5 . 8 3 The Puppetmaster: as the officer asks about the 5 .

84 But when the officer must decide whether to

matter, a foreground figure blocks him, stressing prosecute, he shifts slightly into visibility, commanding
the boy and his father. our notice.

5 . 8 5 In the shot's finale he claps the boy on the

shoulder and sighs, his expression no longer visible
but his arm near frame center.

Discussing his love of deep space, Hou told a French critic in 1 9 9 0 : " I've always liked
an action which hides itself-or better, an action which reveals another action."5° Com­
pared to his mid-r98os New Cinema films, the trilogy revels in oblique and uncommu­
nicative images. A cafe conversation in Good Men, Good Women seats the central charac­
ter away from us, the booth shows only the top of her head, and that in turn blocks one
of the two men with whom she talks. Only when she turns her head slightly does the sec­
ond man's face briefly become visible. The image recasts the sort of schema we exam­
ined at the beginning of the chapter, where Hou solved the dinner-table problem by hav­
ing diners shift their position in the near plane; yet this taciturn shot makes that one seem
transparent. In The Puppetmaster Li's son is brought into the Japanese officers' head­
quarters, accused of selling fish harvested from the river. The interrogation is handled
through minute shifts masking the officer's reaction and highlighting his gesture of pat­
ting the boy's shoulder (Figs. 5 . 83-5. 8 5 ) . An action revealing another action: the phrase
encapsulates Hou's use of the thinnest slices of space and just-noticeable differences within
broad, crowded telephoto compositions .
City ofSadness harnesses all these tactics t o the most complex plot in all o f Hou's work.
The story of the Lin family unfolds with the major historical events taking place offscreen,
most significantly the 2-28 incident of 1947-a series of riots sparked by the killing of

224 H 0 U, 0 R C0 N STRA I NTS

a woman who sold smuggled cigarettes. The Nationalist army put the insurgence down
brutally, following a massacre with a string of executions; a 1952 report admitted that be­
tween eighteen thousand and twenty-eight thousand Taiwanese were killed. The fact that
Hou did not explicitly show the KMT's violence was counted against him in a polemical
1991 collection of critical articles, Death ofthe New Cinema. He was taken to task for avoid­
ing political criticism in favor of more "universal" concerns like romance and family con­
tinuity. 51 The charge has been rebutted by Lin Wen-chi, who suggests that the film often
treats the KMT dream of recapturing China as a myth.52 At the same time, fastened on
the concrete, Hou traces how political change reverberates through everyday life. City of
Sadness registers the fluctuating routines and tensions within a family with ties to Tai­
wan (the Lins' restaurant business a�d imbrication with local gangs) , to the mainland
(where the Shanghai gangsters are based) , and to Japan. Lin Wen-ching's friends Hinoe
and Hinomi are close friends with the Japanese girl Shizuko, who must return to Japan
at the end of the war and in a moving scene leaves them several keepsakes. Whereas An­
gelopoulos would create an austere, abstract spectacle out of a KMT firing squad, Hou
keeps us within the cell that the deaf-mute Wen-ching shares with other prisoners . Sev­
eral men are hustled out to be shot; in one of the film's most celebrated moments, Wen­
ching doesn't react to the offscreen fusillade because, of course, he can't hear it. This,
one might say, is how people experience history.
The film's first scene opposes the thinness of official pronouncement to the textures
of ordinary existence. As a radio transmits Hirohito's announcement of surrender (in a
formal language no average Japanese or Taiwanese could comprehend) , Wen-heung's mis­
tress gives birth to a child. He lights joss sticks at the family altar and drinks tea. The
scene is packed with details and bits of sound rising out of the darkness. The emperor's
stiff declaration is interwoven with the cries of the mistress, the midwife urging her to
rest, the advice of female relatives, various household sounds, and a plaintive, percussive
synthesizer melody. " It's a boy, " a voice declares. It is, of course, easy to read this sym­
bolically-the nation of Taiwan is reborn after decades of colonialism-but symbolic
meanings seem secondary to the textural density of the moment. For the Lins the birth
is at least as big a turning point as the surrender. History is writ both large and small.
One way to register the concrete changes that history brings is by returning to images
of a locale we have seen before. The iteration of compositions across a film is a common
strategy of long-take directors (see Figs. 3 .72-3 -81), and Hou has recourse to it in A Time
to Live (in the kitchen, at the father's desk, the house viewed from the garden) and Dust
in the Wind (recurring framings of the village street winding down from the family's
house) . No Hou film uses such scene clusters more scrupulously than City of Sadness.
The hospital and an area in the depths of the restaurant become recurring locales, filmed
from quite similar positions each time. Perhaps the most prominent iterated framing
involves the dining vestibule in front of the altar room. In the second scene our intro­
duction to the New Shanghai restaurant comes through this magisterial setup, with the
Lin family moving through the crisscrossed planes of the shot (Fig. 5.86) . Later, variants

