BiblioVault - Books about Hou, Xiaoxian

Envisioning Taiwan

Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary

June Yip

Duke University Press, 2004

In discussions of postcolonial nationhood and cultural identity, Taiwan is often overlooked. Yet the island—with its complex history of colonization—presents a particularly fascinating case of the struggle to define a “nation.” While the mainland Chinese government has been unequivocal in its resistance to Taiwanese independence, in Taiwan, government control has gradually passed from mainland Chinese immigrants to the Taiwanese themselves. Two decades of democratization and the arrival of consumer culture have made the island a truly global space. Envisioning Taiwan sorts through these complexities, skillfully weaving together history and cultural analysis to give a picture of Taiwanese identity and a lesson on the usefulness and the limits of contemporary cultural theory.

Yip traces a distinctly Taiwanese sense of self vis-à-vis China, Japan, and the West through two of the island’s most important cultural movements: the hsiang-t’u (or “nativist”) literature of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Taiwanese New Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. At the heart of the book are close readings of the work of the hsiang-t’u writer Hwang Chun-ming and the New Cinema filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien. Key figures in Taiwan’s assertion of a national identity separate and distinct from China, both artists portray in vibrant detail daily life on the island. Through Hwang’s and Hou’s work and their respective artistic movements, Yip explores “the imagining of a nation” on the local, national, and global levels. In the process, she exposes a perceptible shift away from traditional models of cultural authenticity toward a more fluid, postmodern hybridity—an evolution that reflects both Taiwan’s peculiar multicultural reality and broader trends in global culture.

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Melancholy Drift

Marking Time in Chinese Cinema

Jean Ma

Hong Kong University Press, 2010

Ma offers an innovative study of three provocative Chinese directors Wong Kar-wai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming-liang. Focusing on the highly stylized and nonlinear configurations of time in each director’s films, she argues that these directors have brought new global respect for Chinese cinema in amplifying motifs of loss, nostalgia, haunting, absence and ephemeral poetics. Hou, Tsai, and Wong all insist on the significance of being out of time, not merely out of place, as a condition of global modernity. Ma argues that their films collectively foreground the central place of contemporary Chinese films in a transnational culture of memory, characterized by a distinctive melancholy that highlights the difficulty of binding together past and present into a meaningful narrative.

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Staging Memories

Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness

Abé Mark Nornes and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh

Michigan Publishing Services, 2015

In Staging Memories, authors Abé Mark Nornes and Emilie Yeh present an updated study of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s landmark contributions to Taiwanese and world cinema, with particular emphasis on A City of Sadness (Beiqing Chengshi), the winner of the Golden Lion award at the 1989 Venice Film Festival. Staging Memories is based on Narrating National Sadness, one of the first hypertext analyses in film studies, and its analysis is couched in a general history of Taiwan, the political massacre that A City of Sadness recreates, and the history of Taiwan New Cinema. This background information is crucial context for viewers, and one of the reasons teachers have long valued the hypertext version of the book. The body of the text analyzes Hou's style, representation of violence, and the complex manner in which he renders history in his oblique long-take style. The book ends with a chapter that examines a single sequence that unifies the various threads of the overall analysis.

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