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Cinema and history: critical reflections

Hou Hsiao-Hsien; Petrus Liu

Online Publication Date: 01 June 2008

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Hsiao-Hsien, Hou and Liu, Petrus(2008)'Cinema and history: critical reflections',Inter-Asia Cultural Studies,9:2,173 — 183

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Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, 2008

ISSN 1464–9373 Print/ISSN 1469–8447 Online/08/020173–11 © 2008 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14649370801965547


HOU Hsiao-Hsien (Translated by Petrus LIU)

TaylorandFrancis

ABSTRACT Hou Hsiao-Hsien was invited to Singapore to talk about himself. In the speech, he focused on talking about his family background, his childhood memories, life experiences and howthese experiences affected his life, and also how he made his films. Furthermore, as Taiwan had gone through many drastic political and economic changes, especially after the lifting of MartialLaw, these conditions influenced Hou’s life and his films, too. That is, Hou’s films presented notonly the changes in a rapidly urbanizing rural society, but also the important events of Taiwan’shistory. At the end of the speech, Hou also mentioned that realizing the importance of socialresponsibilities, he would like to get more involved in the public sphere in order to make a differ-

ence in society.

KEYWORDS: Hou Hsiao-Hsien, film, memory, childhood, political changes, Taiwan

I’ve been here for a few days and I foundSingapore to be a rapidly changing city,with a high concentration of energy, mainly because many people in Singapore havetaken a keen interest in developing a rela-tionship with external world affairs andcontinue to cultivate those connections fromwhere they are. I believe that if they cankeep up their work, Singapore will be agreat city.

I am invited here today to talk aboutHou Hsiao-Hsien. The organizers for thisconference asked me to talk about myself reflexively, which means that I should treatmyself as a sample, and think about howHou Hsiao-Hsien, the sample, has becomethe way he is today over the years.

Actually, in the film industry, we oftensay that a director has a ‘third eye,’ meaningthat he has an additional ‘view’ and able todistance himself and observe the presentsituation objectively, including himself. Soin keeping with Kuan-Hsing’s request, I amnow going to talk about myself as a thirdperson, as if I were talking about someoneelse, say Wong Kai-war or Edward Yang.

I don’t know what I’ll talk about yet, but I’lltry talking about myself this way.

A Time to Live, A Time to Die

I was born in 1947, in the Mei County inGuangdong, and in that same year myparents brought me to Taiwan. My father atthat time was acting directing secretary of Taichung City. I remember this in greatdetail because my sister once told me thatwe moved to Taiwan when I was fourmonths old because my parents heard thatTaiwan has tap water. My father was notused to politics. He studied and graduatedfrom the Department of Education atGuangzhou’s Zhongshan University. Later

he transferred to the Ministry of Educationin Taipei, and our family moved to Hsing-chu. The current mayor, Hu Zhiqiang,heard the story about my family back-ground and kindly looked up the originalappointment letter for my father in thearchives, and gave it to me as a keepsake.From the letter I learned that he started hisnew post in June.



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Hou Hsiao-Hsien

My father had a hard time acclimatingto the weather and had bad asthma. He hastuberculosis from the days when he wasworking in the newspaper business inShantou, when he wrote almost daily andworked too hard. Soon he couldn’t live in the

humid part of Northern Taiwan anymore, sowe moved to Kao-Hsiung instead and he gota less demanding job at the county office,serving as the director of a co-op. My fathereven published a book about co-ops while hewas working there. My childhood memoryof my father was that he was always sick andspent a lot of time in a sanitarium in Tainan.My mother visited him often, and the tripswere very exhausting for her. I remember mysister once said that it happened more thanonce that my mother missed her stop

because she fell asleep on the train and didnot wake up until Pingdong.

I have a vivid memory from my child-hood. We were living in the dormitory of the County government, a Japanese style building in the Fengshan district. We wereplaying a hide-and-seek type of game inthe alley and I covered my face behind apole and counted 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35until 100, waiting for the others to find ahiding place. When it was my turn to hide,

I found a large dumpster, which was actu-ally an enclosed area against the wall andnot a container. It had a wooden door, andduring that time of the summer, the shadedareas were extremely dark. I was hidingin the dark and my hands accidentallytouched some chicken dung – you know,chicken shit. I remember what it felt like.Then my parents came back from the sani-tarium in Tainan and my sister called us back home. Then she told me to wash mehands immediately (because my hands just

touched chicken dung). That was the lasttime my father went to the sanitarium. Hepassed away soon after (I was 12 in 1959).

