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What's happening? Story, scene and sound in Hou Hsiao-Hsien

Adrian MARTIN

Online Publication Date: 01 June 2008

To cite this Article MARTIN, Adrian(2008)'What's happening? Story, scene and sound in Hou Hsiao-Hsien',Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies,9:2,258 — 270
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14649370801965620
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649370801965620

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

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

Adrian MARTIN

In the films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, we are constantly confronted, during our first view-
Taylor and Francis

ABSTRACT
ing, 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 mean-
ing. 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’ refer-
ences 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
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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.

KEYWORDS: story, backstory, narrative, scene, sound, sound design, politics, repression,
mise en scène

Introduction moment of being right inside them, inhabit-

This essay is about confusion – but a very
productive confusion, the kind created in a
viewer as they try to take in, first time
around, a film by Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
I have often been drawn to the intuition
that something we need to keep a hold of, in
film theory, criticism and analysis, is this
experience of the first time: our first encoun-
ter with a film, with its unfolding. This is
true for every film, but it is more true for
certain films that base themselves upon a
very careful, unwinding thread of mystery
and ambiguity. What we make of such films,
and how we value them, is going to have a
lot to do with the sticky, transformative
ing them like a terrain that we must map out
and explore. And I think this is especially
true of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films.
In Hou’s films, more than many others,
we are constantly confronted, during that
first time viewing, with the question:
‘What’s happening?’ What is happening in
the storyline as a whole; and what is
happening in any given, individual scene?
Of course, with Hou, this quality of perplex-
ity, of questioning – sometimes frustration
or exasperation for some spectators – can
extend past the first viewing into subse-
quent viewings. And there may well be
mysteries that we will never be able to solve.

ISSN 1464–9373 Print/ISSN 1469–8447 Online/08/020258–13 © 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14649370801965620

What’s going on in Café Lumiere (2004),
for example, within the head of the father
who never speaks to his daughter about her
pregnancy? One frequently hears defensive
or apologetic remarks from non-Asian spec-
tators: ‘Maybe I missed some important
narrative information because the subtitles
were not very good’, or ‘My attention was
wandering so I couldn’t properly distin-
guish one character from another’. Such
casual remarks can be derided or critiqued;
but I prefer to take them as clues to some-
thing actually going on within the films.
Why is it important to remember the
first time – not just remember it, but ensure
that our analyses and discussions of Hou’s
films preserve the ongoing doubts and
mysteries of this initial encounter? Much
writing about Hou’s work begins (as it
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were) at a time and place far removed from
this scene of viewing. Analyses pick up
from the moment of clarification, research,
reading – having already filled in many
holes, cleared up the mysterious zones, and
clarified the empty spaces in the work. This
leads to an unfortunate and sometimes quite
mistaken tendency: Hou’s films are some-
times described as if everything in them,
every relationship, every event, every
connection between details, is perfectly
clear, perfectly graspable – as long as you
are in the correct position of a knowing
viewer. But this is not, in my opinion, the
truth of the matter.
And what happens in this situation is
that some viewers, unsure of their own
more confused reaction, take refuge in writ-
ings like the highly misleading synopses on
the back of video and DVD editions of
Hou’s films. Take, for example, the plot
synopsis provided by the American DVD
edition of Good Men, Good Women (1995).
This document informs or primes the
prospective viewer to expect a film in which
‘[central character] Liang Ching finds
herself imagining the film she will be star-
ring in, but her visualisation of scenes from
the script seem inflected more and more by
her personal memories which are awakened
by the mysterious receipt of faxed pages
from her old diary’. This fairly typical
Story, scene and sound in Hou Hsiao-Hsien 259
promotional blurb shows you the trap of
automatically reading or understanding
Hou’s films as stories, first and foremost, of
individuals: individuals who remember,
project, connect everything up through their
subjective points-of-view.
The actual film, and more generally
Hou’s entire storytelling theory and practice,
are far more ambiguous and complex than
this. The subtle sliding between modes and
states, the lack of clarity as to the status of
anything we are seeing – is it a dream, reality,
flashback, flashforward, the auteur’s direct
interpellation, or something entirely outside
these standard options? – such ambiguity is
in fact absolutely constitutive of modern
cinema, at least since the early 1960s.
