Hou Hsiao-hsien

b. 1947, Meixian, Guangdong

Film director, actor, producer

Born to a Hakka family in Meixian, Guangdong province (see Hakka, culture of), Hou Hsiaohsien helped pioneer Taiwan’s New Cinema movement (see cinema in Taiwan) and remains one of Asia’s premier film artists today. His family moved with the post-war flow of mainlanders to Taiwan. Despite his father’s service as an education administrator, Hou became a gangland ‘enforcer’ in his late teenage years. Figuring greatly in his films are love for his adopted homeland, and especially for the simple village life of his youth; Taiwan’s transition to a modern urban culture; Taiwan’s complex mix of languages, politics and sub-cultures; and a fascination with the gangster underground as an alternative to established authority.

Hou graduated in film from the National Taiwan College of the Arts in 1972. Following a series of light comedies, Hou’s contribution to the three-part film Sandwich Man (1983) helped signal the beginning of a new era in Taiwan film. With A Time to Live, A Time to Die (Tongnian wangshi), which won the Critics’ Award at Cannes, Hou introduced a slowpaced, lyrical but realistic style that captured the essence of Taiwan’s disappearing village lifestyle, nostalgically seen through his own childhood experience. Dust in the Wind (1986), by contrast, illustrated the pressures of modernization on the island’s rural youth forced to move to the cities during a period of rapid economic development.

As development brought a loosening of the Nationalist Party’s ruling grip, Hou’s A City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi, 1989) led to the first public acknowledgement of government massacre of intellectuals that commenced on 28 February 1947. The first Chinese-language film to win at the Venice Film Festival, A City of Sadness, was a political event in its own right, describing the impact of the transfer of colonial control from Japan to mainland China on a single family comprised of businessmen, gangsters and intellectuals. Two films completed Hou’s so-called Taiwan Trilogy. The Puppet Master (1993), a semi-documentary life of Taiwan’s famous puppeteer Li Tianlu during Japanese rule; and Good Men, Good Women (1995), a complex narrative and profound consideration of historical morality as experienced by two women born into widely divergent roles—one a real-life patriot, the other a fictional gangster girlfriend-turned-actress, representing Taiwan in two different generations. Hou’s most recent major films are Flowers of Shanghai (1998) and Millennium Mambo (2001). Hou’s film career has also taken him into acting (Taipei Story, 1984, dir. Edward Yang) and producing (Raise the Red Lantern, 1991, dir. Zhang Yimou).

Further reading

Browne, Nick (1996). ‘Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Puppet-master. The Poetics of Landscape’. Asian Cinema 8.1 (Spring): 28–38.

Li, Tuo (1993). ‘Narratives of History in the Cinematography of Hou Xiaoxian’. positions: east asia cultures critique 1.3 (Winter): 805–15.

Neri, Corrado (2003). ‘A Time to Live, A Time to Die: A Time to Grow’. In Chris Berry (ed.), Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI, 160–6.

Reynaud, Bérénice (2002). A City of Sadness. London: British Film Institute.

Udden, James (2002). ‘Hou Hsiao-hsien and the Question of a Chinese Style’. Asian Cinema 13.2 (Fall/Winter): 54–75.

Xu, Gang Gary (2003). ‘Flowers of Shanghai: Visualising Ellipses and (Colonial) Absences’. In Chris Berry (ed.), Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI, 104–10.

JEROME SILBERGELD