an unfolding horizon: the films of hou hsiao-hsien october 13 - 27, 1999 photo: GOODBYE SOUTH, GOODBYE

calendar | about the program walter reade theater box office and ticket information The Film Society thanks Wendy Lidell and WinStar Cinema for making this program possible. THE PUPPETMASTER / HSIMENG RENSHENG (1993; 142m) Drawn from the memoirs of Li Tien-lu, who had appeared in three previous Hou films, THE PUPPETMASTER is the second chapter in Hou's tripartite history of Taiwan. Taiwan's most famous puppeteer, Li remembers his childhood (bullied by his father's second wife, a former whore), his days on the road with a troupe of traveling puppeteers, working anti-Japanese propaganda into his puppet theater, and all the wonderful and terrible experiences that shaped this feisty 84-year-old. Hou's film is epic in scope but personal in outlook, astonishingly rich in atmosphere but as unforced as the passing moment. Here is life as it is apprehended by an artist who pulls the strings of his marionettes and can only assume that someone pulls his: "I regard my life as a drama and a dream." Splendidly acted and photographed, this is a profoundly moving film. Wed Oct 13: 1 pm & 6:30 pm Sat Oct 23: 7 pm Tues Oct 26: 1 pm Wed Oct 27: 8:45 pm

FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI

FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI / HAISHANG HUA (1998; 120m) An exquisitely formal film adapted from an 1894 novel by Han Ziyun, FLOWERS takes place within a 19th-century brothel's ornate jewelbox rooms, where enervated "callers" and their chosen flower girls practise elaborate, repetitive rituals of social intercourse and consumerism. The artificial decor is Sternbergian, as are the long-buried passions and masked despair of the beautiful people who meet in the brothel's airless compartments-each with a pool of golden lamplight at its center-to measure out their lives in gambling, saki cups, rich food and pipes of opium. Phillip Lopate writes that "Hou builds on the geisha melodramas of Mizoguchi and Naruse--the cruelty of sexual commerce, the women's debts, the madam's bossiness, the self-protective, two-faced nature of a courtesan's attachments--and strips down this narrative genre to its essence, by way of formal blackouts, frontal compositions, and gyroscopically rigorous camera movements." Wed Oct 13: 4 pm & 9:15 pm Fri Oct 15: 6:15 pm Sun Oct 17: 3:45 pm Fri Oct 22: 8:45 pm Sun Oct 24: 4 pm & 9:15 pm Wed Oct 27: 6:15 pm THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI / FENGKUEI-LAI-TE JEN (1983; 101m) A group of recent high school graduates from the Peng hu islands come to the city of Kaohsiung in search of jobs before they do their military stints. Hou captures the rhythms of their idleness and the feeling of adulthood looming large on their horizon, in this breakthrough 1983 film that put him on the international map. Working with his longtime collaborator, novelist and screenwriter Chu Tien-wen, Hou builds his film out of apparently unrelated incidents and vignettes, with the long takes, naturalistic acting and remarkably sharp sense of place that have since become the hallmarks of his cinema. "The turning point of Hou's career in terms of artistic achievement." -Peggy Chiao Thurs Oct 14: 3 pm Thurs Oct 21: 1 pm & 8:45 pm GOODBYE SOUTH, GOODBYE / NANGUO ZAIJAN, NANGUO (1996; 116m) Hou's first film with a contemporary setting since DAUGHTER OF THE NILE was a shock to his admirers. An apparently loose, free-floating tale of Kao (Jack Kao) and his two sidekicks, Flatty (Lim Giong) and Ying (Hsu Kuei-ying), three lost souls who work the no man's land between marginality and criminality, GOODBYE SOUTH, GOODBYE documents the sad drift of modern Taiwan towards a modern, highly impersonal form of life, across a variety of locations: a gambling den, a pig farm where the trio hope to make a killing, a karaoke bar that's the site of a high-level meeting between local gangsters. But these characters are most at home while they're in motion, in cars, on trains, going through city scapes, country roads or car washes. One of the greatest scenes Hou has ever filmed is a long take of the misfit trio coasting up a lush road into the mountains. An altogether beautiful film, GOODBYE SOUTH, GOODBYE is a sad poem of motion, a lament for souls in the process of getting lost. Thu Oct 14: 5:15 pm Fri Oct 15: 1 pm & 8:45 pm Sun Oct 17: 6:20 pm Fri Oct 22: 3 pm Wed Oct 27: 3:45 pm DAUGHTER OF THE NILE / NILOUHE NUER (1987; 93m) A young woman (played by Yang Lin, Taiwan's most popular singer) who works in a fast-food restaurant and her burglar brother (Kao Jai) try to survive amid the money-driven neon glamour of Westernized Taipei. DAUGHTER interweaves the rich rhythms of Ozu-like family life, the misadventures of petty gangsters and the excitement of nightclubbing--to compose urban music, sometimes cacophonous, sometimes melodic, but always full of energy. The title refers to the girl's favorite comicbook, about an American girl who falls in love with an Egyptian king. Fri Oct 15: 3:30 pm Sun Oct 17: 8:45 pm Fri Oct 22: 1 pm Tues Oct 26: 3:45 pm A TIME TO LIVE, A TIME TO DIE (1985; 138m) Out of his own childhood experience, Hou weaves a tapestry of collective memory. A family emigrates from mainland China to Taiwan in 1947, settling down in a small village. While the older generation, especially Grandma, looks homeward, the children start putting down roots--the son matures from new kid on the block to teenage rebel. Hou mines everyday details and events for the uninsistent but cumulative significance that is the profound stuff of life, history. Only those numbed by Hollywood's vision of life as sledgehammer-action film, fueled by machine-gun editing from one peak experience to the next, could fail to savor the humor, long takes, and exquisite deep-focus compositions with which Hou unfolds the "times" of his people. Janet Maslin praised the film's "attractive plainness": "Much of the film is about suffering and loss, detailing the painful circumstances in which family members, one by one, grow ill and die. [It] has been photographed, most effectively, with a streamlined ordinariness that amounts to a kind of eloquence." Sat Oct 16: 3:45 pm & 9:30 pm Sun Oct 24: 6:30 pm Wed Oct 27: 1 pm

GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN

A CITY OF SADNESS / BEIJING CHENGSHI (1989; 159m) A CITY OF SADNESS is set during the most infamous period in Taiwan's history, beginning with the Japanese surrender in 1945 and ending with the terrible "February 28 incident" in 1947 and its aftermath, which marked the beginning of the island's 40-year stretch under martial law. But unlike most historical epics, Hou's film is told strictly through the eyes of ordinary citizens: Wen-cheung (Chen Songyong), who's trying to hold his family together; his sweet brother Wen-Ching (Tony Leung), a portrait photographer who's been deaf since childhood; Wen-liang (Gao Jie), the third and most volatile of the three brothers; Ah-lu (THE PUPPETMASTER's Li Ten-lu), the family patriarch; and Hinomi (Xin Shufen), the sister of Wen-ching's best friend (Wu Yifang). This tragic, serenely beautiful film, whose narrative cuts through time like a scythe cutting through tall grass and whose images sing with light and color, reminds us that history isn't something that merely happens to famous, important people, but to all of us. And when Hou cuts from the death of one of his central characters to a bird in flight on the day of his funeral, A CITY OF SADNESS soars into a new form of metaphysical poetry that has no equal in modern cinema. Sat Oct 16: 6:30 pm; Tues Oct 19: 1 pm Sat Oct 23: 4 pm; Mon Oct 25: 6 pm HHH: A PORTRAIT OF HOU HSIAO-HSIEN Olivier Assayas, France/Taiwan, 1997; 93m When he was a critic at Cahiers du Cinéma, Olivier Assayas was one of the first people in the West to write about Hou's work, and the two directors have had a long friendship that led to the making of this gentle, spontaneous portrait of Hou on his home ground. As he's visiting his old friends, presiding over a tea ceremony, or explaining his aesthetics, Hou betrays the same kind of warmth and candor that characterize every frame of film he's ever shot. Along the way, Assayas offers a mini-portrait of Taiwan, as well as a sad chronicle of the now broken friendships that once formed the bonds of the Taiwanese New Wave. Including interviews with Hou's longtime writing collaborators Chu Tien-wen and Wu Nien-jen, among others, Assayas' portrait, commissioned for the wonderful French television series Cinéma de notre temps, is informative, winning and beautiful to look at. And be sure not to miss Hou indulging his passion for karaoke! Wed Oct 20: 1 pm; Mon Oct 25: 3:15 pm DUST IN THE WIND / LIANLIAN FENGCHEN (1987; 109m) Against the wishes of their elders, two young lovers quit school and move to Taipei to find jobs. Of course, the crowded city has more workers than work, and the couple are soon confronted by the bitter taste of economic reality. Their relationship is further strained when the boy is drafted. Jonathan Rosenbaum writes that "Hou's feeling for the textures of everyday life...gives this unhurried but deeply affecting drama a deceptively subterranean impact that gradually rises to the surface. The very natural and, for the most part, underplayed performances by nonprofessionals are especially impressive." Wed Oct 20: 3 pm & 8:30 pm Thurs Oct 21: 3:15 pm Fri Oct 22: 6:30 pm GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN / HAO NAN HAO NU (1995; 108m) The final installment in Hou's historical trilogy, which also includes A CITY OF SADNESS and THE PUPPETMASTER, GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN is conjugated in three tenses. A film actress (Annie Shizuka Inoh) starts receiving faxed pages of the diary she kept during her days as a barmaid, when she was the mistress of a gangster (Jack Kao). At the same time, she is preparing to play Chiang Bi-yu, an anti-Japanese resistance fighter from the 40s who returns to Taiwan in the 50s only to be imprisoned as a subversive during the ugly, paranoid days of the "White Terror," Taiwan's more horrific equivalent of our red scare. So the film slips back and forth between the ordinary present, the actress's past with her lover in glowing, vibrant color, and the rich black-and-white past of the film about Chiang, whose heroism puts contemporary life in sad relief. Hou's formal control in this film is stunning in and of itself, but GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN's vision of history through the lens of a spiritually depressed present is a major achievement and, in the end, a deeply moving one as well. "If you care about the future of world cinema you can't afford to miss it." - Jonathan Rosenbaum Thu Oct 14: 1 pm Wed Oct 20: 6:15 pm Sat Oct 23: 9:45 pm Mon Oct 25: 1 pm & 9 pm