6 hou hsiao-hsien’s films -pursuing and escaping history.pdf

8/10/2019 6 Hou Hsiao-Hsiens films -pursuing and escaping history.pdf

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Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, 2008

ISSN 14649373 Print/ISSN 14698447 Online/08/02023912 2008 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14649370801965604

Hou Hsiao-Hsiens films: pursuing and escaping history

DAI Jinhua (Translated by ZHANG Jingyuan)

TaylorandFrancis

ABSTRACT This article situates Hou Hsiao-Hsiens films in the post Cold-War global setting. Itdiscusses two common interpretive approaches to Hou Hsiao-Hsiens films French auteurism andnational allegory and puts these two approaches within their historical context of Cold-War andpost Cold-War global politics. The article places the rise of Hou Hsiao-Hsiens films parallel to therise of the mainland fifth generation of film directors, pointing out that their apparently oppositedirections Hou Hsiao-Hsien going political in his Taiwan trilogy and the fifth generation filmdirectors going apolitical are part and parcel of the same phenomenon of alternative politics in itsparticular contexts and the reconstruction of a new identity politics. Particular attention is given to

Hous Taiwan trilogy, Flowers of Shanghai, and Coffee Jikou.

K

EYWORDS

: Hou Hsiao-Hsien, auteurism, national allegory, Cold War, post-Cold War,history, Taiwan films

Axes of interpretation

It is dangerous to try to offer a deep read-ing of Hou Hsiao-Hsiens works, but notbecause Hou Hsiao-Hsiens film world is

an elaborate labyrinth. On the contrary, hisfilms are often plain and down-to-earthfrom start to finish, demonstratingemotional suffering and bewilderment yetwithout narcissism or affected sentiment.His films gaze squarely at history and itstrauma with frankness and ease. Readinghis films is dangerous not because theysuggest a myriad of conflicting readings,but because they seductively invite clearand simple approaches to interpretation.

One simple approach is auteurism. Hou

Hsiao-Hsien is a mature first-rate film direc-tor; and his films display a clear set ofpersonal narrative styles, from The Boys fromFengkuei

, which won him international famein 1983, to Caf Lumire

(

Coffee Jikou

) in 2004.He has been recognized in various interna-tional film festivals in Europe as the leadingChinese film director and one of the leadingfilm directors of Asia. In the eyes of Euro-

pean culture, especially in France, HouHsiao-Hsiens films are seen as entirely orig-inal, and therefore as embodying the purefilm genre. Jean-Michel Frodon explains:

Hou Hsiao-Hsiens films question allthe cinematic elements, and break fromthe European tradition of fiction andtheater art. This places his films at thecore of modern cinema. Hou Hsiao-Hsiens films address a particularhistory, geography, and culture. Thesefilms are not based on films by others.Hou is closer to the original formalistinventors of the 1920s and 1930s, suchas Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, CarlTheodor Dreyer and the Russianformalists, than to the New Wave

movement of the mid-1950s, whichgrew out of the long cinematic traditionin France, America, Italy, and Japan.(Frodon 1999: 27)

Starting from the mid-1980s, there havebeen many new waves of Chinese films. Asa film auteur, however, Hou Hsiao-Hsiensonly equal in representational style is theIranian film director Abbas Kiarostami. In


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Pursuing and escaping history

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historical period of the Cold War. The rise ofAsian/Chinese films on the world stagethrough the medium of European interna-tional art film festivals was directly relatedto the drastic geopolitical changes from theCold War to the post-Cold War. Another

historical reference linking the non-Euro-pean-American or third-world films is thenational liberation movements thathappened simultaneously with the ColdWar and had a very complicated historicalrelationship with the Cold War.

