感動我的 (8)：「每天都去菜市場？那是多大的福分。」(hc對林皎碧說......) hc訪客兩席話的回應與反思。 從愛的藝術到 The Art of Being，補充 東海大學首任董事長。讀方瑜《昨夜微霜》。懷念香港與台中、台北的人物：孫述宇等、洪炎秋等，與其出版業：香港：中國OUP：台中：中央書局 。 ".....如一本金剛般若波羅蜜經"《楊牧 和棋》蔣勳的佛經書；董橋的 RARE BOOKS收藏。71歲思考宮﨑駿新作《蒼鷺與少年》；This is Water by David Foster Wallace : simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential 。
感動我的 (6)：馬英九們自欺欺人十多年。 給馬英九們上幾堂課 (曹興誠 八不居士)， 雷煥彰/ 雷文炳神父（JEAN LEFEUVRE, S.J.1922.7/5－2010）自述、留言--參考Reflections on Taipei(Expat Residents Look at Their Second Home) 2003. 許台灣朋友許多與東海校友等緣分，....。 印象深刻的數代友誼： 《梁思成與林徽音──探索中國建築的伴侶》Liang and Lin: Partners in Exploring China's Architectural Past By Wilma Fairbank費慰梅. Foreword by Jonathan Spence 史景遷 成寒譯 ，賓大校友補充照片。沈君山談兩岸關係 。體力智力感情：張己任的象山與大安公園。
感動我的 (5)：「桃花流水理想鄉在人世！」國際衝突地獄變相。中國經濟脆弱，長期前景趨於黯淡。 (京都)陳文華學長來訪/(台北)楊誠學長來電【《王孝廉紀念文集》】，羅斌博士旅台近30年─和 Anne Rodier 2023.10.19，在東華大學東湖河畔《參考Reflections on Taipei(Expat Residents Look at Their Second Home 2003， "a better sense of style")》。蘇錦坤兄【蔡惠如】、林公孚每日看書好地點 蔦屋書店等等。《台北畫刊》漢字英文日文，宜蘭展《高信疆 紙上風雲/阮義忠 映像之旅 》 【2023金馬電 影大師來台開課 公布12位黃金師資陣容】，《當太陽墜毀在哈因沙山》【「一一重構：楊德昌」回顧本週結束展】！
感動我的 (4)：伴手禮：半顆白菜 (林皎碧) 清燉牛肉湯。以巴衝突話倫理學教育；巴黎的藝術展催燦 ( 紐約時報多篇Paris Cultivates a New Allure；The exhibition "Picasso. Endlessly drawing" musée Rodin.《建築師的20歲年代 Dominique Perrault巴黎都市發展史與建築設計 》。 李明明 ‘𝘈𝘯𝘵𝘰𝘯𝘺 𝘎𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘭𝘦𝘺 - 𝘊𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘔𝘢𝘴𝘴’) 。Beethoven Symphonies No.5 & 7 by C. Kleiber/VPO 十方樂集：喻紹發、張己任(音樂導聆)、徐伯年 ，邵頌雄《黑白溢彩：荷洛維玆的藝術》希望能以文會友。 史景遷之墓historian and teacher to all. 《古事紀》和《日本書紀》中提及天照大神Utagawa Hiroshige 《建築師的20歲年代》 I. M. Pei 旅行學習....... The Grand Canal”, 1875，《普羅旺斯來的香水》
感動我的 (3 )：林義正老師介紹林柏東老師：難忘的茶會(臺大醫院儀器上摘錄Serenity Prayer；我向AI大師Herbert Simon請教大學管理學教法........)。《福爾摩沙音樂家：呂炳川》v1 ( 約一小時半的YouTube影片，很好)。林國彰《台北道筆記》(林柏樑) 。DISNEY 公司創業100年の試練 They Want to Live Disney.。Albert Schweitzer史懷哲：《自傳》Out of My Life and Thought等；尹汝貞(77歲)只想隨心所欲活著。谷村新司（Shinji Tanimura 1948—2023）的笑臉迎人 。林徽因遲來的建築學位Penn to Award Posthumous Architecture Degree to Lin Huiyin。日本之匠心 Crafting quality knife-sharpening whetstones。《明道文藝》。湖口泓格生醫公司挑戰不可能任務
感動我的 (2 )：清理研磨機、磨豆聲。肉桂(棒).......台大電機六十週年的同學會(王晃三；助理曹竣閎).【東海15屆1973級 畢業50周年同學會旅遊會 美國回台 Wenchien Wu+黃美惠】；老友 張旺山 (清大哲學/出版社；韋伯名著新譯)。十方音樂劇場的團隊 (重讀Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony)。 為朋友出書決心(曹永洋)、摯友親交的師長來信(王孝廉面交楊誠)。Bill Schkenbach 懷念 Dr. Deming 影片。朝聖地北義大利.Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy
A scene from Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Puppetmaster (1993)
Although the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien has been making movies since the early 1980s, I first became convinced of his genius when I saw The Puppetmaster(1993) some twenty years ago. Until then I thought of Hou as the maker of extraordinarily fine, essentially contemplative, quasi-autobiographical youth films—my favorites were Dust in the Wind (1986) and Daughter of the Nile (1987), both of which impressed me with their evocation of the ephemeral, their haunting sense of solitude, and the eloquence with which they left things unsaid. The Puppetmaster went much further, demonstrating a profound and original sense of motion pictures as a way of exploring the passage of time.
Like most of Hou’s films, The Puppetmaster was never commercially released in the United States and has been rarely screened. It is an event to have it anchoring the comprehensive Hou Hsiao-Hsien retrospective now showing at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, which will continue on a North American tour to cinematheques and museums in Cambridge, Berkeley, Washington, D.C., Rochester, Toronto, Vancouver, Houston, and Chicago.
