By Nicholas Elliott
Translator: Yi Ersan
Proofreading: Issac
Source: BOMB (February 12, 2016)
Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's Good Men and Good Women (1995) was the first film to have such a strong emotional reaction to me that I had to hide my face from other audiences to avoid causing public panic.
Good Man Good Woman (1995) Good Man Good Woman (1995)
The film moves back and forth between the two characters. Liang Jing is an actress who received a large "blood debt" after the murder of her lover, while Liang Jasper was a Taiwanese communist who fought the Japanese on the mainland in the 1940s and returned to Taiwan after losing her husband in the bloody purges of the 1950s.
Hou Xiaoxian juxtaposes the fanatical ideals and sacrifices of a not-so-distant era with the beliefs of the present being replaced by karaoke, and although my psychological state is stable, I am still ashamed that my reaction is so exaggerated. This is the kind of film I would want to make, because the reason why Hou Xiaoxian's gaze is so precious is because the contrast between Jiang Jade and Liang Jing's situation is not judgmental. In front of Hou Xiaoxian's camera, Liang Jing is a good woman like Jiang Jasper. It wasn't her fault that her time wasn't heroic.
A few years later, as I revisited Good Man good woman for this article, my tears and snot welled up again, and to my delight, it survived the decline of DVD. I used to be afraid that Hou Xiaoxian's composition, long shots, and slow rhythm would give way to my home entertainment system, and the ubiquitous noise of an apartment surrounded by Latin music lovers in Woodside, Queens, but I once again held back my crying when the credits began to roll.
Until I received a call from a banker at First Capital to offer me a federally insured certificate of deposit, my voice was still hoarse. While we discuss financial rewards, risks, and fines, I feel that I have entered the next phase of Hou Xiaoxian's sequence of works: Goodbye to the Southern Kingdom, Southern Kingdom (1996) and Millennium Mambo (2001) – the past has been erased, and now it is a transient that has been blurred by capitalism.
In "Goodbye to the Southern Kingdom, Southern Kingdom", Hou Xiaoxian gives a realistic and tedious balance between capitalism and the underworld by telling the story of Gao Ge and his partner Flat Head and Little Twist Flower.
Goodbye To the South, Goodbye to the South (1996)
Earlier, a group of "businessmen" who carved up NT$2 million complained about the recession. The line between legal and illegal activities is not only blurred, but irrelevant: what matters is the bottom line. However, beneath the main line of the story, there is also a melancholy, and as Hou Xiaoxian's protagonists move between urban and rural areas, between the past and the present, an uneasy emotion is always stirred up in them.
While everyone in "Goodbye Southland, Southland" talks on the phone about plans to buy real estate and settle down, much of the film takes place in cars, trains, and motorcycles. Even if the characters are not moving aimlessly, Hou Xiaoxian's shots are highly characteristically full of vitality, eliminating the illusion of a safe place called home.
If two people were talking in a small apartment, there would be other people coming and going, tv lights projecting other worlds onto their bodies, sounds leaking in from the outside, and a boxing bag kept rocking during these ten minutes of footage. In terms of environment, that place isn't much different from an apartment in Queens, and in terms of impossible dreams and dubious values, the situation at the time was very close to 2014. This makes the film's inevitable ending—a car accident in a field—seem disturbingly a metaphor for the direction we're headed.
But Hou's disillusionment with the present doesn't explain why his films are so moving. A simple answer is that he expresses emotion by repeating fragments of simple melodies at unexpected times. In Dust in Love (1986), a relatively traditional story of a boy and girl moving from the country to a big city, when the boy receives a letter telling him that the girl has married another man, there is no acoustic guitar accompaniment, followed by footage of the old village, and the music is more like an echo chamber of all the struggles we witness and the kindness between the boy and the girl, rather than a direct comment on a particular moment. Music can help you mourn, and Hou Xiaoxian's films also have many elements of mourning.
Dust in Love (1986)
Hou Xiaoxian gave the audience enough space to feel what they wanted, whether it was the music, or the length and width of his shots, and most importantly, his tolerant and generous gaze. For Hou Xiaoxian, it seems that everyone is equally important, which sometimes makes it difficult for the audience to decide who to see. I can't think of a single footage of Hou Hyo-hyun that guides my emotions or suggests that I pay special attention to the example of someone who, in this regard, is both the opposite of Scorsese and an unintentional precursor to a large number of boring films at international film festivals. However, the camera does move, capturing information in a seemingly idle way, which doesvetails with the aimlessness of his characters.
