Hou Hsiao-Hsien

Dust in the Wind is better, but they're pretty much all good. Watch them both, definitely.

I loved City Of Sadness. It was long but had a really strong sense of period authenticity and some subtle performances and Flowers Of Shanghai was also beautiful as well. I need to watch A Time to Live ... next.

i didnt get a time to live and time to die until the second time.

What didn't you get the first time that was now clear?

Its a beautiful film and fearless about confronting the grubby business of death in the family. As w/many things, it grows the more you spend time with it, but I loved it on my only viewing.

City of Sadness available in a decent print on YouTube btw

Seeing Puppetmaster this Sunday #excited

Jealous! This HHH season is pretty much the first time in about 8 years I've wished I still lived in London.

Didn't know Cit of Sad was on Ytube, so thanks for that Alfred - wonder if there's anything else by him up there (sooo difficult to see his earlier movies on any form of home viewing format)

If you are willing to get into the world of torrents a lot of his early stuff is downloadable on K4T.

Thanks xelab - Ilxor Jed once very kindly sent me a Karagarga invite, but I am absolutely useless at computer type stuff and the whole world of torrents totally befuddles me.

Puppetmaster on Sunday was one heck of an event. I think City of Sadness is pretty good but I found the plot convuluted. must revisit. Puppetmaster allowed Hou to tell a similar story - basically that of Taiwan being a pawn in a game between China and Japan for fifty years - but from a very unlikely POV.

Love the shots of puppet plays and Chinese Opera, how the (for the Western audience watching) what you'd term as Li's collaration with the Japanese is actually not discussed at all (its clear he had to eat and had a family to take care of), how his artistry is sublimated to going in from one job to another, via one company to another. It seems he learns a craft, and not much more - after getting into it via family connections and needing something else after getting in trouble at school. It is mysterious how he comes to be revered among all the other puppeteers - or at least that is partly what it looks like. My mind was running afterwards that he was the ONLY puppeteer that survived war at all, like he was the only reminder that culture existed, the only book that escaped the burning.

Lotsa great shots - Hou is p/distinct, sorta following on from Ozu but only one shot really reminds you of him: in the house where a family member is getting drunk in the foreground (he has been kicked from the army) and is kicking off while Li and family eat on the table in the adjacent room in the background, one level down so you can see their upper bodies, camera nearer to the floor. Then there are Hou only ticks - in another early introductory scene you have the family around the dining room table - three generations around and talking together, celebrating the arrival of another member, talking and making noise.

The way he tells it is nicely done: Li's voice narrates a scene or two (not the event dramatized in his narration) - then Hou gets him on camera to tell a story then finally he tells a story that is then re-enacted in the next shot. All the while Li is rambling like crazy, he can be v funny and possibly unreliable (using frogs to cure a fever), but possibly too full of himself - must've been a job to edit.

so i saw good women good men, and goodbye south - i think the latter might be my favourite of all his films, save for time to live, time to die. though i know its prob the most different, and perhaps least hsien-like of all his films in some ways. reminded me more of tsai ming liang and even wong kar wai actually, which might be why i liked it. i think his delicate style of filmmaking in general might just not be for me, i find it too... mannered? though im still going to check out his later films on dvd.

Dust In The Wind is another brilliant one. He does social realism better than any director I have ever seen, as in the scenes where people are talking/eating/drinking/smoking that are always interesting and driving the narrative without any crude expositionory shit. That old skinny dude who plays grandpa and is also in City Of Sadness is amazing and his scenes don't even resemble acting - more like projecting his own hard lived life to the camera, he lights up every scene, even where he is talking about ginseng and potatoes at the end.

I saw that too. can I confirm here whether he repeats those ginseng and potatoes remarks twice? Interpret it as the onset of dementia.

The scene where the father and son are having a meal before he sets off for the army and where the father talks about how generations of his family have been unlucky in getting themselves an education was moving as hell.