This epic chamber-piece, which split the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1993, is neither documentary nor fiction. (The Chinese title is “Drama, Dream, Life.”) The movie dramatizes the youth and early career of Taiwanese “national treasure” Li Tien-lu who, born in 1910, became an apprentice puppeteer at age eight, performing traditional plays first in remote mountain villages and later for Japanese officials in Tapei. During the war these shows became morale-building propaganda, dramatizing combat against American forces, complete with puppet airplanes and smoky special effects. Even in peacetime, though, Japan was a presence. Li’s story, one of continuous family turmoil, is played out during the fifty-year period during which Taiwan was a Japanese colony, from 1895 to the end of World War II. He is one protagonist and history is the other.
Eighty-four when The Puppetmaster was made, Li was for Hou “a living encyclopedia of Chinese tradition” and the film is a comparable anthology of the various ways a story can be told. There are a half-dozen theatrical performances of various types, from puppet shows to Taiwanese opera—usually shown head-on, some in a single long take, and at times revealing the young Li (played by Lim Giong) and his colleagues working behind the stage. These, and panoramic shots of rural Taiwan punctuate the ongoing melodrama of the young Li’s motherless upbringing—one that, among other things, involves child abuse and drug addictions—and later, his own life as an absentee father. Intermittently, there are shots of the octogenarian Li himself recounting his own life.
Presenting these disparate elements in stately alteration, Hou manages to sustain an interplay between Li’s biography, the impersonal social forces around him, and the implacable movement of time. A long sequence around a kitchen table introducing the prostitute who becomes Li’s mistress is followed by a shot in which she is having a her portrait taken, a close-up of the photograph, and then a return to the kitchen table where the photo is being examined with old Li’s voice-over picking up the story.
The Puppetmaster was one of several films in which Hou mixed historical material with a daringly counterintuitive, even oblique, narrative structure. City of Sadness (1989) is an “autobiography” set during the filmmaker’s infancy that uses shifting points of view to recount the postwar occupation of Taiwan by Chinese Nationalists. Based on historical personages, Good Men, Good Women (1995) uses the making a movie to exhume the tragic fate of Taiwan’s progressive intellectuals during the “White Terror” forty years earlier. Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996) is a tale of petty gangsters predicated on long stretches of emptiness—a landscape without a landscape, a road film that goes nowhere.
A scene from Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Dust in the Wind (1986)
Flowers of Shanghai (1998), the first of Hou’s film to be set outside Taiwan, adapted from Han Bangqing’s Sing Song Girls, a novel some consider the greatest work of nineteenth-century Chinese fiction, consists of only forty shots, none of which are exteriors even though the book itself is much concerned with the texture of China’s first modern city. For Hou, it is the text that is being documented. In this case, he suggests, the historical moment and the place in which it takes place is beyond our reach.
