read/article/8316?utm_expid=39413488-2.V1WWANj6THavp
VxAtmYb1Q.0&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F
(accessed September 15, 2015).
25. Huang Wenying 黃文英, Tang fengshang 唐風尚 (Taipei: INK, 2015): 39.
26. Ibid., 263.
27. Tu Duu-chih, “A New Era of Sound,” in Suchenski, 222.
28. Mark Lee, “Exploring Visual Ideas,” in Suchenski, 209.
29. Liao Ching-sung, “Finding the Right Balance,” in Suchenski, 216.
30. Pascale Wei-Guinot, “HHH ou la ‘distance adequate’,” INK 143: 187.
31. Xie, 144.
32. Ibid., 172–73.
33. Ibid., 118.
34. Ibid., 95.
35. Ibid., 88–89.
36. Ibid., 272.
37. Ibid., 213–14.
38. Pi Kebang.
39. Huang, 6.
40. Xie Haimeng, 250–51.
41. Ibid., 101.
42. Xie Xinying.
43. Chu Tien-wen, “Looking up at the Editing Table,” INK 143: 86.
44. Chu, interview by Olivier Assayas, “Master Class Hou Hsiao-hsien,” May 27,
2015. Brussels, Belgium.
45. Zhang Shida 張士達, “With Back to the Audience, a Hidden Blade Stops Killing,”
INK 143: 174.
46. Xie Haimeng, 126–27.
47. Emery, “A Historical Perspective on the Film: Explaining Nie Yinniang,” Parts 1
and 2, 故事, http://gushi.tw/archives/14452 & http://gushi.tw/archives/14746
(accessed October 10, 2015).
228 Notes to pages 200–204
48. Steven Zeitchik, “Why Hou Hsiao-hsien Made ‘The Assassin’ So Elliptical,”
L.A. Times, May 26, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/
moviesnow/la-et-mn-hou-hsiao-hsien-the-assassin-cannes-movie-20150526-
story.html (accessed June 27, 2015).
49. Yang Zhao 楊照, “Conversation with Hou Hsiao-hsien and Xie Haimeng,” INK
143: 40.
50. Ibid., 37.
51. Shu Qi 舒淇, Cannes Press Conference.
52. Ding Mingqing 丁名慶, “‘Present but Not Visible’ Vision: An Interview with
Mark Lee,” INK 143: 150.
53. Ibid., 151.
54. Xie Haimeng, 65–68.
55. Xie Zhongqi 謝仲其, “The Sounds of Cultural Origins and Passages: An
Interview with Lim Giong,” INK 143: 162.
No Man an Island
Udden, James
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Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, HKU, 2018.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
Udden, James.
No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Second Edition.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, HKU, 2018.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
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Zeng Yuwen 曾鬱雯, ed. The Puppetmaster: An Oral Record of the Memories of Li Tianlu
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1998.
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Maitian, 2000.
Udden, James.
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Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
Qing dynasty, 13, 14–15, 60, 88, 89, 118, Taipei, My Love, 41
145 Taipei Story, 58, 66, 71, 125
Qiong Yao, 35, 37, 39, 41–42, 171–72 Taiwanese Experience, 9, 12, 17, 20, 56,
Qiu Fusheng, 84, 96, 98 57, 63, 76, 78, 82, 87, 90, 140, 142, 163,
164, 165, 172, 185
Raise the Red Lantern, 114 Taiwanese New Cinema, 9, 10, 12, 22,
Rayns, Tony, 106, 150 32, 45, 47, 49–55, 56, 58, 59, 65, 66,
Reis, Michelle, 147 70, 71, 72, 74, 76, 78, 82, 83, 84, 85,
Renoir, Jean, 78, 178, 179 87, 100, 116, 132, 140, 160, 165, 175,
Republic of China (ROC), 18, 19, 20, 22, 176, 190
28, 29, 30, 31, 36, 37, 50, 51, 76, 77, 96, Tang dynasty, 5, 6, 188, 189, 193, 194,
97, 117, 134, 166, 167 195, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203
Reunion, 70, 74, 87 Tao Hungyi, 193
Reynaud, Berenice, 109, 162 Taoism (Daoism), 5–6, 26, 27, 59, 199
Rhythm of the Wave, 41 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 182
Riding a Wave, 45 Teacher of Great Soldiers, 41
The Ripening, 40 The Terrorizers, 70, 76, 77, 125
The Road, 34–35, 44 Tesson, Charles, 80
Rosenstone, Robert A., 103 Tian Xia (company), 65
Ruan Ji, 6 That Day, on the Beach, 65
Runaway, 70 Theatre (journal), 51
“Three Principles of the People,” 23,
Salt, Barry, 39 93–94
The Sandwich Man. See “Hou Three Times. See “Hou Hsiao-hsien”
Hsiao-hsien” A Time to Live, A Time to Die. See “Hou
Shaw Brothers, 32–33 Hsiao-hsien”
Shen Congwen, 10, 59–61, 65, 70, 119, Together Forever, 30
130, 137, 165, 179 Touch of Zen, 34, 39, 202
Shen Xiaoying, 122 Tsai Ming-liang, 23, 85, 115, 134, 183
Sheu Fang-yi, 199 Tsui Hark, 53
Shimonoseki, Treaty of, 14–15
Shochiku, 135, 142, 147, 173 Union (Lian Bang), 32, 33, 35, 36
Shou Yuming, 99
Shu Kei, 96 waishengren (mainlanders in Taiwan
Shu Qi, 172, 175, 176, 196, 202 post-1945), 16, 17, 27, 57, 90, 165,
Sinomovie, 58, 147, 170 168
Six Is Company, 45 Waking from a Nightmare, 30
Soong, James, 53–54, 55, 168 Wan Ren, 55–57, 58
The Source, 38 Wang Tong, 65, 114, 115, 118
Spring in a Small Town, 159, 160 Wang Xizhi, 6
Story of a Small Town, 41, 51–52 Wannianqing (company), 65–66, 84
Straub, Jean-Marie, and Huillet, Daniele, Weerasethakul, Apitchatpong, 182–83
120 Wei-guinot, Pascale, 194
A Student’s Love, 41 Welles, Orson, 178
Su Shi, 7 Wen Xing (journal), 25
Index 247