Long Pauses

Tag: Director: Hou

  • Further Questions for Hou Hsiao-hsien

    Further Questions for Hou Hsiao-hsien

    This interview was originally published at Mubi. I collaborated on this piece with Daniel Kasman.

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    div>We can’t get enough of The Assassin, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first film in eight years, his first so-called martial arts film, a film set deep in the past yet bracingly present and heartbreaking. A longtime hero of ours, we sought every opportunity to speak with Hou. Thus, the strange email interview after The Assassin‘s premiere in Cannes. And thus, too, this equally strange conversation between Hou, critic Darren Hughes, and myself, where it seemed as though each participant talked past the other, our words and ideas becoming distorted in translation. We offer it to you as a small addendum to the wealth of discourse that surrounds this very special filmmaker, in general, and this film, specifically, aware of and saddened by its slim inadequacy.

    At the end of our conversation Darren requested a picture. Hou removed his ragged baseball cap, glanced quickly at the window and at the fluorescents over our heads, pushed back the curtain, and then leaned awkwardly into the natural light, giving us the photo above. That split-second gesture was a good deal more revealing of Hou’s technique than the preceding conversation.

    NOTEBOOK: Many of your films are set in the past, but you’re also a strong proponent of realism in cinema. Is there a difference for you when you’re staging, say, a scene between a man and a woman in the past, as in The Assassin, or one set in contemporary Taipei?

    HOU HSIAO-HSIEN: I shoot the films the same way. I give the actors short stories to read to give them a sense of how people spoke in that era, but I want them to figure it out for themselves. When making films in Asia, there is little time to give the actors a deep understanding of an era. The best I can do is a classic presentation: the way they wear their clothes, the locations.

    When you see a stranger, or when you talk with someone for the first time, you’re naturally fascinated by that particular something they have. I want actors to come on set and bring that same thing. I want to capture that essence and describe it on screen. So there’s no rehearsal. The actors know what I expect of them. I allow it to sink in for the actors, but it’s not through discussion. I really want them to feel it so that when it’s time to deliver those lines it is realistic to them.

    If it doesn’t work, I stop the scene and we come back to it later. For example, the scenes between Tian Ji’an [Chen Chang] and Huji [Nikki Hsin-Ying Hsieh] were not quite right [at first], so I allowed them to workshop a bit and come back to shoot those scenes again.

    NOTEBOOK: Did the use of an ancient dialect for the film’s dialog transform that process in any way?

    HOU: It comes down to the actors’ relationship with the language. Again, in the scenes with Tian Ji’an and Huji, I made them shoot a couple more times. But with someone like Shu Qi, who didn’t have too many lines, it was fairly easy to get into the dialect!

    The actors who play the parents are from China, so they have more of a basis in the old language. They didn’t have to workshop at all. It was all very natural for them.

    NOTEBOOK: The Assassin opens with a title card about events from 8th century China, and then the second sentence jumps a hundred years to the “present day” of the film. That jump reminds me of your films Good Men, Good Women [1995] and Three Times [2005] in its juxtapositions of different eras. You seem especially interested in the cinema as a historical tool.

    HOU: The opening titles were not in the original cut. The French distributors told me they didn’t really understand what was going on and asked me to add an introduction. But even after adding it, I’m convinced many people still don’t understand.

    Hollywood is good at telling meticulous historical stories. I’m not that kind of director. I don’t want things to be so clear. Carefully plotting every storyline, as Hollywood does, would distract from the humanity of the characters.

    NOTEBOOK: There’s a moment in The Assassin when Shu Qi walks alone through the mainland countryside, and it reminded me suddenly of the young couples in Good Men, Good Women. When I described you as a historian, it’s because your films are interested in causations: what happened in the 8th century affected the 9th century, what happened in 1940 mainland China affected 1995 Taiwan.

    HOU: You’re looking for a thread running through my films, for similar shots in different eras. For me, there are no connections like this. Because I’ve worked with certain actors many times, I’ve come to appreciate certain aspects of their performances, so perhaps this is the connecting line you see.

    The Tang Dynasty is a very modern era. The way people lived their lives was very modern. For example, the assassin questions what it means to murder. Even if there were a time machine, it would be of no use to me because no amount of detail would overcome our modern eyes.

    As I mentioned, I often work with the same actors. But when I was writing the script, I thought about incorporating other interesting people I’ve encountered. I considered casting actors from the mainland who might better encapsulate the feel of the Tang Dynasty. But I like to write with specific actors already in mind because I don’t want to arrive on set and think, “How am I going to fit your personality into my script?”

    The circle of actors in Asia is fairly small. By casting Shu Qi, I knew I could give her direction and there would at least be a possibility of her changing her performance. Even though Shu Qi is not from deep in mainland China, she plays the role like an assassin, and that’s what I needed.