My father never spoke with us childrenwhen we were little. I didn’t know whyuntil later, when I found out that he wasworried he would pass tuberculosis to us.My mother had a deep scar, with stitches.I didn’t know how she got it and dared notask. Because of the way things were in my

family – or maybe it had something to dowith my horoscope too (I am an Aries) –I had to sneak out of the house everyday. No one else in my family except mehad the guts. I slipped out by climbing thewalls whenever I could. In my memory, my

father was always sitting by the desk, eitherreading or writing. We had tatami and mostof our household items, especially thekitchen utensils, were made of bamboo. Myfather slept in the corridor outside thetatami mats, on a bamboo bed close to the backyard like the one in my movie A Time toLive, A Time to Die

(1985). Later, I found outfrom my sister that my father hadpurchased cheap bamboo household goods because he thought we would very soon bereturning to the Mainland. What about my

mother? When I was making A Time to Live, A Time to Die

, I wanted to begin with myown childhood memories. I asked my sisterwhat my mother was like in those days. Mysister was eight years my elder and she wasattending third grade in the elementaryschool at that time, so she had a clearermemory of my mother. She said, basically,my mother had depression. After our familymoved to Taiwan from Guangdong, myfather’s friends and relatives frequently

came to us for help. My father had to takecare of them, sometimes by helping themfind work, so my mother was under a lot of pressure as well. I think that was an impor-tant cause of her depression. My grandfa-ther had only a son and a daughter and mymother was the apple of his eye. After wemoved to Taiwan, my mother lost herconnection to her own family and money.You can compare her experience to migra-tion, but it was not even like that. When youmigrate to another country you’re there to

stay and you want to make the new placeyour home, which was not what she had inmind. Adapting to entirely different circum-stances and living conditions was a greatchallenge to my mother. On top of that, myfather was very ill and only earning 620 kuai

per month. My mother often said that ourfamily was eight bottomless mouths, alwayshungry for more food. My mother spent along period of time in the sanitarium, and




175

attempted suicide, which is how she got thescar. I mention these things because I wantto give you an idea of what it felt like togrow up in a family like this.

I remember a fight between my parents.It was not actually a fight, strictly speaking,

because my parents were strange in thatway. When my mother married my father,he said to her, ‘Mmm, if you don’t haveanything to do, you should learn English.’Although my mother was an elementaryschool teacher and educated, my father’srequest still put a lot of pressure on her. Myfather was an intellectual of an older genera-tion. If he were still alive and saw memaking movies, he would probably say thatI should find a proper career instead. Onetime they were discussing something and

we kids knew they were getting more andmore emotional, and I was doing the dishes– we all took turns doing dishes – and myparents asked me to come over and gave mea hug and praised me for helping out in thehouse. I got embarrassed, being hugged bymy mother like that, and I tried to slip away because I was just not used to it. These areall things from my childhood that I remember very well. A Time to Live, A Time to Die

shows many these memories, including the

time when my grandmother passed awayand ants were crawling all over her bedsores. The mortician saw it, and gave usfour brothers a look. My mother died of throat cancer one year before my grand-mother passed away, when I was 18 or 19.

I spent most of my childhood outside.Unlike the Singaporeans, I didn’t bringfriends and things from outside back to myplace, except that I did bring home knivesand similar weapons we street kids used forfighting. My grade school friends and I were

always hanging out at the town temple. Westarted gambling early and we did it consis-tently while we were growing up. Wegambled with large sums of money, espe-cially at New Year. I lost more and moremoney in gambling, and I was quickly indebt, and I even stole my elder brother’ssavings account passbook to borrow money.I was the second eldest of the boys, and myeldest brother alone was working to bring

home the bacon. We were too poor to go toprivate schools so my brother and sister bothattended Normal Universities. I spent somuch time hanging out with the kids by thetemple that my Taiwanese got impeccable,almost native-sounding. The temple was a

popular place. Kids of my generation werealways hanging out there, but our elder brothers and uncles also often met up withpeople their age there. Over time, thereformed what we commonly call in Taiwan‘corners’. We had a lot of street fights. A seri-ous one, I remember, took place when I wasabout 14 or 15. Another guy and I wereelected to be ‘lookouts’. I didn’t even knowwhat ‘lookouts’ meant, but we were theyounger ones and we were naturallyassigned these roles. The two gangs were

going to meet at the park, and I remember wewere taking on a gang by the name of 24 blueeagles. We crossed the bridge, each carryinga knife, and scouted out the area but did notsee a soul, and told our mates so. We weretoo young. They were all hiding under the bridge and they ambushed us. I only sawsparks in the darkness and heard knifesclanking. Our gang retreated to the streetsand we started throwing bricks at them, andthen we joined the fight. These fights

normally wouldn’t leave anyone seriouslyinjured, because there were simply too manypeople. Eventually, I had to say goodbye tomy days at the town temple and serve in thearmy, and when I was released I wassupposed to be sent to for discipline, but I ranaway and went to Taipei by myself.