It is often remarked that, in order fully
to understand and appreciate Hou’s films,
the viewer must have a good knowledge of
Taiwanese history – that he or she must
come equipped, having done the necessary
homework. If not (it is said, sometimes
rather chillingly), you will be lost, left
behind. I think that this type of introduction
to Hou’s cinema, this kind of position on it,
has generated two attitudes, two
approaches that are implicitly posed as
mutually exclusive. Together, these two
approaches form a powerful (indeed,
formidable) insider/outsider dialectic
which in the long run can only be destruc-
tive of our true appreciation of the films.
The first attitude is that a only certain
kind of historical expert with insider infor-
mation can fill the gaps in an outsider-
viewer’s knowledge, by providing that
supplement of the history-book which will
explain, illuminate and enrich the cryptic
things happening on the screen – as if Hou’s
films offer a kind of legend that demands
and requires specialist decoding to those
excluded from the circle of its assumed,
local audience. This is an approach which
claims for Hou’s work a particular kind of
social-historical specificity – and places that
specificity as the absolute, primary, central
fact about it, in terms of its making, its audi-
ence reception, and its analysis.
The second attitude abstracts the films
from their specific times and places, and
 260 Adrian Martin
extols them as cosmic or metaphysical,
aggressively claiming them for a universally
immanent encounter with things like life,
death, love, speed, bodily experience,
melancholy, youthful yearning. In this criti-
cal move – in some sense, the revenge of the
previously excluded outsider – that previ-
ous aspect of historical and cultural specific-
ity is cast off as a straitjacket, and Hou’s
films are thereby liberated. They are liber-
ated into the kind of sensual, drifting
universe they share with the films of
contemporaries like Wong Kar-wai, Olivier
Assayas, Claire Denis, Atom Egoyan and
others, within a cosmopolitan Film Festival
and arthouse culture (with the significant
limit that Hou speaks little English and has
not entered the English-language co-
production circuit that those other filmmak-
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ers have eagerly done). One American
commentator, for instance, writes that Hou
creates films in which
history is really understood as some-
thing visited on a collection of individu-
als, and where the mystery of why
we’re here dissolves into the mystery of
flight, where the viewer might feel like
he or she’s really getting a purchase on
the transitory nature of things. (Jones
2000: 36)
I feel that both these approaches, the
historically precise and the jazzily free, do
indeed speak to and capture qualities that
are very present, very alive, in Hou’s work (it
is true, for instance, that Hou’s recent films,
especially Millennium Mambo [2001] and Café
Lumiere, work more abstractly than his previ-
ous films). These attitudes also encapsulate
two analytical approaches that are, in my
opinion, always possible and equally valid,
no matter what film we are talking about: a
film can be tracked back, painstakingly, to the
socio-historical coordinates that produced it;
and it can be spirited away, imaginatively,
into any viewing context that is able to make
use of it, find some reflection (no matter how
distorted) of its own concerns within it. The
trick is not to knock out one approach to the
exclusion of the other – for how can any
intercultural communication or exchange
take place without both attitudes being in
play, reversibly, from both sides?
So I will attempt to start over from that
traditional warning – that you have to know
a lot before you can watch a Hou Hsiao-
Hsien film – and see if I can find some way
into the deep coherence of this director’s
work. For the assertion that his films assume
background knowledge generates certain
aesthetic consequences and implications
that have not yet been brought out in the
critical discussion of his films. For we are
not dealing with narratives that make
occasional, passing allusions to past events
of history – an allusion carried in a line of
dialogue, a choice of an old song, or a paint-
ing on a wall. There are many fine films
based on a practice of allusion, and these
allusions can be few and simple, or many
and complex (as in the allegorical mode of
Hou’s The Puppetmaster [1993] or Oshima’s
The Ceremony [1971]). But Hou’s films gener-
ally go far beyond this. His films ask, and
find answers for, one of the principal ques-
tions of all cinema that has a political
impulse or consciousness: how can a film,
this tiny fragment of the cosmos of manufac-
tured culture with a measly two or three
hours at its disposal, incorporate history,
incorporate reality – document it and then
also reflect on it, analyse it?
This returns us to the crucial questions
Paul Willemen posed in his essay ‘An
Avant-Garde for the 90s’, where he gathered
a loose family of films driven by ‘an insis-
tence on problems of reference’ for the sake
of ‘the elaboration of an artistic practice
capable of representing the complexity of
historical processes’; a kind of ‘contempo-
rary avant-garde [which] seeks to mobilise
and transform the cultural knowledges and
experience of the audiences it addresses’
(Willemen 1994: 148, 154). As I hope to
show, such problems of reference constitute an
exciting, radical adventure for both insider
and outsider audiences of Hou’s films.
Story
Almost any viewer of Hou’s movies will, at
one time or another, testify to the difficulty

