Hou Hsiao-hsien, and his big dream that can't fit into the movie
Assassin Nie Yinniang
The poetic long shot is the signature feature of Hou Hsiao-hsien's films in the hearts of many people. A foreign scholar once asked Hou Hsiao-hsien when he would choose to use close-ups.
Hou Hsiao-hsien only said: "When you want to see clearly." ”
Hou Xiaoxian's friend Tang Nuo for many years mentioned the above story in a sharing. Not long ago, some media organizations reported that director Hou Hsiao-hsien would no longer continue to direct films due to dementia, and shortly after the report was released, Hou Hsiao-hsien's family issued a statement confirming the news.
As a result, "Assassin Nie Yinniang" is likely to become the last film directed by Hou Xiaoxian. Tang Nuo once wrote an article, starting with "Assassin Nie Yinniang", about Hou Xiaoxian and his film world in his eyes. The article, titled "A Millennial Dream," is included in Donno's new work, Seeking the Sword. Today's sharing is from this article. Let's walk into Hou Hsiao-hsien's big dream about movies.
This article is an excerpt from "Seeking the Sword", which is abridged
A millennium dream
Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Nie Yinniang", what I knew before was that Hou Hsiao-hsien intended to shoot with fast, short-cut, and approaching shots, and even the camera was changed, and the screenwriter (as in the past or the necessity of Hou Hsiao-hsien's creation, Hou Hsiao-hsien is also a screenwriter) also received this, and was very cooperative and excited to try to create a tight, interlocking, and meteor-like book, yes, a bit like the Jason Byrne trilogy.
In the end, still, the clouds are high and the sky is high, and Hou Hsiao-hsien "shows the most beautiful poetry that has flowed in the blood of this nation since the Book of Poetry." Although it is not unexpected, the question of "why is it always like this" is still there, and it is getting more and more - gradually, I believe that there is something very fundamental in this, not only the problem of image selection, but also the inertia of "cut back if you can't shoot" and "hide back to the most comfortable and confident Hou Xiaoxian" Yunyun, the latter few sentences are just idiomatic expressions that we have nothing to use to laugh at Hou Xiaoxian.
Hou Xiaoxian, whom I have known for many years, has to be solemnly said - he has never been a timid, self-conscious, and sufficiently demanding person for safety, which has become more and more obvious with age, making movies is "the main thing he does in his life" or even "the only thing he will do", and everything else is just something that comes with or does not follow. I am completely convinced that the success and failure they perceive are different, do not overlap, and have nothing to do with the success or failure that most people think, and even no longer trust the words "success" and "failure", and must say that it will be like the aging Hemingway (Nobel Prize speech, the world's pinnacle of life) said, "If you are lucky, he will succeed"; Or García Márquez followed suit, "Success is worthless".
Hou Hsiao-hsien is not a person who will hide back. Are you still hiding at this age?
Hou Hsiao-hsien after "Wind Cabinet".
At the beginning, Hou Xiaoxian said that he didn't want to shoot the kind of light and fluttering, people flying around in the sky, he wanted people to step on the ground, water, leaves, or gravitational and reactionary force on the blade; In other words, he wants to give up this part of the genre agreement with the audience, recall the basic laws of physics, and limit himself. Why is it okay to find the limit? The simple answer is that it sounds like it's real, or at least has a texture.
But once it starts, what is called back will not stop at the laws of physics, and the entire real world will follow back piece by piece, which is almost inevitable - in fact, when it comes to the real and virtual boundaries of martial arts, the laws of physics are probably the easiest and the most indifferent. It's just that the matter doesn't start today, and this matter has a longer history - we have been saying with a little slander that Hou Xiaoxian has an "underworld complex", and a national theme like "City of Sadness", he puts it into a three-generation underworld family; Like "The Best of Times", he chose (or remembers deeply) the pool room that was still a "bad place" in the early years, the restaurant in the earlier years, and the nightclub today. Hou Xiaoxian also smiled and said that it was probably because he didn't mix enough when he was young, he didn't finish it, and his five bodies were not satisfied, so it was like a gap in his life that had been hanging there and sticking out his tongue to lick. Of course, this is Hou Hsiao-hsien's slightly humble statement (as evidenced by his years of wandering around to support the vulnerable), and it may be embarrassing to force him to talk about social justice.
