The Puppetmaster (Film)

1993. Dir: Hou Hsiao-Hsien.



Context:
First of Hou's films to be shot in mainland China, as this had become a possibility politically, and pre-1945 settings could better be realised there. However there were difficulties organisation-wise and delays in shooting.




The Film:
Historical setting: The film ends (with the defeat of Japan and the end of the war and the colonial era) exactly where City of Sadness had started. It begins with Li Tianlu's birth at the beginning of the Japanese colonial era, and thus covers most of the years of Japanese rule.

Once again major events are elided or just alluded to in the background, and are viewed as incidental and temporary against the wider background of life and nature --- suggested by the numerous landscape shots.

Consists of three 'modes': Li Tianlu himself recounting his life, sometimes just heard on the soundtrack, but then leading to shots of him talking directly to camera; acted reconstructions of events from his life; the insertion of puppet shows, performed (in the acted narrative) by the young Li Tianlu, and operas.

Fiction-documentary shifts made smooth by cuts to the real Li in the same setting, and from the same axis, as the previous (fiction) shot, as well as by the sound bridges (of Li's narrating voice first off-screen then on-screen), which are crucial.

"It’s just that “greatness” is not quite the right word to ascribe to such a self-effacing movie. It’s long but not big, complex but not epic, morally committed but not given to proselytizing, and offers no grand spittle in the face of the cruelty of colonization."

"He’s on the wrong side of the law from the very beginning, with covert actions required to give him a family name (his parents’ choice of naming him matrilineally contravenes Japanese custom)" This motif (reflective of Taiwan's identity crisis?) also featured in Growing Up, and Dust in the Wind --- where Li Tien-lu himself spoke about it in the dream/flashback scene, hinting that this element was added in that film to suit Li's (autobiographical) performance.

" while Hou is careful never to let us forget that oppressive ideology, through the humiliations of official reprimands and ceremonies and the final insult of using his puppetry for propaganda, there’s also no countermovement in the form of angry rhetoric or even elaboration on a theme. Instead, Li carries on regardless. The important point is not the clash of civilizations but the measures to which one victimized civilization must go to accommodate another when it expands its borders and invades."

"If there is a valid point in stating that Hou has erased activism and resistance (and it’s a hard charge to dismiss completely), there is also the sense that the converse is true, that reducing everything to The Struggle tends to obliterate the very mundane existence that politics are supposed to secure."


Preservationist: a film aimed at "exploring the values of traditional culture which we have lost, particularly at this [materialist and technological] juncture of our existence," [Hou interview, quoted Suchenski 87.]





Reception:
First Taiwan film to compete in main competition at Cannes where it won the Jury Prize. This, according to Udden, was in large part due to the determined backing from Kiarostami on the jury.

Shigehiko Hasumi wrote that with this film Hou is able to 'reinvent cinema', and J. Hoberman in Village Voice described it as 'more like the rebirth of cinema itself' [Udden 116]