Hou Hsiao-Hsien

[Melville]

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I just watched Millennium Mambo and thought it spectacular. Pure, beautiful atmosphere. The aesthetic reminded me of Lost in Translation, with lots of blurred foreground objects, lights reduced to blobs of color in the dark, everything awash in ethereal music. And it did some interesting things with that atmosphere in terms of social connectivity: the sea of music and color acts as a social solvent, something allowing a shared experience as everybody lets themselves dissolve into it; but it also serves as an escape and a barrier to personal connection, a kind of empty, blurred state away from hard, differentiated reality, as emphasized by the protagonist running away to it and her abusive boyfriend donning his headphones in the midst of an argument. Also, wintry scenes for the win.

I plan to watch some of his other movies soon. Only seen Red Balloon and Three Times prior to Mambo.

[Izzy Black]

YES!!!!!

:pritch:

[Melville]

YES!!!!!
Any plans to write that long essay about Hou you mentioned a few months back? I'd definitely be interested in reading it.

[Izzy Black]

And I totally agree with you about Lost in Translation. I consider them to be almost companion pieces. I remember people thinking I was crazy when I once compared the aesthetic of Sofia Coppola, Hou-Hsiao-hsien, and Claire Denis. I think the aversion seemed more with my placing Coppola on par with these other two than anything, but I think she deserves it.

I recommend Flowers of Shanghai, Goodbye, South, Goodbye and Good Men, Good Women. I don't consider any of these as good as Three Times and Millenium Mambo, but they deal with similar themes and showhis progression toward the aesthetic achievements of the latter two films.

Of his early work, I recommend Dust in the Wind, The Puppetmaster, A Time to Live and a Time to Die and City of Sadness especially..

I would also like to recommend a very under-seen and under appreciated Hou Hsiao-hsien film called Daughter of the Nile. It's a strange film in that it doesn't quite cohere with a lot of his earlier work. It's contemporary urban concerns and feel, and even its protagonist, bring it closer to Millennium Mambo than, say, A Time to Live and a Time to Die. I'm personally quite fond of it.

[Izzy Black]

Yes, I still plan on doing that. But as usual, my ole unreliable self has put several essays I wanted to write on the backburner. I've been a bit busy lately, but you're inspiring me to revisit it. I hope to write it soon.

[Izzy Black]

Here's some irony. I didn't even particularly like Lost in Translation when I first saw it. It wasn't really until I delved into the work of Hou-Hsiao-hsien and particularly his late work that I began to really appreciate Sofia Coppola's films. I actually don't think I really even understood her cinema until later. I now consider her an auteur of the highest order.

[Melville]

And I totally agree with you about Lost in Translation. I consider them to be almost companion pieces. I remember people thinking I was crazy when I once compared the aesthetic of Sofia Coppola, Hou-Hsiao-hsien, and Claire Denis. I think the aversion seemed more with my placing Coppola on par with these other two than anything, but I think she deserves it.
Yeah, I can kind of see the comparison with Denis as well. There's a similar kind of lightness and drifting quality to the aesthetic, a similar way of luxuriating in a moment, but with more pronounced images and compositions than people like Weerasethakul who also drift and luxuriate. I haven't seen any Denis movies in a while, though.

Thanks for the recs. Not sure what I'll go for next.


Yes, I still plan on doing that. But as usual, my ole unreliable self has put several essays I wanted to write on the backburner. I've been a bit busy lately, but you're inspiring me to revisit it. I hope to write it soon.
Nice.

[Melville]

Here's some irony. I didn't even particularly like Lost in Translation when I first saw it. It wasn't really until I delved into the work of Hou-Hsiao-hsien and particularly his late work that I began to really appreciate Sofia Coppola's films. I actually don't think I really even understood her cinema until later. I now consider her an auteur of the highest order.
What did you think of Somewhere? I never saw it.

[Llopin]

Not a big fan of his more recent output. Café Lumiere, sold as some kind of blatant Ozu tribute, felt rather aimless, Three Times was boring and Flight of the Red Balloon was utter bullshit. To be honest I didn't think much of Millenium Mambo when I saw it years ago, but maybe a rewatch is in order.