The appearance of the numerical desig-nation Third World was itself a product ofthe Cold War structure. Putting aside thehistory of the term, Third World hasalways been associated with the undevel-oped regions and countries in most of Asia,

Africa, and Latin-America. It shows a thirdkind of existence outside the Western camp,led by the USA, and the Eastern camp, ledby the Soviet Union. Here, I only want topoint out three distinctive features of ThirdWorld discourse in the Cold War context.First, the term was first adopted by themajority of Asian, African, and Latin Ameri-can countries, with the help of the non-aligned movement and the BandungConference, at which China proposed a

Third World theory to break through theenemy encirclement of China. Third Worldtheory was adopted by the pan- AsianAfrican and pan-Latin American move-ments, in order to obtain their own rights toexist, speak, and exercise national sover-eignty in the Cold War structure of dividinghumanity into two camps. Secondly, theThird World was constructed by the hege-monic battles between the US and the SovietUnion through their military and politicalassistance and intervention. The US and the

Soviet Union fought over these Third Worldregions for ideological influence andeconomic dominance. Thirdly, and closelylinked to our current topic, Third Worldtheory was given importance by post-warEuropean and American intellectuals whosecritical theory was a discursive transferenceto the Third World. Here, Third Worldbecame the Other in the self-criticism ofEuropean culture and the overcoming of

Cold War dichotomies. In a sense, the politi-cal and spiritual crises in France created byAlgerias war for independence directly andindirectly produced the new-wave Frenchfilms and the French film author theory,while Fredric Jamesons article Third-

World Literature in the Era of MultinationalCapitalism proposed the concept of ThirdWorld national allegory. The articleattempted to create an island of resistance inthe Western total system, to speak for ThirdWorld nationalism and to highlight nationalallegorical writing (Jameson 1986). Suchpractice was itself the politics of the Otherwithin the Western/American culture, asocial and cultural grounding outside thebinary structure of the Cold War.

The interesting thing is that during the

entire Cold War period, Hollywood andeastern bloc socialist realism occupied themajority of the global cinematic market.The European new wave of films amid thepost-war European devastation, reconstruc-tion, and crisis was third in importance inthe global film industry. The end of theCold War with the collapse of the SovietUnion and the changes in Eastern Europebrought about the collapse of the Sovietand eastern bloc film industry. The Polish

director Krzystof Kieslowski, later namedas one of the greatest European film direc-tors of the twentieth century, came to beregarded as a French director. His experi-ence is a kind of trophy of Western histori-cal victory.

Although the end of the Cold Warreunified Europe, it did not revive the gloryof European art films. On the contrary, longbefore the end of the Cold War, with theestablishment of new liberalism in Englandand America, Hollywood as the sole tran-

snational film superpower had alreadyinvaded the European film market, just as itdemolished the film industry in other coun-tries. In the last 20 years of the twentiethcentury, while European art films weredeclining, the European film industry begana global set of institutions that recognizeand introduce non-European-American filmartists and their products through Europeaninternational film festivals.


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between China and Taiwan. The Americanmilitary bases whose presence was to securethe divisions were reinforced. The variousnationalisms on both sides of these divisionsmade this region one of the most tense in theworld. In this context, the art-film directors

in China and Taiwan began a re-politicizedpractice in their creative works. In the case ofHou Hsiao-Hsien, when the heavy historicalcloud began to dissipate, beginning with ACity of Sadness

, his films launched a clearpolitical intervention in reality.

Traces of memory

Hou Hsiao-Hsiens films remind people ofthe films by Francois Truffaut (the origina-tor and conscious practitioner of the idea of

author-films), and especially his AntoineDoinel series. From The Boys from Fengkuei

and Daughters of the Nile

(1987), Hous filmsare inscribed with his own personal memo-ries. The coming-of-age stories in his filmsare quite revealing. However, unlike thenarcissistic, melancholic, and mocking tonein Truffauts Antoine Doinel series, thetone of Hous films narrating youth is mean-dering and slow, clear of narcissism andaffectation, until the historical memory of

the bloodshed and gun-shot suddenlyintrudes in the filmA City of Sadness

. AfterACity of Sadness

, Hous films no longer dealdirectly with the traumatic history ofTaiwan; and yet his later films seem to beforever wrestling with the ghosts of history,from the personal memory in The Puppet-master

to the re-encounter with history in

Good Men, Good Women

. However, theattempt to escape the nightmarish past onlyinvites it back to the present through theprocess of repression. Flowers of Shanghai

(1998) is an exception, though: it portrays apast directly, staging the late Qing era in aclosed environment. The original novel onwhich the film is based takes place in theforeign concession in Shanghai, and the filmis the result of the historical links amongZhang Ailing, Hu Lancheng, the Zhu sisters,and the Taiwan new-wave films.

