Becoming Hou Hsiao-hsien

By Sean Gilman

Features—

Mar 8, 2024

Becoming Hou Hsiao-hsien
Share

Most accounts of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s early career hinge on a book, the autobiography of the celebrated Chinese author Shen Congwen. Sometime around 1983, the writer Chu T’ien-wen, who would later become one of Hou’s closest and most frequent collaborators, gave the filmmaker a copy, thinking that he shared a certain sensibility with Shen. Hou was at the start of his career and had directed three successful films within the generic norms of Taiwanese popular cinema, and the book was instrumental in helping him find his way toward his signature style. He later described the effect Shen’s words had on him in an interview: “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.” Hou’s way of applying this outlook to his own art form was to instruct his cinematographer to “keep a distance, and be cooler.” Soon after reading the book, he arrived at an aesthetic of long takes and long shots, which came to define both his work and that of his compatriots in the New Taiwan Cinema. This minimalistic style would also be adopted by auteurs around the world and become one of the dominant modes of international filmmaking.

Over the next thirty years, Hou would establish himself as one of the most celebrated directors in the world, winning major prizes at Cannes and Venice, and placing seven titles in the Golden Horse Film Festival’s list of the best Chinese-language films of all time—three of which made the top ten. The Boys from Fengkuei—the first feature he directed after meeting Chu and reading Shen’s autobiography—took home the top prize at the Nantes Three Continents Film Festival in 1984, bringing international recognition to the New Taiwan Cinema, and helping open the door for directors like Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, and Ang Lee.

But the new approach of that breakthrough film did not emerge completely out of the blue. Reading Shen’s book crystallized something that was already there in Hou’s earliest feature films, a trio of romantic comedies he made within the parameters of Taiwanese popular cinema: Cute Girl, Cheerful Wind, and The Green, Green Grass of Home. Though on the surface these movies bear little resemblance to Hou’s better-known later work, traces of his mature style are readily apparent in them. The Hou Hsiao-hsien who directed Cute Girl is not wholly different from the director who made masterpieces such as A City of Sadness, Flowers of Shanghai, and Millennium Mambo.

After graduating from the National Academy of the Arts, where he studied following the completion of his mandatory military service, he worked primarily as an assistant for accomplished directors like Lee Hsing and Lai Ching-ying, and eventually began writing scripts. He entered into a partnership with his fellow apprentice Chen Kun-hou (Lai’s nephew), and the two collaborated on several films, taking turns directing, with Hou writing the scripts and Chen handling the cinematography. All of their early collaborations were made in the prevailing modes of 1970s Taiwanese cinema, which was dominated by romance films (led by a quartet of stars collectively dubbed “the Two Lins and Two Chins”: Brigitte Lin, Joan Lin, Charlie Chin, and Chin Han) and “healthy realism,” a variation on social-realist drama devised by the ruling Kuomintang party to promote proper behavior and patriotic attitudes. The waning popularity of these genre cycles eventually created the space for the New Taiwan Cinema to emerge in the early 1980s.

Due to the paucity of early Taiwanese movies available with English subtitles, I have been able to track down only a couple of Hou’s pre–Cute Girl films, but they have given me a tentative impression of the local commercial cinema in the late seventies, when Hou entered the movie industry. Lover on the Wave (1978), written by Hou and shot and directed by Chen, is a melodrama with a dizzying cascade of incident, as if the young Hou were trying to fit every idea he’d ever had into one screenplay. Stars Joan Lin and Chin Han lurch from dingy discos and drug dens, enduring heart attacks, rival lovers, and disapproving parents while playing out their own alternately comic and tragic romance. Hou’s script for Chu lien (1979) is more controlled. Directed by Lai Ching-ying, the film stars pop star Feng Fei-fei as an abused woman whose lifelong love of a boy in her neighborhood is thwarted at every turn by her villainous adopted parents, an indifferent village of onlookers, and some of the most useless cops in film history. A bleak and unrelenting tragedy, Chu lien plays a bit like a knock-off of The Life of Oharu, albeit with an ending that looks forward to, of all things, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Early Films by Hou Hsiao-hsien
Watch Now On
Top of page: The Boys from Fengkuei; above: Cute Girl

Cute Girl shares a few obvious similarities with these works: a reliance on major stars, a plot that prioritizes density of incident over coherence, and a dedication to uplifting moral messaging. The film follows two city dwellers (Feng and Kenny Bee, the superstar lead singer of the Hong Kong band the Wynners) who meet and fall in love while visiting the Taiwanese countryside but are separated when the woman’s parents arrange for her to be married upon her return to the city. The story is perfectly pleasant and absolutely generic, but Cute Girl departs from genre norms in significant ways. The first is location: unlike the healthy-realist films, which focus exclusively on rural life, and the “Lins and Chins” films, which largely take place in urban settings, Cute Girl moves between the two milieus, forming a dichotomy that Hou—who grew up in the country and did not move to Taipei until he was an adult—has returned to throughout his career.