A Time to Live and a Time to Die is mandatory, a must-see film for all interested on contemporary asian cinema, a very beautifully shot family portrait. Dust in the Wind and City of Sadness are great films as well.

[ledfloyd]

i adore flight of the red balloon

[Izzy Black]

Three Times was boring

When will this kind of dismissal finally be considered a cardinal sin of cinephilia?

[soitgoes...]

When will this kind of dismissal finally be considered a cardinal sin of cinephilia?

When films stop being a form of entertainment?

[Izzy Black]

Yeah, I can kind of see the comparison with Denis as well. There's a similar kind of lightness and drifting quality to the aesthetic, a similar way of luxuriating in a moment, but with more pronounced images and compositions than people like Weerasethakul who also drift and luxuriate. I haven't seen any Denis movies in a while, though.

Right. This technique (that I think Weerasethakul lacks) allows them the shared ability to tap into distinct urban identities along with the confusion, neurosis, and strange beauty of the post-industrial world. This characterizes, at least, Hou's late work and much of Denis and Coppola.

[elixir]

Joe is different. That isn't to his detriment...

[Izzy Black]

He participates in a similar style, I just don't find him very interesting myself.

[elixir]

Well, I don't find you very interesting myself!

jk, I do, bud

[Izzy Black]

When films stop being a form of entertainment?

The point is that it's utterly uninformative as a line of criticism. You can dismiss all of arthouse cinema as "boring" and still fail to say anything useful or revealing. But, hey, maybe that's all they want. Three Times isn't one's cup o' tea. OK. Got it. Moving on...

[Izzy Black]

Well, I don't find you very interesting myself!

jk, I do, bud

:lol:

[Melville]

There are definitely some broad similarities, but I only brought in the comparison because I realized I was using words identical to those I'd used to describe Joe's style. Joe's style is much more one of stillness, ambient noise, and slow rhythms. Rather than creating a moment awash in atmosphere, he lets the atmosphere settle into the moment, letting you (i.e., I) settle into the atmosphere. And that's when the magic happens. His films (or the things I associate most strongly with them) feel of the countryside in the same way Translation and Mambo feel of the city. I like my favorite film from each of the them roughly equally.

Curious what Llopin found boring about Three Times and bullshit about Red Balloon.

[Izzy Black]

What did you think of Somewhere? I never saw it.

The general reaction seems to have been mixed, but I really enjoyed this film. It runs through many of the same themes as Lost in Translation and Marie Antoniette, continuing Coppola's semi-autobiographical interests on the pressures, emptiness, and absurdity of celebrity, trading in familiar themes of disappointment and loneliness, but this time bringing it even closer to home with the celebrity father/daughter dynamic. It certainly lacks the elegance and poetry of Lost in Translation, but something about it's raw, stripped down aesthetic still registered with me. It's not her best work, but I did like it. It just feels so sincere, and Elle Fanning is splendid in what appears to be a largely improvised performance.

[Izzy Black]

There are definitely some broad similarities, but I only brought in the comparison because I realized I was using words identical to those I'd used to describe Joe's style. Joe's style is much more one of stillness, ambient noise, and slow rhythms. Rather than creating a moment awash in atmosphere, he lets the atmosphere settle into the moment, letting you (i.e., I) settle into the atmosphere. And that's when the magic happens. His films (or the things I associate most strongly with them) feel of the countryside in the same way Translation and Mambo feel of the city. I like my favorite from each of the them roughly equally.

Right, I acknowledge the similarities, but for me it's mostly in Tropical Malady, and even then, the effect isn't quite the same, although it's much closer here. Syndrome's wide-angle shots of landscapes and corridors brings Tsai Ming-Liang to mind more than Hou or Coppola to me. I'd also say I see even more Jia Zhangke in Joe with the stasis, the elliptical pace, the ambience, the on-location shots of the countryside, and so on. In Mambo, Hou's camera roams and wanders with flattened space and a soft blur. Lost in Translation has a similar kind of "softness" to the aesthetic. Joe's aesthetic tends to be crisper and harder, even jarring at times. It doesn't quite match the fluidity, movement, and soft elegance of Hou's film and Coppola's film, and that's where I think a lot of the atmosphere and visual meaning seep into the frames.