H O U , O R CONSTRAI NTS 225

5 . 8 6 City of Sadness: the "christening" camera position 5 . 8 7 Hinomi has now moved in to help care for Wen­
for the Lin household. leung, the half-mad brother.

5 . 8 8 A teacher arrives to help get Wen-heung released 5 . 8 9 Hinomi stops snapping beans while Wen-ching
from jail. tells her, by scribbling notes on his pad, that she is
unlikely to see her brother again.

5. 9 o The wedding of Hinomi and Wen-ching. 5 . 9 1 Our last view of the family: Grandfather Lin
and Wen-leung are the only men surviving.

of this camera position will register stages of the family's changing fortunes (Figs _
5.87-5.91) . Hou, like Mizoguchi in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, recycles a cam­
era setup to provide just-noticeable differences in setting or character presence, calling
forth from us a spatial memory of the Lins' home, the hospital, and other locales, evok­
ing lived history through the ways in which a constant space shelters lived change.
H ou soaks the particular and personal into these fixed spaces through another strat­
egy, one more allied to editing. He will define a locale as dominated by political debate
or action and then carve out of that a pocket of more intimate action. Thus the rebel

226 H O U , OR C O N S T RA I NTS
camp to which Hinoe has retreated is first shown in an ensemble shot, with anonymous
comrades flanking Wen-ching and Hinoe for their reunion. A subsequent cut-in to the
two friends eliminates one extra man, finding the personal within the political while
also not losing sight of Hinoe's mission: one of his comrades remains quietly, almost
indiscernibly, in the shot. This would seem to echo an earlier scene during which Hi­
noe and his fellow intellectuals met at Wen-ching's home, and a discreet cut underscores
the friendship emerging between Hinoe's sister, Hinomi, and Wen-ching, while the po­
litical discussion murmurs offscreen. Often Hou saves his cuts in order to highlight such
moments of intimacy within more impersonal-he might say, more "objective" -scenes.
By contrast, the sustained long shot, or a cut backward to a broader view, can evoke a
sense of the largest possible context. This principle governs the vast landscape shots
that bracket phases of narrative action. They often serve to swallow up people's petty
concerns in a larger rhythm of stability. H ou has remarked that he made the landscape
shots in the final phase of production, since he felt the need to counterbalance so many
interior long takes.5 3
As he would again in The Puppetmaster and Good Men, Good Women, Hou bathes many
of the most important scenes in darkness. The first sequence, the birth of Wen-heung's
son, makes the film's commitment to chiaroscuro evident. In a pitch- dark set yielding
soft silhouettes and few highlights, Wen-heung lights joss sticks and then a cigarette; at
the end of the emperor's surrender notice the bare hanging bulb bursts on. A title tells
us that the son will be named "Light" (another parallel to Taiwan as a whole, which is
sometimes called the "island of light" ) . Thereafter, as opposed to the flatly lit hospital
and the overcast skies, many interiors are plunged in gloom. Perhaps most strikingly,
when the police tramp into the New Shanghai looking for Wen-heung, a variant on the
principal camera angle in the Lin household shows us old Lin challenging the officers
in a silhouetted foreground. Meanwhile the police search for Wen-heung in a deep cor­
ridor on the very left edge of the frame, and as distant figures plunge through the pas­
sageway, the "main" characters standing in the foreground realize Milton's oxymoron of
"darkness visible" (Plates 5 . 5-5 . 6 ) . Color film finds one justification in this palpably tex­
tured blackness.
The play of small differences is evident in Hou's minute adjustments of actors' posi­
tions across a scene's development. Often it is a matter of setting and lighting that masks
off everything but a key gesture, as when Wen-leung returns to the family after his stay
in prison; the dining room wall allows us to see only Wen-heung calling out to the fam­
ily on the far right (Fig. 5 . 9 2 ) . The death of Wen-heung, shot during a quarrel with the
Shanghai gang, is rendered at a distance, glimpsed in semidarkness and partly blocked
by the angle of the corridor (Fig. 5 . 93 ) . In the rebel camp the Taiwanese woman whom
Hinoe has taken as a wife hesitates to approach him and Wen-ching; almost too neatly,
she pauses in the crook of a tree ( Fig. 5 . 94) . Most characteristically, it is other actors who
block and reveal key information. Important as Wen-ching's nonreaction to offscreen
gunfire is, ·Hou subtly prepares for it by having him bid farewell to his fellow prisoners

