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

ISSN 1464–9373 Print/ISSN 1469–8447 Online/08/020239–12 © 2008 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14649370801965604

Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films: pursuing and escaping history

DAI Jinhua (Translated by ZHANG Jingyuan)

TaylorandFrancis

ABSTRACT This article situates Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films in the post Cold-War global setting. Itdiscusses two common interpretive approaches to Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films – French auteurism and‘national allegory’ – and puts these two approaches within their historical context of Cold-War and post Cold-War global politics. The article places the rise of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 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 its particular contexts and the reconstruction of a new identity politics. Particular attention is given to

Hou’s 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-Hsien’s works, but not because Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 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 of personal narrative styles, from The Boys fromFengkuei

, which won him international famein 1983, to Café Lumière

(

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-Hsien’s films are seen as entirely orig-inal, and therefore as embodying the ‘purefilm’ genre. Jean-Michel Frodon explains:

Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 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-Hsien’s 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 have been many new waves of Chinese films. Asa film auteur, however, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’sonly equal in representational style is theIranian film director Abbas Kiarostami. In



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terms of treating historical themes, the clos-est Asian film director to Hou Hsiao-Hsienis the famous Japanese film director YasujiroOzu. When Hou Hsiao-Hsien was invited tomake a Japanese film Coffee Jikou

to mark the100th anniversary of the birth of Yasujiro

Ozu, he was widely regarded as the obviouschoice for the job.

A second simple approach reads thefilms as what Fredric Jameson called third-world ‘nation-state allegories.’ Here, HouHsiao-Hsien’s Taiwan trilogy – A City of Sadness

(1989), The Puppetmaster

(1993), and

Good Men, Good Women

(1995) – seems to bethe best entry point. From here, readers canproceed forward or backward into thehistory of Taiwanese society, revealing thememory of blood and pain in a heavy and

many-layered emotional structure.These two modes of interpretation

clearly occupy different discursive spaces:the author-focused approach is internationalor more specifically European, while thenational allegory approach is favored bythird-world critics. It is interesting to notethat although these two interpretations mayseem to differ only in interpretive strategiesand emphases, in reality they differ morefundamentally in their historical roots and

discursive purposes.The authorial approach, which beganafter the Second World War, focused on thedimension of individualistic style andaesthetics, as if the author, once declared to be dead, had been resurrected in the young body of film. As a recognition mechanismand critical practice, auteurism started byselectively recognizing Hollywood filmdirectors and later became more of an inter-nal European or Western European culturalphenomenon, focusing on European film-

makers and art films. By the time auteurism became a synonym for ‘art film’ or ‘filmartist’ in the late 1950s and early 1960s, itstood for resistance to commercial films asrepresented by Hollywood and its narrativemodels. Auteurism became the recognitionmechanism mediated by European filmfestivals. In so-called ‘world cinema,’ thereare therefore two unequal powers: Holly-wood/commercial films and French/West-

ern European/art films, each involvingglobal film distribution, film showings andfilm criticism. Auteurism, coming of age inthe intellectual rebellions of the 1960s, holdscertain critical attitudes and maintains acertain distance from the universal

(American) values promoted by Hollywood.But auteurism also condones the great(European) humanist tradition based on‘individuality,’ ‘aesthetics’ and ‘originality.’If it had some radical influence during itstime, then this radical influence has now become a post-modern political practicewhich holds that ‘the personal is political.’

Different from the ahistorical andapolitical focus on the author, the nationalallegorical reading of literature and art,from its inception, was based on a salient

geopolitical idea: the Third World ‘in the eraof multinational capitalism.’ It is first of allhistorical, communal, and political.

Third-world texts, even those which areseemingly private and invested with aproperly libidinal dynamic, necessarilyproject a political dimension in the formof national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the publicthird-world culture and society

. (Jameson1986: 69)

As a result, auteurism

and the ‘national alle-gory’ approach are incompatible in the eval-uation and interpretation of one artist’sworks. The difference is not only in thedimension of time (modernity and post-industrial societies), but also in the dimen-sion of space (Western Europe, NorthAmerica, and the Third World).

