NYC Happenings: "Also Like Life: The Films Of Hou Hsiao-hsien" Celebrates A Taiwanese Master
In a key scene of Hou Hsiao-hsien's 1993 masterwork The Puppetmaster, in which the titular figure Li Tien-lu (who appeared in small roles in Hou's previous films) takes center stage to tell his story, Li explains why he named his puppet troupe "Also like Life." He says, "Puppets in performance are like people, so puppet plays are also like life."
That key phrase also perfectly describes the consummate artistry of Taiwanese master filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, who for over three decades has used real life, especially Taiwanese history and contemporary experience, as the raw materials for his inimitable cinema creations. Alongside directors such as Edward Yang, Hou was a key figure of the New Taiwanese Cinema of the 1980's, which brought a new sense of realism and lived experience to Taiwanese films. Hou graduated quickly from his early, more commercial work to such films as The Boys from Fengkuei (1983), A Summer at Grandpa's (1984) and A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985), which sensitively detailed the everyday experiences of ordinary people, contrasting rural life with the rapid urbanization of Taiwan.
Ever since then, Hou has consistently developed and refined his distinctive style of filmmaking: mesmerizing and meditative long takes with elaborate in-depth staging; an elliptical approach to narrative often using complex flashback structures, compressing major events or even leaving them off-screen entirely; also employing an evocative use of sound. All of these cinematic techniques, as challenging or demanding on the viewer as they may seem, are solidly based in Hou's deeply humanistic desire to create enduring vividly rendered art out of the everyday lives of people affected by the shifting tides of history and the rapid changes of contemporary life.
The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York City, will present a complete retrospective of Hou's films called "Also like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien," which screens from September 12 through October 17. This retrospective, which will tour internationally, includes all seventeen of Hou's feature films, and is a rare opportunity to see many of the films, most of which are not in distribution in the U.S. This includes new 35mm prints of two of his finest films - Flowers of Shanghai and Good Men, Good Women - as well as rare early films and shorts. Also included are a related selection of films by other directors, such as Olivier Assayas's fine documentary HHH: A Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hsien, and films by two major collaborators: Edward Yang's Taipei Story (co-written by and starring Hou) and Wu Nien-jen's A Borrowed Life (cited by Martin Scorsese as one of the ten best films of the 1990's).
The retrospective was organized by Richard I. Suchenski, director of the Center for Moving Image Arts at Bard College, and the editor of "Hou Hsiao-hsien," a new collection of essays on the director, with contributions by scholars, critics, and filmmakers, including many key Hou collaborators. (The book is available at Amazon; more info here.) And although unfortunately Hou himself will not appear in person for these New York screenings, an impressive array of scholars and critics will be on hand to introduce selected films in the series. This includes Suchenski (who will intro the opening night screening of Flowers of Shanghai on Sept. 12), J. Hoberman, Amy Taubin, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Philip Lopate.
Full details on the retrospective are below. For more information, visit the Museum of the Moving Image's website.
Hou Hsiao-hsien, the leading figure of the Taiwanese New Cinema movement, is one of the most important and influential filmmakers to emerge over the past three decades. His sensuous, richly textured work, marked by elegantly staged long takes and an elliptical approach to storytelling, can be seen in such widely acclaimed films as Flowers of Shanghai, A City of Sadness, Dust in the Wind, and Flight of the Red Balloon. His modernist formalism was complemented by a humanist touch expressed most strongly in films that addressed Taiwan's history and identity, often laced with Hou's own memories. From September 12 through October 17, 2014, Museum of the Moving Image will present Also like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien--the first comprehensive Hou retrospective in New York since 1999. It includes all of Hou's seventeen feature films as director, presented on film (including two new 35mm prints), as well as rare shorts, and a selection of related films, among them Olivier Assayas's documentary HHH: A Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang's seminal Taipei Story (starring, and co-written by, Hou), and Wu Nien-jen's rarely shown A Borrowed Life.
