Hou Hsiao-hsien (; born 8 April 1947) is a retired Taiwanese film director, screenwriter, producer and actor. He is a leading figure in world cinema and in Taiwan's New Wave cinema movement. He won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1989 for his film A City of Sadness (1989), and the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 for The Assassin (2015). Other highly regarded works of his include The Puppetmaster (1993) and Flowers of Shanghai (1998).
Hou was voted "Director of the Decade" for the 1990s in a poll of American and international critics by The Village Voice and Film Comment. In a 1998 New York Film Festival worldwide critics' poll, Hou was named "one of the three directors most crucial to the future of cinema." A City of Sadness ranked 117th in the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made.Kevin B. Lee, Degenerate Films, Two “Greatest Films” Polls Yield Different Results for Best Chinese Films, http://dgeneratefilms.com/critical-essays/two-greatest-films-polls-yield-different-results-for-best-chinese-films In 2017, Metacritic ranked Hsiao-hsien 16th on its list of the 25 best film directors of the 21st century.
Life and career
Hou Hsiao-hsien was born in Meixian District, Guangdong in 1947 to a Hakka family. Later that same year, Hou's father took a job as Head Secretary for the Mayor of Taichung City. The rest of the family joined him in Taiwan the following year and in 1949 he was made Supervisor of the Taipei Educational Bureau. Hou was educated at the National Taiwan Academy of the Arts.
Internationally, Hou is known for his austere and aesthetically rigorous dramas dealing with the upheavals of Taiwanese (and occasionally larger Chinese) history of the past century by viewing its impacts on individuals or small groups of characters. A City of Sadness (1989), for example, portrays a family caught in conflicts between the local Taiwanese and the newly arrived Chinese Nationalist government after World War II. It was groundbreaking for broaching the long-taboo February 28 Incident and ensuing White Terror. It became a major critical and commercial success, and garnered the Golden Lion award at the 1989 Venice Film Festival, making it the first Taiwanese film to win the top prize at the prestigious international film festival.
His storytelling is elliptical and his style marked by extreme long takes with minimal camera movement but intricate choreography of actors and space within the frame. He uses extensive improvisation to arrive at the final shape of his scenes and the low-key, naturalistic acting of his performers. His compositions are decentered, and links between shots do not adhere to an obvious temporal or causal narrative logic. Without abandoning his famous austerity, his imagery has developed a sensual beauty during the 1990s, partly under the influence of his collaboration with cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing. Hou's consistent screenwriting collaborator since the mid-1980s has been the renowned author Chu T’ien-wen, a collaboration that began with the screenplay for Chen Kunhou's 1983 film, Growing Up. He has also cast revered puppeteer Li Tian-lu as an actor in several of his movies, most notably The Puppetmaster (1993), which is based on Li's life.
Hou's films have been awarded top prizes from prestigious international festivals such as the Venice Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, Hawaii International Film Festival and the Nantes Three Continents Festival. Six of his films to date have been nominated for the Palme d'Or (best film award) at the Cannes Film Festival. Hou was voted "Director of the Decade" for the 1990s in a poll of American and international critics put together by The Village Voice and Film Comment.
He contributed two songs to the soundtrack of Dust of Angels, a film he produced.
He directed the Japanese film Café Lumière (2003) for the Shochiku studio as an homage to Yasujirō Ozu; the film premiered at a festival commemorating the centenary of Ozu's birth. The film deals with themes reminiscent of Ozu—tensions between parents and children and between tradition and modernity—in Hou's typically indirect manner. His 2005 film Three Times features three stories of love set in 1911, 1966 and 2005 using the same actors, Shu Qi and Chang Chen.
In August 2006, Hou embarked on his first Western project. Filmed and financed entirely in France, Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) is the story of a French family as seen through the eyes of a Chinese student. The film is the first part in a series of films sponsored by the Musée d'Orsay and stars Juliette Binoche. In 2010, Hou directed the 3D short film for the Taipei Pavilion at the Expo 2010 Shanghai China.
Hou has also had some acting experience, appearing as the lead in fellow Taiwanese New Wave auteur Edward Yang's 1984 film Taipei Story. He starred as Lung, a former minor league baseball star who is stuck operating an old-style fabric business, longing for his past days of glory. Lung becomes alienated from his girlfriend and tries to find his way in Taipei. Hou also had a small role in the 2013 Chinese comedy-drama film Young Style, about a group of teenagers in high school.
In 2015, Hou won the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival for The Assassin (2015).
Films directed
Prior to his retirement, Hou directed a total of 18 feature films, and three short film segments of omnibus films, which leads to a total of 21 films. Out of the 21 films he has directed, he has written or co-written 11 of those films in addition to writing or co-writing 10 other films directed by other filmmakers, including Taipei Story (1985) (Dir. Edward Yang), Heartbreak Island (1995) (Dir. Hsiao-ming Hsu) and My Favorite Season (1985) (Dir. Kun Hao Chen).
Feature films Hou has directed a total of 18 feature films, of which he has written 11.
