Curator Richard I. Suchenski discusses Hou Hsiao-hsien's innovative cinematic style, and how it all comes down to trying to find ways to represent everyday life experience.

The Hou retrospective was initiated because for cinephiles of season curator Suchenski's generation, Taiwanese cinema has a special status comparable to Italian neo-realism or the French new wave for earlier generations.

Hou is the most important Taiwanese filmmaker and his sensuous, richly nuanced body of work is at the heart of everything that is vigorous and genuine in contemporary film culture. His unique style however, including a radically elliptical approach to storytelling, does place certain demands on the viewer. These formal innovations, that can prove difficult for viewers new to Hou's cinema, are inextricably bound up with the sympathetic observations of everyday experience.

Suchenski gave a detailed talk at the BFI to try unravel Hou's cinematic style on September 21.

How does Hou's formal style operate? Suchenski stated that whilst there is often the notion that Hou's cinema is one of stasis, he doesn't think this is true. Instead, Hou makes films about movement, space and time, and the aesthetic system that has developed in his cinema throughout his career hinges on his editing style.

Hou Hsiao-hsien [File photo]

"Flowers of Shanghai" (1998) is composed of fewer than forty shots, some of which last for up to ten minutes. The most important point is where the cut comes and what happens in between the cuts. It is often only after the cut that you begin to understand what has just happened in the scene you just saw. This is one reason why Hou's films demand great concentration from the viewer.

From "The Boys from Fengkuei" (1983) onward, Hou started to link multiple zones of time, between memory and the present. In "The Boys," the experience a character has of watching the Italian classic "Rocco and his Brothers" (1960) at the cinema is connected to the character's private mental space. The two are linked together through overlapping sound, which bridges disconnected spaces together. The sound of the Italian movie continues as the image moves from the public space of a cinema to the private space of memory, in which we see him throw a baseball that accidentally hits his father on the head. The image that sparks this memory is of an Italian actresses' leg on the big screen, and Suchenski suggests this association between eroticism and guilt, of the baseball accident, is something that Hitchcock would have appreciated.

Italian neorealist cinema, and the selection of "Rocco" playing in the film, was linked to Hou's cinema in the way they both ask: How do I make sense of the shifting reality before me? This relates to how in the 1970s and early 1980s Taiwan was rapidly industrialising and modernising, undergoing a massive economic, cultural and social transformation that could be compared to what happened in Italy in the late 1950s-1960s.

Hou's films have often been difficult to see on either the big screen or on DVD, no more so than "The Puppetmaster" (1993). The film is very dark, and cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin said he had to play tricks just to get things to show up on screen because Hou wanted absolutely no artificial light, to recreate how people would have seen things in the early part of the twentieth century. It is a film which needs projection on the big screen to be visible, and Suchenski fought for a year to get the film in the retrospective since it is caught up in a rights dispute.

Hou's films' visual style was also compared to Chinese landscape paintings, although when Suchenski first asked Hou about this, Hou replied that his films are not influenced by them. However a little later Hou started talking about landscape painting in terms of realism because everything for Hou is about realism. Hou said that he gained a new appreciation for Chinese landscape painting when he visited China, during shooting "The Puppetmaster" in 1993. Hou realised that this form of painting was an attempt to depict real concrete spaces. Many of Hou's images utilise a similar technique to Chinese landscape paintings, where the viewer constructs a sense of continuity from discreet spaces that have their own autonomy.

The title of the entire retrospective is "Also Life Life: Hou Hsiao-hsien." This title comes from a character in "The Puppetmaster" who says "the puppets in the performance are like people, so puppet plays are also like life". Suchenski used this phrase because it points to an idea of realism, and the form used to give that realism life, to make it "also life life." Representations of everyday life, via a cinematic search for realism, is what makes Hou's cinema energetically alive.

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