"Although Hou Hsiao-hsien has been widely regarded as one of the world's greatest directors, most of his films are not in distribution in the United States," said David Schwartz, the Museum's Chief Curator. "We are very grateful to Richard Suchenski at Bard College for tracking down and securing the best film prints in the world of Hou's films, and creating this essential retrospective."
The internationally touring retrospective, Also like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien, was organized by Richard I. Suchenski (Director, Center for Moving Image Arts at Bard College) in collaboration with Amber Wu (Taipei Cutural Center, NY) and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of China (Taiwan). The retrospective arrives in conjunction with the publication of the new monograph Hou Hsiao-hsien (2014, Austrian Filmmuseum and Columbia University Press), edited by Suchenski, and featuring essays by scholars and filmmakers including Olivier Assayas, Peggy Chiao, James Quandt, Jia Zhangke, Kent Jones, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Jean Ma.
At the core of the retrospective are the films that established Hou's reputation--and which are widely regarded as his masterpieces--including A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985), A City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster (1993), Flowers of Shanghai (1998), and Flight of the Red Balloon (2007); as well as rarely shown early works that trace the development of Hou's style and recurring themes. Throughout the Museum's presentation, films will be introduced by scholars and critics beginning with series organizer Richard I. Suchenski on opening night with Flowers of Shanghai, presented in a new 35mm print (Sept. 12); critic J. Hoberman with The Puppetmaster (Sept. 13); critic Amy Taubin with Three Times (Sept. 14); critic Jonathan Rosenbaum with The Sandwich Man, an omnibus film that features the Hou-directed The Son's Big Doll (Oct. 5); and critic/author Phillip Lopate with Dust in the Wind (Oct. 11).
Also on opening day, Friday, September 12, 3:00 to 4:30 p.m., the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Columbia University School of the Arts-Film will host a panel discussion about Hou Hsiao-hsien featuring Ian Buruma, Bard College; Richard Suchenski; and Richard Peña, Columbia University. The discussion takes place at Kent Hall 403, 1140 Amsterdam Avenue, Columbia University. All screenings take place at the Museum and are included with Museum admission (free for Museum members). A full schedule is included below.
Hou's 1989 film A City of Sadness was a watershed for both Hou's career and for Taiwanese cinema: the first Taiwanese film to depict the volatile period of transition after Japanese colonial rule. Inspired in part by The Godfather, this intimate family saga follows the fortunes of three brothers--the eldest, a gangster; the middle son, a translator; the youngest a photographer--as they navigate the shifting political tides. The film's formal audacity--the flashbacks, the emphasis on the quotidian, long takes with in-depth staging, the evocative use of sound--was critically acclaimed (the film won the prestigious Golden Lion at that year's Venice Film Festival) and it struck a chord at home where audiences flocked to see it, breaking box office records.
A City of Sadness, together with The Puppetmaster (1993), a hybrid film that looks at the life of performer Li Tien-lu (declared a "national treasure" in Taiwan and who frequently appeared in Hou's films), and Good Men, Good Women (1995; presented in a new 35mm print), formed Hou's historical trilogy and established him as the foremost recorder of his nation's troubled past. Rather than subscribing to a grand historical narrative, he favored the perspective of individuals and families as history unfolded around them. His friend and admirer Chinese director Jia Zhangke called Hou "the genius narrator passing down the memories of a nation through films" and captures Hou discussing the making of Flowers of Shanghai--Hou's first film shot outside of Taiwan, a lavish costume drama set in a Shanghai brothel--in his own subversive documentary I Wish I Knew (2010; screening October 17).