City of Sadness
For the creator, it is not necessarily a bad thing to really go in from such a special angle, at least not for a long time, just because the force that drives him is real, indeed what he wants to figure out, and it can really be sustained, focused, dense, and patiently waiting for those hidden images to slowly emerge, as Benjamin said, which is something that witty and strategic creative design can't do. The price of a special angle is limitations, and the other side of the sharp cut is often biased and obsessed, sacrificing general things and not being able to reach "ordinary people", which is not a problem for creators who only want to complete one or two good works, but for Hou Xiaoxian, the hidden uneasiness must be accumulating.
The best movie made in this way, Hou Xiaoxian himself still says that it is "The Man from the Wind Cabinet", on the grounds that everything is "just right", what does it mean? - "Wind Cabinet" is a typical story of four outlying island teenagers (all under the age of 20) who enter the big city, the four teenagers are very much like Benjamin said to let the wind of the city blow the pieces of paper away in their hands, and the people will follow wherever the pieces of paper blow, but "in the end it always leads to crime"; But at the same time, they don't have to go too far, and a big city like Greene says is just a few streets, a few houses, and a few people, not (or not yet) a whole world. The meaning of "just right" also refers to the contact between the four teenagers and the real world at first glance, and it stops here for the time being, without asking the further inevitable question of "what should Nala do when she goes home", and the two sides can also establish each other and be safe; And we may also think, isn't it "just right"? It's like unloading a long-term heart, a juvenile absurd dream, becoming a happy theme, and it's comfortably completed, isn't it?
"The Man from the Wind Cabinet"
What I want to talk about is the last part of "Coffee Time", which was originally the memory of Hou Xiaoxian's Japanese work partner Shiko Kosaka, and the first "picture" that caught Hou Xiaoxian's attention was the sleeping uncle on the cross-city tram at night and the little girl staring nervously at the bag on the luggage rack - the worn-out bag was always full of 10,000 yuan bills. The uncle is the little girl's own uncle, and the little girl who has no other relatives is actually responsible for collecting debts from place to place by the underworld organization, and lives on the tram most of the time. The uncle told the little girl that the more she threw it there, the safer it would be, the less noticeable it would be, and that was the trick, but the little girl just couldn't help but look at it.
It's been more than 20 years since "Wind Cabinet", it's still an underworld, and there are still some things that haven't ended and haven't subsided. "That picture", a specific image that the creator can't wander and thus slowly grows into a work, is generally placed in the most important and explanatory position of the work, just like Faulkner's "The Noise and the Tumult" in which the little girl climbs a tree, unconsciously revealing her dirty panties, and watches her grandmother's funeral, in "One Hundred Years of Solitude", the old man takes the child to see and touch a piece of ice and even lights up on the first page, the first paragraph, and the first sentence, but this scene that starts "Coffee Time" is not left at all. Even the character of the uncle has disappeared, how can you give it up?
It seems that this person and the underworld he is in have been ostracized in various ways, and he can't enter the ordinary world of a little girl when he grows up (especially "restored" to having parents and family...). It's not even a memory that came to her by chance, and even if it did, it was forgotten. Many years after the performance of a young girl, the little girl walked to the area of the used bookstore street in Kanda Jimbocho, if there is anything extra, it is another world that is thickly stacked with words, and the ending scene is very beautiful, not far from the intersection of the JR train of Ocha Mizumi Station (Ochanomizu Station), the picture of the waterway bridge is quiet and complete like a large painting, and every detail is so clear and full that it seems to have become a metaphor, but it can't stop, it can't be fixed like a moment, and it is as if the boat is asking for a sword, and the world under the feet of people is moving and rushing.