The small town where I grew up got mewell acquainted with Taiwanese opera, forthe temple happened to be where competi-tions for dramatic performances in theseven Southern Counties in Taiwan were

usually held. I was not very interested inTaiwanese opera, but I was hooked to thepuppet shows and shadow plays. Whenthey came on they usually lasted one or twomonths. In addition, the temple also hadeight gajong

(Taiwanese), which means dang gi

(Taiwanese, ‘shaman’ or ‘medium’). Thetemple had a very old and thick banyantree, and another one that was really tall.Together they looked like Seventh Lord and



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Hou Hsiao-Hsien

Eighth Lord (deities in popular religion).The town temple was built ages ago, andhas a tablet hung above its door that reads‘You Come Back Here,’ which means evenafter you die, you’re supposed to return tothe temple. The temple also houses a giant

abacus, which supposedly keeps count of your merits and sins in your life.

That’s how I grew up. During thoseyears, rental bookshops were popular, espe-cially for comic books, so I set up a stand onthe street as well. My younger brother brokehis leg when I took him to pick mangosfrom someone else’s orchard and was hospi-talized. My sister was teaching at anelementary school then, and another teacherat the school liked her, so he’d buy comic books for my brother in the hospital. I took

those to my stand after I was done readingthem and rented them to other people formoney. The guy who liked my sister had amonthly subscription to some of the mostpopular titles at the time, such as ModelYouth

and Comics Weekly

, so I always hadthe latest issues of everything. I took a matand sat in front of the temple with the booksI had, both old and new ones. I also peddledpineapples. I did almost everything, andwas fun-loving. I was especially drawn to

artistic things. I mentioned a tree earlier.The tree was the beginning of my musicalcareer! I learned how to read simplifiednotation in sixth or seventh grade, andI could sing just about any song with thenotation. So I sang a lot of songs – I knewalmost all the popular songs – atop that tree.Later on, I became addicted to martial artsfiction, and I would ride a bicycle with a basket in the front to the largest rental book-shop next to Fengshan Theater. I quicklyfinished all the martial arts novels they had,

and I started reading romance novelsinstead – Yu Qiwen, Jin Xingzhi, An Aromatic Lover’s Dream

, Hua Yan, SimaZhongyuan, all of those people. As forQiong Yao, I didn’t get to her works until Iwas in high school, when my classmateswere all reading her. Jin Yong I also read inhigh school, but I had apparently readplagiarized and underground copies of JinYong under other names before. I read The

Legend of the Condor Heroes

for the first timein high school.

During those years, movies were a realluxury, and we didn’t have money to go tothe movies. When I was little, I would standin front of the entrance to the movie theater

and begged random adult movie-goersto bring me in with them. Then I got older.In junior high, I started to sneak into thetheater by climbing the walls. I had a buddycalled Ah-Xiong, and we would cut the barbed wire and slip into the theater. Therewas no theater we couldn’t get into – TheFar East Theater, Fengshan, or Dashan.Another way was to use a fake ticket. Youcould pick up a stub from the ground andpiece it together with a torn ticket. We werereally smart. We knew that they never actu-

ally looked at the ticket. That way I got tosee a lot of movies. As long as there was anew movie, I would always go to see it.During those years there was no bookI wasn’t allowed to read and no movieI wasn’t supposed to see. No one was hold-ing me back, because my father had alreadypassed away, and my mother wasn’t keep-ing an eye on me either. Home was toodepressing, so I was out as much as I could be. I found some of those stitch-bound

books, like The Story of the Mad Monk

, Seven Heroes and Five Gallants

, Xue Dingshan

, andthe likes. I also read many translated novels,such as Tarzan

, Robinson Crusoe

, The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

, and TreasureIsland

. I also got into a lot of fights. The mostserious one was when I smashed thewindow glass of a GI club. I even got intoa physical altercation with the teachers.I included some of these autobiographicaldetails in A Time to Live, A Time to Die

. Thefight was pretty bad. The police chased me

all the way back to my house and I escapedthrough the backdoor, and my brother washopping mad.