Cute Girl (1980) Hou's first film as a director, as well as writer, was Cute Girl (1980) or Lovable You, a relatively formulaic romantic comedy (prevalent in Taiwan at the time) starring Kenny Bee, Anthony Chan and Feng Fei-fei. The film was primarily devised as a vehicle for Bee and Feng, who were popular pop-stars in Hong Kong and Taiwan, respectively, at the time. Hou would later collaborate with both Bee and Feng later on in his next feature film, Cheerful Wind (1981). Although the film was shot in a more commercial style unlike his later work, film critic and writer David Bordwell stated that Cute Girl and the rest of Hou's early films "show [Hou] developing, in almost casual ways, techniques of staging and shooting that will become his artistic hallmarks."
Cheerful Wind (1981) The second feature film that Hou both wrote and directed was Cheerful Wind (1981) (Feng er ti ta cai), which teamed him up again with the trio of leads from Cute Girl, Kenny Bee, Feng Fei-fei and Anthony Chan.
The Green, Green Grass of Home (1982) Hou's third feature film which he both directed and wrote was The Green, Green Grass of Home (1982) (Zai na he pan qing cao qing), which also starred Kenny Bee from his previous two films but also a set of new actors that Hou previously did not work with before, including child actor (at the time) Chou Pin-chun, who won a Best Child Star award from the 1982 Golden Horse Film Festival and Awards for his performance in the film. The film was also nominated for Best Film, Best Director and another Best Child Star award (for actor Cheng Chuan-wen) at the 1982 Golden Horse Film Festival as well.Id.
The Boys from Fengkuei (1983) As his fourth feature film, The Boys from Fengkuei (1983) featured the beginnings of what Hou would later consider tenets of his cinematic style, which include more of a naturalistic style and focusing more on youth and provincial/rural life. The film starred now-director Doze Niu as Ah-Ching, as a member of a gang of young boys who have finished school in their island fishing village of Fengkuei and spend most of their days fighting and drinking. They decide to go to the port city of Kaohsiung to look for work, where Ah-Ching falls in love with a girlfriend of a neighbor. The film is also about how the teenagers face the realities of urban life as they come of age. The film won the Golden Montgolfiere award (tied with 1984's Wanderers of the Desert) at the 1984 Nantes Three Continents Festival. It was also nominated for Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Cinematography (Kun Hao Chen), and Best Film Editing (Ching-Song Liao) awards at the 1984 Golden Horse Film Festival.
The "Coming of Age" Trilogy (1984-1986) Hou's "Coming of Age" trilogy includes the three films: A Summer at Grandpa's (1984), A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985), and Dust in the Wind (1986).
A Summer at Grandpa's (1984) Hou's fifth feature film was A Summer at Grandpa's (1984), which won a Best Director award for Hou at the 1984 Asia-Pacific Film Festival and the Golden Montgolfiere award (tied with The Runner (1984)) at the 1985 Nantes Three Continents Festival, and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury - Special Mention at the 1985 Locarno International Film Festival. The film was also nominated for a Best Child Star (Chi-Kuang Wang) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Chu T’ien-wen) at the 1984 Golden Horse Film Festival.Id. The film also starred fellow New Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang in a brief role, with Yang returning the favor by casting Hou in his film Taipei Story (1985).
A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985) As his sixth feature film, A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985) (also known as The Time to Live and the Time to Die, ) was perhaps Hou's first internationally successful film, winning a grand total of 8 awards from film festivals all over the world: a Special Jury Award at the 1985 Asia-Pacific Film Festival, a FIPRESCI Prize at the Forum of New Cinema at the 1986 Berlin International Film Festival (or Berlinale), a Best Original Screenplay (Hou Hsiao-hsien and Chu T’ien-wen), a Best Supporting Actress (Ru-Yun Tang) at the 1985 Golden Horse Film Festival (where it was also nominated for Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Original Film Score (Chu-chu Wu) and Best Sound Recording (Chiang-Sheng Hsin) awards), a Special Jury Award at the 1986 Hawaii International Film Festival, a Rotterdam Award for Best Non-American/Non-European Film at the 1987 Rotterdam International Film Festival, a Kinema Junpo Award at the 1990 Kinema Junpo Awards (also for Dust in the Wind), and a Special Jury Prize at the 1986 Torino International Festival of Young Cinema.
Dust in the Wind (1986) Hou's seventh feature film was Dust in the Wind (1986), which won a Kinema Junpo Award for Best Foreign Language Film Director at the 1990 Kinema Junpo Awards (shared also with his previous film, A Time to Live, A Time to Die), and Best Cinematography Mark Lee Ping Bin and Best Score (Hou Hsiao-hsien) at the 1987 Nantes Three Continents Festival (where it was also nominated for the Golden Montgolfiere).
Daughter of the Nile (1987) Hou's eighth feature film concerns the story of a girl (played by Taiwanese pop star Lin Yang) who works at a Kentucky Fried Chicken location in Taipei to support her family, which includes a brother character (played by Jack Kao) who is involved in crime and gangs. The title is also a reference to a character in the Japanese manga Crest of the Royal Family who is referred to as the "Daughter of the Nile." The film won a Best Original Film Score award (Hung-yi Chang) at the 1987 Golden Horse Film Festival and also a Special Jury Prize in the International Feature Film Competition at the 1987 Torino International Festival of Young Cinema.
The Taiwan Trilogy (1989-1995) Hou's "Taiwan Trilogy" includes the three films: A City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster (1993), and Good Men, Good Women (1995).
A City of Sadness (1989)