in following or getting up to speed with his
stories as they unfold. We are often in the
position of thinking we have perhaps
missed out on some vital plot information –
when that information has, in fact, been
deliberately withheld, often for remarkably
extended periods of running time. In Café
Lumiere, for example, it takes 27 minutes for
Yoko to announce that she is pregnant – and
later, at the 88 minute mark, she will add
that she has been pregnant for three months
already, probably long before the story
began on screen; and it takes about
45 minutes before she or the film clarifies
that the person we assumed was Yoko’s
mother is in fact her stepmother.
The film-time in Hou is made still more
complex by the enormous holes punched in
the story-time (via ellipses), and by the
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difficulty (sometimes impossibility) of
reconstructing how much time in days,
weeks, months or years the entire narrative
covers. On this level, it is instructive to
compare Hou’s chronicles with Philippe
Garrel’s autobiographical narratives, such
as J’entends plus la guitare (1991). Hou has
said that he likes to introduce the story to
the spectator through a multiplicity of
details – but there is also the aspect of a teas-
ing game with the spectator in this tension
of slow revelation, this sure control over
what is leaked and what is withheld, in
what way and for how long.
A particular way to study this aspect of
Hou’s construction is by referring to the
popular screenwriting notion of backstory. A
backstory is the part of a story that has taken
place before the film begins. Most films have
backstories of one kind or another, but it is
important to emphasise the radical nature of
Hou’s approach to backstory. First, the
backstory is often huge, vast and complex.
Any one character never has simply their
own, limited, individual backstory; their
backstory includes the web of their connec-
tions to other characters throughout the
span of their lives, and the family tree of
filiations, obligations, debts and so on, that
extends beyond their immediate biological
being, back through previous generations.
And then, of course, the circles of backstory
Story, scene and sound in Hou Hsiao-Hsien 261
multiply, beyond the family tree, to take in
determinations of settlement and migration,
changing economic fortune and status, class
mobility, the time-line of wars, invasions,
government change-overs, and so on.
The biggest challenge or problem for
any traditional screenwriter, in relation to
the backstory, is what is known as exposition.
The exposition at the start of a movie is, in a
sense, the catching-up with the backstory,
summarising and bringing it into view, into
our comprehension as viewers. This catch-
ing-up – in a hurry and all at once – is
exactly what Hou refuses to do, and what he
refuses as a comfort or crutch for viewers. In
a conventional film, it is an error, a sin, to be
still giving out crucial, preliminary informa-
tion about the characters and their world 30,
60 or 90 minutes in. But this is what Hou
does all the time, almost systematically, on
principle.
One special aspect of backstory in Hou
deserves a book all to itself. It is simply this:
the backstory in a Hou film is real; it
comprises the events of real history. You
may well respond: isn’t that true of most
stories that include such backstory lines as
‘my father fought in the war, my family
lived through the Depression’, etc? In fact,
most films go to enormous lengths to rid
themselves of such troublesome (because
real) backstory elements. The great screen-
writer and teacher Jean-Claude Carrière
once said: ‘Cinema is a man who arrives on
horse in a Western town, and we know
nothing about him. He will go on to define
himself bit by bit, in his gestures, his looks’
(Carrière and Bonitzer 1990: 40; my transla-
tion). This cinematic ideal of the cowboy is
thus a man with no past, no ties, no identity
except what you see and what you get; he
effectively begins to exist, like the film itself,
at the first moment that he appears.
Carrière’s ideal screen cowboy-character
will never appear in a Hou Hsiao-Hsien
film.
Most films – those that are unlike Hou’s
– allow themselves to access only very
select, manageable, highly individualised
bits of backstory (John Wayne’s charged
glance in The Searchers [1955] at a woman he
 262 Adrian Martin
once knew and perhaps loved … ). Or they
invent wholly fictive backstory universes
(like the phantom African country whose
destiny is decided by Nicole Kidman in The
Interpreter [2005]). In this repsect, Hou is a
long way from filmmakers such as Aki
Kaurismaki, Quentin Tarantino and Miike
Takashi – but, surprisingly and paradoxi-
cally, rather close to Samuel Fuller, another
director for whom real, historical backstory
always mattered, and always weighed
heavily on the present-tense existence of
even his most generic or cartoonish charac-
ters. This points us, on a more general theo-
retical plane, towards the dual nature of
cinematic backstory, the two major levels on
which it figures: it is a compositional process
(how to order, tell, narrate stories), and a
socio-cultural one, involving the way in
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which any film addresses (includes,
assumes, challenges) a particular spectator
or audience. Backstory, in short, constitutes
one of (narrative) cinema’s primal problems
of reference.
Hou takes his time giving out the back-
story; sometimes, he holds back some pieces
of it right to the end, creating mysteries we
cannot empirically solve by referring (even
on multiple viewings) to the film itself. Let
us put the question of backstory another
way. What process of narration or of story-
telling begins once a film by Hou Hsiao-
Hsien begins? What precisely is the film
narrating at any given moment – what’s
happening? These are questions we are
compelled to ask, finally, about very few
films. But we must ask them about Hou’s
films.
It has been rightly said that every scene
in a Hou film is in medias res, coming in at
the middle of things, the middle of an event,
a situation, an interaction. I think of the
scene in Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996), for
instance, where Gao (Jack Kao) comes in on
his younger brother Flatty shooting hoops,
Gao’s lover Ying is sitting silent and sullen,
and a barely visible Pretzel (Flatty’s girl-
friend) is seemingly passed out and
bandaged up on the bed. Gao’s seething,
exasperated question that he speaks aloud is
(according to the English subtitle): ‘What’s
going on here?’ – and it’s our question, too,
as viewers.
Cinema has other great masters of the in
medias res approach, and I will cite, in pass-
ing, two by way of comparison. Their hot
styles are seemingly so different from the
cool Hou: John Cassavetes and Maurice
Pialat. What must be emphasised, in this
light, is a special, radical aspect of the
mystery generated by this perpetual
coming-in-at-the-middle-of-things in all
three of these filmmakers. In the traditional
catching-up work of backstory exposition,
there is far more at stake than simple plot
clarity or orientation for the viewer. Exposi-
tion is also a deeply social and ideological
process. Conventional exposition is, funda-
mentally, a way of sorting out as quickly as
possible, and unambiguously labelling
everything and everyone we see – and this
labelling always goes on in terms of given,
standard, assumed social roles.
Think, as an example, of all those
dinner or breakfast table scenes at the start
of mainstream American movies, where the
first words you hear from someone’s mouth
are invariably something like: ‘Don’t talk to
your little sister like that – listen to your
mother – your father has an appointment
and will drop you off at school’, etc. These
words, in their most profound motivation,
exist to stamp out or police any bothersome
ambiguities about who’s who, who’s related
to who, and who is doing what with who in
the typical family setting.1
This is exactly the kind of certainty, the
system of assumption – socially prescribed
and inculcated assumption – that
Cassavetes denies us when he alternates
between brother and sister (without telling
us so) in Love Streams (1984), or that Pialat
denies us when he starts a film like Get Your
Diploma First (1978) with a travelling shot of
a boy and girl whom we can’t definitively
say (yet) are lovers, siblings, friends, or
simply strangers sharing the same space.
And it is what Hou, more gently and slyly,
denies us with (for instance) that business
about the assumed-mother-who-in-fact-
turns-out-to-be-stepmother in Café Lumiere.
Once a filmmaker withdraws this easy,