Another important factor in my child-hood was that I only knew popular musicin Taiwanese. A lot of those songs wereactually Japanese songs. I remember vividlythat, when I was 14 or 15, there were twohigh school boys playing a pool game nextto the book rental shop. They were playing




177

with just four balls, two red and two white,with no pocket. A girl was keeping scoreson an abacus. They both sported a crew cut,were wearing bell-bottoms and the waythey played pool looked really cool. The background music was ‘Smoke Gets in

Your Eyes’ and it left a deep impression onme. I remember looking at a very mascu-line-looking tattoo. I was only 15 then andI was pretty short. I was hanging out withAh-Xiong at an ice cream shop. Ah-Xiongwas at a junior college in Kao-Hsiung and a bigger guy called Takei kept bullying us.One time Ah-Xiong and I saw Takei and wewere going to fight him together. We were both short and we saw Takei from the back.He had very broad shoulders and lookedtall and strong. We followed him for a

while and then gave up. Some of the guysin the gang wouldn’t. They would pick afight with a bigger guy. I think my wholelife would have probably different if Ididn’t give up the fight in time. All theseyears I felt there was something inside methat prevented me from going that far. If allmy movies seem to have something to dowith gangsters and brotherhood, it is prob-ably because of that moment in my life.

I also watched a show at Fengshan

Theater that I remember very well. I wasvery young, and the song they performedwas ‘bi bala lu la see my baby.’ I’ve also seena lot of movies, including Hong Kong’sShaw Brothers, Cathay, Hollywood, and Japanese movies. At that time, Japanesemovies weren’t banned yet. These movieswere an important part of my formativeyears. My family is Hakka, and our customsare quite different from others. I had afriend in elementary school called Loku, andhis brother was called Haina. There were a

total of four boys in their family. Theirfather was skilled in an almost lost art of making animal-shaped candies with whitesugar. I wanted to make a movie about this but by the time the idea came to me, theirfather had already passed away. I felt verymuch like an alien growing up. I was anoutsider to my own family, and an alien inthe world outside home as well. That isperhaps why my movies all have bleak

endings. At the same time, people whoknow me will find me to be a passionateperson! I have a hard time saying no tofriends. Both traits probably have their rootsin my childhood, where I formed my firstimpression of the world.

This part of my past shapes my charac-ter today as well. My wife always says mymoney is all spent outside of the house, forexample on a friend who needs help with arecording studio. I guess I have a hard timesaying no to friends because I never gotenough love and warmth from my ownfamily while I was growing up, andcompensated by seeking love and friend-ship from outside. I’m not saying that I’malways trying to please other people; justthat I always feel bad saying no to people,

because it is always unpleasant whensomeone turns you down. I rememberthose feelings very well and these consider-ations have pushed my life in a differentdirection. A friend of mine once comparedme to ‘instant coffee,’ meaning that I ‘blendin’ really well and instantly in a new envi-ronment, almost to the point of forgettingmy self or my former identity. It’s a habitI’m still having difficulty shedding. ForExample, Shochiku asked me to direct a

film as a tribute to Yasujiro Ozu, and of course initially I didn’t feel comfortablemaking a Japanese movie. Nevertheless, Iagreed to it because I didn’t want to letthem down. Take this conference foranother example. I’m good friends withKuan-Hsing, and we’ve talked about thisseveral times so of course I had to come.But I didn’t know it was going to cut intothe busiest time, when we are supposed to be working on finalizing and submitting

Three Times

(2005) to the Cannes Festival.

Things like this have happened more thanonce. I over-commit myself, and then I getattacked by different people. Last year, forexample, I was the leader for the ‘clan.’ Ididn’t know it was going to get thiscomplicated, and I don’t think about my‘ideology’ when I do things. I was justhelping out friends. They asked me to do it,so I did. And then I bore the brunt of allcriticisms.



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Hou Hsiao-Hsien

Moving to Taipei

I was working as an assembly worker for acompany in Muzha when I first came toTaipei, earning 800 Taiwan dollars a month.I passed the entrance examination for my

first choice of school, the National TaiwanAcademy of the Arts, on my third try.

