Fighting Swaying Imbalances of Powers: The Transformation of Spiritual Freedom in Tang Tales into Individual Freedom in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin

The appearance of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 侯孝賢 film The Assassin in 2015 and its distinction the same year with the Best Director’s award at the film festival in Cannes has launched an avalanche of confused and confusing reviews in print-media and on the internet. This partly may have been due to the gap between expectations the film’s attribution to the wuxia genre generated in the public and what actually Hou expects from his audience. Despite an unmistakable historical contextualisation at the heart of power-struggling between the Tang imperial court and the ruling house of Weibo, a state that manages to assert its de facto independence behind a diaphanous diplomatic veil of loyalty, the story of the young female assassin Nie Yinniang develops into a sphere of its own, which seems to extend beyond the confines of history and strongly suggests a freedom unspeakable within the intellectual parameter of Tang. This paper traces back the film’s narrative based on Tang dynasty tales and its cinematic language, and arrives at an interpretation related to contemporary social and political topics such as the female/male body and violence. It also touches upon the cross-strait relations’ issues and the “Western” idea of freedom expressed in an apparently traditional Chinese narrative context