Coffee Time
I would like to offer such a non-surprising explanation - this is not really just Hou Hsiao-hsien's own boyhood dream, and it will not be completed by the completion of "Wind Cabinet"; Or it used to be, but with Hou Xiaoxian's age, and the understanding and care that continues to unfold and touch others in time, it is no longer true, but it is more like (belonging to) Oberaccir's millennium dream of mankind "throughout the ages, regardless of class, religion, or ethnicity", returning to the universal world of human beings.
A person's dream is easily established, it does not even have to consider reality or even go against the conditions of reality, sometimes it is just a blood, some misunderstanding and ignorance; But unless we continue to seal it in dreams as a mere comfort, we will only keep encountering a monolithic world, where it is intenable, incompatible, and difficult to reconcile, and it will be difficult to describe it smoothly (and always with explanations) in the real world in broad daylight. Hou Hsiao-hsien after "Wind Cabinet" is roughly like this, slowly walking towards Sima Qian and Hobsbawm, more often looking for these people who are still alive and still surviving in a corner or moment in the real world. The problem is that Hou Hsiao-hsien uses images instead of words, which makes a big difference.
The movie doesn't fit in
Many people believe that there are things that exist and believe in them before the age of eighteen, and they will not be true after the age of fifty, and life experiences unconsciously teach us many things, force us to notice many things, and require us to endure many things; Too many things are fragile in the human world. That's why Borges said that many books, many stories, have to be read when you are young, and at a certain age you will not believe it and will not be able to read it.
"This is a killer story that can no longer be killed" - in order to allow Europeans to enter the ancient Orient smoothly, this film, "Nie Yinniang" has been simplified into such a sentence and a question. Why can't a person who kills people for his profession (vocation/career) kill people anymore? This is actually a reverse question that seeks the greatest tension and a sharper way, and at its core is still this universal question: Can people kill people?
Of course, the movie "Nie Yinniang" does not only face this question, but just answering this well is enough to make the mouth dry. Basically, this is a topic that is more appropriately dealt with with in terms of text load (the images do not have sufficient explanatory power, or the ability to discuss them in both directions, and the iterative discussion of words is sufficient), and it is only possible to have a sufficient number of words, such as an entire book (such as Hobsbawm's "The Bandits"), or even many other books ("The Bandits" obviously does not solve all our questions).
And a movie, which we have discussed and confirmed again and again over the years, must be converted, and its full load is only the size of a short story. The news report kindly said that "Nie Yinniang" has a "very luxurious lineup of screenwriters", including two big and small storytellers in the world of words, Ah Cheng and Zhu Tianwen, which is actually not the only way since this movie; Also, Hou Xiaoxian himself is also a screenwriter (the most important one, whether he is named or not), and he was present from beginning to end. "Nie Yinniang" should spend more than three times as much time on the literal discussion in the café as it actually took to shoot (not counting its density). Script discussions don't have to wait for the light to arrive, for the clouds to arrive, for the crew to handle the scene, and for the ever-changing emergencies) - many people don't know that Hou Hsiao-hsien has spent far more time immersed in words than in images over the years, and the same is true of ordinary life, although it may not seem like it, he is indeed the most well-read director I know.
The movie can't fit in, more and more can't fit in, with Hou Hsiao-hsien's age and what comes with age - "Nie Yinniang" is of course the ultimate so far, it's about a whole dynasty in decline rather than the two dark alleys of Kaohsiung City, you have to remember the people who count in tens of thousands (although they don't appear in the movie) rather than the job search and salary of the four young people; In addition, Hou Xiaoxian said that this time he should shoot closely, which means that he wants to get closer to each individual and each situation, penetrate the appearance of universal things, and go deeper into it. can't fit into the movie, it's not new for these screenwriters who are accustomed to Hou Xiaoxian (including Hou Xiaoxian himself, who is a screenwriter), and they already know how to continue to work and endure - that is, the so-called "iceberg theory" that everyone is familiar with now, exemplifying the novelist Hemingway, whose works are like icebergs, nine-tenths of them will always be hidden under the sea level, and the screenwriter's task is to create an iceberg for Hou Xiaoxian, a two-hour movie, so the screenwriter's text promised space is twenty hours.