How did I enter the whole movie busi-ness? I have to begin with the time whenI was in the military. I didn’t even finishhigh school, but I was able to take thecollege entrance examination with a highschool equivalent certificate. The first yearI didn’t get into any school, and the secondyear was the same, so I went to serve myterms in the military instead. I had a lot of time to myself while I was in the military

services, and I did two things. I read a lotof novels, and watched a lot of movies.I started thinking what I might want to doonce I was dismissed. I wasn’t sure, but I’dwatched a lot of movies and the industryseemed interesting to me, so I listed theNational Taiwan Academy of the Arts asmy first choice, and I only entered fivechoices. I got into the school but I didn’teven really know too much about filmmak-ing. I just really liked the feelings of watch-ing a good movie. Taiwan’s economy was just taking off and, in the 1960s, saw theproduction of a high volume of domesticmovies, averaging about 100 movies peryear. Existentialism was very trendy whenI was in college, and I read fashionable titlessuch as Wang Shangyi (

A Wild Dove’s Dusk

,1969), Nietzsche, and (William Barrett’s)

Irrational Man

(1958). When I finished the books, I lay on the school track field think-ing, ‘What the hell does this have to do withmy life? I don’t give a damn.’ And threw the

books away. I never picked them up again.I was working part time when I was

going to school. When I graduated, I workedas a salesman for 8 months, when people likeLin Baili were just starting their own busi-ness. A basic calculator, the type that onlyhad 8 digits and could only do pluses,minuses, multiplications and divisions costabout 10,000 Taiwan dollars. I workedin sales for those for eight months before

I entered the film industry. Before I became adirector, I worked as log-keeper, assistantdirector, and scriptwriter. For about five tosix years I was both a scriptwriter and anassistant director. When I was in art schoolI was already teaching my classmates how to

do log-keeping, what to write down, for whatreasons. But I had no practical experiences.My wife trained me. She asked me for myhelp when she was working as a log-keeper,and I helped her organize her notes andgained a lot of experience myself, and thatwas how we got married. At that time, every-thing in Taiwan, from education to the econ-omy, was moving upwards. The wholesociety focused its attention on developingthe economy and had very little politicalconsciousness. It was just like my new film,

Three Times

. The fist part is set in 1966, theyear when the Cultural Revolution juststarted, but in 1966 I was living in a politicalspace that was filled up with playing pool,street fighting, and novels.

An important point I’m trying to under-score here is that, if I hadn’t been working as both assistant director and scriptwriter at thesame time, my transition to the life of adirector probably would have been a lotmore difficult. My responsibilities as assis-

tant director were quite heavy, includingteaching the actors how to act, arranging theset onstage, the production process itself,and casting, and I was even in charge of themovie budget sometimes. I accumulated alot of hands-on experience, which was enor-mously useful to me. These days a lot of young directors want to direct movies assoon as they finish their degrees abroad.They are not aware that directing a movietakes more than ideas, and the logistics of the production process could be just as

important. I spent 8 years in the industry before I directed my first movie. I madeseveral movies in the so-called ‘urbancomedy’ genre. Content-wise, my majorworks began with The Boys From Fengkuei

(1983), which is mostly about my own grow-ing up experiences, displaced onto a differ-ent site, Fengkuei, in Penghu. A Time to Live, A Time to Die

is about my own family. ASummer at Grandpa’s

(1984) is about Chu




179

Tien-wen and Chu Tien-Hsin’s grandfa-ther’s house. Dust in the Wind

(1986) is WuNien-Jen’s (Wu Nianzhen) story. Making amovie is like writing a novel. You’re askingfor trouble when you become friends with anovelist. You instantly become part of that

person’s fiction. I made ample use of thingsthat were close to me, the life stories of thesethree friends and my own. These experi-ences represent changes that take placewithin the family in the context of a rapidlyurbanizing rural society. They represent theimpact of watershed events in an importantera of Taiwan’s history, such as the ROC’swithdrawal from the United Nations, theseverance of diplomatic ties between Taiwanand the United States, after which ChiangChing-Kuo was forced to rethink China’s

future. The political isolation of Taiwanforced him to turn inwards and invest inTaiwan itself with the Ten DevelopmentalProjects, education programs for nativeTaiwanese, and various reform effortswithin the KMT. But I’ve seen the docu-ments of the proposed reform programs,which proved to be futile, because the KMTwas simply too old, and things you thinkyou can change all ultimately turn out to beimmovable. That’s the advantage of a

