What’s happening? Story, scene and sound in Hou Hsiao‐Hsien

Abstract

In the films of Hou Hsiao‐Hsien, we are constantly confronted, during our first viewing, with the question: ‘What’s happening?’ – in the storyline as a whole, and in any given scene. This is a deliberate, systematic and productive confusion created by Hou’s distinctive cinematic style; it also has ramifications for the films’ complex thematic and cultural‐political levels of meaning. By negotiating such artistic confusion, we can find a path between two attitudes that dominate discussion of Hou’s cinema: on the one hand, an ‘insider’ reading that insists on the films’ references to the intricacies of local Taiwanese history; and on the other hand, an ‘outsider’ reading that abstracts the films from their specific times and places, extolling them as cosmic or metaphysical. In fact, Hou’s films ask, and find answers for, one of the principal questions of all cinema that has a political impulse: how can a film incorporate history as well as analyse it? This incorporation is achieved, on the level of narrative organization, by a radical use of the notion of backstory (the parts of a story that predate what is narrated on screen), as well as the better‐recognized device of the ellipse. On the finer levels of scene and shot, further strategies come into play: a crowded type of mise en scène peculiar to Hou, and a use of sound design (incorporating directly recorded voices and atmospheres mixed with music overlays) that is highly innovative within the context of contemporary Asian cinema. This essay concentrates on the rich period of Hou’s career from Good Men, Good Women (1995) to Café Lumiere (2004), precisely the period when he begins to look at present‐day youth and its urban subcultures for renewed inspiration; and it concludes with a close examination of the notion of repression in a scene from Good Men, Good Women.

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