[Izzy Black]

I just don't find him very interesting myself.

And I'll take this back. I do find him interesting, just perhaps not as compelling as others. I probably need to spend some more time with his work. My caution in showering him with praise probably has more to do with the reaction to his work than the work itself.

[ledfloyd]

i adore flight of the red balloon.

[elixir]

You don't say!

[Boner M]

I adore Cafe Lumiere.

[Llopin]

Hou Hsiao Hsien told stories. Then he just bought too much into the artsy side critics were raving on and kinda lost his appeal. He lost the personal-er element of his movie-making and became vapid. There's this anecdote of Kitano meeting Hsien in the 90s and telling him: "I bet you were a wild guy when you grew up". This might be true, since in his earlier films one can sense certain power and angst.

Three Times is by-the-numbers contemplative asian cinema. Well-shot, "gorgeously done" but ultimately pointless. The first section is perhaps the most engrossing, the rest are a downer. No story, no strong characters, no feelings. Not a bad film per se, only highly skippable. I have no tolerance for Flight of the Red Balloon. That a filmmaker so expert in portraying the human struggle and the history of his country ends up filming such derivatively european-auterish, tedious, meandering crap - without any kind of originality and/or risk - it's like automatic pilot and it makes me sad. One can be minimalist and quotidien and succeed if there's an structure and an effort - or one can be lazy and just film whatever. I feel Hsien's choosing the latter lately. I think he's banal.

Also, more than Weerasethakul, I think one could compare Hsien with the works of Jia Zhang-Ke. Hsien even appears in one of his more recent movies, I Wish I Knew.

[kopello]

Flight of the Red Balloon is sublime, one of the best films I watched last year (I think, or the year before). I saw Three Times a few years ago and fell in and out of sleep during the last two segments, it needs a rewatch. I also checked out The Puppetmaster from the library a few months back but couldn't get through it because the print was so bad. I would like to check out more of his earlier stuff though, I've had City of Sadness in my possession for some time now so it'll probably be first.

[baby doll]

Hou Hsiao Hsien told stories. Then he just bought too much into the artsy side critics were raving on and kinda lost his appeal. He lost the personal-er element of his movie-making and became vapid. There's this anecdote of Kitano meeting Hsien in the 90s and telling him: "I bet you were a wild guy when you grew up". This might be true, since in his earlier films one can sense certain power and angst.

Three Times is by-the-numbers contemplative asian cinema. Well-shot, "gorgeously done" but ultimately pointless. The first section is perhaps the most engrossing, the rest are a downer. No story, no strong characters, no feelings. Not a bad film per se, only highly skippable. I have no tolerance for Flight of the Red Balloon. That a filmmaker so expert in portraying the human struggle and the history of his country ends up filming such derivatively european-auterish, tedious, meandering crap - without any kind of originality and/or risk - it's like automatic pilot and it makes me sad. One can be minimalist and quotidien and succeed if there's an structure and an effort - or one can be lazy and just film whatever. I feel Hsien's choosing the latter lately. I think he's banal.

Also, more than Weerasethakul, I think one could compare Hsien with the works of Jia Zhang-Ke. Hsien even appears in one of his more recent movies, I Wish I Knew.What makes me angry about this post isn't that Llopin likes Three Times and Le Voyage du ballon rouge less than I do but that he can't make a compelling argument to support his opinion. I don't want to argue with this post so much as make it repeat seventh grade English.

1. Hou Hsiao-hsien told stories. Three Times and Le Voyage du ballon rouge are both resolutely narrative films.

2. He just bought too much into the artsy side critics were raving on and kinda lost his appeal. This assumes a false dichotomy between reviewers and paying moviegoers, between light commercial fare and more ambitious fare.