Assassin Nie Yinniang
It's a beautiful statement that is very definite and comforting, and the reason why I can't go on without peace is that I think the problem lies with Hou Hsiao-hsien, a Hou Hsiao-hsien who is constantly moving over time, constantly perceiving more, and unable to convince himself simply. In this way, Kundera used the word "structure" naughtily, thinking that it was original, and that each work had its own unique structure that could not be imitated, "so he was confronted with very complex, highly heterogeneous materials." In the face of these materials, he had to give them a form like an architect; Therefore, in the field of the art of fiction, from the moment it is born, the structure (architecture) becomes the most important thing. ...... And the structure is also the ID card of each individual novel. Therefore, the structure is the original path of human thought, in response to the special inquiry of each work (we can roughly imagine it as a mine), these unique paths that have been repeatedly found and stumbled out must be sorted out and ensured, as soon as the structure collapses, the path will break and disappear, and the things you want to grab are buried back, unable to dig up and transported.
Therefore, the director only captures a tenth, and it is (increasingly) not a matter of mere quantity, but rather how do you rediscover it without following this particular path of thinking, and how do you make it still valid and credible if you don't fully present the whole structure—without the guidance, support, and protection of the structure, these hard-earned things always seem dangerous, bravado, unreal or grounded, just because they are not simple and universal in the first place. After all, what exists and is established everywhere still needs to be talked about again and again, and needs people to "discover" it and defend it? I myself have a little experience, as a copy editor for many years, and a writer who quotes other people's words at every turn—the quotations are becoming more and more difficult and even contradictory, and the kind of two-sentence and neatly cut words, like eternal truth and like a beautiful gift box, are less and less attractive to me; The precious words that I want others to read are always longer and harder to cut off.
These words, which are limited to all kinds of harsh conditions and concerns, and even have to be added to them to be valid, carry a certain extraordinary vision, and also carry a certain deep and prudent sense of antagonism against reality, these words do not appear unintentionally, they are people who want them to be said, people want them to exist and be established, and behind the words there is a world that is not taken for granted.
The scene of "Qingluan Crying Mirror" in "Nie Yinniang" is said to have brought Shu Qi to tears when he heard it during the script discussion stage (there is no one of the kind, alone), but if it is not accompanied by enough, touchable, and detailed details of Nie Yinniang's life experience that has led people all the way, this rather overly moving power can easily flow (a large part) to drama; Also, Mu Cong, the wife of the young man who grinds the mirror from Japan, told Nie Yinniang for the first time in front of the fire at night that he said that the long confession of his origin was said to be a very good shot and the scene staff were all moved, but because the memory scene of the mirror grinding boy was discarded along with everyone's memories (it couldn't fit in, Hou Xiaoxian finally chose to cut it in time), this glittering but lonely scene lost its support, so it was like an extinguished star that no one will see again, and it can probably only be given to his wife Mu Cong as a personal collection to commemorate the trip.
Assassin Nie Yinniang
Hou Hsiao-hsien always simply said that this is "not real enough" - either cut it out, or try to loosen the dramatic locks, "place an action, a plot, a dialogue in a broader structure, and dilute it with the flow of daily life". This creates or magnifies the trouble on the other end, how can you just do it this way and not the other? As you have to dilute more and more things and get denser, you undoubtedly need more space to do it, and the movie is still only two hours.