Taiwan’s half-century as a Japanese colony was time enough for many aesthetic concepts to lodge in the island’s consciousness, and the earliest films in which Hou found his style (The Boys from Fengkuei, 1983, and A Summer at Grandpa’s, 1984) have a reserved Japanese flavor. But Hou only discovered the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, so known for his seemingly detached family dramas, well after he began making movies. Hou has his own way of looking. Café Lumiere (2003) which was shot in Tokyo and dedicated to Ozu, is something like Ozu in reverse—rather than a story punctuated by static “pillow shots,” it is a succession of pillow shots with brief narrative interludes.
Rarely using close-ups, Hou is a master of camera placement who frequently shoots an entire scene from a single point of view. Although his characteristic locations—courtyards in Goodbye South, Goodbye, kitchens in City of Sadness and Daughter of the Nile, nightclubs in Millennium Mambo (2001)— tend toward the mundane, his sense of the world is exalted. As much as they are anything else, these deeply melancholy movies are beautiful objects of contemplation.
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.
Hou himself was the child of parents who left mainland China for Taiwan when he was a baby in 1948, and died while he was in his teens. Perhaps as a result, he once called Taiwan a “temporary country,” and has made homelessness his great subject—although I can’t think of another filmmaker whose movies feature so many family meals or scenes set around the kitchen table.
His assured, innovative filmmaking is additionally impressive in that he came to film through Taiwan’s commercial cinema. Hou grew up in rural Fengshan, a tropical region along the island’s southwest coast. After completing his two years of military service, he studied film and drama at the Taiwan Academy of the Arts and, following a stint selling electronic calculators, became an apprentice with the Central Motion Picture Corporation. His first two films, Cute Girl (1980) and Cheerful Wind (1981), were conventional vehicles for local pop stars; his third feature, The Green, Green Grass of Home (1982), was named for a song made famous by Tom Jones. He thereafter made a series of films drawing on his own youth or that of his collaborators, movies characterized by their historical consciousness and pervasive sense of loss. (He was also the first Taiwanese filmmaker to use the island’s indigenous dialect.)
Hou’s mature work has an understated rigor. Once he devises the rules for a particular movie, he’s extremely rigorous although those rules are often not immediately apparent: Three Times (2005) presents the same romantic couple in a succession of psychologically fraught settings and historically charged situations. (The first time I saw it, the movie seemed to fall apart in its final movement. But, on second viewing, that disintegration seemed a carefully edited contrivance—such is Hou’s inventive use of time.)
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.
Trigon Films
A puppet performance in The Puppetmaster
Hou is a postscript to the cluster of European and Asian directors who defined international cinema during the 1950s and 1960s and whose movies were during the heyday of revival theaters frequently available. On the one hand, he is a great formalist, like Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Bresson; on the other, he brought a hitherto unknown national cinema to international attention, as did Andrzej Wajda with Poland, Akira Kurosawa with Japan, and Satyajit Ray with India. (The only figure who was both was the insufficiently appreciated Hungarian master Miklós Jancsó.) As Hou’s temporal constructions are is as sophisticated as those of Alain Resnais or Chris Marker, there is also perhaps a bit of bewilderment in encountering modernist sensibility in an unexpected setting—or rather in discovering an unexpected, self-invented modernism.
It was for The Puppetmaster that Hou first developed a startlingly advanced form of montage that has been compared to the movement of clouds drifting across the sky. Narrative coalesces and dissipates; dramas merge and comment on each other, not least from the perspective of fifty years later. At a certain point, every cut comes as a surprise, spanning perhaps a dozen years even as the voiceover loops over and around the scene to knot the story with an invisible thread. Is there another filmmaker who can so fluidly celebrate the moment as well as the epoch, and do so in the same shot?
A comprehensive retrospective of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s work, “Also Like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien,” is showing at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York through October 17. It will continue to other cities including Cambridge, Berkeley, Washington, D.C., Rochester, Toronto, Vancouver, Houston, and Chicago.
