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^{Goodbye South Goodbye}

^{by Derek Lam}

Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien should be no stranger to those who care about cinema as more than just popcorn entertainment.  J. Hoberman, reviewing a near-complete retrospective of his work last year, considered Hou the "greatest living narrative filmmaker," and in end-of-the-decade polls conducted respectively by the Village Voice and Film Comment, critics both American and international voted Hou overwhelmingly as the Nineties' "director of the decade."  For years, ever since it began appearing on the festival circuit in the early '80s, discerning critics have been praising Hou's work, while, for purely economic reasons, the films themselves failed to find distribution in the U.S..  As only the lucky few who made it to the festivals saw the films, an aura began to surround the literally inaccessible oeuvre.  But now that distributor Winstar Cinema has prepared a touring retrospective of Hou's work, culminating in the eventual release of the films on video and DVD, the question has become: how does one make acquaintance with such a titan? 

One of the most common reactions of the first-time viewer to Hou is to cry incomprehension at the details of Taiwanese history.  True, some of Hou's most well known films deal with his nation's recent past, and in particular A City of Sadness – the film which brought Hou international attention when it won the Golden Lion at 1990's Venice Film Festival – stirred up controversy in Taiwan by mentioning a hitherto taboo "incident" where government troops massacred Communists and indigenous Taiwanese alike.  Yet Hou is neither history teacher nor political filmmaker.  Today, away from the controversy and with the context of Hou's larger body of work available to us, it's perhaps possible to view the period films, from A Time to Live and a Time to Die to The Puppetmaster, for what, among other things, they have been all along: personal stories meditating on mortality that happen to be imbued with a particularly acute sense of history. 

This is most evidently the case in the autobiographical A Time to Live… (1985), where the director's alter ego, Ah Ha, discovers the process of growing up as a painful reconciliation with death's inevitability.  One after another of his closest family members succumbs to illness and old age; that it's all part of nature makes it only harder to accept.  Even an early contemporary drama like The Boys from Fengkuei (1983) found its emotional center in the protagonist's relationship with his father, who dies in the film and whom Hou cuts to (in dreamy flashbacks of a baseball freak accident) as a haunting presence in the teenager's memory.  A City of Sadness (1989) culminates famously in the funeral of an eldest brother who sought to hold his family together (and whose death, like the others in Hou and in life itself, comes so unexpectedly and with such swiftness that the audience is almost always taken by surprise).  Eponymous Li Tien-Lu's frequent invocations of superstition in The Puppetmaster (1993), coupled with the camera's documenting of his frail presence, only serve to underscore the notion of life's fragility.  When we find out how many died around him, Li's survival and resilience come across as a small miracle: the exception rather than the rule. 

The richest of Hou's inquiries into the past, The Puppetmaster also serves as a turning point in the director's work, its experiments with staging and its freedom from traditional narrative constraints marking Hou's increased interest in expanding the possibilities of his medium.  Thereafter, he made an ambitious (but to his own mind, unsuccessful) attempt at reconciling Taiwan's past and present in Good Men, Good Women (1995).  This was followed by two full-blown masterpieces, one triumphantly contemporary, the other set in a distant, richly imagined past.  Both Goodbye South Goodbye (1996) and Flowers of Shanghai (1998) saw a heightened interest in depicting milieu that went beyond anything before in Hou's output.  In Olivier Assayas's documentary portrait, HHH, the director amusingly confesses to his nostalgia for bygone days, when men were "stronger than women" and went about with their machismo "like animals."  Make that social animals.  One of Hou's favorite setups is of a group of men gathered around at a social setting conducting their business, while women, whether courtesans or karaoke hostesses, refill their drinks and generally entertain the men. 

What makes this slightly lurid, decidedly un-P.C. environment particularly compelling is that Hou's characters never seem entirely at home or themselves in it.  In the splendid opening sequence of Flowers of Shanghai, Master Wang (Tony Leung) proves magnetic in his silence, lost in thought and almost oblivious to the deadly gossip mill of chatterbox patrons and courtesans surrounding him at the dinner table.  In Goodbye South Goodbye, Gao (Jack Kao) finds himself schmoozing, in a memorably grotesque karaoke bar, with the local network of politicians, businessmen, and thugs.  The nightmarish long take finds its punchline in the subsequent shot: Gao throwing up in his bathroom, hung over and in disbelief that he has to go through so much just to fulfill his promise to his father to open up a small restaurant.  It's a sense of discomfort with the world they live in that Hou makes all the more acute by contrasting the sometimes torturous "face-time" his protagonists have to endure with private, intimate moments that find the characters far more at ease with themselves.  In Goodbye South Goodbye, Gao would much rather discuss tattoos with a deliveryman, or ride his motorcycle in the hills, than negotiate with gangsters or businessmen.  In Flowers of Shanghai, Master Wang speaks only when in private. 