automatic recognition of social types and
social roles, many things become possible,
in the film as well as in our heads: all sorts
of social and interpersonal relations can be
experimented with.
Hou films his dinner-table or restaurant
scenes with a kind of maximum suppression
of expository, explanatory information, and
by the same token a maximum openness to
all the instant possibilities of interrelation, of
reshuffling of intersubjective identities –
what Jonathan Rosenbaum refers to as ‘the
glory and terror of becoming’ in Hou’s work
(Rosenbaum 2004: 350). There is just such a
restaurant scene, of quickly mounting
drunken revelry, in Goodbye South, Goodbye,
where everyone is introducing themselves
to each other, and the communal vibe, the
groupuscle as Félix Guattari would have
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called it, is cemented immediately. But we
can go back to the start of any Hou film to
judge, in a less raucous register, how this
particular storytelling process works. Take
the opening scene of this same film, Goodbye
South, Goodbye. An adult man in the fore-
ground, speaking into a mobile phone on a
mobile train. Behind him, a young woman
and a young man, playing and flirting with
each other. Who are these people to each
other? What is their relation? Strangers,
people who coincidentally happen to be
occupying the same bit of public space?
This ambiguity continues well into the
following scene on the train platform. The
man is in conversation, but who is this same
girl, again, who is now walking into the
foreground, now into the background,
indistinctly killing time or frolicking about
like a child? Does she just happen to be
there again, or is she connected to the man?
It takes quite some minutes for us to allocate
names to faces, and some time again after
that to allocate roles to these identities: the
older man is Gao, and she is Pretzel, girl-
friend of Gao’s brother, Flatty. They are, we
could say, some kind of family. But the
question of any Hou film is precisely: what
kind of family?
Hou cannot, by any stretch of the
critical imagination, be classified as an anti-
narrative filmmaker, someone who rejects
Story, scene and sound in Hou Hsiao-Hsien 263
narrative, subverts or transgresses it. He
often describes his films in terms of story
and character – and there is always, indeed,
some kind of plot, no matter how buried,
skeletal, minimal or elliptically depicted.
There is the slender story of a love affair, or
family relations through the years, or a
criminal deal gone wrong. But, rather than
going straight to the content, the more
useful question to ask at the outset is: what
kind of stories does Hou tell? Among the
more perceptive American commentaries on
his films, we read summations like these: his
films are ‘a patient observation of people
caught in a trap’; or, ‘again and again in
Hou’s movies, you get moments where
people are quietly overcome with the
question of how they have arrived at their
particular fate, how they’ve come to be in
this particular place at this particular time
under this particular set of circumstances’
(Lopate 2000: 27; Jones 2000: 36). These are
sensitive comments, but they again recycle
that questionable habit of channelling
everything that happens in a Hou film,
everything we see and experience, through
the prism of its thinking-feeling character-
individuals.
This can be put another way. Hou is one
of those key filmmakers in cinema history,
like Robert Bresson or Carl Dreyer, who
meditates long and hard on – and directs his
most intense creative energies to – the ques-
tion of how a story can embody a telling
moment of change, of transformation; and
how the entire apparatus of a film can exist
purely to create the conditions for, and
explore the conditions of, that moment of
change. You can say this is a change in a
character, but it can equally be a change in
the world, in history, even in the weather, in
a general mood or state or zeitgeist that is
transpersonal, in a zone between and beyond
people, rather than individually personal.
Bresson said of the ending of his film
L’Argent (1983): ‘I tried to capture the force
in the air just before a storm’ (Ciment 1998:
501) – and that could be the motto for a film
by Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
Indeed, I think a great deal of the
aesthetic – and lyrical – force of Hou’s films
 264 Adrian Martin
comes from narrative and stylistic strate-
gies that lead us into this kind of transper-
sonal or impersonal space/sense/mood.
The greatest, recurring example of this is
the travel shot, literally (in cinematographic
terms) a travelling shot, filmed from cars,
motorbikes or particularly trains, where the
motion, the duration, the constant change
in the landscape and the view, encourages
us to drift far from the subjective
consciousness of the character who initially
stepped onto that particular humble vehi-
cle. In these travelling shots – as, more
generally, in Hou’s distant framings –
fictional, personal experience truly trans-
mutes itself into something larger, into (in
the first place) cinema, rather than drama
following primarily a literary or theatrical
model.2 And this larger cinematic mode
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inhabits the conceptual space of the mental
image (Deleuze’s term) or what I would call
a pictured complex, an idea to which I will
return in my final section.
In film history, the canonical emblem
of transformative narrative is Bresson’s
character of the pickpocket (in the 1959
classic Pickpocket), coming to his ultimate
moment of turnaround, of redemption if
you like – and, beyond him, the mystery of
how he got there, via the secretive criminal
and erotic ritual of all that pickpocketing,
rather than by something arbitrary and
magical like Providence or God’s Grace
shining down on him. There is a spiritual
dimension in Hou’s work, but it never (as
far as I can see) flirts with notions like
Providence or Grace. His cinema, at one of
its deepest levels, is about the difficulty of
ever arriving at such a magical, Bressonian
moment of change or transformation – and
the difficulty of ever being able to convinc-
ingly tell or shape such a story today.
Beyond the specific social and relationship
problems of its young characters, Millen-
nium Mambo is about the problem of a
story, and a story-world, in the grip of a
repetition-compulsion, stuck in a rut, spin-
ning in a grove, unable to advance or trans-
form itself. Goodbye South, Goodbye, with its
droll final image of the car running off the
road, presents a similar case. How will the
future be born from the present? – that is a big
question in the cinema of Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
In the interview that appears on the
DVD of Millennium Mambo, Hou talks in
very evocative terms about how the narra-
tive of a film should take up from where the
backstory ends – and he expresses his opin-
ion that, so often, the narrative that unfolds
on screen seems like a disappointing betrayal
of the backstory. What does this intriguing
statement mean? Hou, no doubt, shares a
certain widespread disenchantment about
the majority of conventional narrative films:
that they are like a well-oiled machine, a
conquistador as Jonathan Rosenbaum once
called it, in other words a simplifying and
resolving economy, driving through to the
end, drawing in every plot element, discard-
ing what is deemed inessential or incidental,
and exhausting the mechanism by the end,
using it all up. No doubt, for many of us at
many moments (perhaps even for Hou
himself as a viewer), that is the definition of
a good narrative, a good story. But it can
also, in another light or another mood, be
viewed as a loss, a disappointment, a
betrayal of the rich possibilities that exist
arrayed at the start of a film – or, in Hou’s
case, before the start.
This is why in Hou’s cinema, by
contrast – like in Michelangelo Antonioni’s
or Bresson’s – we often receive the poetic
impression of simply brushing up against,
getting a glimpse of, other characters, other
stories, other connecting, complicating lines
that will not be pursued, but that still vibrate
in our imaginaries as we view the film, and
then afterwards. Doubtless the central, love-
liest images of this in Hou’s career to date
are in Café Lumiere: the shot of the woman
and man passing each other on different
trains, not seeing each other; or the digital
artwork that the guy demonstrates on his
laptop, diverse trains forming a ‘womb of
life’. As a footnote to Professor Hasumi’s
magisterial reflection on this subject
(Hasumi 2008), I would add that trains often
express a certain vision in Hou: always
another passenger, another direction,
another possible story, approaching us and
then receding into the distance …