Man alive Three Times was killer - what a magical Sun afternoon screening. This has turned out to be one of BFI's best seasons in at least 2-3 years.

Still one week left, hoping to catch one more this coming weekend.

The Assassin isn't first tier Hou: if you walk in after the opening titles, you'll have no idea who's doing what to whom. Lovely costumes.

feel like that's both a bizarre standard to expose a film to - if you miss some of it, it won't make sense - & one generally not meaningfully applicable to a hou film, or at least one in this mode. it's absolutely first-tier hou, i think.

All I meant was that nothing in the story or images indicates the tensions between the assassin and the governor. Hou has never been much good at plot, but his compositions and editing were more than enough. Here there are many dead spots between the swordplay seuences.

i.e. without the opening titles you're at sea.

have you seen a hou film before?

You think that film makers should consider people who missed the beginning? 😳

I think posters should read what I wrote.

i am In Pain reading these posts

What you see in the film is what happened; there’s no CGI, it’s all natural and exactly as it happened. This was shot in Hubei province in Mainland China, in an area called Shennongjia, which is about 2,700 meters above sea level. So it’s very high up and it was a very humid day, so there were cloud after cloud just coming in waves through the mountain and the valley. So honestly, it didn’t take us very long at all to shoot the scene; it was just happening like that. So we just showed up and shot it. Had it not been a very humid day without clouds, I may have still been able to utilize it. It just so happens there were clouds, it was humid, and so it was the kind of scene we ended up utilizing for the film.

http://filmmakermagazine.com/96104-we-just-did-long-takes-every-time-hou-hsiao-hsien-on-the-assassin/

Hou has never been much good at plot

ok cool.

like Beckett, say

like James

It's very much worth watching, and still damn impressive, but I couldn't figure out who was doing what to whom, which in most Hou movies isn't a problem but the wry ending requires understanding what just happened. I'm gonna watch it again tonight or tomorrow.

turn off the vacuum cleaner this time.

Saw it in the theater! I felt most sorry for a tour bus full of Taiwanese tourists tangentially acquainted with Hou who hurried excitedly into the theater and when the lights went up a hundred minutes later looked like soccer balls had hit them in the gut.

I think posters should read what I wrote.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, October 26, 2015 1:32 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I read it and my response was flippant/stupid and I've really enjoyed your writing at times in spite of the fact that you've stated in that past you're not a particularly vigilant viewer. I mean you've been on record as being on the treadmill or doing housework or whatever else while you views films and I honestly don't know how that is a useful position for a critic. I dare say the new hou is confusing but criticising it for being confusing if you missed the credits is stupid.

ditto jed re: the general quality of alfred's posts, this tragically now something i can only wince, remembering, confronted with his terrible descent into philistinism. anyway i'm joking & i didn't mean to post-&-run whenever it was but just to clarify-

All I meant was that nothing in the story or images indicates the tensions between the assassin and the governor. Hou has never been much good at plot, but his compositions and editing were more than enough. Here there are many dead spots between the swordplay seuences.

just leaving the plot thing aside because: i can't, it's wild to me to read something dismissive of dead spots in this, or really for the knife fights to be invoked as if they were in some entirely separate, jarring tonal register (i saw a bunch of hou in quick succession during the retro, & so get everything mixed up, but the fights in this reminded me of a kind of believably-clumsy chase-&-fight scene, shot at a distance, & half-obscured by the long grass of a field, in one of the older films -- possibly dust in the wind?). i think maybe most perfectly in cafe lumiere hou manages to create this incredibly balanced micro-climate of just mood & feeling, akin to what other films control by periodically drip-feeding events & revelations, tension accumulated & diffused, with hou this kind of thing all depending on just like utterly transparent, lighter-than-air vibrations in scenes. & in this it just felt so incredibly well judged; there was an especially intense scene, after the assassin is wounded, when her cuts are being treated, in the room with the other wounded man, & it's this judicious, sparing close-up & the most direct confrontation we have with her just fierce concentration, like it's such an restrained & expressive performance & although it isn't explicit it's a real kind of direct shot. & then the next few minutes of the film are these light dance scenes, the ones before the woman collapses against the pillar, the lightness of this seeming exactly proportionate to the heaviness of the preceding scene, like the film is air currents circling & replacing one another. i really think the parts of the film that are maybe susceptible to confusion - like sure i could not draw a family tree or whatever - just kind of aren't important to the film that this is, & are aligned with the assassin's similar detachment from such matters.

