This is My Brain on Hou

Having so far failed to make good on my promise to post more regularly, I post an informal, very rough piece on Hou Hsiao-hsien:

More than any other films I have seen, the recent films of Hou Hsiao-hsien play on the link between our visual and aural perception and our sense of duration as a register of reality [02/10/09 edit: Not reality, but more like 'experience'. These senses give access to a world]. In one sense, when we are consciously engaged in a certain way of life, setting aside altered states of consciousness and periods of heightened emotion, life proceeds in an uninterrupted flow of perceived events [02/10/09 edit: events, which recede back into this flow, much in the style of E.H. Gombrich's metaphor, history as a river]. Similarly, in a Hou film, long, roving takes issue us into a space-time continuum stretching beyond the frame, and so also backward into a past and forward into a future. In this sense, there are few moments of truth in a work like Three Times, fewer still in Millennium Mambo, Café Lumière, and Flight of the Red Balloon. It is difficult to pinpoint where the poetry of the style begins. The things we behold exist in the sense that they have been and are in the process of being, including Mark Lee Ping-Bing’s contingent compositions. Thus, there is only this duration, by which I mean this constant flow of visual and aural events, a dynamic perceptual environment upon which the reality [experience] of an imagined world is founded. The result is the much-belabored “hypnotic” esthetic of a Hou film. The most direct signification and embodiment of which is the falling of light across a configuration of surfaces.

On the other hand, over the course of our everyday existence, our attention span is fractured, our mental focus ever shifting, and our memory imperfect. So too our eyes are constantly engaged in hundreds of minute physiological operations towards which we typically pay no notice. Life does not proceed in the uninterrupted flow we have hitherto assumed. Simlarly, Hou builds into his esthetic frequent disruptions (via rack focus and jump cutting, or, in A Time for Freedom, which has no jump-cuts and few changes of focus, intertitling), concentrations (via subtly rhythmic panning, tilting, and tracking), dilations (via cut-ins to ‘zones’ of shallow focus, suspending figures and objects in space) and crystallizations (via rhythmic and tonal resolution) of the duration. These effects, and others, are variously applied, often in combination. Hou’s is a poetics, which challenges any notion of real time, of documentary reality, by manipulating the emotional ['perceptual' is better here. Emotional sounds too classical and dramaturgical] involvement of the audience with the flow of events presented to them, by modulating the mood under which we experience an environment in motion, and by insisting that sensual [sight-sensual, sound-sensual] experience is limited [also, inadequate and helpless] in its subjectivity. On the one hand, Hou claims, we have access to the world only in so far as we see and hear it. Yet on the second hand, our perceptions are limited [as above]. Yet still, on the third hand, these imperfect faculties are what bring the world before us [this sentence seems redundant in retrospect]. It is necessary that we see.

If duration is a matter of how we perceive it, then indeed there can be moments of truth, and in a Hou film, in fact, there are those rare, ecstatic moments where a sensuous image is rhythmically suspended, saturating the duration and turning the event before us into a romance. In A Time to Love, as Aphrodite’s Child builds to a crescendo, a couple’s hands make love in a slender sluice of space, beyond which lights shift out-of-focus, rendering the moment euphorically tenuous. Similarly, individual sights and sounds from each time period in Three Times resonate beyond their situation in a linear sequence of frames and narrative occurrences, and reverberate significantly across the span of the entire film via our memory of it. These flows of images – constantly interrupted, abbreviated, elided, and limited to only one point-of-view, stuck inside looking out, or outside looking in, or telescoping an object in an envelope of shallow focus only to abstract the space between – are the compounds with which Hou fabricates an atmospheric structure for history (i.e. a sense of history, a sense of duration, a sense of reality, a sense of truth).

Those who have accused Hou’s work of political correctness, stylistic decadence, and emotional and intellectual simplicity have typically launched their attacks based on two (incorrect) claims about his art: 1.) The style sentimentalizes history (e.g. A Time for Love). 2.) The style dehumanizes history, even commodifying it (e.g. Goodbye, South Goodbye, Flowers of Shanghai, Millennium Mambo, Three Times). It should be noted that these two claims are not mutually exclusive. Rather the latter is often seen as the basis for the former. Thus, Nathan Kosub argues: “So much of the section [A Time for Love] is so broadly sentimental – the tenuous but eager joining of hands at a bus stop, say—that real emotion is reduced to social gestures that rely on our own experiences to impart a sense of romance. And that’s no romance at all.” But this is to assume that a traditional romance is the film’s aspiration, when, strictly speaking, the style in Hou’s films has never romanticized history, at least not in the classical sense of the term.

A contemporary like Michael Mann is a genuine dramaturgist of surfaces, whose oeuvre represents a deeply romantic cinema reflected in the intense immediacy of hi-def imagery, the no-holds-barred egotism of star performances, and the all-or-nothing climaxes of plot lines. Like Hou, Mann often deals with people from economically insignificant, even marginalized backgrounds, but, unlike Hou, the entire universe hangs in the balance of their struggle. Out of necessity, Mann's people are constantly posing as bigger and more badass than they truly are. The essential Mann frame consists in a lone figure set flatly against a sea of lights, and yet a characteristic wash of color and texture integrates the figure and landscape with an organic fluidity, so that it becomes his environment. The relation between figure and cityscape is poised between resistance and embrace. The cityscape becomes something other than environment. It becomes an expression of this figure's existential condition. Mann mobilizes surface for the sake of drama. His images are never purely sensual. To romanticize something in the graphic arts is to harness an inner force imagistically as Mann does. The screen surface becomes an expression of historical struggles, of dialectics. This is the Eisensteinian tradition in cinema to which Mann has frequently professed a great debt.

On the contrary, Hou's camera remains always outside his figures, and they are always inside their environment [they're part of it, contiguous]. Hou sets out to sensualize history in a filmic way, to saturate the duration of a series of frames with every ephemeral, environmental detail a given space contains, to saturate his figures in turn and finally to reach an existential condition [Fergus Daly is probably right that existentialism is putting too Western of a spin on Hou's cinema. So a 'cosmic' condition may be more apt here... still, Hou continues to evoke Heidegger for me. His films enact a kind of phenomenology of perception... there, I've said it] via the things themselves. Ceding my unfamiliarity with the oeuvres of Bela Tarr, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Alexander Sokurov, Carlos Reygadas and a number of other filmmakers of recent European and Asian art cinema, at present it seems to me that no filmmaker since Andrei Tarkovsky has so intently sought to exploit the 35mm image’s capacity to record minute, material detail. Nor do any of Hou’s contemporaries play so frequently as he does upon that old fallacy of the modern mind, which would link the impression of film grain inextricably to that of physical reality. Hou’s sensualization of the frame may, as in A Time for Love, culminate in romance, but such instances are rare, and more importantly they are rarified. Romance is often longed for, but it is seldom achieved. That tenuous joining of hands is not an expression of boiler-plate sentiment, thinly concealing an attempt to cash in on festival popularity. It is rather one of the most meticulously defined articulations of a cinematic vision this side of Mildred Dunnock embracing Anne Bancroft in 7 Women. It is one of the most beautiful images in all cinema. It is the achievement of cinematic romance in a formal system where romance has been reduced to a matter of focal length, of mathematical probability, of the crossing of two people’s vectors at a precise coordinate in a nebulous space-time continuum. Here, Hou says, time is suspended and the history of a people comes into focus.