Scene
How do we get from scene to scene in a Hou
film? Narratological theory, and standard
filmmaking craft, knock themselves out
trying to figure out the best, most economic,
most driving ways to get out of one scene
and into the next: plot motivation, transi-
tion, overlap, rhetorical question-and-
answer devices on the level of the intrigue,
the whole shooting match. Hou takes a very
particular, unconventional approach to the
plotting of such connective tissue linking
scenes. He does not ignore it entirely – quite
the contrary. Sometimes there is a prop link-
ing two consecutive scenes (like the disco
glitter ball in Good Men, Good Women); some-
times a gesture or exchange will return,
perhaps unexpectedly, at a later point (like
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Yoko’s gift of the umbrella in Café Lumiere);
and often there is, in larger-scale terms,
some kind of mission to be carried out (as in
Goodbye South, Goodbye), or some sort of
problem-situation to be sorted, usually
within those communal dynamics that Hou
names local power (jiaotou) and factional
power (shantou shili).3
Hou, however, has a way of picking up
and dropping, or of tightening and relaxing,
these traditional narrative linkages as he
pleases. Montage is a crucial stage in Hou’s
formal shaping of the material: Bérénice
Reynaud recalls Sergei Eisenstein’s theory
and practice of intellectual montage in rela-
tion to Hou, not so much at the level of shots
but of scenes or scene-blocks. In Good Men,
Good Women, his most extreme and innova-
tive film on this score, the scene-montage
works (as Hou described it) to ‘blur the line’
between reality and flashback, so that it
became ‘unimportant to define’ this differ-
ence in scene-status (Reynaud 2002: 10). We
will return in the next section to how Hou’s
sound-design also aids this process.
Let us linger a little on the very category
of the scene. One of the most haunting state-
ments collected in the annals of film-speak
is this remark attributed to John Cassavetes
during the post-production of Love Streams
in 1983: ‘Don’t make it easy to make the
scene work, because then there’s no scene’
Story, scene and sound in Hou Hsiao-Hsien 265
(Cassavetes cited in Carney 2001: 495). It is
not easy to know what Cassavetes really,
exactly meant by this statement, but I
believe that it is rewarding to speculate on
it, and spin it out into a central aesthetic
question of cinema. What is a film scene? The
answer seems so obvious, so standardised
over so many years of international film
production, that we rarely, perhaps never,
ask the question. A scene is a piece, a block,
a unit of the drama. It moves the plot along
roughly one major step. A scene is some-
thing with a beginning, a middle and an
end, and a movement between these stages.
A scene advances not only the story; it also
elaborates the theme a little further; and,
also, it develops the form or style of the piece.
Many great filmmakers and screenwriters
refer to the necessity of making each scene a
microcosm of the entire story.
The scene is also the logistical crux of
the practical filmmaking process – the entire
production is organised around the fact that
on a particular day, the cast and crew will
assemble at a particular place to shoot a
particular scene. And even though modern
cinema (since the 1960s) has chipped away
at and assaulted the scene in various ways –
through aggressive montage (cutting and
mixing up many scenes at once), through
massive expansion (films comprised of only
a very few long-take sequence shots, like
Hou’s Flowers of Shanghai [1998]) or contrac-
tion (films made up of thousands of short
shots, inserts or details, like Resnais’ Muriel
[1963] and Alain Cavalier’s Libera Me [1993])
– still, the scene stands supreme as the most
essential unit of cinema, much more essen-
tial than the shot (which is the great fetish of
film analysts) or the story act (which is the
great fetish of scriptwriting teachers).
Given that a filmmaker, even the most
progressive, usually has to work with
scenes, what does he or she do? Cassavetes’
response was: don’t make it easy to make
the scene work; I believe Hou Hsiao-Hsien
would agree. Cassavetes made his gnomic
statement to his musical collaborator Bo
Harwood, but I think it can also be
addressed to us, as viewers. What would it
mean to doubt or question a scene unfolding
 266 Adrian Martin
before us, to find it refractory, hard to work?
It might mean finding ourselves unsure, as
viewers, as to the status, point or direction
(as in orientation) of a scene. It would mean
questions like: in this scene, at this moment,
where is the element of narrative intrigue
coming from, and where is it going? What is
the foreground, what is the background,
and what are the transitional zones between
foreground and background? Where is the
centre of the scene? What is its shape? These
are not abstract, theoretical questions: direc-
tors ask themselves such things all the time,
over the script, on the set, and in the editing
room (Mackendrick 2004).
A scene imagined, prepared and staged
by Hou Hsiao-Hsien is unlike any other
scene in cinema history. Hou’s scenes can
wash over us, grip us, distress us, or take us
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floating along with them, without any clear
point, direction, centre or shape easily
becoming visible. If you try to map the struc-
ture or shape of a Hou scene, you are in for a
merry time. They can come in from a
complete sideways direction, get lost in
digression, multiply the richness of inciden-
tal detail, turn a background element into a
new foreground element, and then suddenly
find themselves back on track, oriented
towards some clear end-point. A lot of Hou’s
mastery as a director (and it is, I believe,
entirely inimitable) is this high-wire balanc-
ing act between making the scene hard to
work, and then suddenly bringing it to a
point – and then perhaps losing that point all
over again in some other thread of action.
Maybe action is not even the right
word; activity might be better. Hou’s films
are full of activities, lovingly arranged and
filmed: eating (of course) and drinking,
putting on make-up or brushing hair, wash-
ing clothes, singing. In fact, you can disas-
semble and reassemble several of his films
not along the lines of plot, theme or style,
but in terms of the system of some activity.
In more ordinary films, such activities are
referred to as bits of business. They exist
either simply to fill out the realism of the
scene (as in much television drama), or (as
in Otto Preminger’s films) they are more
charged gestures, expressive of character
psychology. Hou’s bits of business can fill
both these functions, but more often they
become events or spectacles in themselves. I
can see why some critics like to evoke
Manny Farber’s ideal of termite art – mark-
ing the chains of fascinating or significant
detail that work in, under and around the
main plot, eating it away – to discuss Hou’s
films (and Farber, although he longer writes
criticism, is a great admirer of Hou).
The framing of a scene is crucial in
Hou’s films. He often picks a single, central
position from which to take in an event –
sometimes a static camera position, some-
times more of a zone within which the
camera will track, pan and reframe. Now we
are in the cinematic domain of mise en
scène, properly speaking – the staging and
capturing of a scene – but Hou’s mise en
scène is a modernist one, fluid and dynamic,
while being nothing like Vincente Minnelli
or Luhcino Visconti, or even (in contempo-
rary cinema) Stanley Kwan.
It is tempting – and, I believe, a trap – to
relate Hou’s method of mise en scène to
André Bazin’s ideal of the cinema as a
partial framing of, a mobile window onto,
the real world – where all the incidence of
life itself is flowing in and out of the frame
at all sides. This indeed approximates what
we see, and feel, as we watch some of the
most elaborate scenes in his films – when
the food bowls are being incessantly
brought in and taken away, when the dogs
are wandering in and out (as in Goodbye
South, Goodbye). But Hou is not a realist
director, and his aesthetic is not a realist
aesthetic. His careful framing of the world
(as he has imagined and recreated it) turns it
into a stage, a theatre – and also a kind of
diagram to chart and analyse social and
historical forces as they compete, clash and
fall in and out of the dominating position.
The block of the real which he fixes and
captures in a mobile frame is an exceedingly
stylised, abstract thing.
Sound
Some of the quality of stylisation and
abstraction – of unrealism – derives from