In "Good Man, Good Woman," Japanese soldiers storm a field and attack the village where Jiang and the Communists are hiding. We saw soldiers hiding behind a tree, their backs to us, running fast through the tall grass. The camera then tilts, away from them, and follows the tree frozen in the sky covered with white light. This memorable shot can be understood as rejecting violence and deliberately turning away.
Obviously, Hou Didn't like to depict violence —when he had to, he usually shot from a distance, and such a bloody fight looked like a stupid melee—but in this case, the camera's movement felt more like approaching than far away. In the process of climbing the branches and the sky, Hou Xiaoxian hints at the persistence of good and bad things and invites you to experience a subtle emotion that you may not be able to feel in watching a group of communists being slaughtered.
Good Man and Good Woman (1995)
Hou Xiaoxian's directing style is like that of a narrator in the perspective of God, and he is reluctant to stand on the side of the characters (subjective shots are rare in his mature style), let alone invade their thoughts. This style of God's perspective is most evident when the flat head in "Goodbye to the South, The Southland" sits on the roof and watches a train pass by. Suddenly, the camera starts shooting from the train —repeating the classic shot from The Wind and Dust in Love—the train is engulfed in a dark tunnel, and then a precise beam of light appears and expands to show more of the tracks winding towards the lush mountains ahead.
"Love Wind and Dust" (1986) "Love Wind and Dust" (1986)
None of the characters in the film are on the train, but this passage tells us some of the uneasiness that haunts them, and its beauty is a testament to the richness of life. So it's like another emotional resonance chamber, a place to collect your thoughts and feelings in a movie.
With the Trilogy of City of Sorrows (1989), Dream Life (1993) and Good Man and Good Woman, Hou Hsiao-hsien takes a different, increasingly adventurous approach to Taiwan's recent history, but always maintains authentic emotions, as best illustrated by the title of his early work, The Wind and Dust.
Hou Xiaoxian's films are not about the creators of history, but about those who have been hammered by the forces of history. Although Hou Xiaoxian sees all the protagonists as "good men and good women", I think that if he finds a "hero", he does not know what to do with him. Hou's restraint in telling their stories is a sign of respect, even if it feels counterintuitive.
The 1985 autobiographical film Once Upon a Time in Childhood is one of his most approachable and touching films, telling the fate of a family who moved from the mainland to rural Taiwan in the late 1940s. There is a scene in the film where a sick grandmother tells her adult daughter the story of a child she died a long time ago. Many directors will cut into the characters little by little, closer and closer between the storyteller and the listener, in order to squeeze emotions.
Childhood Memories (1985)
Hou Xiaoxian, on the other hand, unfolds the passage with a series of coherent shots: from some souvenirs on the ground to close-ups of the mother's and daughter's hands, and then from their side close-ups, to the panoramic shots of two women sitting side by side in the distance, the mother partially turning her back to the camera as she begins to speak. As she ends her story with the death of her baby, Hou's camera is aimed at a window where rain is dripping from the night sky.
Perhaps the most important point of "Childhood Past" is that it is Hou Xiaoxian's own story. There is a brief voiceover at the beginning of the film, and Hou Xiaoxian's stand-in Ah Xiaoxian says that this is the story of his childhood, especially the story related to his father. In a sense, Ah Xiao is a typical unreliable narrator: his father appears to be a distant character who dies about a third of the way through the film.
But if we trace the miserly use of close-ups of Ah Xiao, we realize that the film is about an awakening of moral consciousness, and Ah Xiao's father is inseparable from this story. Ah Xiao's first close-up is when he was a child, watching his mother mourn his father. This is followed by a close-up of a teenage boy— the standard film grammar— suggesting that years have passed and what we see now is teenage Ah Xiao. But the two shots next to each other also maintain a connection with the father.
When we discover that Ah Xiao has become a small gang member, we have to think about whether things would be different if his father was still around. Although Ah Xiao is not a monster, he has gone astray. So, the next time we see a close-up of him, looking at a schoolgirl he likes from a safe distance, there will be some shocking touches.
The coldness on his face vanished, and the little boy who used to pick guavas with his grandmother returned. Later, the girl's life almost did not intersect with Ah Xiao, but her simple words put him back on track. The absence of his father and the brief presence of the girl, and the loss of his mother and grandmother, turn ah xiao into the Hou Xiaoxian we imagine—an artist who gets along comfortably in an environment of modesty and moral ambiguity, with compassion and at the same time humbly hiding his own compassion. So he kept his distance and let us feel it with him – if we could.