Hou's own life as the son of displaced mainland Chinese parents living in Taiwan served as ripe source material for his films. (Hou was born in 1947 in Guangdong, China.) Together with like-minded artists, including the filmmakers Edward Yang (Taipei Story, screening September 21) and Wu Nien-jen (A Borrowed Life, screening September 28) and writer Chu Tien-wen (a longtime collaborator of Hou's), this cohort formed the basis of the first wave of the New Taiwanese Cinema, which blossomed in the 1980s. Drawing from their own experiences, they examined the lives of regular people, often from rural places, as they adapted to a rapidly urbanizing Taiwan. The omnibus film The Sandwich Man (1983; screening October 5), featuring three segments (including the Hou-directed The Big Son's Doll), was a key film in the emergence of the New Cinema movement. The experience of coming-of-age for this generation is captured in Hou's trilogy of A Summer at Grandpa's (1984), A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985), and Dust in the Wind (1986).
The series also includes Hou's earliest feature films. A trio of light, romantic tales starred the Hong Kong pop icon Kenny Bee: Cute Girl (1980), Cheerful Wind (1981)--both also featuring Taiwanese pop star Feng Fei-fei, when the two stars were at the height of their fame--and The Green, Green Grass of Home (1982). These films mark the emergence of Hou's stylistic signature, especially his thematic focus on movements between rural and urban spaces. A more significant work, The Boys from Fengkuei (1983) follows three young men who leave their fishing village for the city as they await being called up for compulsory military service; one of his most emotionally direct works, it has been compared to Fellini's I Vitelloni.
Another rarely shown film, Daughter of the Nile (1987), centering on a young fast-food worker who listens to pop music and reads Japanese manga, shares the cool detachment and focus on disaffected youth in cities that appear in Hou's more recent films, such as Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996) and the techno-infused Millennium Mambo (2001) (his first to open theatrically in the United States). Three Times, released in 2005, tells three love stories, set in 1911, 1966, and 2005, each with the same actors, the luminous Shu Qi and the charismatic Chang Chen, playing the lovers.
Hou's celebrated Café Lumière (2003) is a Tokyo-set ode to Yasujiro Ozu, while his most recent film, Flight of the Red Balloon (2007), set in Paris and starring Juliette Binoche, is a tribute to Albert Lamorisse's 1956 classic The Red Balloon.
Hou's importance to Taiwanese cinema is unparalleled and his influence on contemporary filmmakers is wide-ranging; it can be seen in the films of Olivier Assayas, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Hou's compatriot Tsai Ming-liang, and Jim Jarmusch, among many others. Hou's films reveal an innovative relationship between realism and modernism and ultimately offer the audience a rare sense of optimism for the future of the medium of film itself.
SCHEDULE FOR 'ALSO LIKE LIFE: THE FILMS OF HOU HSIAO-HSIEN,' SEPTEMBER 12-OCTOBER 17, 2014
Screenings will take place in the Sumner M. Redstone Theater or the Celeste and Armand Bartos Screening Room at Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Avenue in Astoria, and are included with paid Museum admission and free for Museum members unless otherwise noted. For information about Museum membership and to join, visit http://movingimage.us/support/membership.
Link to program info: http://www.movingimage.us/films/2014/09/12/detail/also-like-life-the-films-of-hou-hsiao-hsien/
Flowers of Shanghai (海上花)
With an introduction by Richard I. Suchenski
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 7:00 P.M.
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 1998, 113 mins. New 35mm print. With Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Michiko Hada, Carina Lau Ka-ling. Hou's ravishing, lapidary chamber drama follows the fates of four "flower girls" working together in a brothel in the British section of Shanghai in 1884. Inside the sealed, illusory world of the flower house, fading Crimson fears losing the attention of Master Wang to Jasmin, while naïve Jade allows herself to be drawn into a suicide pact. "One of the most sublimely beautiful films I've ever seen, and one of the most unbearably sad. To watch these characters break one another's hearts, and then to have your own broken, is to experience something that the movies rarely grant us--perfection." (Manohla Dargis, LA Weekly). Richard I. Suchenski, Director, Center for Moving Image Arts at Bard College, who organized the internationally touring retrospective, will introduce the screening.
Cute Girl (就是溜溜的她)
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2:30 P.M.