It is fair to say that Hous films alwayscenter on reminiscences and the search for

memories. He is forever looking for andrecording the lost best times. A Japanesefilm critic, Shigehiko Hasumi, has raised thequestion, What do these absences and long-ings in Hou Hsiao-Hsiens films mean?Hasumis own answer to his question is:

During the turbulent years of theSecond World War, Taiwan went frombeing a Japanese colony to being a partof China, looking very much to pastand future. For Hou Hsiao-Hsien, wholeft the mainland to come to Taiwan invery early childhood, the present tensewas always an insignificant speckamong grand historical dramas. A longtime passed before Hou realized this,but the loss and absence of the presenttense were the important experiences in

his childhood and youth. Because itwas not possible to touch on thepresent, he turned to the history andthe past of a Taiwan which he had notexperienced. The lifting of martial lawin Taiwan in 1987 made it more possi-ble for him to do so. The finely detailedsadness in Hous historical trilogyfilms can be regarded as the profoundexpression of loss in the collectivememory and in his personal memory.(Hasumi 1999: 27)

We can also situate Hous films in the histor-ical framework of the Second World Warand the Cold War. As a chronicler ofpersonal history, Hou Hsiao-Hsien experi-enced his youth as a closed and suspendedpresent it was a temporary residence, awaiting with no end in sight, a stopover by afamily in constant relocation. As a historianwriting with his camera, Hou Hsiao-Hsiencreated an allegory for contemporaryTaiwan: the light and cheap bamboo furni-ture in Fengshans home. It could be

discarded easily before moving, corre-sponding to Chiang Kai-sheks coffin in theChiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. Thiscomparison occurred several times in thefilm, showing the frozen and undevelopedhistorical moment. While the Japanese occu-pation and departure divided Taiwanstwentieth century into two halves, thedivision of the Cold War became a spatialdivision across the Taiwan Straits. The


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Nationalist desire to return to the mainlandbecame an empty and absurd narrative. Ifthe Cold War cut short, blocked or emptiedTaiwan society from historical depth, thenthe prolonged delay of the return to themainland put the future forever into a

realm of cloudy doubt or inaccessibility.From this perspective, the early films byHou Hsiao-Hsien showed a closed present,a present that struggled to move on but raninto the glass walls. The repeated images ofrailroad trains, of waiting on the platform,and of repeated journeys, represented acertain spatial mode of existence on theTaiwan island, but also a rupture andsuspension of time and meaning. Forinstance, in the filmA Time to Live, A Time toDie

(1985), the old grandmother who

wanted to return to her hometown packedup her cloth bundle but was unable to walkacross the bridge. Images like this are alle-gorical explorations of the absurdity of thefate of Taiwan and the promise of returningto the mainland.

The literal history within these films is acertain kind of personal coming-of-agestory. These stories are about fatherlesschildhood and youth. The fatherlessness isnot literal; rather, fathers always stay within

the domestic household, silent and timid,like decorations in space but not in time.These fathers do not hold authority or thepower of castration, but instead seem to bethe remains of historical castration. In thefilm The Boys from Fengkuei

, the father is amindless zombie. In the filmA Time to Live,A Time to Die

, the father is always sitting athis desk alone and speechless, finally dyingthere. The father who married into his wifesfamily and therefore was kept quiet andhumble in the film Dust in the Wind

(1986)

has been reconceived as the self-consciouslypolitical writer and interpreter in the filmABorrowed Life

(1994) by its director Wu Nien-Jen, based on his own life story. And yetalthough Hous films often portray protago-nists who are in a sense fatherless, the sonsdo not fall in love with their mothers either.Most of Hous films show prematurelyweathered mothers under the heavy burdenof daily chores and worries mothers who

cannot perform the duties of the fathers indealing with their sons. The presentabsence of the father from Hous filmscannot be explained in terms of psychoanal-ysis, but rather can only be explained interms of the family genealogy that has been

severed by historical violence. Therefore,the prominent presence of the grandparentsin the domestic scenes of these films repre-sents fragments of history, not bridgesbetween memory and history. The youngmen in Hous early films grow up alone,struggling with innocence and awkward-ness and finally reconciling with fruitlesslove. Unlike European psychoanalyticnarrative models of coming of age, thefatherless childhood and fruitless love inHous films are not obstacles to youth and

growth. The protagonist is reconciled to hisfate after an outburst of despair at the end ofthe film The Boys from Fengkuei