H O U , O R C O N STRAI NTS 227

5 . 9 2 Wen-heung, bringing back his ill brother, is seen 5.93 Wen-heung shot by the Shanghai gang.
far on the right, framed in a windowpane.

5 . 9 4 In the partisans' camp Hinoe's wife pauses

in a tree branch as he talks with Wen-ching.

in a quiet clearing of the foreground. In the same way, the all-important little notepad,
on which Wen-ching must write to others , is not made visible until it is needed, and the
intellectuals visiting must unobtrusively step aside to reveal it.
If Hou's New Cinema works sometimes evoke Ozu, his trilogy edges closer to Mi­
zoguchi in the articulation of minute shifts of character position. Yet Hou's affinity for
telephoto lenses and the widescreen format yields a more striated space than Mizoguchi
affords. The Hou prototype is the long-lens shot of several people sitting around a table,
with layers of foreground heads shifting slightly to highlight this or that player. He uses
this device intermittently in earlier films, for example when the gamblers are stirred up
by the arrival of Ah-Hsiads gang in A Time to Live, a Time to Die. By City of Sadness this
schema will activate all areas of the screen, since important characters need not face us
but also may be placed in profile on the far left or far right, as in Fig. 5 . 9 5 .
City of Sadness offers a remarkable visual variety (and not just because of its nearly
three-hour running time) , so any generalization about its style is likely to be a half-truth.
For instance, Wen-leung, angered at the sight of Red Monkey's mistress consorting with
her lover's killers , ignites a fistfight, and the slow lead-up to this is handled in diagonal
shifts and slender apertures reminiscent of Mizoguchi (Figs. 5 . 95-5 . 9 6 ) .54 As elsewhere
in Hou, a simple sustained medium long shot of a few figures reacting to a situation needs
no fancy detailed blocking ( Fig. 5 . 6 6 ) . This scrupulously realized film (down to the at­
tachable sleeves Wen-ching uses when touching up negatives) shows Hou at the height

228 H O U , OR C O N S T R A I N T S
5 . 9 5 Wen-leung stares at Red Monkey's old girlfriend, 5 . 9 6 As Wen-leung continues to harass her, the thug
now hanging around with the Shanghai gang. Hou on the right of Fig. 5.95 rises to push him away.
teases us in the Mizoguchi manner by having her face
slide out from behind the pillar.

