This article was written in 2006, in collaboration with another Close-Up Film writer; his task was to cover the early part of Hou's career, and I was to cover the later work from The Puppetmaster (1993) up to his latest release, Three Times (2005).
In the second part of our feature on Taiwan’s foremost director, Mike Bartlett traces the development of his later career and discusses his place in film history.
A small pinpoint of light pierces the black of the screen, builds in intensity, and slowly takes the shape of an oil lamp, bathing a room in a warm orange glow. Its delicate rays pick out paintings, furniture, wall hangings, the exquisite silks and nightgowns of the people within – courtesans arranging their hair, customers patiently waiting. The camera lingers to one side – not static, but floating, unable or unwilling to move from its chosen vantage point, but capable of focusing on the smallest but most significant detail. We’re trapped in this remove from the characters, frequently peering into a space from behind a screen, or with our view partly cut off by an interior wall. But at the same time, this limitation of perspective makes us feel privileged, as if we’re peeping toms or voyeurs with access to a world previously hidden from public view. Little is heard – perhaps the echo of a drinking game down the hall, the preparation of an opium pipe, the petulant, whispered arguments of the younger girls… But the sense of being there is palpable. The film is Flowers of Shanghai (1998) and this is the cinema of Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
As every film student knows, one of the mainstays of movie history is the comparison drawn between the early pioneers, Georges Méliès and the Lumière Brothers. The latter, of course, made straight single-shot movies of everyday phenomena – a train pulling into a station, workers leaving the factory – which could loosely be classed as documentaries, or at least concerned with real events. Méliès, on the other hand, like the good old illusionist and magician that he was, dived straight into the worlds of fantasy and special effects, revelling in the tricks this new toy allowed him to play on his audience. And so, the age-old divide between fantasy and reality opened up and subsequent filmmakers were often categorised according to their relative closeness to one or other ideal.
But there is another way of looking at the Lumière-Méliès split. Forget the content of the films and focus instead on the style, the means of looking. Now the crucial difference becomes one of editing. Méliès often cuts, principally to make his effects work, so that a ghost can suddenly appear or a rocket plunge into the moon’s eye. But the Lumières hold the shot, so that we can gaze around the scene and take it in more fully. One director leads the eye, another lets it roam. Looked at this way, a whole new approach to film history opens up. Suddenly, Méliès becomes the precursor of Griffiths, Eisenstein, Welles, Godard – filmmakers seldom concerned with fantasy, but whose common reliance on montage knits them together, despite their different cultural and aesthetic backgrounds. The Lumières, meanwhile, become the foundation stone of a whole other tradition – what we might call, the “cinema of contemplation” – where the pace of cutting slows, scenes are played out in long sequence shots, and the conventional shift from master shot to close-up is replaced by the actors having a greater depth of field in which to move. The audience become observers rather than passive spectators. This tradition traces its line through Feuillade to Ozu, Antonioni, Angelopoulos and Tarkovsky. And I would argue that it reaches its fullest development in the work of Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
He started directing in the 1980s, churning out the romantic comedy musicals that were a staple of Taiwanese cinema at the time. But as David Bordwell notes in his excellent book, Figures Traced In Light, there were already significant differences in his approach to that of his colleagues. He toned down the kitsch décor found in those movies, subdued the lighting, and favoured longer establishing shots, reducing the cut-and-thrust of the editing to a slower pace. In short, he started putting restraints on the more obvious dramatic devices and pared his style down. In this, he resembles the “transcendental” directors identified by Paul Schrader, like Yasujiro Ozu, to whom he has been frequently compared. But his method is subtly different to that of the Japanese director. Ozu works out plot and character through dialogue; Hou only uses dialogue obliquely, focusing instead on visual detail. Ozu rigorously composes his shots to frame people speaking face-on to camera, holding our gaze on the actor’s face at just below eye-level. He also cuts within interiors to show different spatial relationships between characters. Hou pulls us right back so we are at some distance from the protagonists – they seldom speak to camera. If we are in a theatre, we watch the stage from the audience, looking over people’s heads; if we are in a house, we observe the proceedings from another room. Ozu’s camera respects the players by the way it frames them; Hou’s camera respects them by withdrawing and giving them space.
It was this approach that Hou refined over the following decade until it emerged fully formed in what is arguably his finest film, The Puppetmaster (1993). Based on the recollections of a famous puppeteer about his life in Taiwan between 1900 and 1945, when the island was under Japanese rule, the film is split up into a series of episodes, or vignettes. Each episode is played out in one shot and from one camera vantage point. Only the bare minimum of contextual information is given, the viewer being asked to build the links between each event they witness. If there is any plot exposition at all, it comes from the mouth of the puppeteer himself, who acts as narrator in both voiceover and cameo appearance. That way, our attention is completely focused on the scene in question - its specificity, its physical presentness, the details in clothing, furniture, personal etiquette that, for Hou, tell us much more about the times than any plot or narrative unspooling could ever do. And what all these details are building up – and what is Hou’s ultimate project – is a complete social, political and personal history of his homeland, Taiwan, perceived through purely cinematic means. Not only are we dipping into a biographical story that reflects on the times in which it is set – as also happens in The Time To Live and The Time To Die (1985), City of Sadness (1989) and his most complex film, Good Men, Good Women (1995) – but we are made to experience it as it was lived. This is perhaps the most remarkable trait of his work – very little seems to be going on, but after the film is over, the viewer realises just how much they’ve absorbed.