; in the film

Dust in the Wind

the protagonist, aftersilently weeping over his heartbreak,returns to his family in the mountains, putson the clothes made by his former lover,passes by his mother napping on a Japanesemat, and chats with his aging grandfatherabout the weather and the harvest. Never-theless, on the symbolic level, what chokes

off the narrative voice of Hous coming-of-age tales is the coming of age itself. OnceHous protagonist becomes an adult, hefaces a world that cannot tolerate him and aworld to which he no longer belongs. Hefaces wholly negative and murderous socialforces.

Looking beyond the historical eventsnarrated in several of Hou Hsiao-Hsiensfilms, perhaps we can situate his film writingwithin a certain male double pattern. On oneside we find a restless youth growing up

without parental guidance, and on the otherside we find an adult man, mature, faithful,and socially responsible. But the former hasnever formed any relationship with thelatter. Rather, the latter seems to be the idealpersona or the mirroring idol of the former.This idol reflects aspects of Hou Hsiao-Hsiens own life experience, with addedtraces of martial-arts fiction and cops-and-robbers films. In a sense, this idol serves as a


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bearer of history and a ghost of history; herepresents both historical continuity anddiscontinuity. Even within the film narra-tive, the idol is shown as a heroic man out ofplace in his time. In the filmA City of Sadness

,the idol is older brother Wenxiong who takes

part in historical events but dies before thestart of the bloody new age. In the film GoodMen, Good Women

, Zhong Haodong tries tocarry the historic burden but ends like astructural absentee. In the same film, Ah Weiremains a vivid presence after his death. Incurrent metropolitan society, the idol cannottake the center stage even for a moment: heremains a marginalized man. Such examplescan be found among the protagonists LinXiaoxiang (in the film Daughters of the Nile

),Ah Wei (in the film Good Men, Good Women

),

and Gao (in the film Goodbye South, Goodbye

).The idol is murdered many times in Houslater films by various opponents: the good,the bad, the underworld, or the government.In the film Taipei Story

(1985; a film for whichHou helped to get funding, was involved inthe screenplay writing and even played acharacter), Hou himself plays a part in theconcluding death scene: in the shadow of theabandoned black-and-white screen, AhLong quietly dies at a garbage dumpster,

along with his long forgotten glory anddream. The scene wordlessly replays thecruelty of historical exile.

Hous writing style is especially appar-ent in this scene: he likes to write about theups and downs of grand social and humandramas, but he tries to avoid depicting greathistorical events directly. The deep and sadmemories of tragic historic moments surfacemomentarily in the retelling of the events byothers years later, as the long echoes ofhistory in life. Hou Hsiao-Hsien once said,

The world is not so dark or decadent.During times of drastic change, people haveno choice over the course of their lives.Death and parting from family and friendsare as inevitable as the running river (Hou1998). This philosophy is the basis of Houscharming narrative style, and indeed itdiffers from Euro-American philosophy. Atthe same time, it exposes a certain historicalsymptom: in Taiwan under the cold-War

martial law, events of social conflict werekept out of public sight, hidden deep insilence. Hous use of long camera shots anddepth of field in his films have beendiscussed by many film critics. These tech-niques not only form the narrative rhythm

of slow and lyrical motion in Hous films,but also the narrative distance within hisfilms. However, such a distance is not anobservation from afar, not transcendentalwithdrawal, but a persistent gaze with soft-ened pain. It is introspection of introspec-tion and layered distances. Hous stanceresembles a stance taken by the mainlandwriter Shen Congwen, who chose silence asa way of refusing to accept the historicalchanges in China in the late 1940s and 1950s.Hous pure and original film language

therefore reflects another historical identity:it is more than an identification with thenation-state; it is an individualized gesturein dealing with historical trauma.