  • 2007 TIFF Days 1 and 2

    2007 TIFF Days 1 and 2

    My favorite scene in Persepolis takes place at a small kitchen table in the childhood home of writer/illustrator/co-director Marjane Satrapi. An anxious neighbor has dropped in to tell them that her 14-year-old son has been recruited to join the fight against Iraq. Satrapi’s mother — fearless, kind, intractable — comforts her friend, promising, “We’ll talk to him.” The scene ends with a simple voice-over: “Because of my parents, the boy did not go to war.” It’s the kind of moment that could very easily have been cut from the film for the sake of pacing. (And Persepolis does, I think, have some minor pacing problems.) But it’s the level of specificity in the scene, and in the film at large, that makes it so compelling. That moment at the kitchen table so radically transformed Satrapi’s understanding of her parents that now, more than two decades later, she’s still meditating on its significance from the vantage of adulthood. I should also add that the film’s animation is a real pleasure to watch — witty, surprising, and beautiful.

    All of Fengming, A Chinese Memoir is summed up in the opening minutes of the first interview. He Fengming takes her seat in front of the camera, where she will remain for nearly all of the next 180 minutes, and begins to tell the story of how her life was forever changed in 1949, when at the age of 17 she left the university to join the staff of a newspaper. “And that,” she laughs, “was the start of my revolutionary career.” Her laugh is sarcastic and a little bitter. “We were so naive back then,” she later tells director Wang Bing. “Back then,” she and her husband were branded as “Rightists” by the Party and were separated from each other and from their two young sons in order to undergo rehabilitation at labor camps. Her husband died in his; she returned briefly to her family before being detained again during the Cultural Revolution. We learn relatively late in the film that Fengming wrote a book-length account of her life in the late-1980s, which proves to be an important detail in understanding the form of Wang’s remarkable film. Shot entirely in long static takes, with only a handful of cuts and quick dissolves, it seems to present an unedited account of Fengming’s story. But her story has been edited — over the course of nearly sixty years, changing slightly with each of the tellings and each of the hours spent hunched over a typewriter and notepad. So, for example, when she describes the night when she discovered her husband had died, her language takes on an uncharacteristic literariness, with extended metaphors and hand-picked symbols. Recounting this most “rehearsed” of her memories, she remains composed and calm, despite the horror and sorrow. When she describes a more recent event, however — one that occurred after she’d written her book and that she’s yet to fully integrate into her life’s narrative — she chokes and sobs. I have two pages of hand-written notes on Fengming, one of my favorite films of the fest, and hope to return to it later.

    Hou Hsiao-hsien might be my favorite living director, so I had assumed that the lukewarm reviews of Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge coming out of Cannes weren’t to be trusted. I was right. At this point, midway through the festival, Voyage is among my two or three favorites. I’m hopeless when it comes to writing about Hou, whose films are visceral and emotional experiences for me. A friend asked after the screening if I thought the red balloon was integral to the film — if it was necessary at all — and I realized in answering that, for me, the balloon had acted as a kind of emotional locus: a splash of color and beauty, less symbol than catalyst or accelerant.

    Last year at the festival, I assumed I had missed something when I came away ambivalent from Manufactured Landscapes. I discovered Friday night that what I had wanted from Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary was, in fact, something closer in spirit to Peter Hutton’s At Sea, a 60-minute, silent triptych about the birth, life, and death of a modern ship. Hutton’s film begins at a massive boatyard in Korea — one of several aspects of At Sea that reminded me of Claire Denis’s L’Intrus — where we watch, in a series of strange and awesome compositions, the workings of modern technology at its most forceful and elegant. In the middle act, Hutton turns his camera to the sea itself. He booked passage on a trans-Atlantic freighter and filmed the water as it churned beneath him and as it turned the moon’s reflection into abstraction. And the final twenty minutes take place on the shores of Bangladesh, where poor men and boys participate in a growing and dangerous trade: breaking ships with their bare hands and the simplest of tools. The structure of the film makes a compelling (if obvious) argument: “The developing world is our dumping ground,” as Hutton said during the Q&A. But that was less interesting to me than the form of his shot selection and cutting. When a member of the audience challenged Hutton, suggesting that his film would be as effective as a series of still photos, Hutton, non-plussed, responded with a phrase I’ll be regurgitating for years. (I’m paraphrasing.) “It’s very difficult for us to watch a silent film today. Cell phones ring. We’re easily distracted. I’m interested in countering the emotional velocity and the visual velocity of contemporary films.” The film’s form, then, which deliberately challenges our “emotional velocity,” offers a more radical political position than its content, I think.

