Born 1947, Meizhou (Guangdong Province), China.
His family, who were of the Hakka ethnicity, moved to Taiwan in 1949, settling near Kaohsiung. After graduating in 1972 from the film department of the Taiwan National Academy of Arts, (he worked for a while as calculator salesman and then...) he entered the film industry the following year, initially working as production assistant and assistant for several established directors. He also wrote scripts during this time. His early film
Green Green Grass of Home (1982) established much of his concerns and traits: it had a rural setting and children protagonists, much like most of his 1980s output.
Entry into the film industry:
Hou entered the industry in 1972 as the apprentice of Lai Chengying, a longtime cinematographer for
Li Xing. “Lai san” (Japanese meaning “Mr. Lai,” as Hou respectfully addressed his master) was a prolific cinematographer in the 1960s and ’70s. Lai was responsible for the photography of many Taiwan classics, including the 1965 healthy realist Beautiful Duckling and a number of famous Qiong Yao romantic melodramas. Hou was brought in to work as a continuity keeper on Li Xing’s 1973 romantic melodrama, Heart with a Million Knots (Xin you qianqian jie), a Hong Kong and Taiwan coproduction meant to cash in on the huge success of Li’s earlier hits. As an apprentice to the film industry, Hou’s major task in his formative period was to learn various genre conventions in order to assist his teachers and seniors. In 1975, Hou was promoted to assistant director and followed his teacher Lai Chengying to Young Sun (Yongsheng), a distribution and producing company. Hou continued to work as Lai’s assistant director and scriptwriter. It was during this period that Hou established a collaborative relationship with
Chen Kunhou, Lai’s nephew and Young Sun’s in-house cinematographer. In the next five years, Hou worked on ten films directed by Lai and collaborated with Chen on several romantic comedies.
Also met Liao Ching-sung during those years, who would edit his every feature to the present day. Interview with Liao with Suchenski in his book, reveals a lot about influence of Chinese poetry, and Taoist thought, on the editing and transitions of Hou's films.
Then he was given an opportunity to direct and write, with Chen Kunhou as cinematographer, three films in the following two years. The first two films, Cute Girl (aka Lovable You, Jiushi liu liu de ta, 1980) and Cheerful Wind (aka Play While You Play, Feng’er ti ta cai, 1981), are somewhat like “package films” in terms of making them as double bills based on one premise. Cute Girl and Cheerful Wind share identical casting; their stories are comparable; their narrative structure and visual-audio style and even comic gags are almost indistinguishable. Both films cast Canto pop singer Kenny Bee (Zhong Zhentao) and Taiwan pop icon Feng Feifei. The surplus value of casting pop idols is to fill the soundtrack with many popular songs by the two leads. This was a standard practice in romantic melodrama in the 1970s, a symbiotic, cross-media cooperation between the recording and film industries. Pop singers plus comic features granted Hou a hot ticket to the rather closed film distribution network. These two films were released for consecutive Chinese New Year holidays, traditionally the most profitable period of the year for the movie business. With these two films, Hou was able to establish himself as an A-list commercial director.
Cute Girl (1980): Hou’s first feature exemplifies seizure of opportunities for renewal, as well as maintaining continuity with a popular tradition. Youth subject matter, family ethics, the Taiwanese countryside, popular music, and low humor commingle in an appealing mixture of romance and comedy. Hou capitalizes on the “Taiwanese” quality of Feng Feifei, a Taiwan girl popular with Taiwan natives through her songs and television work. Using popular music and television, Hou took previous forms in a new direction away from the sentimental, literary quality of the film melodramas of the 1970s. Audiences appreciated the new emphasis, at once lighter and more topical. Cute Girl may seem a long way from Hou’s mature works. However, two themes reappear later in different forms. They are the
contrast between competitive city and communal countryside, and an important aspect of the modern Taiwanese family, namely, that a seemingly rigid kinship can actually be malleable, with some ingenuity, sincerity, and good humour.
Cheerful Wind (1981): Hou’s second film, with the same two stars, is a clever romantic comedy released for the Lunar New Year. Like Cute Girl, its charm is so effortless that the artfulness is easily overlooked. If it seems like commercial fluff, Cheerful Wind has much unexpected richness. The opening scenes that take place on the P’eng-hu Islands (Pescadores) take great liberties with generic and thematic expectations. (Note the fiction within fiction beginning where it is only revealed after a while that the kids trying to set off a firecracker are in fact acting for a washing powder commercial, when the camera moves to reveal the film crew.) When the story moves to Taipei after the first thirty minutes, it settles into a more conventional moralistic musical comedy. The structure is a reverse of Cute Girl in that it begins in the rural setting and then moves to Taipei in the middle section. But in both films Hou already gives the impression of being more interested in filming the rural locations, the specific tempo of that setting, the mischievous kids, the trees, etc. Movement and distance also emerge as themes in both these films. Overall though, it is perhaps more useful to see these films as part of the continuing learning curve of Hou, as an empirical filmmaker rather than a theoretical one, who learnt on the job, making the most of his increasing industry experience and natural instinct to solve whatever problems were encountered.
