Hou Hsiao-Hsien

i am inviting myself to this party

this ... slumber party

The Boys from Fengkuei is a formidable entry in the I Vitelloni genre.

Otm. This scene has been in my mind since I saw it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2jvVT-xYRs

Esp. the second shot.

Yep, that was definitely the best scene of the movie.

hmmm, i wouldn't go that far. Were you there Sunday?

Frederik, do these films circulate in Europe? Because I probably last saw The Boys 20-25 years ago until this weekend, and I bet it hasn't been possible to see it on more than 2-3 other occasions in NYC in that time.

Hoberman (who mentions that the retro will go to Cambridge, Berkeley, Washington, D.C., Rochester, Toronto, Vancouver, Houston, and Chicago):

When I interviewed Hou many years ago in Tapei we met at his preferred spot, a Japanese style teahouse—a marked contrast to the “Chicago-style” burger joint chosen by Hou’s leading contemporary Edward Yang. Unlike the gregarious Yang, whose masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day (1991) concerns Taiwan’s “American” period, immersed in high school turf wars and imported Elvis worship, Hou was reserved and modest, preferring to speak through a translator although he clearly understood English. He disliked travel, he told me, and was critical of Taiwanese investors who, rather than support Taiwanese films, preferred to put their money in Hong Kong or mainland productions: “It’s typical. People don’t value their roots here.” Rather than talk movies, he preferred to explain the history of Cold War Taiwan.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/sep/19/taiwan-master-timekeeper-hou-hsiao-hsien/

I don't really know if it circulates in Europe, I'd guess there would be french copies. I can't figure out if any of his films ever got a Danish premiere (four are mentioned in the database, but without premiere-dates and number of tickets sold. Don't know what that means) He is way more obscure than he should be, and I'd love for this retrospective to come to Copenhagen.

There was a retrospective in 2007, apparantly. Time for one more!

Liked the piece quite a bit:

In a certain sense, Hou is an artist out of time—a reminder of our belatedness more than his. When Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) opened here in 2008, I began my Village Voice review with the unprovable assertion that if the director were French, he’d be far more appreciated. Flight of the Red Balloon was in a way a French movie, shot in Paris (it even played at the Paris Theater in New York) but I should have written, “if Hou were French and we were still living in 1974.” His presence signifies the end of a particular era in film culture that ended long ago.

Even in the mid-70s 'timekeeper' stuff was getting made in France but how appreciated was it really?

More valuable is how that moment has lingered on and taken further by others in different ways, that includes Hou.

Saw the '83 omnibus film The Sandwich Man, intro by Jonathan Rosenbaum (who reminisced about singing drunken Beatles karaoke with Hou in '91). Hou's title segment was likely the best-made -- apparently a transitional work from the three pop comedies he'd made -- but in a way the other two episodes were more socially acute, the second beginning essentially as comedy and sliding into tragedy, the third vice-versa, and taking as their respective themes the role of the Japanese and American presence in Taiwan.

https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=houhsiaohsien&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::context_id=

Can't wait.

i want to delve into that season but am wary of which to see. i wasnt into city of sadness but did like a time to live a lot (on second viewing at least)...

am wondering what those early genre movies of his are like.

see as much as you can imo!, just because it's all enlightening, & seeing the development of his style adds a lot to the films you're watching & the films you've seen. but probably if you want to be cost effective see everything after (/inc.) the boys from fengkuei, which is the first genre pic to really mirror his later kinda multi-generational semi-slo-mo dynasty style. actually seeing (& hearing, really great scores & fx throughout) taiwan genre cinema from the '80s is just super interesting anyway i think.

the genre movies are like taiwanese porky's btw

Yeah its gonna be interesting to see some genre work as well as things like Puppetmaster.

does the assassin have a uk release date? i want to see that more than the old ones tbh.

no it doesn't / go see the old ones

i want to see that more than the old ones tbh.

What are the BFI doing showing us old films huh?

i think HHH is the kind of director whose films you have to watch twice. i didnt get a time to live and time to die until the second time. i really liked the boys from fengkui and summer at grandpas house, though at times im not totally sure why - theres a real delicacy in SAGH, but i love how that seemingly idyllic surface is broken up by these violent/domestic disruptions, but without it being jarring. HHH isnt trying to shock, or be 'disruptive' to the mood, he somehow makes it seem totally level (which occasionally i think might be his flaw). is dust in the wind worth seeing?

Dust in the Wind is the only one I've seen twice, and yeah, it's definitely worth seeing. It's very much life as it happens, and I think the first of his films where the characters reach some kind of maturity. I'm still having trouble figuring out what happens and who is related to who, but some of it is edged in my memory.

any supporters of daughters of the nile? i want to see that one more than dust as it sounds a bit more urban in setting, but might just do both, as neither are on dvd.

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.