Although Hous early films seem to tellthe stories of individuals and even ofhimself, many of them have an omnipresentnarrator. The off-screen narrator, commonlyin the form of diaries and letters in femalevoices, add alternative perspectives to themain narrative lines of these stories, mainly

about men. In Hous films, the structuralrhythms are reflected not only in the use ofthe long shot, but also in the prolongedlingering after the conclusion of the plots.The long anti-climaxes toward the ends ofthe films depart from the traditional narra-tive format and violate the rules of classicalfilm making. The ending of a love affairdoes not stop the growth of the protagonistsin Hous films, and even the death of theprotagonists does not close the curtain onhistory or on the story. For instance, at the

end of the film A City of Sadness

, behindWenxiong and Wenqing, we can hearKuanmeis voice reading aloud her letter,retelling her farewell to Wenqing andreporting the growth of the children. Thecamera fixes its long shot on a wide-angleview of the repeated domestic scene of theLin family eating dinner together under alamp in the evening. It shows not just theempty seat at the head of the table symboliz-


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ing the historical trajectory of a clan in therealist epic tradition but, more importantly,it shows by way of the young people in theshadowy background who keep getting upto refill their rice bowls that life goes on aftera catastrophe. The young generation will

grow up in another time and perhaps haveits own interesting stories to tell. It is in suchgaps and suspensions that Hou Hsiao-Hsiensilently conveys the stunning truth of lifeand history.

Toward history and away from history

A City of Sadness

is undoubtedly a landmarkin Hou Hsiao-Hsiens filmmaking. Not onlydoes it begin a very important, perhaps themost important of his film series the

Taiwan trilogy it also touches on a part ofTaiwans history that had been suppressedby the KMT government for decades.Released at the time when martial law waslifted in Taiwan, A City of Sadness

lifted thecurtain of taboo covering the great scar inTaiwans history: February 28, 1947, whenthe KMT government killed thousands ofcivilians in order to put down an uprising. Itis in fact the first Taiwan film in the post-Cold War construction and deconstruction

of the nation-state narrative.Lin Wenqing, a major character in thefilm, reveals a subtle but culturally signifi-cant feature of the position of the film narra-tor. Deaf and mute, Lin is a moving andmeaningful character in the film, and isplayed by the Hong Kong actor Leung ChiuWai. Lins muteness could indicate thesilenced part of the official Taiwan history.His muteness was a result of his deafness,which isolates him from the space of soundand from historical time. He did not hear the

radio broadcast of the surrender statementby the Japanese Emperor; nor did he hear theradio broadcast by Chen Yi (the Governor-General of Taiwan) on the day of February28, 1947, the patriotic song Songhua River,nor the gunshots from the prisons. He didnot hear peoples arguments andcomplaints, nor indeed any of the conversa-tions the film parades before us in theMinnan dialect, the Guangdong dialect, the

Shanghai dialect, Mandarin, and Japanese.In a very interesting scene in the film, whenKuanrong and his friends are talking loudlyabout political affairs, Wenqings wife Kuan-mei walks to Wenqing who is quietly sittingat a corner. Kuanmei writes down for

Wenqing the words of the song playing onthe gramophone. The two of them pen awritten conversation about the happy eventsof their childhood. The sunlight through thewindow cuts a bright section on the screenand situates the two in a loving and personalspace, marking them off from the tragichistorical moment. Similarly, during amidnight scene, a messenger comes todeliver the news that Kuanrong has died andthe rebels base has been destroyed.Wenqing holds the picture frame tightly.

Kuanmei leans against him, afraid to wakeup their young son. In a corner of the screen,the family helplessly awaits the approachinghistorical catastrophe.