If this all makes Hou sound like hard work and only for the high-culture snob – and let’s face it, that is the reputation Hou currently trails, at least in English-speaking circles – then it’s important to recognise that the greatest pleasure of his films lies in their appeal to the senses. In a way only matched by Tarkovsky, they recall those memories in which the emotional and physical sensations combine – like the experience as a child, for example, watching through the banisters as your father returns home late one evening, bringing in something of the night with him. The freshness rising off his suit, the clank of car keys on the sideboard, the sudden realisation that you’re seeing him for the first time without him knowing you’re there… There are innumerable examples in Hou’s work where he captures just such moments – the clearing away of plates patiently observed by a couple silent after quarrelling in Flowers of Shanghai, a young woman settling into the mundane domestic routine while on a casual visit to her parents’ house in Café Lumière (2003). Rituals that are utterly specific to the characters on screen but which fix on something universal.
And Hou is hardly concerned with the mores of high society. He freely admits to chasing girls in the snooker halls of his youth and, as Tony Rayns has pointed out, the cameo role he gave himself as a “brash wideboy” in The Boys of Fengkuei (1983) indicates a personal affinity with the young adolescents in that picture. Indeed, a fascination with gangsters runs throughout his work, particularly in Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996), which is remarkable precisely because it is so true to the gangster genre. Everything is present – the petty hoodlum, his wayward brother, trouble with the local Mr Big, set-up ambushes in bars and hotels – so much so that the lazy comparisons with Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) are, for once, wholly apt. And how many other directors considered at the top end of the arthouse scale would throw themselves with such evident enthusiasm into the world of techno music as Hou did in Millennium Mambo (2001)? Though it’s worth noting that techno is the precise equivalent of Hou’s cinema in musical terms, its repetitive beats and trance-like aura translated into the hypnotic rhythm of his visuals. And many of the scores of Hou’s films pick up on this, the music for Flowers of Shanghai being composed of simple string chords and faint drumbeats.
Furthermore, Hou is probably the finest chronicler of the contemporary woman. No other director has invested so much interest – and sympathy – into exploring the modern freedoms opened up by feminism and changing social mores, and I would argue that, since The Puppetmaster, it has been the driving force in his work. Good Men, Good Women brilliantly traces its melancholic view of Taiwanese history through the experiences of a frustrated actress playing the part of a freedom fighter turned political dissident in the 1940s. As she rehearses the role and relates the woman’s story in flashback, she comes to terms with her own dissolute past with a wayward boyfriend. Subtly, the film builds to show the relationships between previous betrayals and present frustration, both in the personal and social sphere, culminating in one of the most exquisite shots in recent cinema history. It’s the same as the one that opened the film - anti-imperialist rebels singing in the fields – but the sepia tinge of flashback has gone to be replaced by the colour of the present. The past has become contemporary – it is not just history but a moment that is vital to us now, an idea cemented by the presence of the actress now fully ensconced in her role. In Millennium Mambo and Café Lumiere, Hou carries this examination forward, focusing first on an attractive girl caught in the clutches of Taipei’s underground, enjoying the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll but searching for something more, and then on a twentysomething writer, providing a portrait of the artist as a young woman, living off fresh air in her quest to research the life of a composer. Both women are essentially selfish, particularly the writer, but Hou never judges them. Instead, he is content to map their respective worlds and to leave the audience to ponder the conflict between their independence and the society that both breeds it and tries to contain it.
Hou’s new film, Three Times, represents the most extreme development of his concerns, both stylistic and social, to date. Examining the roles of women and relationships in three distinct periods of Taiwanese history, it arguably takes Hou’s experiments with form as far as they will go, a point brought home to me at the last London Film Festival when I made the (unfortunate) decision of watching it in a double bill with the British fantasy, Mirrormask. The latter film is set in a bizarre dream world that the filmmakers have to make convincing through dazzling production design and amazing special effects, with which they barrage the viewer relentlessly. For the record, the audience I was with burst into spontaneous applause when it finished. Three Times, on the other hand, constructs its three time periods with a minimum number of locations – a snooker hall, a brothel, a contemporary flat and nightclub – and around the wispiest of storylines. There is precious little dialogue and no set-piece scenes of plot development. The audience were walking out in droves. But I went home reeling at the amount of insights Hou had packed into those exquisitely-held shots, into the little details that overlapped each segment and commented on the others, on the delicacy and subtlety of the cinematography that left images burnt on my brain. I can’t remember a single frame of Mirrormask.
Hou has provided two portraits of himself as an artist, which correspond basically to the two protagonists of Café Lumière. The young writer, Yoko, at the centre of the film, is researching the biography of a figure from Taiwanese history, something which, as we’ve seen, provides the backbone of many of Hou’s films. Furthermore, she has selected someone whose life is intimately bound up with Taiwan’s relationship with Japan – another of Hou’s obsessions. But it’s in the person of Hajime, her friend-cum-boyfriend, that Hou offers a more subtle self-portrait. Hajime’s bizarre project is to record the sounds of Tokyo’s metro system – the tannoy announcements, the swish of closing doors, the rumble of trains along the tracks. It seems pointless, but as he tells Yoko, one day it could be used as ‘evidence’. This, surely, is Hou’s aim – to build up an audio-visual body of evidence, to examine the currents of history and the nature of the present through their physical reproduction on screen. At one point, Hajime shows Yoko some of his computer artwork – a tangled mass of trains forms itself into a huge eye, and there, in the pupil, is a lonely figure who Yoko correctly identifies as Hajime himself. Replace the trains with our cities and societies, and we find Hou at the centre. He is the eye of our contemporary world.