    At the very end of Mutum, a middle-class, urban doctor rides into the isolated Brazilian village where the film takes place and offers a young boy a pair of glasses, opening his eyes to the world around him. I was relieved during the post-screening Q&A to hear director Sandra Kogut acknowledge the similarities between herself and that doctor. I’m deeply ambivalent about films like Mutum. They’re a kind of genre, really — stories of the poor in the developing world, shot by well-educated, middle- to upper-class filmmakers, that are then taken to film festivals, where they’re easily digested by well-educated, middle- to upper-class audiences. A surefire cure for those annoying bouts of liberal guilt that plague folks like me. When children are the focus of the story, it’s even easier. Kogut seems to be aware of all of this and has crafted a solid film from the source material, a classic Brazilian novel by Joao Guimaraes Rosa. The key to the film’s success, I think, is Kogut’s camera, which never escapes the subjective perspective of her protagonist, a ten-year-old boy who struggles to make sense of the adult world around him. Because of that p.o.v., the film is full of ambiguities and, occasionally, oversized emotion. This is Kogut’s first feature, and I look forward to seeing whatever comes next from her.

  • Good Men, Good Women (1995)

    Good Men, Good Women (1995)

    Dir. by Hou Hsiao-Hsien

    Images: Hou cuts constantly between scenes set in contemporary Taiwan, which are in full color, and scenes from the film-within-the-film, which are a tinted black and white. This allows the director to be more traditionally “cinematic” in the filmed footage — beautiful shots of trees, prison hallways, light fixtures. Favorite images: the self-reflexive shots of the actors in costume posing for photos; all of the moments that reveal the emotional intimacy between Liang and Ah Wei; the amazing move from black and white back to color in the penultimate shot.

    • • •

    The first cut in Good Men, Good Women establishes several dichotomies that, over the next 100 minutes, are beautifully dismantled for explicitly political purposes. The film opens with a long, static, black and white shot of an ancient mainland village. Toward us marches a small group of peasants (we are led to believe), who sing joyfully as they snake closer to the camera before finally exiting to the right of the frame. The sudden cut to a fluorescent apartment in contemporary Taiwan is made all the more jarring by the obnoxious sound of a clamoring telephone. A young woman rises slowly from her bed, retrieves the phone (no answer), sips from bottled water, then tears a sheet of paper from her fax machine. The remainder of the film rewrites the forgotten narratives that connect these seemingly opposed worlds: mainland China and Taiwan, the past and present, truth and fiction, the personal and political.

    The young woman, we eventually learn, is Liang Ching (Annie Shizuka Inoh), an actress who is preparing for her role as Chiang Bi-Yu in an upcoming film called, interestingly enough, Good Men, Good Women. This film within the film tells the true-life story of Chiang and her husband, Chung Hao-Tung (Giong Lim), who moved to the mainland in 1940 in order to join the anti-Japanese resistance movement. Chiang would eventually be forced to give up her children for the cause, and would be widowed by it as well. By cutting constantly between the “real world” of Liang’s life and black and white footage from the completed film, Hou blurs the boundaries that might otherwise separate Taiwan from its past, the actress from her role.

    And yet even that complex description is a gross oversimplification of Hou’s narrative, which further problematizes any simple notions of the “present” by adding to the mix sequences from Liang’s recent past. Five years earlier, she had been a promiscuous, drug-addicted bar maid, who had found solace only in her relationship with the surprisingly tender gangster, Ah Wei (Jack Kao). Liang is forced to revisit this period of her life when a stranger steals her diary and begins faxing pages of it to her. It’s a remarkable story-telling device, allowing Hou to sound echoes of Chiang’s experience through these various versions of the actress who plays her. The women (all played, of course, by Inoh) share so much in common — in particular, the timeless sorrow over lost lovers and children — but, as the film forces us to acknowledge, the selfless struggle of Chiang’s generation has been realized, tragically, in only the empty consumerism of Liang’s.

    In lesser hands, a film like Good Men, Good Women would likely collapse into either a turgid technical exercise or a vehicle for didactic moralizing, but Hou avoids both traps by investing his characters with recognizable life. The film’s most joyful moments emerge from Liang’s and Ah Wei’s lazy familiarity with one another. Like Godard thirty years before, Hou allows his camera to capture the Gangster and His Girl at their most ordinary — impromptu dances in their bedroom, everyday conversations about their future. When watching Flowers of Shanghai and Puppetmaster, I am often frustrated by Hou’s elliptical style, but here — perhaps because of the nonlinear narrative — I feel as though I am being granted brief glimpses into beautifully rich lives. Knowing that Liang’s happiness, like Chiang’s, will be short-lived makes her/their struggle all the more compelling.

    Good Men, Good Women would make a textbook study of aesthetic harmony in function and form. Unlike so many recent American films that have reordered the traditional narrative in service of empty excitements or trite analyses of “postmodern truth,” Hou’s cuts and splices history into a well-told tale, revealing those relationships between action and consequence that are so easily elided in our short-term, soundbite memories. Like fellow Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang’s Vive L’Amour, Good Men, Good Women concludes with a remarkable image of mourning, but here the scene is tempered by some promise of potential change. The film ends as it began: with the sight of those marchers, their identities now revealed to us, and with the joyful sound of their voices echoing through the mountains.