Hou’s very particular sound-recording
techniques. A City of Sadness (1989) is often
cited as the first Taiwanese production shot
in direct, sync sound – as if, in a single
stroke, this national cinema was opened up
to a greater, more authentic realism of voice,
place, landscape and cityscape, and the
natural elements. To an extent, this is palpa-
bly true of A City of Sadness and subsequent
works. But sync sound is, in itself, not neces-
sarily realist in its intention or its material
effect. Sync sound on a Hollywood studio
set is immaculately clean, merely an element
designed for a hundred-channel mixing
desk; while sync sound in a Dogme produc-
tion is merely an impression of chaos,
distorted sonic overload.
Hou chooses another path when it
comes to sound recording. The zone from
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which a scene is framed, giving an impres-
sion of the scene in all senses of this word, is
also the point from which that scene and its
impression are aurally recorded, rendered on
another level of what Bresson called the
cinematograph, the image-and-sound record-
ing apparatus. Whether staged or chosen,
every space in a Hou film is also a sound-
space (as in Jean Renoir’s early sound films
such as Night at the Crossroads [1934]) – it
allows us to experience, in a sensory form,
the competing or counterpointing waves of
voice, technology, cars, radios, television
sets and video players. And perhaps the one
truly Bazinian feature of this process is that
the sound-space is always a little bigger
than the visual field – but it is no less styl-
ised, no less filtered and pre-planned, no
less diagrammatic for that.
The overall sound design of Hou’s films
is a remarkable and under-studied aspect of
his work. One of the main ways in which
Hou departs from realism is in his mixing of
various sound levels, his transitions from
one sound source to another. This is also a
key way in which Hou interrogates, under-
mines and re-shapes his own scenes. I have
already indicated how a certain blurring,
suspension or doubt comes to attach itself to
Hou’s scenes, on many levels. This is, in fact,
something that closely links Hou’s work on
sound with that of Jean-Luc Godard, partic-
Story, scene and sound in Hou Hsiao-Hsien 267
ularly Godard’s films since the start of the
1980s. Godard chooses, as much as possible,
to use sound tracks (verbal texts, natural
sounds, dialogue, music played back live
through speakers) that are actually recorded
in the site or space of his scenes (on the spot
where he films them). He then combines
and separates these tracks, articulates and
disarticulates them, with great virtuosity.
(The scene of Godard’s lecture on cinema in
Notre musique [2004] is a supreme example
of this aesthetic strategy.)
Hou does not use the particular kind of
split-second, fragmented collage of sound
familiar from Godard. But the way he mixes
tracks carries the same force of disarticula-
tion in a more subtly disorienting fashion.
Even at the primary level of what I call a
sound-event – the actions related to the phys-
ical production of sound that are contained
in the shoot, in the mise en scène, long
before the post-production mix (Martin
2000) – Hou is very fond of disarticulation:
think of how often, in Good Men, Good
Women or Café Lumiere, the figure of the
other, the interlocuter who is listening on the
other end of a mobile phone, or sending
through faxes, remains a mystery, a struc-
turing absence, unheard and unseen.
Intriguingly, Hou’s investigation of the
formal dimension of sound really took off
when he began to use, in earnest, very
modern pop-rock music in Goodbye South,
Goodbye, which then evolves into the
extremely sophisticated use of techno music
in Millennium Mambo.4 In Goodbye South,
Goodbye, as in many of Hou’s films, virtually
all the music has its origin or source some-
where within the story-world; it is diegetic
music that is somewhere performed or
played or sung or listened to. There is little or
no conventional soundtrack (extra-diegetic)
music composed as a score to be overlaid on
the drama in Hou’s film: mainly only over
the end credits, where he likes to conclude
with a rousing song or orchestration. In
contemporary cinema, hefty use of diegetic
music is in itself no big deal; many contem-
porary, mainstream films from American
Graffiti (1973) onwards routinely employ this
device. But in a Hou film, a Hou scene, the
 268 Adrian Martin
questions we find ourselves asking, as we
are lost in the middle of the what’s-happen-
ing, are: where did the music start, exactly –
where in time or in space – where is it
coming from, and where will it end up? In
fact, you can chart some Hou films using the
title of an old Howard Hawks film: A Song Is
Born (1948). Somewhere, a character starts to
sing, perhaps when they are alone in their
apartment, or at a microphone at a karaoke.
This song will continue, on the soundtrack,
migrating across scenes. Perhaps the song
will be interrupted by another song, or taken
up by someone else.
An example: early in Good Men, Good
Women, Liang Ching moves behind a glass
screen. We start to hear her singing, and the
sound is a typically reverberant, ambient
room tone. But we do not see her singing in
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this shot, so we cannot absolutely say that,
in the real time of the scene, she is singing
behind that screen. Hou often creates ambi-
guity in this way, through a temporary
obscuring of vision. Then the sound of the
singing overlaps the cut into the next shot,
as the camera wanders down from a ceiling
fixture. This is an extremely ambiguous cut
in visual terms: it may mark just another
shot that is part of the scene we are already
watching (maybe the space behind the
glass), or it might be an altogether new
scene. And that is just what it turns out to
be, except that this new (next) scene is in the
past, not the present. In terms of the sound –
the sound of the singing that is being carried
over this strange transition – we might think
in this disorienting moment that, surely
now, we will find the source of this singing,
we will see Liang Ching (or someone else)
mouthing, emitting the sound. But this is
precisely what we do not see. What we get
in Hou’s work is an unfamiliar spectacle,
characteristic of his aesthetic: the birth,
wandering and loss of a sound.
Millennium Mambo offers an even more
radical construction in this regard. We can
say, schematically, that there are three central
sound levels or tracks in this film: the techno
music, which belongs to or is associated with
the clubs, and especially the DJ character of
Hao-hao; the often chaotic jumble of voices
in ambient space; and the more socially insu-
lated, intimate, distant voice of Vicky’s
voiceover narration, which comes from ten
years in advance of what we see in the
images. We must praise here the brilliance of
the sound-designers, Tu Dou-Chi (who has
also done outstanding work with Tsai Ming-
liang) and Kuo Li-Chi. What happens, in
virtually every scene-block of Millennium
Mambo, is that what we take to be diegetic
techno music begins very slowly to fade up
from an extremely quiet volume level. But the
music never hits the right volume level, or
attains the correct ambient edge, to ever really
reassure us that it is, in fact, part of the scene.
And whenever the voiceover punches in, this
techno music immediately dips.
As a matter of fact, if you shut your eyes
– keep your eyes wide shut – and just listen
to this film, you will experience it like waves
in an ocean: all three levels of sound are
constantly rising and falling in relation to
each other, submerging and then being
submerged by each other. And, as in Good
Men, Good Women and Goodbye South, Good-
bye, where the music starts and ends –
before the start of scenes or after they are
over – further reinforces these sensations of
mysterious rising and falling, waves of
intensity and of association. In a haunting
passage of Goodbye South, Goodbye, Hou
even takes the corniest aspect of any pop
song – the fade-out at the end, as the song
(as it were) bids farewell to us and disap-
pears into the distance – and, by suddenly
placing that fade-out over the long shot of a
landscape, and positioning in the mix the
departing or dying of the song against the
slow fade-up of natural landscape sound –
he really makes us hear and experience this
sensory event of an industrially recorded
musical sound that is decaying, met by a
sound of a world that is blooming. How
many filmmakers can make you aware of,
and curious about, such an odd material
phenomenon? – which is, after all, the sound
phenomenon of modern life, the transition
between our Walkman or our iPod and the
environment (natural or social) to which we
must suddenly re-acclimatise our ears and
ourselves.