also apropos of nothing another really beautiful thing, seeing this, & having seen stuff relatively recently in the retro, was just the joy of seeing new variations on a few kinda signature shots he uses, like the scene of the homestead the assassin quietly walks through, or some of the architectural shots.

ps 龜 did you see this yet, it's mark lee ping bin

I dare say the new hou is confusing but criticising it for being confusing if you missed the credits is stupid.

I saw the film in a theater and was there for every second; it was my first Hou in a theater, and because The Flowers of Shanghai and Cafe Lumiere are among my favorite films ("i think maybe most perfectly in cafe lumiere hou manages to create this incredibly balanced micro-climate of just mood & feeling, akin to what other films control by periodically drip-feeding events & revelations, tension accumulated & diffused, with hou this kind of thing all depending on just like utterly transparent, lighter-than-air vibrations in scenes" -- otm exactly) of their respective decades I dug in for more goodies. Without the benefit of the title card and the opening scene, it's impossible to figure out that, say, the governor and the assassin are related; I should think these facts should be obvious from subsequent scenes. I'm not sure why it's so offensive to admit I preferred other Hou films?

I don't really polish shoes or whatever while watching screeners -- I said it to irritate Morbs, who considers it a distraction if you take notes during a movie.

shot at a distance, & half-obscured by the long grass of a field

I thought this was Hou's shrewdest decision

Haven't seen any of his other movies but I'm seeing The Assassin tonight, and I'm psyched.

Wow was this ever hard to follow, and the opening title didn't help at all with trying to figure out and track the intertwined familial + political relationships between everybody. The whole time I was trying to figure out whether it mattered or not, and we spent the rest of the night trying to piece everything together. Very pretty though.

LOL @ this:

Without the benefit of the title card and the opening scene, it's impossible to figure out that, say, the governor and the assassin are related; I should think these facts should be obvious from subsequent scenes. I'm not sure why it's so offensive to admit I preferred other Hou films?

You are not offending anyone at all. There is another film I've heard about that has a lot of stuff around assassins and people like that, something to do with an agent called James Bond. Looked at a news item on it and the plot might be easier for you, maybe you ought to try that instead.

Just trying to help.

It might be easier for you to fuck off. No reason for the attitude, hoss. You're acting as if I haven't commented in this thread many times over the years. Plus, I watched it a second time and quite loved it.

Btw every single person I talked to that night had no idea what was going on in terms of plot, who was who, characters appearing & disappearing, etc.

Still not sure if the woman in the mask was another assassin sent by the nun or a metaphor.

It might be easier for you to fuck off

I am not sure why that was so offensive? Can you help?

zzzzzz

Off to do some ironing now. brb.

be sure to get the wrinkles out of your brain

Getting the wrinkles out of the fridge today.

ithout the benefit of the title card and the opening scene, it's impossible to figure out that, say, the governor and the assassin are related

wasn't true at all btw

It wasn't not true at all either.

What has or is about to happen?

I've seen critics far more intelligent than I call this his most perplexing movie. I don't think Alfred is alone on his flags.

his most perplexing movie

that would be the puppetmaster

all you really need to know is that the assassin and the person she's assigned to kill are related. that's the driver!

you aren't even told that in the titlecard. it's repeated throughout the first half!

Is The Puppetmaster perplexing? I was following it ok..

The one that I felt was pretty convuluted was City of Sadness but there is so much else to Hou there are other things to follow if you are weighed down by narrative.