Whoever takes off must always land
The angiest screenwriter of this time, Zhu Tianwen (I count the eyewitnesses), tried to calm her anger — in addition to reiterating that "the film is directed by the director," she thought that Hou Hsiao-hsien was almost reversing the Lumière brothers' film source, and that the train roared into the station, and the film was a record of the real world approaching us, or remembering it deeply. But we still have to say that the source should not be the whole reason, and the source is sometimes meaningless to trace the origin of the word, as Borges said, except for some kind of surprise that people are so at the moment; In addition, many forms of human writing and creation do start with amazement and dealing with the real world, but over time, we may have discovered the more unique power of each form of writing and its more appropriate use (what only fiction can do, only movies can do). In addition, we have a deeper, more fluid and complex understanding of the so-called truth, and it is difficult to say what is true and what is false, and "the boundary between what seems to be true and what is false is no longer under surveillance."
We always believe that a better way to use movies is to let us (temporarily) get rid of this uncomfortable real world that is entangled, echoing and inheriting the thousand-year-old dream of myths and legends dressed up in fairy tales, dreaming of a more dazzling, more righteous, or more satisfying, in short, this reality never gives us a world of longing, or another life that has not happened. Fellini's gorgeous, uninhibited, star-like explosion of imagination in all directions; Like Woody Allen's sweet "Cairo Purple Rose", Mia Farrow is an ordinary young woman with a rough, unemployed, alcoholic worker husband during the Great Depression in the thirties of the twentieth century, who hides in the movie theater and watches the same adventure hero movie over and over again, until the hero on the screen finally "notices" her, walks out of the movie, and takes her into the world or life that she cannot exist.
Cairo Purple Rose
In the movie, we can easily get such a world, a life again and again, which is not only a comfort, but also has multiple meaningful imaginations, allowing us to discover and preserve all kinds of possibilities, and naturally carry with us the necessary departure, reflection and refutation of the only world to realize. But here I would like to offer the reverse words of Kundera: "But will you and I ask rhetorically one day; If I had been born somewhere else, if I had been born in another era, what would my life have looked like? The question itself contains one of the most common human delusions. This illusion leads us to mistakenly believe that our life is just a mere setting, an occasional, exchangeable situation, in which our independent and constant 'I' passes.
Hey, it's a wonderful thing to fantasize about your own different life, your other ten possible lives! Daydreaming and doing it! We are irretrievably locked in the date, day, and place of our birth. If we detach ourselves from our specific and unique situation, our 'I' is unimaginable. Unless we look through this situation, unless we look at it in this situation, our life is incomprehensible. If it weren't for the two strangers who came to Joseph J. in the morning. K, and if he announces that he has been charged, then he will be completely different from what we know him. ”
The more definite requirement is here, in the irrevocable limitations of man (we are irretrievably locked in the date, month, day and place of our birth)—you can easily imagine that there is a medicine of all souls, and even eternal youth, but your cat, your relatives, will only die; Moreover, the more miraculous and disease-free this medicine is, the more we don't need to understand this disease, and even the various kinds of people in the disease, the more we don't need to understand it, isn't it? Don't get Kundera wrong about his bad temper, he doesn't scold you, his anger is directed at the world that is always frustrating, and at himself and the profession of fiction - "Whoever takes off will one day land".
I'd rather say that a creator who is good enough and good enough for a long time will sooner or later fall back into reality, and usually, it will be a wrestling process of constant discovery and constant resistance to delay, and it will often be seen as a decay process by people who don't know what is going on and those who hold grudges (on the surface, it is indeed a falling arc).
The creator will give up the contractual privileges given to him by the creative form in the same way, and let himself be trapped in the constraints of reality one by one (the creator is born free, but everywhere he returns to the shackles), so that people outside always think that he has lost his imagination and all kinds of gorgeous and incomparable things that people have been tormented for (such as Tolstoy's "Resurrection", which Bakhtin mourns as "withered leaves", which was once the most foxy, ingenious, and skillful master in the history of human fiction; The same is true of Kundera's Celebration of Meaninglessness, which Kundera has just completed, and the novel itself is even clumsy); The last (abandoned) privilege of the convention is the form itself, and in recent years I have been interested in rereading the last works of these great writers (without wasting time on novelists who have broken early, of course), noting exactly when they closed their pen (if not death came first), and preferably reading the interviews they had to say before and after.