Returning to the element of sound-
recording during shooting, we can perhaps
hear better now how Hou’s films orchestrate
extremely stylised shifts in sound focus
within extremely elaborate scenes staged
across different zones in a large space. Like
Robert Altman or Orson Welles, Hou has a
highly radiophonic sense of how to stage
sound-events – their succession, movement
and overlap – for the various microphones,
recorders and tracks. Any of Hou’s cele-
brated, crowded-long-take sequences would
give us evidence of such strategies.
A synthetic example
To bring together various aspects of what I
have so far discussed, let us examine a
typically complex sequence from Good Men,
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Good Women, just over an hour into the film
(it is in Chapter 11 of the US DVD edition).
At the end of the previous part of the
sequence (another Hou restaurant table
scene in which power relations are figured
out), a karaoke song begins, fading up in the
mix.
This time, we see who is singing the song
– Liang Ching. But it is a typically decentered
Hou-style mise en scène. There are two
elements, superimposed (the singing man,
and Liang Ching with her companion), but
no clear hierarchy of foreground and back-
ground. We can find our attention drifting,
wandering from one to the other. Who are we
following, who are we meant to follow, what
is Hou’s camera following? This is the char-
acteristic uncertainty of a Hou scene. Note
the role of glass and mirrors, of all manner of
reflective surfaces in Hou: they are items that
break up, complicate and indeed mystify the
space of the scene. We will never be able to
exactly place this reflected man within the
lay-out or floor-plan of the club. Note also the
typical bit of business that becomes a specta-
cle in itself: the game she plays with the man
seated at a table.
As Liang Ching gets up to dance, we are
wondering by now: what is the subject of this
scene? Is it her dissipation, her drunkenness?
As often in Hou, the motivation for showing
us this action at such length and in such detail
Story, scene and sound in Hou Hsiao-Hsien 269
is delayed, almost hidden. The scene is about
guilt, erasure, repression of consciousness
(rather like many such scenes of tawdry
Dionysian revelry in Abel Ferrara’s work).
But Hou does not yet lock us in to this coming
theme. He lets the subject or topic of the scene
drift off in the detail of the song. And so, in
this eternal moment of Liang Ching dancing
and singing, we observe the flickering
coloured lights, and hear the odd mix of live
and pre-recorded musical sounds – and we
finally notice a buried element in the space:
namely, the drummer who has been sitting
there the whole time, waiting to play. There
are many framing or spatial surprises of this
kind in Hou’s work.
The song continues, and now we flash
back: it seems to be a romantic moment with
her lover, perhaps a subjective memory on
her part, though not overdetermined or
heavily marked as such. Their dancing is in
sync with the song. Note, in passing, the
fluid, lyrical style of this moment: we are far
from the mode (overstressed by critics) of
Hou as the unbending master of the long
take/long shot/static frame. But now there
will be another leap in time, a mysterious
and violent leap. How Hou achieves this is
pure Godard: we hear a gunshot, and then
we see an uncharacteristic whip-pan to the
bodies on the floor. We might say, conven-
tionally: the memory or dream of happiness
has been broken by the violent reality of
death. But in fact much is more is happening
here. In the full narrative of the film, Liang
Ching is responsible for luring Ah Wei out
to his death. It is as if the entire scene, in its
representation of the murder, deliberately
partakes of the repression of this terrible
fact, elaborates and lays bare a kind of
mental sound-image of repression, pictures
a cinematic complex of repression. The
moment of murder, the gunshot, the wound
– all are gone, scrubbed clean away, folded
away, obscured and mystified within the
layers and transitions of the elements of the
scene. And, as always in Hou, we note that
the song-line that never properly started
does not now return to any point of origin;
instead, it echoes and fades away, over the
return to another time frame.
 270 Adrian Martin
I end this discussion of Hou on the idea
of repression – something darker than