of his powers . If only because meal scenes always tax his energies, it's worth noting one
session that parallels the intellectuals' meeting we considered at the very start of this chap­
ter (Figs. 5 .1- 5.4) .
Wen-leung, in a period of lucidity, is fraternizing with the Shanghai gang, in the same
restaurant where we had seen the intellectuals. One goal of the mise- en-scene is to de­
lineate a two-step strategy: the young gangster will gain Wen-leung's confidence, and then
his father will intervene to suggest that Wen-leung use his brother Wen-heung's shipping
business to import drugs. The scene also introduces Red Monkey, a hanger-on who will
be suspected of leaking the plan, and it characterizes Ah-ga, who works for Wen-heung
but who is prepared to join the drug-smuggling conspiracy. Wen-leung and Ah-ga sit on
center right, the Shanghai gang center left. Hou starts the scene by picking out the core
interaction in crowded telephoto medium shots (Figs. 5.97-5 .98). In the establishing shot
the men toast one another, with the configuration of diners masking the gangster patri­
arch and highlighting his son (Fig. 5 . 9 9 ) . The conviviality will halt when Red Monkey
brings in more women and the patriarch explodes in anger. This begins the intimidation
of Wen-leung, which will draw him into an alliance with the gang (Figs. 5.100-5.103) .
Here no window opens out onto the nation; the gang's plotting remains tightly enclosed.
Within a cramped space Hou works yet another variant on his characteristic solution to
the dinner-table problem, letting the patriardrs face pop abruptly into a tiny slot (Fig. 5.103).
Yet it is also characteristic of Hou that dramatic turning points develop around meals,
not only a spatially dense arena for drama but also a deeply meaningful ritual of com­
munity in Chinese culture. In The Puppetmaster, reflecting on the death of his son, Li re­
marks : "That's fate. He wouldn't eat with us. So he's gone. What can we do about it ? "
The Puppetmaster's Special Jury Award a t Cannes i n 1 9 94 was to b e H ou's last maj or
prize in the 1 9 9 0 s . He was now on his own. He had developed powerful enemies in the
local film establishment, who made sure that City of Sadness won no major awards at
the Golden Horse Festival. Audiences now avoided his work; Good Men, Good Women
earned only U S $3 5 , o o o at the box office. Critics, however, kept his reputation alive, de-

H O U , O R C O N ST RA I N TS 229
5 . 9 7 Wen-leung, now momentarily sane, sits at the 5 . 9 8 In an answering framing they offer friendship.
table with the Shanghai gangsters in a dense long-lens
medium shot.

5. 9 9 An axial cutback yields the master shot, which 5 . 1 oo After the toast Red Monkey brings in a new
will define the next phase of the scene. batch of bargirls on the far right.

bating whether his films constituted valid ways of representing national politics and his­
tory. To sustain himself, Hou directed Japanese television commercials and sold his films
abroad. By now the Taiwanese industry had withered. Hong Kong films had conquered
the market, and local production dropped to fewer than twenty titles per year. More em­
barrassingly, Hong Kong films routinely won the maj or Golden Horse prizes. Once im­
port quotas were lifted, Hollywood films poured in, eventually swamping the Hong Kong
product.
The government tried to stimulate production, mounting subsidies and negotiating
coproductions . The CMPC funded films by Ang Lee, Tsai Ming-hang, and other young
talents. Although local audiences liked Lee's films, government planners recognized that
the real market lay abroad. Soon festival recognition arrived, with Lee's Eat Drink Man
Woman (19 93) and Tsai's Vive l'amour (1994) and The River (19 97) winning maj or prizes.
Hou was becoming an elder statesman, producing films by his protege Hsu H siao-ming
(Dust ofAngels, 1992; Treasure Island, 1995) and establishing a postproduction facility that
allowed filmmakers to record direct sound.
Tsai and less prominent filmmakers were strongly influenced by Hou. If the long take
had been an identifying tag for the New Taiwanese Cinema of the 1980s, it became vir-

230 H O U , OR C O N S T R A I N T S
5 . 1 0 1 As the women take vacant seats around the 5 . 1 02
• .the gangster patriarch's face jerks into a slot
•

table . . . left of center, framed by two other faces. His voice rings
out: "What is this? We're talking business here!"