In contrast to the main characters of thefilm, such as the strong man Wenxiong andthe idealist Kuanrong, Wenqing wasinvolved in history involuntarily. Ratherthan being an active participant, the muteWenqing serves as a witness to the historicaltempests. He faces historical reality, but he

cannot or will not get involved. In the flightscene, the passing train in the foregroundshadows Wenqings family on the platformin the background. There is a symbolic rela-tion between the narrative of A City ofSadness

and history itself: Taiwan nativehistory, which is also Cold War history. Therole of Wenqing is connected to the narrativeaction of the film, but his profession as aphotographer is not a way for the film torefer to its own filming. In the film, the mosteffective historical action by Wenqing is to

express certain final messages: from prison,he writes to his wife and son, You have tolive with honor. Your father is innocent.Alive I leave my country; upon death Ireturn to my country. Life and death aredetermined by Fate; I dont have anythoughts or worries. He writes to his friends:Dont tell my family. When I am dead, Ibelong to the beautiful future of my country.Wenqing passes on his last will, but his will


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cannot be executed. If we can say that alegacy is also a debt, then Wenqing (or thefilm text) cannot pay the debt. A City ofSadness

has revealed another kind of historyand at the same time it has written a legacythat has been sealed by blood. By revisiting

the legacy, the debt, the film has opened amagic box of the unknown.

The position of Wenqing in A City ofSadness

resembles the structural position ofmany female characters in Hou Hsiao-Hsiens films. In fact, the male he repre-sents another axis in Hous film series.Starting from the film Daughters of the Nile

(1987), Hou Hsiao-Hsien turns his eyesfrom a fishing village at the foot of themountains, strange small towns, a lonelytrain station, and a fatherless sons comings

and goings, to the hustle-and-bustle life ofthe metropolitan cities. Over the course ofhis film career, his protagonists also changefrom lonely youths and hot-blooded men todrifting and wandering young women. Theyoung girl becomes Hous main narratorand recorder of events. Women in Housfilms are the survivors of disasters. Shetravels through the glass wall of the pres-ence of sealed history. However, in the fewfilms where women are the main protago-

nists, such as Daughters of the Nile

; GoodMen, Good Women

(1995); Flowers of Shanghai

(1998);Millennium Mambo

(2001); and CoffeeJikou

(2004), female protagonists are allalone in their struggles against the ghostlyimpact of history and memory in themetropolis. If we say that the presentabsence in Hous films means the hiddenpresence of history, then with the arrival offemale protagonists or female narrators, thepresent and the city also mean the escapefrom the history except in Flowers of

Shanghai

.


, the last film inHous Taiwan trilogy, is his most structur-ally complicated film up to this point.Unlike the other two films in the trilogy,


reaffirms a certainhistorical absence and escape, instead ofrepresenting or even calling for the presenceof history. The film follows historical eventsantecedent to the historical events in A City

of Sadness

and parallel to the historical time-line in The Puppetmaster

, which depictsTaiwanese grassroots life under Japaneserule. In Good Men, Good Women

, the narra-tive line of revolutionary leftist resistanceagainst the Japanese rule is almost non-exis-

tent. The part of Taiwan history in which theleftist patriotic young people went to main-land China to join the resistance against theJapanese invasion in the late 1930s and early1940s appears as a film within the film: wesee rehearsals, scenes from the film, andcosmetic makeup photos. In the closedpresent, Liang Qing, a young urbanwoman character in Hous film who plays arole in the film within the film, waits aloneand endlessly for the camera to start rolling.Liang Qing tries to get close to the model for

her role in the film, a woman called JiangBiyu from a bygone era. Over Liang Qingswhisper, a few brief cruel and absurd histor-ical scenes are shown in the secondary film.Between the noisy present and the historythat Liang Qing is attempting to call backand enter alone is a dimming light and agreat gap. Liang herself lives in the memoryof yesterday: the telephone rings, but whenthe phone is picked up, there is no sound atthe other end; Liang Qings stolen diary is

faxed through her fax machine these arelike ghosts that cannot be driven away, likean old wound that will not stop bleeding,reminding her of her betrayed dead loverand the time in which Liang struggles toforget about him. When Liang Qing finallymeets Jiang Biyu, it is not at a historicalmoment, but at the occasion of death, thefinal departure and separation. When LiangQing, speaking into the silent telephone,calls out the name of her dead lover Ah Weiand sings songs of heartbroken love, she

thereby arrives at a moment parallel to amoment in Jiang Biyus life. Jiang, a womanof great composure, broke down and weptbitterly over her executed husbands body.The one meeting between Liang and Jiang,at the latters funeral, is merely an occasionfor the display of personal pain, womenspain, the despair of the survivors ofcatastrophe, and wounds that cannot behealed.


