The Taiwanese film director Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose films detail the micro and macro complexities of his country’s history, is the subject of a massive and comprehensive retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image, running now through October 17. Born in Guangdong, China in 1947, Hou left the country as an infant as fighting resumed in the Chinese Civil War. Landing in Taiwan, he would become a major figurehead of the country’s cinematic new wave in the early 1980s, which combined personal stories of displacement with historical examination and critique.
Much of his work has been nearly impossible to see in the United States for many years. Only in the last decade, when some of his most recent films began to receive miniscule theatrical and DVD releases, was he fully appreciated by the larger critical community in this country, despite already being an active presence on the film festival circuit.
But just as quickly, Hou’s work has been misunderstood. Or rather, at a time when his films could have grown in popularity, they were reduced to the laziest of simplicities: they are slow, too long, boring. The writer Dan Kois, in a ridiculous piece for the New York Times Magazine in 2011, lumped the director in with Tarkovsky, Edward Yang, and others as filmmakers who, despite feeling that their work is worth seeing, he is giving up on because he just doesn’t get what they’re doing. To watch their films is akin to eating disgusting “cultural vegetables,” his reasoning goes.
A simple survey of Hou’s films displays how wrongheaded this way of thinking about his work can be. From his earliest autobiographical epics to the more recent present-day whispers, the work is anything but stilted or traditional. Despite their veneer of minimalism and lack of histrionics — and his films can be slow and boring, but why can’t we strip these terms of their negative connotations when talking about art? — Hou’s films are all about movement. He invokes the long-take, often moving the camera through a host of different compositions before cutting. But when his camera is still, or the movement is hushed and gentle, is where Hou’s films come alive. When the camera is still the action inside the frame is alive, as characters move in and out and across the frame, changing the way we look at the scene. This subtly gives the impression that Hou’s films are bound by stillness when they are actually quite kinetic. Precision is confused with tedium.
Movement is also seen in the narrative structure of his work. “A Time to Live and a Time to Die” (October 3), one of his earliest masterpieces, stretches over a long period of time, tracing the life of the main character from adolescence through adulthood. “The Puppetmaster” (September 13) displays movement via multiple narrative lines — the main story, which jumps many years; the narration, spoken from the present; and real life monologues from the main character the story is based on.
In recent years, Hou’s work has become even more reserved. He has moved away from the personal meditations on Taiwan’s maze-like history, making the Ozu-tribute “Café Lumière” (September 26) in Tokyo and a remake of “Flight of the Red Balloon” (September 28) in Paris. As part of the series, the museum will be screening two films in which Hou did not direct but played a part, behind or in front of the camera, in their production: Jia Zhangke’s “I Wish I Knew” (October 17) and Edward Yang’s “Taipei Story” (September 21).