younger country like Singapore. Despite itslevel of political oppression, Singapore’sdynamic economic development has createdthe momentum for non-governmental orga-nizations and movements. Its social atmo-sphere supports such development, unlikeTaiwan during the White Terror, whenanyone with a political consciousness risked being abandoned by their family andfriends. In the 1980s, Taiwan’s social imagi-nation was ripe. Fiction flourished first.Writers of Huang Chunming’s generation

wrote in a fast-paced narrative style becausethey started writing as soon as they had apen and a piece of paper. Chen Yingzhen’sfictions were very influential to many of us, especially the stories that depict thehorrors of the White Terror, ‘Bellflower,’‘Mountain Road,’ and his story about inter-ethnic relations, ‘Groups of Generals.’Huang Chunming and others wereconcerned with those local, native, daily,

lived and visceral experiences for a genera-tion of people in Taiwan before Martial Lawwas lifted in 1987.

After 1987, Taiwan’s society and socialstructure underwent drastic changes, and itsaccumulated wealth began to move in a

different direction as well.

Our current situation

Film scripts used to be censored in Taiwan.One could say that creative expressionswere highly controlled, but after the liftingof the Martial Law, Taiwan became a moreliberal society, with increased freedom of the press and freedom of political organiza-tions. But I feel that one step was missing inthe democratization of Taiwan, with detri-

mental effects, just as if I had started todirecting movies right out of film school,I would not have survived for long. Afterthe lifting of Martial Law, the internal orga-nization of the KMT underwent drasticchanges. Lee Tenghui’s rise to power wasthe beginning of much internal strife withinthe KMT. In order to consolidate his power,Lee tired to win over the support andinfluences of corporations and gangs withcriminal ties by spending governmental

resources. His policies affected the entiresocial and economic structure of Taiwan.Soon after, Lee’s reign created a new symbi-osis between politics and economic inter-ests, which is a new alliance between statepower and local elites that continues todetermine the current affairs of Taiwan.Nicknamed ‘black-gold politics,’ this symbi-otic relationship places a heavy burden onTaiwan’s society and continues to consumeits energies.

Working in the midst of these crises,

I experienced a lot of life changes as well.Before, I saw movie-making as an expressionof my inner self, and I trusted my intuition –I would make movies as I liked them. But,last year, I sensed that the movie industrymight undergo another major change.I began to participate in the so-called publicsphere about three years ago. We establishedthe Taiwan Film and Culture Association, asan NGO with social responsibilities, trying



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Hou Hsiao-Hsien

to make a difference. At that time, I realizedthe importance of making right decisions atall times, especially decisions that involvethe public. That realization helped me staytrue to my values when I became moreinvolved with politics. In the 2004 election,

politicians manipulated ethnic communitiesto their own gains and intensified ethnictensions in Taiwan. We came together anddiscussed some alternatives, and finallydecided to organize a group. A groupneeded a leader, and everybody was lookingat me. I’d only come to two group meetings,and both times at someone else’s bidding, but everybody thought that my ‘face was bigger’ (‘ka wu tao bin’ in Taiwanese), so I became the organizer of the group. Mypersonality is that, once I decide to do some-

thing, I will do my best and do it to the end.You cannot give up halfway, because thenyou would never find out what happens inthe end. Our group has only been operatingfor two years and, to everybody’s surprise,the political situation between Chinaand Taiwan has altered drastically, andsuddenly ‘westward advances’ became thepolitically correct policy.

1

At the same time, the movies I wasmaking were changing as well. We founded

the Democracy School in an attempt torestore history by making documentaries.

2

This affected my Three Times

. The main ideafor the movie came from an article TangNuo wrote for the Hou Hsiao Hsien Classic Movie Collection 1983–1986

DVD-Set (

QingChun Pan Tao Shi Jian Bu

). He says that the best times are not the prettiest or most funtimes, but rather, those moments that onlyexist in our memories, those moments thatcan be conjured up but never relived orreplicated. From this idea, I came to see that

I had accumulated too many images in mymind that I did not know how to processthem. The ‘smoke gets in your eyes’ momentI mentioned earlier, for example, contains amale totem, which I developed into a scene.Another scene has to do with Jiang Weishuiand his cohorts on a mission to assassinateYuan Shikai. They carried a poison vial andwent to Tokyo to look for a map of Beijing.They couldn’t find it in Japan, and went to

Manchukuo instead. When they finally gotto Beijing, they realized that having a mapwas useless – Yuan Shikai’s residence washeavily guarded. How were you supposedto poison him? That was a great story to me.Other examples include Ye Rongzhong and

Lin Xiantang, and the beginnings of theCommunist Party in Taiwan and the ThirdInternational. Many historical figures hadthose fantasized or idealistic moments in lifethat I find immensely interesting. It is veryexhausting to make a long film, so I startedmaking short films for a change. I’m almost60 years old now. It’s hard to say what’llhappen in the next ten years. Being a direc-tor is a very taxing job. If you are really oldand still making movies, you must be anidiot, because at that age, your mind is prob-

ably all muddy, and when your moviecomes out, people will just laugh at you,saying that Hou Hsiao-Hsien is nothing buta sample, and there is nothing to it. So I’mpretty sure that my future lies in myinvolvement in the public sphere, which will be more rewarding.