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Hous Taiwan trilogy violates politicaltaboos and shows a rift in history andemotion. The historical structure andmemory of half a century of the Japaneseoccupation in Taiwan marks the difference inemotional structures between the mainland

and Taiwan. During the second half of thetwentieth century, the KMT governmentstayed in Taiwan and practiced martial lawfor several decades of white terror, success-fully eliminating both the Chinese and theindigenous Taiwanese leftist social andcultural tradition. In other words, eventhough both the Taiwanese new wave filmsand the mainland Chinese fifth-generationfilms were made during the same globalpost-Cold War situation, and for a time thefilm people from both sides of the Taiwan

Straits formed a kind of blood-is-thicker-than-water network, the oceanic politicalgap deeply informed the filmmaking on bothsides. The fact that Hou Hsiao-Hsiens filmscannot deal with certain features of Chinesehistory is an effect not just of the spatialdistance between Taiwan and the mainland,but also of the psychological distance. Evenif one repudiates the Cold-War conception ofred China as a strange beast, even after thebeast has dissipated into dust, one can still

feel the shadowy hole left by its absence. Atthe beginning of the 1980s, both sideslaunched art films. However, just whenHous films began their political interven-tion, the fifth-generation film directors wereabandoning the function of social criticism. Ifwe say that Hous Taiwan trilogy showstraces of the Cold War in its structural gaps,the mainland Chinese films at the turn of the21st century toy with the red ghost of cold-war history and memory. As both sides ofthe Taiwan Straits become more involved in

globalization and in regional conflicts andrestructurings, the shadow and ghost willsurely recur constantly in the texts and soci-eties of these two places.

Perhaps, in a way, Flowers of Shanghai

isno exception. For the first time, Hou set afilm on the mainland, and for the first timehe planned to film on the mainland. But inreaching China, he departed from it onanother level, for the film shows the absence

of Chinas culture. In the words of ScottTobias, an international film critic, Housfilm Flowers of Shanghai

creates a beguilingworld unto itself, sealed off from all otherworlds, real or cinematic what remains isa succession of tableaux so vividly realized

in purely cinematic terms that the emotionsseem to waft from the screen like smoke(Tobias 2006). In Hous own words, To me,China is the origin of Taiwan culture. But Ido not mean contemporary mainland China,that concrete entity separated politicallyfrom Taiwan. When I was young, I waseducated in classical Chinese, reading classi-cal masterpieces and classical poetry. Later Iliked reading classical martial art novels andclassical drama. These Chinese classics haveformed the background of my life and the

basis for all of my creative works. But classi-cal China is entirely different from contem-porary mainland China (Hou 1998). Indeed,

Flowers of Shanghai

used long shots and animmobile camera to make a splendiddisplay of late Qing interior decoration,achieving a dreamy and yet claustrophobiceffect. During the 1980s and 1990s, bothTaiwan and Hong Kong filmmakersadopted the strategy of avoiding the red(communist) period of mainland China by

using the period between late Qing and the1940s as the entry point of their narrativeson China. But the filming process of Flowersof Shanghai

revealed a deeper symptom:because of difficulties about permission tofilm in mainland China, Flowers of Shanghai

,which was scheduled to be filmed in Shang-hai, had to be finished indoors in Taiwan.The scenes of Hou Road and the Qian familyresidence have disappeared in thecompleted film; but the end-of-film screenstill credits Qian Zigang played by Xie

Xian, reflecting the anticipated but unreal-ized arrival on the mainland. In the film,people rush to the window to look at thenon-existent Hou Road. The scene is like areversal of the famous picture on ZhangAilings book cover, where a modern personis outside the window looking in at adomestic scene of the late Qing and thebeginning of the Republic: here Hous filmportrays a modern China from afar, in a late


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Qing building in Taiwan. The revisiting ofmodern Chinese history has become anotherflight from history, a failure to bridge thehuge gap created by the Cold War.