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 1980, 90 mins. 35mm. With Kenny Bee, Feng Fei-fei. Hou's directorial debut is in the style of light melodramatic romances then popular in Taiwan. A pastoral romp, Cute Girl is the first of two films that Hou would make co-starring two pop singers then at the height of their fame, Hong Kong's Kenny Bee and Taiwan's Feng Fei-fei. Bee, a surveyor preparing rural Taiwan for development, meets Feng, a city girl visiting family in the countryside, and the encounter disrupts her plans for marriage. Per film scholar David Bordwell, these are films that "show [Hou] developing, in almost casual ways, techniques of staging and shooting that will become his artistic hallmarks."
HHH: A Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hsien
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 4:30 P.M.
Dir. Olivier Assayas. 1997, 91 mins. Digital projection. With Hou Hsiao-hsien, Chu Tien-wen. French director Assayas, a longtime friend and admirer of Hou's, created this affectionate and probing portrait of the filmmaker for the French TV series Cinema de Notre Temps. An unpretentious and casual-tough figure, Hou shows the scenes of his childhood, source of his early, autobiography-based films, and hits up a karaoke bar with members of the Goodbye South, Goodbye cast. Hou's longtime scriptwriter and collaborator Chu Tien-wen also appears, while Taiwanese critic Chen Kuo-fu provides a historical and aesthetic context for their groundbreaking work together.
The Puppetmaster (戲夢人生)
With an introduction by J. Hoberman
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 7:00 P.M.
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 1993, 142 mins. 35mm. With Li Tien-lu, Lim Giong. In the acclaimed second chapter of his "Taiwan Trilogy," Hou illustrates the childhood and early adulthood of Li Tien-lu, an 84-year-old Taiwanese puppet master, using a combination of documentary technique and elegant dramatization. The real Li, who had previously appeared in bit parts for Hou, functions as on- and off-screen narrator, as the film travels from 1908 to 1945, showing the years of Japanese rule as they impact one man's life, including a ban of street theater in Taiwan during the Sino-Japanese war and recruitment of puppet-art for propaganda purposes.
A Summer at Grandpa's (冬冬的假期)
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2:30 P.M.
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 1984, 93 mins. 35mm. With Wang Chi-kuang, Li Shu-chen, Ku Chun. The first entry in Hou's coming-of-age trilogy, A Summer at Grandpa's was inspired by the childhood memories of his screenwriter Chu Tien-wen, an invaluable new collaborator. When four-year-old Ting-Ting and eleven-year-old Tung-Tung's mother goes into the hospital, they are packed off to spend the summer with her father, a country doctor. Scenes of pastoral, bucolic idyll are combined with indications of a darker side to country life, including roadside robberies, sexual assaults and shotgun weddings.
Cheerful Wind (風兒踢踏踩)
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 4:30 P.M.
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 1981, 90 mins. 35mm. With Feng Fei-fei, Kenny Bee. A photographer travels with her television producer boyfriend and his film crew to shoot a detergent commercial in a seaside village in Penghu. There she strikes up a relationship with a former medic blinded in an ambulance crash. When they reencounter one another back in Taipei, where he is preparing to undergo an operation to restore his sight, their connection intensifies. A little-seen early work, Hou's second romantic film with Feng and Bee offers a look at the development of his signature style of continuous takes and telephoto compositions, and evinces an early devotion to location shooting.
Three Times (最好的時光)
With an introduction by Amy Taubin
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 7:00 P.M.
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 2005, 135 mins. 35mm. With Shu Qi, Chang Chen. In three segments, set respectively in 1966, 1911, and 2005, Hou depicts three love stories between three sets of characters (played each time by Shu Qi and Chang Chen), under three different periods of Taiwanese history and governance. The 1966 segment has a soldier falling for a pool hall girl, the 1911 segment is set in a brothel, and the 2005 segment features a bisexual female pop singer and a photographer--the cumulative effect is that of a summation of Hou's career to date. "The resonance of these combined stories, their differences and similarities, their quietness and seeming simplicity, left me in a near dream-state--something that only happens to me after the most striking cinematic experiences."--Jim Jarmusch
Millennium Mambo (千禧曼波)
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 7:30 P.M.
