Hou Hsiao-hsien

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hearthesilence
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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#251 Post by hearthesilence » Sat May 02, 2015 11:18 pm

Ridiculous about the rights situation - aren't there allegations that organized crime was involved in the financing (and therefore ownership) in a large number of films in Taiwan, including landmarks such as The Puppetmaster?

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#252 Post by jindianajonz » Sat May 02, 2015 11:50 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:The print of Puppetmaster looked _infinitely_ better than the misbegotten US DVD. ;-}
I haven't seen it beyond Dvdbeaver caps, but Suchenski said it may be the worst DVD he's ever seen. It was pretty disappointing when he said home video rights are stonewalled, since this will likely be the only time I can see this film in decent quality. He mentioned that they tried to track down other subbed prints, but they all seem to have been destroyed in the last two decades. His comment about taking steps at preservation was in response to a question about whether the negative or other materials exist, so that was heartening.

Re: the rights, he said he couldn't get into specifics, but did say it was common for films released after the ending of Martial Law and relative opening of the island in the late 80s through the early 90s to have really tangled rights issues. He also stated that rights holders often don't have any interest in seeing films released. I had assumed that the copyright laws of the time were untested and full of holes, but organized crime taking advantage of newly opened markets could fit that description as well.

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#253 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sun May 03, 2015 12:02 am

Prof Suchenski is lucky if the Puppetmaster DVD is the worst he's seen. For instance, Ann Hui's God of Killers/Story of Woo Viet and WKW's Ashes of Time were both far worse. ;~)

It really is unfortunate that so many of HHH's films have not gotten decent (or even any) subbed home video releases.

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#254 Post by Northside777 » Sun May 03, 2015 9:32 am

jindianajonz wrote:Very excited that I got to see this, and despite the subpar picture quality I would encourage everybody to seek it out while it is showing. During the Q&A Suchenski made a comment that the physical film had the darkest print he had ever seen, and there's a special quality to the way a projector bulb opens it up, so it's well worth seeing this last remaining English subbed print.
I also attended the Chicago screening of The Puppetmaster and want to reiterate the last point in Jindianajonz' post.

I was very surprised to hear Professor Suchenski say that the print being shown is the only English-subtitled print currently in existence.

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#255 Post by zedz » Sun May 03, 2015 4:55 pm

Northside777 wrote:I was very surprised to hear Professor Suchenski say that the print being shown is the only English-subtitled print currently in existence.
I know it seems shocking, but for films that didn't achieve a commercial release in an English-speaking country, it wasn't unusual for only one or two subtitled prints to ever be in existence. They did the international festival circuit (and, if in demand, were very intensively booked: non-stop screenings all around the world for a year or two, by which time the print might be worn out and not replaced) and then that was it, unless there was enough demand for retrospective screenings.

Our world cinema heritage has always been much more precarious than you might assume, and the films that get remembered tend to be the ones that were picked up for English language distribution, and thus remained in circulation for longer. Those aren't necessarily the best films, just the most marketable to the local audiences of the time. There's an entire alternative history of masterpieces that never made it past - or never made it to - the festival circuit, and are now relatively inaccessible. The move to digital has improved the situation a little: at least a DCP should still be screenable after a year on the circuit, and the film is more readily transferable to home video.


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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#257 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon May 04, 2015 11:58 am

Just another reminder of the very good book that sort of goes along with the HHH retrospective:

https://www.filmmuseum.at/jart/prj3/fil ... 0519&ss1=y" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#258 Post by whaleallright » Mon May 04, 2015 12:41 pm

Was at the Puppetmaster screening in Chicago this weekend. Richard Suchenski, who organized the retrospective and edited the book Michael mentions, spoke briefly about the issues concerning the circulation of the film. Although he understandably couldn't go into details, he did affirm that the film is tied up in a rights dispute that is unlikely to be resolved in the near future. The 20-year-old print screened at the Film Center is, per Suchenski, the only English-subtitled print in existence. He also said that the fuzzy transfer used on the out-of-print Winstar DVD, which is cropped to the Academy ratio, is the only digital transfer of The Puppetmaster he knows of. (And one reason he was unable to use frame grabs in the book.) The film's negative has been preserved, however, so if and when the rights issues are sorted out, new prints could be struck and a HD master could be made. But--sadly--don't hold your breath.

Having now seen the film in its intended ratio on the big screen, I was struck by two things. One, the framing of the puppet performances leaves room on the sides in which we see musicians accompanying the performance. We also sometimes see the puppeteers moving around. This information is often lost in the cropped version, in which the proscenium of the puppet theater is frequently coextensive with the film frame. Two, the framing of the "human" theatrical performances is such that it really seems to position the film's audience in the place of the theater audience. At least that is the feeling I got watching the movie, a feeling I didn't have watching it on home video. It seems an important part of Hou's design.