I’ve talked about myself endlessly,sorry about that.

Q and A

Q.

Mr. Hou, Sorry, I’ve waited for a longtime. I just saw Café Lumière

(2004) onWednesday and I thought it was great. I’ve been waiting for three days to ask you thisquestion. This movie feels more Japanesethan Japanese movies. Could you tell ushow you made this movie? Where did youget your inspiration for a Japanese story?I understand that language is very impor-tant to you. If you don’t speak Japanese,what was it like to direct this movie? I’m

sorry if I’m asking too many questions.

A.

Okay I’ll tell the story from the begin-ning. It might take a while to explain thewhole production process of Café Lumière

.I’m not too familiar with Japan. I never livedthere. The only few times I went, I did so forthe movies, sometimes for publicity. I haveno concrete memories of those trips, but inthe past ten years since I started going to




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Japan, I have of course made some friends,and the main outline of the story came out of conversations with friends and what I knewof their backgrounds. It usually works likethis. I’d start with a concept, and develop astructure, and then I’d start exploring some

concrete instances. Some ‘concrete instances’include places in Tokyo that I like, such asthe coffee shops that I visited with Zhong A-Cheng ten years ago. There was another,smaller coffee shop that I liked very much. Ilike old coffee shops. I have a friend calledKosaka who married a Taiwanese. Part of the storyline was copied from her life. Shewas a ‘cafe girl.’ What I mean is that she didall her work at the coffee shop, includinghaving meetings with people, writing, andorganizing her work. The funniest was the

day when she took an entire suitcase to thecoffee shop when she met with us. She putsome of her stuff into her suitcase and tooksome more out while she was explainingherself to us. Before we came, she was wait-ing for her parents at the coffee shop to pickup her kid. The coffee shop was her office.This part of the story came from her. Once Ihave a story, I have to work on casting. Iheld auditions with several actors and theyrecommended many. I had to make a judg-

ment. I finally decided on (Tadanobu)Asano. I’d seen many of his films and he’dplayed many roles – generic ones, hystericalones, murderers. He was like a clean slate tome, shy and bashful, like he was new to thescene. I was intrigued. I thought that he’d becapable of any roles. Then I had to decidewhere to place him. I finally put him in asecondhand bookstore in Jinbocho andmade him a second-generation owner of a bookstore. In that area there were manysecond- or third-generation small shop

owners. The hardest casting was finding thegirl. The Kosaka-like character that I had inmind is a freelance writer who knows someChinese. I couldn’t find an actress to playher. At first I was interested in a girl whosename escapes me now. A director friend of mine has worked with her; she is a goodactress, full of energy, pretty and sexy.I thought that if she got the part, the charac-ter would have to be modified. And Asano

would be sadder, by which I mean theirrelationship would be more complicated.They would be physically and emotionallyentangled and their relationship moremundane. Later we found Yo Hitoto and shefelt right. After we decided to cast Yo Hitoto

in the role of Yoko, the parents were cast aswell. I then started adjusting the scriptaccording to the actors we found. And then Idid more research on the layout of Tokyo,trying to figure out which part of Tokyo,and on which railway line, people like mycharacters usually lived. I found that self-employed people often lived along the ChuoMain Line and Chuo-Sobu Line. But I likedthe districts on Arakawa Line better, and Istarted looking for a house there, and finallyfound one in Zoshigaya, nearby Kishibojin.

The house was pretty strange. You can’t takea shower there because there is no bath-room, and you can’t even wash your clothes.There is a public bathhouse and a laundro-mat nearby. You don’t have to include thesurroundings in the film, but you haveto understand what kind of living spacethe house is in. And like that, a characterwas born.

Coincidentally, I have a friend wholived near the station. His name is Motegi.