The second distinctive thing about Hou’s romantic comedies is their visual style. Though Cute Girl was shot by Chen Kun-hou—who also served as the cinematographer for Lover on the Wave—the compositions are much more artful in the later film. Hou makes frequent use of visual humor, employing tricks of editing and perspective that give the movie a comic charm independent of its script. He demonstrates a talent for staging, spatially arranging human figures in such a way that he doesn’t need to rely on cutting to emphasize different characters or ideas.

Third is his use of nonprofessional actors, especially children. In the coming years, Hou would work with a handful of bona fide international movie stars (among them, Tony Leung in A City of Sadness, Shu Qi in Millennium Mambo, and Juliette Binoche in Flight of the Red Balloon), but most of his work is built around unknown, inexperienced performers, like the kids in Cute Girl, who play a small but important role, notably in an early mud fight sequence that reflects the chaos and community of the rural location, a kind of freedom absent from the film’s urban settings.

The biggest difference between Cute Girl and Hou’s previous work is how it flows so smoothly. The film’s gentle vibe is the result of not just its extremely likable stars or its designation as a romantic comedy, but also of Hou’s script, in which conflict is washed away in waves of good cheer. When Wynners drummer Anthony Chan shows up as Feng’s arranged fiancé, Bee, rather than fight his rival, instead becomes his friend, hanging out with him and enjoying a slice at Shakey’s Pizza (a frequent location in this era of Hou’s oeuvre: the restaurant also shows up in Lover on the Wave and Cheerful Wind). This is the way of all the drama in the film: dilemmas are forgotten, magicked away by a plot twist, or simply dealt with in a friendly and mature manner.

Much the same vibe is created by The Green, Green Grass of Home, which leans more in the direction of healthy realism. Bee plays a man from the city who comes to a small town to work as a schoolteacher. Unlike in Cute Girl, there is no traveling between settings; instead, the film is set entirely in the village, and Hou paints a finely detailed portrait of the community as seen through the eyes of its children. The scamps have a variety of stock problems: a missing mother, a bully, parents who don’t understand. Bee doesn’t solve these issues for them, but Hou offers a persuasive vision of a world in which conflicts resolve themselves naturally and organically. Less successful are the film’s nods toward predictable rom-com complications and a heavy-handed environmentalist message in keeping with the didactic demands of the genre.

RELATED ARTICLE
Hou Hsiao-hsien on the Films That Changed His Life
By Hillary Weston
The Green, Green Grass of Home

In the aftermath of The Green, Green Grass of Home, the New Taiwan Cinema was inaugurated with the 1982 omnibus film In Our Time. Hou contributed a short to a follow-up, The Sandwich Man, which came out the following year, and a few months later he and Chen released Growing Up, based on a story by Chu T’ien-wen that Hou read in a literary magazine. Told through the eyes of a young girl who watches her neighbor deal with domestic and economic problems, the film invokes a theme of autobiography by framing itself as the recollection of a woman writer. As much as the director’s idiosyncratic visual style, the adoption of this perspective marks the mature Hou Hsiao-hsien: almost all of his subsequent films are biographies of some sort, based on memories of his own or those of his collaborators (The Time to Live and the Time to Die, Dust in the Wind) or adapted from a memoir or personal story (A City of Sadness; Good Men, Good Women; Flowers of Shanghai).

This biographical quality is evident in The Boys from Fengkuei, which was inspired by events from Hou’s youth. The film is about a group of male friends in their late teens who have chosen not to go to college and idle away their time until their mandatory military service, hanging out and engaging in fights and petty crimes. While maintaining a familiar story structure, Fengkuei is much more narratively oblique than its predecessors, and is built around observations of quotidian life rather than familiar miniplots. Instead of explaining the meaning of the boys’ various actions, Hou leaves space for viewers to try to figure the characters out themselves.