A few years later, a young womanroaming in metropolitan cities searching for

historical traces appears in yet another ofHou Hsiao-Hsiens masterpieces, CoffeeJikou

. Hou Hsiao-Hsien made this Japanesefilm to celebrate the 100th anniversary of thebirth of Japans famous filmmaker YasujiroOzu. Coffee Jikou

has established Hou Hsiao-Hsien as the pre-eminent Asian art filmmaster. However, the fact that Japanremains as the ambiguous Other withinTaiwan informs Hous (non)historical narra-tive. A thin Hou-style narrative thread linksTaiwan, Japan and China, as these three

places occupy the real and also the imagi-nary discursive space in contemporaryTaiwan. In the film, a young Japanesewoman named Yoko is pregnant with achild by a Taiwanese umbrella merchant.The umbrella merchant has already movedhis factory to mainland China. Yoko calmlydecides by herself to remain unmarried andbe a single mother. The story is not about amarriage between history and reality orabout their painful separation. However,

many episodes in the film show Yoko look-ing for biographical material and historicalrecords about a mainland Chinese musiciannamed Jiang Wen. Jiang Wen was born inTaiwan, held a Japanese passport, and diedas a Chinese on the mainland. Jiang Wenslife is clearly linked with a turbulent part ofAsian history. Yoko meticulously traces thetrail that Jiang Wen left in Taiwan, Japanand mainland China; but she never wishesto arrive at an understanding of history, letalone to participate in history. The traces

that Yoko can find are only the physicalplaces where Jiang Wen spent his days,some existing only as landmarks recordedon old maps. Even those traces are sunkdeep in historical dust. The figures oncealive in history have all become ghostslingering in the sediments of history, unableto form concrete shapes. Even though Yokomay not have recovered any fragments ofhistory, she may have come to understand

the story of time itself, encapsulated in thefilms final image of a train going through adark tunnel.

Once again, caught in the strugglebetween history and reality, Hou Hsiao-Hsien has returned to himself, temporarily

suspending the long march into the hinter-land of history and reality.

References

Frodon, Jean-Michel (ed.) (1999)

Hou Hsiao-Hsien,

Cahiers du Cinma.Hasumi, Shigehiko (1999) Contemporary nostalgia.

In Jean-Michel Frodon (ed.)

Hou Hsiao-Hsien.

Hou, Hsiao-Hsien (1998) Preface to A CompleteScreenplay of Flowers of Shanghai

,

A CompleteScreenplay of Flowers of Shanghai

:

,

Taipei: Yuanliuchubanshe.Jameson, Fredric (1986) Third World literature in

the era of multinational capitalism,

Social Text

15(Autumn): 6588.Tobias, Scott (2006) Symphony space presents

Flowers of Shanghai & The Puppetmaster(DOUBLE FEATURE!), http://www.sympho-nyspace.org/event/428.

Special terms

A Borrowed Life

A City of Sadness

A Time to Live, A Time to Die

Coffee Jikou

Daughters of the Nile

Dust in the Wind

films about the native landGood Men, Good Women

One and Eight

The Boys from Fengkuei

The Puppetmaster

Yasujiro Ozu

Authors biography

Professor Dai Jinhua graduated from the Depart-ment of Chinese, Peking University, in 1982. She isProfessor of the Institute of Comparative Literatureand Comparative Culture in Peking University, theDirector of the Cultural Studies Workshop, andVisiting Professor of the Department of East Asia,Ohio State University, USA. Professor Dai isengaged in studies of mass culture, film history and


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Dai Jinhua

feminist literature. Her publications include

Surfacing from History: A study of ContemporaryWomen Literature

, Breaking Out of the City of Mirrors:Women, Film, Literature

, The Mirror and SecularMyths: 18 Film Cases

, Invisible Writing: ChineseCultural Studies in the 1990s, Outlook from a SlantingTower: Chinese Film Culture 19781998.

Contact address: Institute of Comparative Literatureand Culture, Peking University, Beijing 100871,Peoples Republic of China.

Translators biography

Zhang Jingyuan teaches at the Department of EastAsian Languages and Comparative LiteratureProgram, Georgetown University, Washington, DC,USA.

Contact address: Department of East AsianLanguages and Cultures, ICC 306, GeorgetownUniversity, Box 571052, Washington DC 20057-1052.USA.

6 hou hsiao-hsien’s films -pursuing and escaping history.pdf

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