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 2001, 105 mins. 35mm. With Shu Qi, Jack Kao, Tuan Chun-hao. The story of a young woman whose life is in flux, Millennium Mambo stars Shu Qi as Vicky, a bar hostess fed up with her jealous boyfriend, Hao-hao, who finds a refuge of sorts with a gangster named Jack. A departure in more ways than one, Millennium Mambo finds Hou deviating from his usual long-take master shots to work closer to his actors, and in a distinctly contemporary setting, filled with the throb of electronic music. Even the present is a future past, as Vicky narrates the events of the film from the year 2011.
Good Men, Good Women (好男好女)
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2:30 P.M.
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 1995, 108 mins. New 35mm print. With Annie Shizuka Inoh, Lim Giong. The past is an ominous presence in Good Men, Good Women: While actress Liang Ching is preparing to play in a 1940s-set historical epic called Good Men, Good Women, someone is terrorizing her by faxing her pages from her stolen diary. Her story is criss-crossed by colorful flashbacks to her affair with the now-deceased Ah-wei, as well as black-and-white film-within-a-film scenes in which Liang imagines the movie about the anti-Japanese resistance that she is to appear in.
The Boys from Fengkuei (風櫃來的人)
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 5:00 P.M.
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 1983, 99 mins. 35mm. With Doze Niu, To Tsung-hua, Lin Hsiao-ling, Chang Shih. Three teens from the Penghu Islands, in pre-adult limbo before their compulsory military service, travel from their fishing village to Kaohsiung, the second-largest city in Taiwan, where they find part-time employment. This coming-of-age-story is a string of moving vignettes, showing the boys roughhousing, sneaking into an arthouse playing Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers, and following one of their number, Ching-tzu, as he becomes enamored of a hoodlum's girlfriend. Hou's breakout film is one of his most emotionally direct works, comparable to Fellini's I Vitelloni, though it also anticipates his future examinations of urban anomie.
Taipei Story (青梅竹馬)
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 7:30 P.M.
Dir. Edward Yang. 1985, 110 mins. 35mm. With Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Chin. Hou, who co-wrote the screenplay for Taipei Story with his frequent collaborator Chu Tien-wen and mortgaged his house to finance his friend Edward Yang's second feature, also stars in the film as Lung. Returning to Taiwan from a stint in the United States, Lung has abandoned his dreams of a baseball career to join his family's textile business. While Lung is lodged in the past, his real-estate developer girlfriend Chin sees career opportunities ahead, and Yang shows their relationship coming apart at the seams with frightful clarity. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum singled out this film as "a turning point in the history of Taiwanese cinema."
Café Lumière (Kohi jiko), preceded by The Electric Princess Picture House (電姬館)
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 7:00 P.M.
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 2003, 103 mins. 35mm. With Yo Hitoto, Tadanobu Asano. Hou is frequently compared to the master Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. In Café Lumière, commissioned for the centenary of Ozu's birth, Hou addresses that legacy directly. He applies Ozu's low-angle perspective to this film set in a distinctly contemporary Tokyo that looks backwards to the city's disappearing past. At the center is Yoko (pop star Yo Hitoto), a writer investigating the life of a Japanese composer of the 1930s. She is pregnant by a man she does not want to marry, and has found a kindred spirit in a used-bookstore owner who aids her research. Preceded by The Electric Princess Picture House (電姬館) (2007, 3 mins.), Hou's contribution to the 2007 anthology film To Each His Own Cinema.
The Green, Green Grass of Home (在那河畔青草青)
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2:30 P.M.