Both films are in widescreen, with frequent zooms and pop songs to show off their stars' talents.
In 1982, Hou directed
The Green, Green Grass of Home, the film believed to have been a spark for the commercial director to defect to art cinema in the approaching
New Cinema movement.
"It was while working with a child actor during the production of The Green, Green Grass of Home (1983) that he first allowed his actors to improvise their dialogue, a practice he continues today. This method has enabled Hou to coax more naturalistic performances out of professional and nonprofessionals alike, and it has subsequently had far-reaching effects on Hou's filmmaking as a whole, demanding longer takes to allow for cohesion in the actors' work. And it is this practice, among others, that aligned Hou's style (however inadvertently) with a kind of
international neorealist movement and defined it in opposition to his commercial contemporaries in the moribund, constrictive Taiwanese film industry of the early and mid-1980s"
In 1983 he collaborated on the omnibus film
The Sandwich Man, where his segment is typically considered the most impressive (just like
Edward Yang's in
In Our Time made one year before).
"His "country" films do not simply evoke bucolic nostalgia; they are about the intersection of the rural and the urban (or the past and the future) in modern Taiwanese life. In both The Boys from Fengkuei and A Summer at Grandpa's, the dichotomies of past/future or of country/city are not quite opposed or contentious, rather they are in dialogue, and this dialogue is part of a broader debate about Taiwan's modernization"
In 1988, he was voted by World Critics at the New York Film Festival as one of three directors likely to shape the future of cinema in the decades to come.
Literary influences: The influence of
Shen Congwen, the famous 20th century mainland Chinese writer (recommended to him in the early 1980s by
Chu Tien-wen, see quote below), had some impact in his incorporating the concept of 'distance', 'objectivity' and observing/relating his story and characters with some form of dispassion. The long take/long-shot aesthetic may partly have stemmed from the artistic breakthrough Hou achieved in discovering Shen Congwen.
His films are sometimes regarded as a cinematic equivalent of the literary
'roots literature' movement which expressed a nativist Taiwanese sentiment and addressed issues of Taiwanese cultural identity.
Style:
- Long-take long-shot aesthetic. Often static camera but not always. Preference for flat frontal shots as opposed to angled ones.
- When The Puppetmaster competed at the 1994 Cannes festival, Hou came out openly about his propensity for Eastern / Oriental aesthetics, particularly in his use of liubai as a key narrative strategy in The Puppetmaster. Liubai, leaving space blank, is a common compositional device in traditional Chinese ink painting to prompt emotional contemplation. In cinema, liubai entails inviting audiences into a cinematic space, not to understand, connecting cause and effect, but to experience: in other words, an aesthetic of deliberation. Thus, spatiality is emphasized to privilege aura, ambiance, and mood, leaving temporal markers as mere footnotes. Ellipses, elimination of a significant portion of plot, are likened to the traditional compositional principle in which a small section is believed to be more revealing than a totality.
- "Before making Fengkuei my ideas about cinema were rather simple: narrative, to tell the story in the script. Later on I met some filmmakers who had returned to Taiwan from abroad. They had a lot of theories about cinema, which got me all confused. I was puzzled; the script was ready but I didn’t know how to give it form. After listening to me, my scriptwriter Zhu Tianwen showed me a book called Autobiography of Shen Congwen. After reading the book I discovered Shen’s point of view was somewhat like looking down from above. Like natural laws, it has no joy and no sorrow. That I found to be very close to me. It doesn’t matter if he’s describing a brutal military crackdown or various kinds of death; life to him is a river, which flows and flows but is without sorrow or joy. The result is a certain breadth of mind, or a certain perspective that is very moving. Because of this, it produces a generosity of viewpoint. I decided to adopt this angle. The problem was how to transplant it to film. I didn’t really have a solution but I discovered a simple device, and that was to constantly tell the cinematographer to “keep a distance, and be cooler.” It allowed certain real situations to naturally unfold themselves. The camera just stayed at a distance and quietly watched over them." [p158, Taiwan Treasure Island]
- Hou's films/scenes have been described as always 'in media res', present-tense, always in the present moment (hence comparisons with Pialat by French critics) and his rendering of time/the present as something perpetually vanishing (one writer described his style as 'writing in water'). His style prioritises unmitigated experience of the moment over narrative development (he prefers filming/showing over storytelling/plot-development, which however belies the careful structure of his screenplays), which is part of his attitude to dealing with time in his films. (Also the way he deals with history, macro-history happening in the background of micro-history, the characters he focuses on are living in the moment, e.g. the family in A City of Sadness, without always being aware of the greater historical narrative they are caught in, which is only clearer to us from a more distant vantage point in time.)