It's a tribute to Hou's stylistic mastery that sometimes these spheres public and private collide within the same shot.  In Goodbye South Goodbye, a characteristic long take manages to encompass both a quiet dinner scene between Gao and his father and in a neighboring space Gao getting from gangster acquaintances the latest word on a possible scam.  Few directors can stage a scene so organically as Hou: more often than not, simultaneous narratives unfold within the same frame.  Hou loves populating his shots with characters in different parts of the frame, each conducting his own activity, often unaware of the other's presence, so that when the occasional interaction occurs, it takes both viewers and characters by surprise.  A typical shot in A City of Sadness finds two young adults conversing mid-frame, while children play in the foreground, and an older relative sits knitting in the back.  Just as one has come to consider the kids and the old woman shot decoration, the knitting comes to a halt and the old lady interjects with a pointed comment: she's been eavesdropping all along. 

The complexity of the choreography has something to do with Hou's generosity of perspective.  Not one to associate with tendentiousness, Hou can rarely be accused of editorializing.  The detached observation stems from a refusal to limit himself to any one single point-of-view.  In both content and style, Hou likes to portray his characters in relation to the space and the people around them.  Even in the most subjective of his films, perspective is never insular: Master Wang's disillusionment may take center stage in Flowers of Shanghai, but his sadness and disappointment are placed in the context of the world of courtesans and bureaucrats he passes through, the sense of multiple points-of-view emphasized by Hou's formal division of the film into chapters about individual characters, each identified as living in a certain section of the same space.  Hou remembers, on filming the early Boys from Fengkuei, telling his cinematographer always to pull further back, to be at a more objective distance and show more of what's happening around. 

If Hou's deliberately undemonstrative style means ultimately more work for his viewers, then it's all the more reason to celebrate his presence in cinema this side of the millennium.  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.  Unlike more conventional filmmakers, Hou is in no hurry to deliver a product by "making a point" or getting to the second act.  Each scene is given its due and its share of time passing without being subjected to the exigencies of plot.  It's a glorious alternative to the deterministic plotting and rigid demands of storytelling that characterize much of mainstream cinema.  As Philip Lopate observed, Hou belongs to a category of ontological filmmakers who prefer to observe a moment and let it bloom rather than tailor fit it according to its teleological purpose.  "A film," Hou once told his editor, arguing for The Puppetmaster's rhapsodic approach to chronology and startlingly free-form, associative narrative, "should simply be a number of moments I treasure."  The result – a series of privileged, anecdotal moments, put together in beautifully surprising ways – affects the viewer on a subconscious level until one becomes grateful for what Hou was surely intending to achieve when he titled his film in Chinese, "to dream of life through film."  It's cinema at its most personal and poetic, and something close to sublime. 

<sup>Selected filmography

1983      The Boys from Fengkuei 
1984      A Summer at Grandpa's 
1985      A Time to Live and a Time to Die 
1986      Dust in the Wind 
1987      Daughter of the Nile 
1989      A City of Sadness 
1993      The Puppetmaster 
1995      Good Men, Good Women 
1996      Goodbye South Goodbye 
1998      Flowers of Shanghai</sup> 

^{Suggested reading}

^{J. Hoberman wrote a predictably excellent essay on Hou's work when it was shown as a near-complete retrospective at the Walter Reade last year.  Regrettably, the Voice seems not to archive on-line articles beyond the current year.  Should the article be once again available on the web, a link will be posted here.} 

^{Mark Peranson, ed., Portraits of Hou Hsiao Hsien (Cinemascope, Spring 2000, Issue 3), issue of Canadian film magazine that provides a compendium of essays on Hou.  Excellent pieces by Philip Lopate, Stephen Teo, Kent Jones, Robert Sklar, and Mark Peranson.  E-mail cinema_scope@hotmail.com for back issue information.} 

^{Jean-Michel Frodon, ed., Hou Hsiao-hsien (Cahiers du Cinema, 1999), in French, with texts by various contributors, including Peggy Chiao, Kent Jones, and Charles Tesson.  Includes a number of thematic considerations, an in-depth interview with Hou, and essays on each of the films.  (Available through FNAC.)} 

^Links

^{Click here for information on Hou titles available from Winstar Cinema.} 

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^{All written material (c) 2001 by Derek Lam}