Are Hou Hsiao-hsien's films political? : a study of gender, culture, history and aesthetics in Hou Hsiao-hsien's historical films

Hou Hsiao-hsien is one of the most controversial film directors in Taiwan. His proponents love him for his artistic and poetic film style of narrating history. The government hated him for his involvement in politics. Regardless of their contentiousness, his films are widely acclaimed and worthy of close analysis. This thesis engages with Taiwanese history by offering a reading of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster (1993), Good Men, Good Women (1995), and Three Times (2005). I critique the films’ historical dimensions, cultural representations and approach to gender issues in the period from the late Qing Dynasty to the present. In addition, Hou’s film aesthetics and cinematography are analysed, through comparisons with the work of Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, in order to explore the influences of Japanese colonisation and Chinese cultural and ethnic connection. Hou’s immense contribution to Taiwanese film consists principally of a Taiwanese trilogy that traces Taiwan’s history in the twentieth century. In The Puppetmaster (1993), Hou details the era of Japanese colonisation from 1895 to the restoration of Taiwan by the Kuomintang in 1945. A City of Sadness focuses on the fate of the Lin family from 1945 to 1949, which epitomises Taiwanese life during the initial stages of Kuomintang domination. Good Men, Good Women (1995) portrays two different eras in Taiwan: the political movement in the 1950s and pop culture in the 1990s. In Hou’s later work, Three Times (not part of this trilogy), Hou uses subtle techniques to give a brief historical retrospective through the respective love stories of three women. The thesis uses examples from not only the above films but also Hou’s initial romantic trilogy, Cute Girl (1980), Cheerful Wind (1981), and The Green, Green Grass of Home (1982) and his first realistic film, Son’s Big Doll, which is featured in the omnibus film The Sandwich Man, to explore Hou’s historical, cultural and gender representations. In order to understand Hou’s ideas and beliefs in greater depth, I also review the documentary, The Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hsien (Olivier Assayas, 1997) as well as his films in the last decade, such as Café Lumière (2003), The Electric Princess House (2007), Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (2008) and La Belle Epoque (2011). In this thesis, I explore the notion of macro-history (official history) and micro-history (family and women’s stories) and the interrelationship between them. I provide my own illustrative family photos and handwritten documents of my grandfather and uncle to show the parallel between my family story and Hou’s depiction of the impact of cultural hegemony on family history (micro-history). In A City of Sadness, with reference to Julia Kristeva’s (1986) notion of ‘feminine time’ and the debate between Emilie Yeh (2000) and Mizou (1991) concerning “whether women can really enter history,” I argue that Hou Hsiao-hsien’s use of a family’s microhistory to parallel the national macro-history of the February 28 Incident opens an important historical window through which the audience may re-encounter and reflect upon Taiwan’s past, and think carefully about its future. As distinct from Mizou and Yeh, I propose that it is possible for micro-history and macro-history to co-exist, based on the theory of yin and yang. In Good Men, Good Women, putting Wu Jia-chi’s and Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s theories on media and memory alongside one another, I question how useful it is to discuss Hou’s use of women in cinema and “film within a film” to represent history and, more importantly, whether this is a reliable approach. Can it be seen as a national allegory? In the discussion of The Puppetmaster and Three Times, I bridge the gap between Nick Browne (2000) and Li Zhen-ya’s (2000) debate about whether Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films are depoliticised. I argue that Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films are political and that his humanitarian concerns should not be ignored. I have also argued that there is a reason for Hou’s poetic style of narration and indirectness, which is chiefly to avoid censorship. To discover the truth, to reconcile and to produce harmony are the primary aims of Hou Hsiao-hsien. Hou’s films suggest that the Taiwanese people should cast away the darkness of the past and face the bright future, as they have understood their history and take a forgiving attitude toward past misfortunes