5 . l 0 3 Ah-ga, on the far right, asks one woman to

come sit next to him, but now the rest of the scene will
concentrate on the old man's pressure on Wen-leung,
just right of center.

tually a national brand in the 1990s. Filmmakers seemed to compete in creating unmoving
single-shot scenes lasting many minutes.55 In Tsai's first feature, Rebels of the Neon God
(1992), a scene in a video parlor makes use of simple but effective blocking and reveal­
ing (Figs. 5.ro4-5.105), and his later films explore a more spare use of depth and dark­
ness, particularly favoring the medium-shot scale. Hou's collaborator Wu Nian-jen made
sparse, evocative use of such devices in A Borrowed Life (1994; Fig. p o 6 ) .
This style spread t o other parts o f the Pacific, making "Asian minimalism" something
of a festival cliche by the end of the 1990s. Korean films by H ong Sang-soo (the director
of the drinking scene analyzed in chapter l ) and Lee Kwang-mo (for example, Spring in
My Home Town, 1998) were built on the static long take, although not always in long shot.56
For decades Japanese films had imaginatively exploited the deep -space long take, but now
directors were favoring planimetric, almost fashion-shoot imagery.57 The ravishing but
barely changing long shots of Hirokazu Kore-eda's Maborosi (1996) were attacked in Japan
for being too much like Hou (Fig. 5. ro7) . The breakthrough works of China's Fifth Gen­
eration, such as Yellow Earth (r984) and Red Sorghum (1988) , were vigorously edited, and
neither Chen Kaige nor Zhang Yimou gravitated toward long takes or complex staging.
Eventually, however, there emerged mainland directors who did. The most famous ex-

H O U , O R C O N STRAI NTS 231

5 . 1 04 The hero of Rebels of the Neon God (1992) 5 . 1 0 5 As he moves closer to study the poster of James
in a videogame arcade. Dean, he clears a path for the gang to come through the
aisle.

5 . 1 0 6 A Borrowed Life (1994): aperture framing

for the bride stepping out of the rickshaw. 5 . 1 07 Maborosi (1996): the widow and her child wait
to meet her new husband in a distant planimetric shot.

ample is Jia Zhang-ke, whose Platform (2001) tells a story of traveling players in a dis­
tant, contemplative style that irresistibly recalls Hou. By 2001 a PRC product like Wang
Chads The Orphan ofAnyang could be shot in a string of dedramatized, planimetric long
takes averaging half a minute apiece.58
Few of these films engage in the intricacies of staging that Hou favored; most rely on
simple figure movements and attenuated scenic development. Still, now that variants of
the Hou brand were available to all, what could distinguish his own work ? With each film
after the trilogy he seemed to take a new tack. Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996), a tale of
two petty gangsters and their ill-fated schemes, marked a return to the world of con­
temporary young people. It was a troubled proj ect, with an exceptionally unsettled script,
three bouts of shooting, and a first cut of six hours chopped down for a Cannes deadline.
Hou then retreated to the past, turning a sprawling 1893 Chinese novel into a chamber
drama. Flowers of Shanghai (1998) is set wholly in the city's brothels quarter, centering
on three women and their tangled relations with their clients. The film cost U S $3 mil­
lion, and across sixty shooting days Hou filmed most scenes ten or twenty times.59 Flow­
ers won no major prizes but did attract support among critics, some of whom considered
it one of the great accomplishments of the 1990s. Few tastemakers, though, got behind
Millennium Mambo (2001), another foray into youth culture, starring the Taiwan-born

232 HOU, OR CONSTRAI NTS