3. He lost the personal-er elements of element of his movie-making and became vapid. There's no clear causal connection between a loss of personal elements (whatever that's supposed to mean) and vapid filmmaking. In any case, what could be more personal than the intimately scaled stories of both Three Times (the first part of which is based on Hou's own experiences) and Le Voyage du ballon rouge?

4. In his early films one can sense certain power and angst. There's plenty of angst in the last segment of Three Times (which you later dismiss as a "downer"), but that said, the guy was pushing sixty when he made that film and Le Voyage du Ballon rouge (which is an homage to a classic children's film, by the way); do you really expect him to still be angsty? I'm sure if Edward Yang had lived longer, he too would've started to mellow out.

5. Three Times is by the numbers Asian cinema. From David Bordwell's most recent blog entry:


Most films' intrinsic norms match what we can call extrinsic norms. [...] What the art film does, I think, is what ambitious Hollywood films try to do: It tries to freshen up its intrinsic norms. But it does this according to broader principles of the art-film tradition.

Hou is one of the leading contemporary Asian filmmakers precisely due to his ability to freshen up art movie conventions: Mixing fiction and documentary and delaying exposition in The Puppet Master; moving between three time frames (recent past, present, and a film-within-a-film about events that happened in the '50s) in Good Men, Good Women; having every significant action take place off-screen in Flowers of Shanghai; and in Three Times, he tells three unrelated stories in different periods featuring the same actors.

6. "Gorgeously done" but ultimately pointless. The point is to show how people's lives are shaped by the society and era in which they live. I can't be the only one who finds this blindingly obvious.

7. The first section is perhaps the most engrossing, but the rest are a downer. The reason Hou starts in the middle rather than going chronologically is so that the tone gradually becomes darker and less hopeful. If he had began in 2005 and ended in 1966, he'd have a very different movie.

8. No story, no strong characters, no feelings. There are three stories, and all three are about failed romantic relationships. I suppose none of the six principal characters are especially memorable, but that's beside the point as they're all intended to be representative of the time and place in which they live.

9. Derivatively European-auteurish, tedious, meandering crap. Le Voyage du ballon rouge is only tedious and meandering if you're incurably hooked on goal-oriented protagonists.

Derivative seems like an odd criticism of a movie consciously conceived as an homage to an earlier film. What did you expect?

As for the derisive allusion to European auteur cinema, this brings us back to the false dichotomy between commercial films (good) and art cinema (bad).

10. One can be minimalist and quotidian and succeed if there's a structure and an effort. As I said earlier, by the standards of classical Hollywood cinema, causal relationships in Le Voyage du ballon rouge are somewhat loose, but to say there isn't a structure--and what's more, that Hou isn't making an effort but just filming "whatever"--is plainly absurd, especially the latter part. Filmmaking is hard work, even if the finished product is crap (and for the record, I don't mean to imply that Le Voyage du ballon rouge is in any sense crap).

11. Without any kind of originality and/or risk--it's like automatic pilot. From Robin Wood's book on Howard Hawks:


The genre movie is obviously (by its very nature) 'conservative' art in this sense; and one of the distinguishing features of 'conservative' art is that it is immediately entertaining: audiences were entertained, from the outset, by Shakespeare's plays and by Mozart's operas, and it was possible for an aria from The Marriage of Figaro to catch on instantly as a popular hit. The originality of such works lay not in the evolution of a completely new language, but in the artist's use and development of an already existing one; hence there was common ground, from the outset, between artist and audience, and 'entertainment' could happen spontaneously without the intervention of a lengthy period of assimilation. It is distressing that one should have to remind people that a great work of art can be, at least on certain levels, immediately accessible and pleasurable.

The originality of Le Voyage du ballon rouge is primarily a matter of local texture--that is, the specificity of these particular people and their situation--rather than in how it tells its story. It seemed to me a lesser Hou movie when I saw it a few years ago, but it still gave me a great deal of pleasure.

[Izzy Black]

daaaamn.... I haven't read BB's post yet, but daaaamn...

[Llopin]

LOL.

[Izzy Black]

Good post BTW, baby doll.

[TripZone]

haha