The long shots in the film—considerably longer than anything in Hou’s previous work—serve as a corollary for that sense of perspective he found in Shen’s autobiography. A street fight that in an earlier movie would have played out in several shots unfolds in a single take here, with Hou’s camera at a fixed point in the distance, the actors running in and out of the frame in the chaos of the brawl. We become aware of the fact that we are outside the action. But rather than decreasing our investment in the characters or what happens to them, this strategy heightens it: we’re drawn into their world while at the same time constantly being made aware that we are separated from it. This dovetails with Hou’s newfound autobiographical approach, which is in full effect in a sequence in which the boys sneak into a theater to watch a beat-up, English-dubbed, and Chinese-subtitled print of Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers. This sequence is mirrored by an invented one in which the boys are tricked into going into an abandoned building to see a movie, only to find the landscape of the city spread out before them, framed by concrete walls, a shot that looks backward to Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero and anticipates Jia Zhangke’s Still Life.

Buy Now
The Boys from Fengkuei

As fine as Hou’s romantic comedies are, they are built not out of experience but out of genre conventions—out of other movies. The Boys from Fengkuei marked a major shift to reality. Whereas Cute Girl and The Green, Green Grass of Home were more or less idealized representations of country life, Fengkuei digs deeper. Its small-town setting is not just a lovable community of misfits, oddballs, and regular folks just trying to make do amid the gorgeous rivers and mountains, but a place of deep poverty, despair, and struggle. In The Green, Green Grass of Home, the local butcher gives Bee a deal on an order of pork because she is smitten with him; in Fengkuei, a young woman deftly scales a fish in a courtyard, surrounded but apparently unbothered by an enormous swarm of buzzing flies.

One moment in Cute Girl offers a hint that young Hou was in search of something more than movies. About a third of the way through the movie, Feng sits high up in a tree reading a book in an idyllic pastoral scene. A close-up of the cover reveals its title—Moment in Peking, Lin Yutang’s 1939 English-language novel, which became a best-seller in Taiwan thanks to a 1977 Mandarin translation. The book is a sweeping account of one extended family in China in the early years of the twentieth century, from the events of the Boxer Rebellion through the then-ongoing Second Sino-Japanese War, modeled on great classics of Chinese literature like The Dream of the Red Chamber. In a brief preface, Lin outlines his approach to his characters:

This novel is neither an apology for contemporary Chinese life, nor an exposé of it . . . It is neither a glorification of the old way of life nor a defense of the new. It is merely a story of how men and women in the contemporary era grow up and learn to live with one another, how they love and hate and quarrel and forgive and suffer and enjoy, how certain habits of living and ways of thinking are formed, and how, above all, they adjust themselves to the circumstances in this earthly life where men strive but the gods rule.

Like Shen Congwen’s “breadth of mind,” Lin’s desire to chronicle his characters’ good and bad qualities without judgment mirrors Hou’s own approach to filmmaking, which immerses us in authentic experience while also distancing us from it. In Cute Girl and The Green, Green Grass of Home, you can see him striving toward this ideal. And in The Boys from Fengkuei, for the first time, he reached it—something like life.

Sean Gilman is a film critic based in Tacoma, Washington. He has written extensively on East Asian film at MUBI’s Notebook, In Review Online, Frameland, and his own site, the Chinese Cinema.

More: Features

Thoughts Transcending Time and Distance: Makoto Shinkai’s Voices of a Distant Star
Thoughts Transcending Time and Distance: Makoto Shinkai’s Voices of a Distant Star

In this early-career gem from one of the most beloved Japanese animation directors of all time, an extravagant sci-fi narrative is anchored by the transcendent power of young love and poignant observations of modern life.

By Jonathan R. Lack

On Film / Features — Apr 24, 2024
Trash and Treasure at the Razzies
Trash and Treasure at the Razzies

What makes a “bad” movie anyway? By surveying the bombs, disasters, and secret masterpieces (dis)honored at the Golden Raspberry Awards, we can learn much about American cinema’s prevailing standards of taste.

By Mark Asch

On Film / Features — Mar 25, 2024
Cinema Revolutionary: Fernando de Fuentes in Morelia
Cinema Revolutionary: Fernando de Fuentes in Morelia

The subject of a revelatory retrospective at last year’s Morelia International Film Festival, this groundbreaking director ushered in Mexican cinema’s golden age with vibrant explorations of the nation’s folk traditions and revolutionary past.

By Imogen Sara Smith

On Film / Features — Mar 13, 2024
A Year’s Worth of Essential Reading
A Year’s Worth of Essential Reading

We’re ringing in the new year with a look back at a selection of the most exciting pieces we published in 2023.


On Film / Features — Dec 31, 2023

You have no items in your shopping cart

View Cart Check Out
Close Menu

Search

For streaming, search the  Criterion Channel