I dearly wish more people could see this film in the theater, so I'm hoping the rights issues Suchenski lamented are cleared up -- along with those for other Taiwanese films of the late '80s and early '90s. Perhaps Taiwan could briefly re-impose martial law in order to nationalize the ownership of these masterpieces. j/k

EDIT: I see that someone else who attended the screening has mentioned a lot of this already! It pays to re-read a thread, I suppose. For what it's worth, I asked the question about the film's negative--I just wanted to be assured that the film would survive, even if it couldn't be widely seen in the near future. I also agree that the DVD of The Puppetmaster with all its flaws is far from the worst I've seen, although it's still galling that a film of such jaw-dropping pictorial beauty would be subject to the particular desecration of cropping. One wonders how that happened, since Winstar's other DVDs of Hou films are at least in widescreen.
Last edited by whaleallright on Mon May 04, 2015 12:49 pm, edited 6 times in total.

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#259 Post by Raymond Marble » Mon May 04, 2015 12:42 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:Just another reminder of the very good book that sort of goes along with the HHH retrospective:

https://www.filmmuseum.at/jart/prj3/fil ... 0519&ss1=y" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I second this--the accompanying book is one of the best academic studies of a director I've read in some time. Interesting how uniformly excellent it is, especially considering it is a compilation from a bunch of different writers.

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#260 Post by hearthesilence » Mon May 04, 2015 2:23 pm

FWIW, if there are other prints (preferably with no subtitles burned in), that could help with future screenings, could it not? I've been to plenty of films that screened excellent looking prints while resorting to a video-type projection that displays the subtitles over the appropriate part of the image without effecting the rest of the screen. Not ideal, but not by any means a detriment to the viewer.

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#261 Post by whaleallright » Mon May 04, 2015 2:36 pm

...but the problem with setting up a screening is not only that there are so few prints, but that the rights have yet to be sorted out. Legally, you can't charge for a screening if you don't pay the rights holder, so it had to be billed as an educational event. Tickets for the Film Center event were for Suchenski's lecture, with the screening as a "free" bonus. This is not the sort of thing that is very repeatable.

In theory the film might be screened for a class, but you'd have to talk with Hou's company, who I believe are custodians of the extant prints. I imagine they would want to limit the number of screenings, since each time one of the few remaining prints is run through a projector, it runs a risk of irreparable damage.

(Edited to fix typos.)
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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#262 Post by pzadvance » Mon May 04, 2015 2:40 pm

jonah.77 wrote:...but the problem with setting up a screening is not only that there are so few prints, but that the rights have yet to be sorted out. Legally, you can't charge for a screening if you don't pay the rights holder, so it had to be billed as an educational event. Tickets for the Film Center event were for Suchenski's lecture, with the screening as a "free" bonus. This is not the sort of thing that is very repeatable.
Interesting. UCLA's screening of The Puppetmaster was also free, I wasn't sure why at the time.

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#263 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon May 04, 2015 4:19 pm

My understanding was that the various rights holders were willing to allow free (limited) screenings of City of Sadness and Puppetmaster, but couldn't agree to any arrangement involving paid screenings.

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#264 Post by jindianajonz » Mon May 04, 2015 9:04 pm

jonah.77 wrote:Was at the Puppetmaster screening in Chicago this weekend.
If I had known you were there, I would have thanked you for getting me hooked on Hou! That box set you sold me was one of the best blind buys I've ever made. Hope all is well!

One other part of the lecture that stuck out for me was something that I had noted when reading Suchinski's book- Although the History Trilogy is generally considered to be comprised of City of Sadness, The Puppetmaster, and Good Men, Good Women (and many essays in the book note it as such), Chinese film professor and screenwriter Ni Zhen replaces The Puppetmaster with A Time To Live, A Time To Die when he discusses Hou's trilogy. This is not an error- at the screening, Suchinski mentioned that the Puppetmaster wasn't very popular in China because it is seen as being too sympathetic to the Japanese, and pointed out that despite being an unwanted occupying power, the Japanese never come across as antagonistic in the film. Because of this, many Chinese film critics tend to gloss over the film when discussing Hou's work.