(while overlapping with) the gentler
‘eloquence of the taciturn’ that Hasumi has
analysed so well, or the ‘aesthetics of silence
and the void’ attributed to Chinese artistic
tradition.5 Repression is central in Hou’s
work – not only in Good Men, Good Women,
but also more generally, if we bear in mind
(for example) the dark mass of that
unspeaking father in Café Lumiere. But it is
crucial to insist that it is never simply one
person, an individual, who is carrying out
this repression. Repression has no single
agent in Hou; it is everywhere, it permeates
everything, it is social and historical as well
as terrifyingly intimate.
Repression dwells in the silences, the
ellipses, the fade-outs, the obscure zones of
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action and focus, seeing and hearing. It is in
the story that is difficult to follow, the scene
that is hard to make work, and the sound
that immerses us like an ocean.
Notes
1. A striking example of this labelling process
appears in the otherwise innocuous Hilary Duff
teen movie, Raise Your Voice (2004). It starts
with Hilary and a friend leaving school, then
jumps to a point-of-view of the heroine through
the digital camera lens of someone who is
watching her. Instantly, we wonder whether
she is being stalked. Then a young guy bounces
into the frame next to Hilary, holding a camera.
After a moment of group chit-chat, Hilary
announces: ‘Hey, my brother shouldn’t be
hitting on my best friend!’ – thus instantly sort-
ing out who everybody is, their place in the
story, and what kind of story it is going to be
(teen romance rather than a serial-killer
thriller).
2. For more on this approach, cf. Daly (2003).
3. Cf. the interview with Hou in Berry (2005).
4. For a broad discussion of the role of pop music
in Hou, cf. Lu (2000).
5. Reynaud cites, in this regard, the work of
François Cheng (Reynaud 2002: 78–83).
References
Berry, Michael (2005) Speaking in Images: Interviews
with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, Columbia
University Press.
Carney, Ray (ed.) (2001) Cassavetes on Cassavetes,
London: Faber and Faber.
Carrière, Jean-Claude and Bonitzer, Pascal (1990)
Exercice du scenario, Paris: FEMIS.
Ciment, Michel (1998) ‘I seek not description but
vision: Robert Bresson on L’Argent’. In James
Quandt (ed.) Robert Bresson, Toronto: Cine-
matheque Ontario.
Daly, Fergus (2003) ‘On four prosaic formulas which
might summarise Hou’s poetics’. In A. Martin
and J. Rosenbaum (eds) Movie Mutations: The
Changing Face of World Cinephilia, London:
British Film Institute, 133–140.
Hasumi, Shigehiko (2008) ‘The eloquence of the
taciture: an essay on Hou Hsiao-Hsien’, Inter-
Asia Cultural Studies 9(2).
Jones, Kent (2000) ‘Expecting to fly: A City of
Sadness’, Cinema Scope 3(Spring): 35–36.
Lopate, Philip (2000) ‘A deeper shot: introducing
Hou Hsiao-Hsien’, Cinema Scope 3(Spring):
27–29.
Lu, Alvin (2000) ‘Hou and pop! Daughter of the Nile’,
Cinema Scope 3(Spring): 32–34.
Mackendrick, Alexander (2004) On Film-Making: An
Introduction to the Craft of the Director, London:
Faber and Faber.
Martin, Adrian (2000) ‘Lang’s sound’. In Philip
Brophy (ed.) Cinesonic: Cinema and the Sound of
Music, Sydney: AFTRS, 155–172.
Reynaud, Bérénice (2002) A City of Sadness, London:
British Film Institute.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan (2004) Essential Cinema: On the
Necessity of Film Canons, Baltimore and London:
The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Willemen, Paul (1994) Looks and Frictions: Essays in
Cultural Studies and Film Theory, British Film
Institute/Indiana University Press.
Author’s biography
Dr. Adrian Martin is Senior Research Fellow in Film
and Television Studies, Monash University
(Melbourne, Australia). He is the author of Phan-
tasms (Penguin, 1994), Once Upon a Time in America
(British Film Institute, 1998), The Mad Max Movies
(Currency, 2003) and Raúl Ruiz (Altamira, 2004); and
co-editor of Movie Mutations (BFI, 2003) and Rouge
(www.rouge.com.au). He has written chapters for
books including For Ever Godard (Black Dog, 2004)
and Vincente Minnelli (Wayne State University Press,
2008). His essays have appeared in publications
including Cahiers du cinéma (France), Film Comment
(US), Sight and Sound (UK), Ekran (Slovenia), Tren de
sombras (Spain) and Art & Text (Australia).
Contact address: Film and Television, Studies,
Monash University (Melbourne).