![]() ![]() Based on historical personages, Good Men, Good Women (1995) uses the making a movie to exhume the tragic fate of Taiwan’s progressive intellectuals during the “White Terror” forty years earlier. City of Sadness (1989) is an “autobiography” set during the filmmaker’s infancy that uses shifting points of view to recount the postwar occupation of Taiwan by Chinese Nationalists. The Puppetmaster was one of several films in which Hou mixed historical material with a daringly counterintuitive, even oblique, narrative structure. A long sequence around a kitchen table introducing the prostitute who becomes Li’s mistress is followed by a shot in which she is having a her portrait taken, a close-up of the photograph, and then a return to the kitchen table where the photo is being examined with old Li’s voice-over picking up the story. Presenting these disparate elements in stately alteration, Hou manages to sustain an interplay between Li’s biography, the impersonal social forces around him, and the implacable movement of time. Intermittently, there are shots of the octogenarian Li himself recounting his own life. These, and panoramic shots of rural Taiwan punctuate the ongoing melodrama of the young Li’s motherless upbringing-one that, among other things, involves child abuse and drug addictions-and later, his own life as an absentee father. There are a half-dozen theatrical performances of various types, from puppet shows to Taiwanese opera-usually shown head-on, some in a single long take, and at times revealing the young Li (played by Lim Giong) and his colleagues working behind the stage. ![]() ![]() He is one protagonist and history is the other.Įighty-four when The Puppetmaster was made, Li was for Hou “a living encyclopedia of Chinese tradition” and the film is a comparable anthology of the various ways a story can be told. Li’s story, one of continuous family turmoil, is played out during the fifty-year period during which Taiwan was a Japanese colony, from 1895 to the end of World War II. Even in peacetime, though, Japan was a presence. During the war these shows became morale-building propaganda, dramatizing combat against American forces, complete with puppet airplanes and smoky special effects. (The Chinese title is “Drama, Dream, Life.”) The movie dramatizes the youth and early career of Taiwanese “national treasure” Li Tien-lu who, born in 1910, became an apprentice puppeteer at age eight, performing traditional plays first in remote mountain villages and later for Japanese officials in Tapei. ![]() This epic chamber-piece, which split the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1993, is neither documentary nor fiction. It is an event to have it anchoring the comprehensive Hou Hsiao-Hsien retrospective now showing at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, which will continue on a North American tour to cinematheques and museums in Cambridge, Berkeley, Washington, D.C., Rochester, Toronto, Vancouver, Houston, and Chicago. Like most of Hou’s films, The Puppetmaster was never commercially released in the United States and has been rarely screened. The Puppetmaster went much further, demonstrating a profound and original sense of motion pictures as a way of exploring the passage of time. Until then I thought of Hou as the maker of extraordinarily fine, essentially contemplative, quasi-autobiographical youth films-my favorites were Dust in the Wind (1986) and Daughter of the Nile (1987), both of which impressed me with their evocation of the ephemeral, their haunting sense of solitude, and the eloquence with which they left things unsaid. A scene from Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Puppetmaster (1993)Īlthough the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien has been making movies since the early 1980s, I first became convinced of his genius when I saw The Puppetmaster (1993) some twenty years ago. ![]()
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