He was the chairman of the Takasaki FilmFestival. I went to see his house and felt itwas right for the movie, and he was happyto let us use it. It was set then. We wereshooting in August. What was going on inAugust in Japan? I asked around. The Japa-nese visit their ancestors’ graves and payrespects to their spirits at the August O-bonfestival, like we do in April, so I found areason for the Yo Hitoto character to returnhome in August. Once I figured out wherethe main female character lives and what

she does, I changed the script accordingly.I made some additional modifications,again based on my observations of theactors. I had observed Asano while he wasacting in someone else’s movie. During breaks, he played the guitar. It was an elec-tric guitar, kind of like the soundless typemy son used for practice. He also had acomputer with him and he showed me howhe drew on the computer during breaks. He



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Hou Hsiao-Hsien

later gave me a portfolio he published withcomputer graphics. The picture he drewwas a city inside the stomach of a giantspider. He showed me how he couldenlarge it and shrink it on the computer forme and I said we could use this in the film.

So I added a scene to the movie where heexpresses his affections to Yo Hitoto. Asanodrew a picture of the railway for the movie,which is a fetus in a series of trains. I imag-ined the story to be centered on the dynamic between the couple. After Yo Hitoto’s char-acter’s child is born, and when the childreaches five or six years old, or actually anyage, Asano the bookstore owner will beconstantly interrupted by childcare duties.The female protagonist will call him when-ever she gets busy so that she can give her

full attention to her own work. And she willcall Asano back when she is done. This is basically what their relationship has cometo. I have seen and had a deep impression of Japanese people who work like this, andthat’s where I got my inspiration. Once wehave a mental map of Tokyo and the wholescript, we started shooting, and it was donewithin two months.

Actually, if it weren’t for the fact that JR(Japan Railway) didn’t give us permission to

use their facilities, we would have finishedthe film even earlier. JR never lends theirfacilities to anyone. If a film wants to shootat their site, they have to establish a specialad hoc committee for you, and change thetrain schedules for safety concerns, and thewhole process gets very complicated andtiring. And you have to work with differentdepartments of JR, and each department hasto find a contact person to be in charge of the project, so they had to say no. But wesaid, with or without your permission, we

were going to proceed, and they knew aboutit, so we secretly shot the scenes and askedall our workers to keep a low profile and doit casually. That way everybody got to saveface. We said ‘shoot it secretly’ but all of ourstaff laughed about it because we werepretty obvious. Everyday we had more thanten people standing at the station, all wear-ing shorts, black T-shirts, and carrying ahuge backpack. It didn’t take more than one

look to see that our group was differentfrom normal passengers. We took thecameras and other equipment apart and hidthem in the backpacks, and once we got intothe train we’d re-assemble them and startshooting. The hardest scene to shoot was

one where the female protagonist is on onetrain and Asano on the other that wasmoving parallel to the first one. I wantedthe camera to catch that, like they weredancing Mambo, and we spent 18 days onthat scene alone.

Acknowledgment

This was the opening speech to ‘The Asia’sHou Hsiao-Hsien: Cinema, History andCulture Conference’ held in Singapore,

April 29–30, 2005.

Notes

1. Hou is referring to changes following Liang andSong’s visit to Mainland China.

2. The Democracy School was founded in 2004,after the presidential election, with Hou Hsiao-Hsien serving as the School Principal.

Special terms

A Summer at Grandpa’s A Time to Live, A Time to Diecornersdang gi

Dust in the Windeducation programs for native Taiwanese

gajong

ka wu tao binlookoutsQing Chun Pan Tao Shi Jian Bu

Ten Developmental ProjectsThe Boys From Fengkuei

Author’s biography

Hou Hsiao-Hsien is an award-winning filmdirector and a leading figure of Taiwan’s New Wavecinema movement. Hou’s films have been awardedprizes from prestigious international festivals, suchas the Venice Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival,Hawaii International Film Festival and the Nantes




183

Three Continents Festival. Six of his films to datehave been nominated for the Palme d’Or

(best filmaward) at the Cannes Film Festival.

Translator’s biography

Petrus Liu is Assistant Professor of Comparative

Literature at Cornell University. He is currentlycompleting a book on Chinese martial arts fiction

and the labor theory of value. He is also currentlyco-editing (with Lisa Rofel) a special issue of

Positions: East Asia Culture Critique

on ‘Beyond theStrai(gh)ts: Transnationalism and Queer ChinesePolitics’

Contact address:

Department of Comparative Liter-

ature, 247 Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University,Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.

2 cinema and history - critical reflections

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