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 1982, 90 mins. 16mm. With Kenny Bee, Chen Mei-feng. Hou's third and last vehicle for Kenny Bee was this Cinemascope musical in which Bee plays a substitute teacher newly arrived from Taipei to a country village, where he begins a romance with a fellow teacher, much to the chagrin of his city girlfriend who comes to drag him back. Such material may seem like an unlikely project for Hou, known for his withdrawn and observant style, but The Green, Green Grass of Home is significant for being the film on which Hou first allowed improvisation, giving the schoolchildren free reign in front of the camera, and so marking the film as an important step in the burgeoning New Cinema movement.
Flight of the Red Balloon (Le voyage du ballon rouge)
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 4:30 P.M.
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 2007, 115 mins. 35mm. With Juliette Binoche, Simon Iteanu, Song Fang. Hou's Paris-set tribute to Albert Lamorisse's 1956 classic The Red Balloon concerns seven-year-old Simon and his life with mother Suzanne, a performance artist, as they are seen through the eyes of a Chinese student hired as Simon's nanny. Song Fang, an actual film student, is essentially playing herself, and the free improvisations give the proceedings a winning air of play, appropriate to a movie that features a sentient balloon as Simon's benevolent companion.
A Borrowed Life (多桑)
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 7:00 P.M.
Dir. Wu Nien-jen. 1994, 167 mins. 35mm. With Tsai Chen-nan, Tsai Chou-fong, Fu Jun. The directorial debut of Wu, who has worked with Hou, Edward Yang, and Ann Hui, was little-seen in the United States despite being one of Martin Scorsese's ten favorite films of the 1990s. A Borrowed Life follows a working-class Taiwanese family from the aftermath of independence from Japanese rule to the 1980s, centering on the relationship between father, coal miner Sega, and son Wen-jian (who is played by three actors), characters drawn from Wu's life. "[C]onveys a remarkably vivid sense of the natural world as it is apprehended by a child." --The New York Times
A Time to Live and a Time to Die (童年往事)
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3, 7:00 P.M.
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 1985, 138 mins. 35mm. With Yu An-shun, Tien Feng, Mei Fang. The centerpiece of Hou's coming-of-age trilogy, bracketed by A Summer at Grandpa's and Dust in the Wind, this "delicate, haunted drama" (Richard Brody, The New Yorker) is drawn from the director's own memories of growing up in rural Taiwan after his family's immigration from China. A Time to Live and a Time to Die follows Hou's on-screen alter-ego Ah-Hsiao (nicknamed "Ah-Ha") from 1947 to 1965, including an early immersion in street gang culture. The film's scope poignantly depicts the toll of time, the presence-in-absence of the left-behind mainland, and Taiwan's gradual changing of the generational guards.
Daughter of the Nile (尼羅河的女兒)
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2:30 P.M.
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 1987, 91 mins. 35mm. With Lin Yang, Jack Kao. In this vehicle for Taiwanese pop star Lin Yang, she plays a disaffected Kentucky Fried Chicken server looking after her wannabe gangster brother; her only escape is found in manga comic books. An outlier in Hou's filmography, which found him working again with the producers of his early commercial romances and engaging with contemporary urban pop culture, this rarely screened film is ripe for rediscovery. "Hou's formalist eye turns every shot into a study in absence and detachment, and his attention to the anomic rhythms of Taipei youth culture reminds one of Godard's early 1960s portraits of Paris," wrote James Quandt in Artforum.
The Sandwich Man (兒子的大玩偶)
With an introduction by Jonathan Rosenbaum
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5, 5:00 P.M.
Dirs. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wan Jen, Tseng Chuang-hsiang. 1983, 105 mins. 35mm. With Chen Po-cheng, Yang Ki-yin. Jointly directed by Hou and two of his close-knit compatriots from the progressive-minded film scene that convened at Edward Yang's Taipei home, The Sandwich Man, along with 1982's In Our Time, is widely regarded as comprising the opening shots of what would be called the Taiwanese New Cinema. A portmanteau film comprised of three separate segments illustrating life in Cold War Taiwan, when American influence and money were ubiquitous, the film's title derives from the subject of the first segment, the Hou-directed Son's Big Doll, which concerns an impoverished young man who feeds his family by taking a job as a human signpost.