- Hou is particularly praised for having found a way in his style, content, formal and aesthetic sensibility to have remained both anchored in a culturally 'Chinese' tradition while also looking forward, innovating, and bringing modernity via a non-Chinese artform and medium to these traditions. Thereby he is both traditional and modern, not simply rehashing Chinese cultural artefacts nor aping Western cinema, but has brought about a productive symbiosis of the two.
Themes & Motifs:
- Taiwanese identity.
- Taiwanese history
- Personal memory
- The family unit
- Meals and banquets
- City vs Rural (migration, displacement)
- Trees, rural settings
- Highly elliptical narrative structure encouraging active/attentive viewership
- 'Master shot' aesthetic (long take, long shot)
- Static camera until 1993, mobile thereafter
- Very dense mise-en-scene
- Blocking and frame-within-frame compositions
- 'Iterated framings'
- Trains
- Travelling shots
Notes:
Hou was an auto-didact who made it into the film industry half by chance, after a misspent youth that could have ended, like many of his friends did, in a life of petty crime and hoodlum gangsterism. His natural talent and instinct are therefore to be reckoned with, but as Chu Tienwen remarks it is his ability to cultivate this natural instinct and continually develop it by looking for new directions/horizons which has made him the master filmmaker he is.
"...an oeuvre whose towering subject has been the entanglements of Taiwanese nationality and Chinese identity".
[personal memory]... It is important that Hou grew up in the countryside, and in the era before Taiwan's economic boom and the mass exodus to the cities which followed. From at least as early as Green Green Grass of Home, Hou begins inserting his personal and most deeply felt memories into his film, that is of a rural upbringing. This must also explain his particular affinity for the rural scenes in his first 3 films. But throughout his 1980s work, shots of trees, trains, fields, family gatherings around a table, etc all abound in his films, and are to his own admission inspired by his own memories of where he grew up and the sense of community that existed there. Of course, A Time to Live, A Time to Die represents the culmination of this approach of mining his own memory. (One can also remember the mango-tree childhood anecdote he told Assayas as an early formative memory which may partly have inspired his distanced objective cinematic outlook)
[approach to history/time]... his films convey a "sense of what it feels like to be a human being dwarfed and engulfed by time, and his passionate enactment of the ways people (not just individuals, but families, nations) navigate the quicksand of history."
A filmmaker of restraint rather than excess, and also one without an agenda or message to be droned into the audience (his films may be read as political but on a less obvious level, e.g. giving voice to aspects of Taiwanese culture and history previously taboo)... also non-judgmental, quotes Confucius maxim: "Observe and do not judge", which seems to stand for his formal/visual aesthetic as well as his attitude to characters. The beautiful paradox is that through this holding back, he makes us feel all the more a powerful emotion for his characters.
The sense of an austere, economic style that passes no judgment but simply records what happens, ..... Placing characters in a larger context does not heighten our awareness of forces working upon them so much as suggest the power of forces working beyond them. It produces a sense of remove without a corresponding sense of indifference.....
Inferential storytelling? (demands active engagement from audience, e.g. Dust in the Wind)
[Reception] "But all this neatly gift-wrapped unity of form and content has left Hou a little slippery, and his entry into art-house prominence here in the U.S. has been overshadowed somewhat by a long-running and rich film festival circuit mythology. Most who care to know had read about Hou long before they’d seen a frame he’d shot, and the near simultaneous availability of a bunch of his works here on DVD in 2001 and 2002 coupled with retrospectives and critical hosannas created a breathlessly rarified situation in which his films, especially the Nineties works, may have become more intriguing as objects to witness and admire than art to examine. Non-traveling cinephiles weren’t given the chance to grow with the artist, understand, say, how the weight of City of Sadness contributed to the several-year break between it and its follow-up, The Puppetmaster. The relative dearth of knowledge most western viewers possess about Taiwan coupled with his lush visual schemas only helped further exoticize his filmmaking."
Filmography:
- Cute Girl (Loveable You, 1980)
- Cheerful Wind (1981)
- The Green Green Grass of Home (1982)
- The Sandwich Man (1983)
- The Boys from Fengkuei
- A Summer at Grandpa's
- A Time to Live, a Time to Die
- Dust in the Wind
- Daughter of the Nile
- A City of Sadness
- The Puppetmaster
- Good Men, Good Women
- Goodbye South, Goodbye
- Flowers of Shanghai
- Millenium Mambo
- Cafe Lumiere
- Three Times
- Flight of the Red Balloon
- The Assassin
References:
Profile in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 189.
Chapter in Taiwan a Treasure Island
Hou Hsiao-hsien (JM Frodon ed.)
http://www.taiwancinema.com/fp_12434_136
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/aug/03/artsfeatures1 (comparison with S Ray)
The Runner (Amir Naderi) and A Summer at Grandpa's (Hou Hsiao-Hsien) shared top prize, while Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige) won a prize for cinematography.
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