In view of these two divergent interpre-tive paths and attractions to Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films, perhaps we should also take

account of a Cold War to post-Cold War axis.We should read Hou’s films in the historicalcontext of the Cold War and post Cold War,to re-politicize the auteur Hou Hsiao-Hsien.This means placing auteurism and thenational allegory approach within such ahistorical context as well. Like the develop-ment of the concept of the Third World,auteurism and the national allegoryapproach were both born in the specific



Pursuing and escaping history

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historical period of the Cold War. The rise of Asian/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 of the 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, led by 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- Asian–African 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 World’ became the Other in the self-criticism of European culture and the overcoming of

Cold War dichotomies. In a sense, the politi-cal and spiritual crises in France created byAlgeria’s war for independence directly andindirectly produced the new-wave Frenchfilms and the French ‘film author’ theory,while Fredric Jameson’s 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 the binary 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 Europe brought 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, long before 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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Without going into questions about thepower relationship between Europe and theThird World, or the cultural mechanisms bywhich Third World films made their way toEuropean film festivals, we can point outthat the selection of Third World film artists

usually marks their works as expressingdissident views in the context of their homesocial political system, and as produced‘underground’ or independently of theestablished industry of their home countries.However, the transcendental norms andstandards of auteurism conceal the politicalcontexts, obscuring the films’ involvementwith real conflicts outside of the scripts. Likevarious other international awards, theWestern European international film festi-vals clearly share the purpose of political

assistance or ‘enlightenment’ of countriesperceived to be in need of such modernizinghelp. But a complication is added by themany roles of the ‘author’s film’ during theCold War: critical, left-wing, and European(as against Hollywood). The award-winningnon-European and non-American films atthese European international film festivalsare therefore placed within many subject–object relationships.

Among these many axes of significance,

Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films reflect a rich vari-ety of images and meanings. It is especiallyinteresting that the year 1983, when HouHsiao-Hsien began his ‘author films’ serieswith his fourth film, The Boys from Fengkuei

,and thus began the new wave of Taiwanfilms, was also the year when young main-land directors produced the film One andEight

(1984) and began the new wave of Chinese films. Coincidentally, the art filmmovements on both sides of the TaiwanStraits began simultaneously although these

two places were completely separated by theCold War. Taiwan new-wave films beganwith films about the native land, and themainland fifth-generation films began bytelling sentimental stories of the lost youth of the fourth generation. While the Taiwan filmscreen was showing a lone individual whohas tired of urban life and returned to hishometown in the countryside, the mainlandscreen was showing self-conscious allegories

of the nation-state. And while these new-wave art films on both sides of the Straitsreflected the entrance of many new filmartists and won many international awardsat European film festivals, the native filmindustries on both sides of the Straits was in

continuous decline as local markets fornative films were collapsing. The emergenceof the new-wave films and the decline of thelocal film industries foretold the coming of drastic social changes on both sides of theStraits.

In a sense, in the 1980s, the beginning of the global new liberalism within the frame-work of Cold War institutions allowed adeep social democratization in both Chinaand Taiwan. With the aging of the militarytotalitarian regimes in China and Taiwan,

forces of social resistance began to gather,and there emerged a promise of futuretransformation and reconciliation. As withmany other latecomers to modernization,the changes flanking the Taiwan Straits began with changes in culture and art, inwhich literary writers and other creativeartists played an important role. Not bycoincidence, the direct or indirect involve-ment in social politics by intellectuals andartists was mainly by way of non-political

expression. This was not just because the de-politicized cultural practice distanced itself from the orthodox/main ideology of thereigning regime, but also because such de-politicized expression often successfullyobtained recognition of alternative politicsin its particular context, calling for andreconstructing a new identity politics.Perhaps, it is from this perspective, HouHsiao-Hsien’s ‘author-film’ series, in its‘pure’ individualized writing, began thecultural-political practice among Taiwan

films.At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, when

the world entered the so-called post-ColdWar era, as the Soviet Union disintegratedand capitalism won without a fight, a specialCold-War situation in the post-Cold-Wartime began to emerge in northeast Asia andthe Taiwan Straits. Even after the fall of theBerlin wall, the Cold-War division stillexisted between South and North Korea, and




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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 of Hou 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-Hsien’s films remind people of the 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), Hou’s 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 Truffaut’s ‘Antoine Doinel’ series, thetone of Hou’s 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 film A City of Sadness

. After ACity of Sadness

, Hou’s films no longer dealdirectly with the traumatic history of Taiwan; 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


. 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 Hou’s 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-Hsien’s films mean?’Hasumi’s own answer to his question is:

