I’m convinced that Asian films are where it’s at these days, and that directors like Ang Lee, Tsai Ming-Liang and Wonghou-hsiao-hsien.jpg Kar Wai are the cutting edge of world cinema. Here in the states, unless you live in a major market, it’s hard to see some of these artists on the big screen; it’s somewhat easier on DVD, but even there, region 1 offerings are hard to find.

In 1982, In Our Time, a portmanteau film featuring four hot young directors (Edward Yang, Te-chen Tao, Ko I-Chen, and Chang Yi), began a movement that came to be known as the Taiwanese New Wave. In in contrast to the more traditional kung-fu flicks and melodramas, New Wave directors concentrated on realistic, penetrating dramas of everyday life in Taiwan. A “Second New Wave” began in the 1990s that included such luminaries as Tsai and Lee, but several of the “old masters” from the first wave keep on keepin’ on.

Pre-eminent among them is Hou Hsiao-hsien who, since 1980, has directed some 19 films or film segments, from 1980’s Jiushi liuliu de ta (aka Lovable You) to last year’s Flight of the Red Balloon. He has been the recipient of awards at major festivals such as Venice and Berlin, and his films have been nominated six times for the Palm d’Or at Cannes. Despite all of this, it is still hard to see a Hou picture in the United States.


goodbye-south-goodbye-2.jpgBut worth seeing they are: Hou’s style is rigorous and formalistic, consisting of long takes in which the camera can be at times maddeningly still. Often, actors walk in and out of the frame to answer the door or the phone, or to carry on conversations with other characters. His scenes of urban life — frequently in the streets and in the apartments of Tai Pei — are beautiful and, at times, almost painterly.

Hou is a master at choreographing complex shots consisting of action at multiple points in the frame. Because he doesn’t telegraph where the viewer’s attention should be drawn, this makes for more involvement on the part of the audience. Derek Lam at writes:

While there’s always been an approach to filmmaking - from Eisenstein to MTV - that predicates itself on visual and audio information so thoroughly processed and “cued” that viewer response is nearly if not Pavlovian, another - one thinks, among contemporary filmmakers, primarily of Hou and the great Iranian filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami - actively encourages the viewer’s participation in interpreting and making sense of the movie.

cafe-lumiere-1.jpgThis, of course, does not inure him to perhaps the majority of movie-goers — both here and abroad — who approach film strictly as entertainment, and to whom working to engage a movie might seem counter-intuitive. (This, of course, might explain the difficulty Hou’s films have getting distribution in this country.)

For my part, I like the contemplative aspects of his style. His unhurried, the-scene-will-end-where-it-ends ethos leaves time to contemplate the lives and circumstances of his characters. In one scene in Café Lumiere, , the camera holds for long minutes on the film’s protagonist as she goes about her domestic chores, answers the phone, and prepares to leave her tiny Tokyo apartment. As the camera lingers, we are able to study her surroundings, to take in and process in our own minds something of what it means to be a lonely, single girl in a crowded city. This is very different than a lot of commercial cinema, which directs our attention to what we are to see in any given shot, tells us what to think, and then moves on to the next set-up. In Hou’s cinema, we are given the latitude, the time and space, to come to our own conclusions. We are not treated like idiots to whom everything must be spoon fed.

The result, I think, is an intensely personal cinema. When each viewer has to decide on their own what to look at, what to pay attention to, then each experience is going to be more distinct, more individual . Although we construct meaning from every experience we encounter, the more ambiguous the experience, or — better — the less specified by its creator, the more room for our own imaginations, fueled by our own experiences, to create something unique. And that, to my mind, is a very good thing.

Some Hou of Note:

  • Goodbye, South, Goodbye (1996) follows small-time gangster Gao (Jack Kao) and his accomplices Flathead (Giong Lim) and Pretzel (Annie Shizuka Inoh) as they wander around Taiwan looking for easy money and a cheap score. Gao’s dream of opening a restaurant is sabotaged by his own incompetence and that of his comrades. Visually stunning and endlessly inventive in its cinematography and direction.
  • Café Lumière (2003) An homage to Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu in honor of his 100th birthday, it deals with Ozu’s themes of family change and generational conflict, using some of Ozu’s stylistic and narrative conventions, but stamping them nonetheless with Hou’s own aesthetic. Shot in Tokyo with a largely Japanese cast.
  • Three Times (2005) Roger Ebert sums it up better than I can: “Three stories about a man and a woman, all three using the same actors. Three years: 1966, 1911, 2005. Three varieties of love: unfulfilled, mercenary, meaningless. All photographed with such visual beauty that watching the movie is like holding your breath so the butterfly won’t stir.”

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