There are complexities to be told here, and it's not easy to tell whether the novel has rejected them or whether they have chosen to leave the novel. Will the novel be something shorter than a life span and one step ahead of the end? Isn't the novel (and indeed all forms of creation) not necessarily something that can be entrusted with a person's lifelong ambition and a person's death?
This time, Zhu Tianwen's understanding is that Hou Hsiao-hsien's almost neurotic demand for reality now seems to require the screenwriter to "create" a completely real world (such an imprecise word "build" exposes the contradictions between them, as Eco said, it is impossible to make a map exactly like the real world), so that no matter where his lens is directed and who it is, it is a scene of the real world, a moment, and the lens "in the frame" and "outside the frame" are connected without boundaries and seams; In other words, what is in the lens is just a "token", like a light yarn to guide the wind, touching, believing, and confirming the whole world outside the lens with the least and most economical things.
"Once Upon a Time"
Towards the poem, into the film itself
In this way, I thought that Hou Hsiao-hsien's films were moving towards poetry—perhaps the ultimate result of cinema might be poetry rather than fiction; In other words, if you are not willing to explore only one point, one night, one manor, and a stage-like enclosed space that temporarily cuts off all connection with the outside world (such as the wonderful old director Altman, I think he is the most worldly, penetrating and most literal thinking), you want to use it to say more, and even like Hou Hsiao-hsien often said, "I can only make movies" (which means that all the knowledge, thoughts, and thoughts of this scene of my life, including my words, can only be told through movies in the end). If you want to use the movie to the limit, it can probably only be poetry.
The point may be that the language of the film is imagery rather than text. Of all the forms of writing that belong to the world of words today, only poetry precedes words, and it touches this eternal world with music and painting. Until today, the fundamental writing and way of thinking of poetry is still not really literal, but a series of specific images or images that are not directly connected, and the words used in the poem are mostly nouns (withered vines, old trees, faint crows, small bridges, flowing water, people, ancient roads, west winds, thin horses, clouds), such as a point or specific object at intervals, one of the meanings of the writing of the poem lies in the selection and placement and processing of these points, so that the points and points meet strangely, unevenly, and unexpectedly, and the points are clear and bright enough. The starry sky above us will attract each other into a line, a line of space, a line of time; The completion of a poem is usually not a story, but a painting.
Assassin Nie Yinniang
Poetry is able to tell the most things in the smallest space, the most economical words, and the most huge things that Woolf says. Hou Hsiao-hsien is known for his patience and his lack of interruption of long shots, such as gazing, and even became his film autograph, but it is rather that he places and processes them point by point. Hou Hsiao-hsien's shot is usually unrelated to the next shot, not because of it, but also the causal link of things, so that the space can be free and real (the chain of cause and effect in the real world is indeed always hidden and unpredictable).
This has reached a point when he "Dream Life", we often laugh privately and say that Hou Xiaoxian basically took an old photo album of Li Tianlu's family to shoot, see? This is Li Tianlu himself when he was twelve years old, his house looked like this at the time, squatting at the door and drinking tea, should it be his uncle or who, his mother raised a few chickens, okay, watch the next one...--people who watch his movies must connect with each other, this is the requirement of Hou Xiaoxian's movies to the audience. Therefore, many people who complain that they can't understand may just need a reminder that you are not reading a novel, you can just read 300 Tang poems as you normally do, "sit alone in the secluded fence", turn over, "play the piano and repeat the long howl", turn over, "people in the deep forest don't know", turn over, "the bright moon comes to take pictures", and it is over.