Growing Up (小畢的故事)
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5, 7:30 P.M.
Dir. Chen Kun-hou. 1983, 100 mins. 35mm. With Doze Niu, Chang Chun-fang. The travails of Little Pi, an adolescent in 1950s Taiwan, are at the core of Growing Up, a film that initiated a meeting of minds vital to Taiwanese New Cinema. Little Pi's experiences of young love and delinquency are narrated by a neighbor and classmate, a touch which suggests the unique perspective of the film's screenwriting team: Hou and writer Chu Tien-wen, his close collaborator in years to come. Growing Up was Chu's first venture into film, adapting her own novel, while director Chen Kun-hou was cinematographer on several of Hou's early films, and a mentor of sorts. The rest, as they say, is film history.
Goodbye South, Goodbye (南國再見，南國)
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10, 7:00 P.M.
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 1996, 112 mins. 35mm. With Jack Kao, Lim Giong, Hsu Kuei-ying, Annie Shizuka Inoh. Hou's first film with a contemporary setting since Daughter of the Nile (1987) is a portrait of the lives of small-time hoods rendered in rhythm-of-life anecdotal detail. Gao is the ringleader of a circle of layabouts including his faithful sidekick, Flathead, and their girlfriends, Pretzel and Ling. He is also the originator of petty crime schemes like selling hogs to the government, which promise to get the gang nowhere fast.
Dust in the Wind (戀戀風塵) preceded by La Belle Epoque
With an introduction by Phillip Lopate
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2:30 P.M.
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 1986, 110 mins. 35mm. With Hsin Shu-fen, Wang Ching-wen, Li Tien-lu, Chen Shu-fang. Wan and Huen, teen lovers, are separated when the young man, Wan, leaves their mining village to seek work in Taipei. Huen follows him, but the big city exercises a toxic influence on them and their fellow provincial migrants, who are doing odd jobs just to scrape by. The couple's bond will be sorely tested when he Wan is called up for compulsory military service. One of Hou's most penetrating looks at the rural/urban dichotomy which is key to his delineation of the Taiwanese experience. Preceded by La Belle Epoque (2011, 6 mins.) Hou's contribution to the 2011 anthology film 10 + 10.
A City of Sadness (悲情城市)
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 12, 6:00 P.M.
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 1989, 157 mins. 35mm. With Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Hsin Shu-fen, Li Tien-lu, Jack Kao. Winner of the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, A City of Sadness announced Hou's arrival as a world-class filmmaker and foremost recorder of his nation's troubled past. This intimate epic chronicles the tragedies that befall the three Lin brothers--a gangster, a translator for the Japanese administration, and a photographer--and those around them during a chaotic period in Taiwan's national history, between the end of Japanese Imperial rule (1945) and the secession from mainland China and creation of martial law (1949-1987). The film was groundbreaking in its depiction of the "February 28 Incident" of 1947, when thousands of native Taiwanese were killed in protests against the Nationalist government.
I Wish I Knew (海上传奇)
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 7:00 P.M.
Dir. Jia Zhangke. 2010, 125 mins. 35mm. With Hou Hsiao-hsien, Zhao Tao, Tony Leung Chiu-wai. A sneakily subversive documentary commissioned by the Shanghai World Expo, I Wish I Knew has the great mainland Chinese filmmaker (and Hou acolyte) Jia traveling from Shanghai to Hong Kong and Taiwan, tracing the history of the port city on the Yangtze--and, in effect the history of China--through personal reminiscences and cinematic testimonies, restoring information (and images) occluded or censored by the official Party line. Hou appears to discuss his experience making Flowers of Shanghai, while between sections the film returns to the refrain image of Jia regular Zhao Tao, a reproachful spirit seen wandering through the new World Expo Park.
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