During the turbulent years of theSecond World War, Taiwan went from being 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 possible for him to do so. The finely detailed‘sadness’ in Hou’s 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 Hou’s films in the histor-ical framework of the Second World Warand the Cold War. As a chronicler of personal history, Hou Hsiao-Hsien experi-enced his youth as a closed and suspended‘present’ – 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 Fengshan’s home. It could be

discarded easily before moving, corre-sponding to Chiang Kai-shek’s 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 Taiwan’stwentieth 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 mainland became an empty and absurd narrative. If the 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 of railroad 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 film A 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 film A 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 wife’sfamily 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 film ABorrowed Life

(1994) by its director Wu Nien- Jen, based on his own life story. And yetalthough Hou’s films often portray protago-nists who are in a sense fatherless, the sonsdo not fall in love with their mothers either.Most of Hou’s 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 present‘absence’ of the father from Hou’s 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 bridges between memory and history. The youngmen in Hou’s 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 inHou’s films are not obstacles to youth and

growth. The protagonist is reconciled to hisfate after an outburst of despair at the end of the 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 Hou’s coming-of-age tales is the coming of age itself. OnceHou’s 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-Hsien’sfilms, 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-Hsien’s 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 of place in his time. In the film A 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 Good Men, 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 Hou’slater 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.

Hou’s 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 of history 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 Hou’scharming 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. Hou’s 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 Hou’s 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. Hou’s 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.Hou’s 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 Hou’s early films seem to tellthe stories of individuals and even of himself, 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 Hou’s films, the structuralrhythms are reflected not only in the use of the long shot, but also in the prolongedlingering after the conclusion of the plots.The long anti-climaxes toward the ends of the 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 Hou’s 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 hearKuanmei’s 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-Hsien’s filmmaking. Not onlydoes it begin a very important, perhaps themost important of his film series – the

Taiwan trilogy – it also touches on a part of Taiwan’s history that had been suppressed by 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 inTaiwan’s history: February 28, 1947, whenthe KMT government killed thousands of civilians 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. Lin’s 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 statement by 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 people’s 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, Wenqing’s 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 Wenqing’s family on the platformin the background. There is a symbolic rela-tion between the narrative of A City of Sadness

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 don’t have anythoughts or worries.’ He writes to his friends:‘Don’t tell my family. When I am dead, I belong 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 of Sadness

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 of Sadness

resembles the structural position of many female characters in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films. In fact, the male ‘he’ repre-sents another axis in Hou’s 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 son’s comings

and goings, to the hustle-and-bustle life of the metropolitan cities. Over the course of his film career, his protagonists also changefrom lonely youths and hot-blooded men todrifting and wandering young women. Theyoung girl becomes Hou’s main narratorand recorder of events. Women in Hou’sfilms are the survivors of disasters. ‘She’travels 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

; Good Men, Good Women

(1995); Flowers of Shanghai

(1998); Millennium Mambo

(2001); and Coffee Jikou

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

Shanghai

.


, the last film inHou’s 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 of representing 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 the Japanese 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 closed‘present,’ Liang Qing, a young urbanwoman character in Hou’s 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 Qing’swhisper, 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 Qing’s 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 Biyu’s life. Jiang, a womanof great composure, broke down and wept bitterly over her executed husband’s body.The one meeting between Liang and Jiang,at the latter’s funeral, is merely an occasionfor the display of personal pain, women’spain, the despair of the survivors of catastrophe, and wounds that cannot behealed.



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Hou’s 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-Hsien’s filmscannot deal with certain features of ‘Chinese’history 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 of red China as a ‘strange beast,’ even after the beast 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 whenHou’s films began their political interven-tion, the fifth-generation film directors wereabandoning the function of social criticism. If we say that Hou’s 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 of the 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 China’s culture. In the words of ScottTobias, an international film critic, Hou’sfilm 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 Hou’s 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 ZhangAiling’s book cover, where a modern personis outside the window looking in at adomestic scene of the late Qing and the beginning of the Republic: here Hou’s filmportrays a modern China from afar, in a late




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Qing building in Taiwan. The revisiting of modern 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 of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s masterpieces, Coffee Jikou

. Hou Hsiao-Hsien made this Japanesefilm to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Japan’s 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 Hou’s (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 and be 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 Wen’slife is clearly linked with a turbulent part of Asian 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 of history, she may have come to understand

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

Once again, caught in the struggle between 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 Cinéma.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): 65–88.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

Author’s 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 Secular Myths: 18 Film Cases, Invisible Writing: ChineseCultural Studies in the 1990s, Outlook from a SlantingTower: Chinese Film Culture 1978–1998.

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

Translator’s 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.

hou hsiao hsien

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