"Dream Life"
Hou Hsiao-hsien's film then has a special kind of calmness, a kind of earth seems to be stable and solid, gradually, people's actions lose their acute angles, become just activities, and disappear into "habitual repetitive behavior", we feel more likely to come from some unknown forces and their existence outside of people—but in this way, what should Nie Yinniang do? The profound meaning of this strange woman, who is as sharp as her claw dagger, is based on her actions, an extremely strong, extremely heterogeneous action, which is close to being free to play as she pleases and never easily reconciles with the world; Without action, she can't go that far, or to put it bluntly, the lonely and unique path that the screenwriter created for her with words, as well as her unique appearance at the end of the trail, have disappeared in the image of the movie.
Over the years, we do feel that there are at least two Hou Hsiao-hsien, one who has repeatedly descended into the messy corners of real life and is full of concern for the specific injustices and injustices of specific people to the point of fighting bravely, and the other is the more hidden Hou Hsiao-hsien, who constantly enters the depths of the creative form of film, tests the limits of cinema, and is like a quiet old craftsman—Hou Hsiao-hsien (and his screenwriters) may still slightly underestimate this contradiction and its dissolving power; In other words, most of the time, Hou Xiaoxian likes and hopes that he is the person in front of him, and he doesn't think that he can't still be such a person at the moment when he is a film director (craftsman), but the film's own requirements and own inquiries always lead Hou Xiaoxian to another person in the end, Hou Xiaoxian, who has entered the movie so deeply, has his more irresistible attraction (the other side is also a limit), as Weber said, the movie is the only demon god in his life, you can only identify and concentrate on serving.
This also helps us explain some of Hou Hsiao-hsien's strange phenomena - Hou Hsiao-hsien's films rely most on his text screenwriting, and the screenwriter (of which he is one) does not just execute the text, but co-creates a considerable degree from the starting point, but when his films are completed, the most prominent thing is always his hesitant and repeated desire to get rid of the new cinematography, and the extremely average strength of the art, which is constantly in the actual shooting process. In fact, this is not Hollywood-style separable, independent photography and art, what is really completed is the overall image itself, of course, it has to come from Hou Hsiao-hsien himself (the photography award and art design award should be awarded to Hou Hsiao-hsien himself). Image is Hou Hsiao-hsien's only language spoken by him, and image is even the increasingly pure film itself that he explores.
"Love in the Dust"
Another strange phenomenon is that the highest evaluation of him is a little exaggerated, and there are several big directors and filmmakers (Abbas, Kurosawa, Coppola, etc.) who are far away and even have more qualifications than him, and they even admire the purity of Hou Hsiao-hsien's films. We can understand these great directors as those who are constantly thinking about and actually touching the limits of cinema, who have to think about what a movie is and what it can do, who stand in a similar position to Hou Hsiao-hsien, who look at the same things and are troubled, they know best what Hou Hsiao-hsien is doing and why he is doing it.
Also, there is a certain harshness and ruthlessness hidden in Hou Hsiao-hsien's films - Hou Hsiao-hsien always starts with passionate care for a special, specific individual, but always "abandons" him in the end. Movies are becoming more and more an end rather than a form of load-bearing expression, and we also heard Shu Qi, who plays Nie Yinniang, very smart: "You won't see me often, I'll hide in the trees." ”
A few days ago, Hou Xiaoxian said in an interview that he would make another martial arts film (a bit against his impetuous speech made by Tang Dynasty art, vowed to return to modern times, and never shoot ancient costumes again, but it is Hou Xiaoxian's "habit" to be inconsistent with the preface and the afterword), it seems that he still has unfinished dreams, and he still believes that he can reconcile the two constantly separated Hou Xiaoxian. I actually like this kind of Hou Xiaoxian very much, contradiction is sometimes a kind of reluctance, a kind of noble will that hopes that good things will be established together, and would rather put himself in a difficult situation; Contradictions, as Whitman said, are a sign of a broad-minded person who can tolerate incompatible things and the conflict of gods, and good enough thinkers are always contradictory because of this - but can it really be done? It seems that we can only continue to look at him, worry about him, and bless him.