Through the 1980s and ’90s, American fans of the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien regarded his movies as, essentially, too brilliant to be released: Although his films showed at festivals and occasional screenings in major cities, distribution companies in the United States largely shied away, even when his titles turned up on best-of-the-decade lists. Maybe Hou was simply too challenging, too singular and too uncommercial for any distributor here to touch, cinephiles scoffed. The longtime advocate J. Hoberman chalked it up less to difficulty than to regional bias: He speculated that if Hou were French, his films would draw crowds.
The shutout came to an end. Hou’s “Millennium Mambo” sneaked into one New York theater late in 2003, and from then on all his features have opened formally. His most recent, the elliptical martial-arts movie “The Assassin,” played widely in 2015. Still, it’s probably fair to say that Hou’s style — for all its visual elegance and influence on other filmmakers — requires some acclimation. Two of his best films from the 1980s can be easily streamed.
Stream “The Time to Live and the Time to Die” (1985) on Amazon Prime; rent or buy it on iTunes.
Stream “Dust in the Wind” (1986) on Amazon Prime; rent or buy it on iTunes.
Much of the acclaim for Hou rests on the implicit challenge that his movies pose to conventional narrative filmmaking. They are less rooted in story than in motion, space and time — the fundamentals of cinema. Hou relays important plot details in passing. Flashes forward and backward occur without immediate signposting. The physical arrangement of characters in a scene — as well as the lighting and depth of field — can be as significant as their actions. Hou’s great “Café Lumière,” a professed homage to the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, is a wistful ode to cities not as places where people mingle, but as sites of missed connections and passing trains.
You might describe Hou’s method as filming negative space. In a study of Taiwanese film, the scholar Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh noted that Hou himself likened his style to liubai, the Chinese ink-painting technique of leaving space blank. “In cinema,” Yeh writes, “liubai entails inviting audiences into a cinematic space, not to understand, connecting cause and effect, but to experience.”
With Hou’s films, close attention is all that’s required. The subject matter of “The Time to Live and the Time to Die” and “Dust in the Wind” is straightforward enough that their gentle disorientations never feel confounding. “Time to Live” is a coming-of-age story drawn from Hou’s memories, particularly, the opening voice-over notes, his impressions of his father, who died when Hou was a small boy. “Dust in the Wind,” partly taken from the life of the screenwriter Wu Nien-jen, is a country-to-city story: A boy forgoes high school to work in Taipei. His girlfriend follows, but over changing circumstances and their trips back and forth, their connection grows tenuous.
“Dust in the Wind” establishes its themes of temporal and geographic dislocation — of mobility and stasis — in its opening shot. In what becomes a recurring image, the camera gazes out from one end of a train emerging from a tunnel. Hou cuts to the interior of the train to introduce the central couple, Wan (Wang Chien-Wen) and Huen (Hsin Shu-Fen), who are returning to their hometown, a mining village. (Neither has yet moved away.)
Transit becomes a continual presence in the movie and their relationship. (One of their big rifts involves a stolen motorcycle.) Wan has barely revealed his big-city ambitions to his father when Hou flashes forward to Huen standing on a platform in Taipei, waiting for him. (It turns out she is in the wrong place.) It takes some time before Hou reveals — in an offhand line about how long Wan has been learning the ropes at a printing factory — that two years have already passed.
“Dust in the Wind” mainly volleys between the two locations, sometimes signaling leaps in setting only subtly, in ways that owe as much to internal rhythm as to direct storytelling. Without an establishing shot, Hou cuts from a scene of an outdoor movie in the village to return to a Taipei loft space, where the muffled sounds emanating from a cinema next door can be heard.
Moments that would prompt outpourings in other films unfold with remarkable understatement. When Wan is drafted into the army, his grandfather (played by the puppeteer Li Tianlu, an important figure in Hou’s films) walks him to the end of a curve in the village train tracks — but the camera stays back, watching them in long shot. The grandfather bids Wan farewell in the distance (we don’t hear them), and when Wan walks offscreen, Hou adds a flourish: a burst of firecrackers the grandfather has been setting off to mark the occasion.
Observing characters from a remove is something of a Hou trademark, but keeping a distance isn’t quite the same as de-emphasizing incident. In “The Time to Live and the Time to Die,” which chronicles the childhood and rebellious teenage years of a Hou stand-in called Ah-hao, there are amazing, deep-focus shots designed to showcase multiple characters (and multiple generations) going about their business simultaneously but separately. Panels and doors in the scenery create frames within frames.
History is frequently a trace presence, overheard on the radio or alluded to in conversation, as when the father summarizes a letter about a relative on the mainland. Hou has a habit of revealing a speaker belatedly in a shot well after the dialogue has begun. Other filmmakers do this, but for Hou it is less to create a sense of surprise than a given, a way of accentuating atmosphere over exposition.
In his excellent book “No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-Hsien,” James Udden notes that Hou’s style — particularly his taste for lengthy shots — began partly as a reaction to the way movies were made in the 1970s and early ’80s in Taiwan, where the film industry favored fragmented camera setups that made it difficult to coax fluid performances from actors. While Hou’s methods may have had practical origins, they developed into pure poetry — a mode of cinematic storytelling all his own, but accessible to anyone.
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