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#265 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Mon May 04, 2015 10:10 pm

jonah.77 wrote:Legally, you can't charge for a screening if you don't pay the rights holder, so it had to be billed as an educational event. Tickets for the Film Center event were for Suchenski's lecture, with the screening as a "free" bonus. This is not the sort of thing that is very repeatable.
That's weird... the Puppetmaster screening in Houston was definitely not free. Either they made a mistake, or we were technically paying $9 for the two-minute introduction by a UT professor.
Michael Kerpan wrote:It really is unfortunate that so many of HHH's films have not gotten decent (or even any) subbed home video releases.
The only Hou films that have never gotten an English-subbed video release are possibly Cute Girl and Cheerful Wind—I say "possibly" because these are the ones for which I'm not aware of any official subbed release, though they may well exist somewhere. (Both have been fansubbed.) So that's two out of 17 features missing, which isn't so bad compared to some of Hou's contemporaries, like his Sandwich Man collaborator Wan Jen (whose work I've been unable to find subtitled outside of The Sandwich Man, Ah Fei, and Super Citizen), or Chang Yi, whose entire filmography bar Kuei-mei, a Woman appears to be unavailable with subs (and is so neglected that his IMDb profile is missing about half his filmography). The quality of the English-subbed Hou releases—and the fact that several are out of print, for decades in some cases—is a big problem, but he's been better treated than many.

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#266 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon May 04, 2015 10:21 pm

Neither City of Sadness or Daughter of the Nile never got a subbed DVD release -- and the nominally subbed versions of the three widescreen musicals were pretty hit or miss (on one, entirely "miss"). CoS did get a pan/scanned PAL VHS release (or open matte, not sure). Many of the DVDs that were released in the US seem to be out of print. I have never seen any commericial DotN home video release, but perhaps there was a long-ago vanished HK VCD or something.

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#267 Post by jindianajonz » Mon May 04, 2015 10:47 pm

The Fanciful Norwegian wrote: That's weird... the Puppetmaster screening in Houston was definitely not free. Either they made a mistake, or we were technically paying $9 for the two-minute introduction by a UT professor.
It's the latter. The only thing they were able to finagle was a series of "educational screenings", which is why Suchenski gave a lecture with the film. Likewise, the upcoming showing of City of Sadness in Los Angeles accompanies a book signing by the lady who wrote the BFI Film Classics book.

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#268 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Mon May 04, 2015 11:31 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:CoS did get a pan/scanned PAL VHS release (or open matte, not sure). Many of the DVDs that were released in the US seem to be out of print. I have never seen any commericial DotN home video release, but perhaps there was a long-ago vanished HK VCD or something.
Daughter of the Nile had a dual-subbed VCD in Taiwan (with a roughly five-minute unsubtitled stretch), and there was also a Japanese VHS, obviously without English subs. A rip from the VCD is kicking around online and used to be on Youtube until Universal nuked the first half with a copyright complaint, presumably over one of the various pop songs on the soundtrack. (The second half is here if anyone wants to see it for some reason. The actual VCD doesn't look much better.) There was also an English-subbed laserdisc of A City of Sadness that was the source of a widely-sold bootleg DVD before remuxed versions of the Japanese DVD began circulating. The U.S. DVDs from Fox Lorber/Winstar/Wellspring are all out of print, the company being defunct and all, but all except The Puppetmaster are readily available with subtitles elsewhere, mainly from the Taiwanese box set discussed way back on page three. I strongly recommend it to anyone who hasn't made the plunge yet yet, especially since I don't expect it'll remain available for much longer. All this is again in pretty marked contrast to Hou's New Cinema peers, most of whose work was never released on DVD in Taiwan or anywhere else.

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#269 Post by Michael Kerpan » Tue May 05, 2015 12:18 pm

Well Hou's films may be marginally more available than those of his peers, but they are still out of reach for most folks. Older HK films don't fare much better than Taiwan ones -- for instance, most of Ann Hui's non-new stuff is long out of print.

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#270 Post by shaky » Sat Jun 06, 2015 10:13 am

New David Bordwell lecture on Hou Hsiao-hsien:

https://vimeo.com/129943635" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#271 Post by andyli » Wed Jul 08, 2015 9:04 pm

The recently restored Son's Big Doll up for Blu-ray pre-order over at Amazon Japan.

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#272 Post by Stefan Andersson » Tue Jul 21, 2015 5:14 am

The Boys from Fengkuei, restored, is scheduled for this year´s Venice Festival:
http://www.screendaily.com/festivals/ve ... ntID=42422" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#273 Post by mizo » Sun Jul 26, 2015 12:04 am

I just finished Millennium Mambo for the second time, and like the few other Taiwanese New Wave films I've seen (the two most readily available in R1 by Yang and Tsai, Yi Yi and Stray Dogs) it's rich and complex enough to make a second viewing an extremely enlightening and even necessary experience. While the film initially appeared to me to be a very moving (if somewhat unfocused) study of Shu Qi's character, Vicky, it now strikes me as much more of a general portrait of life in the Taipei youth/club/drug/gang culture, which of course can double for any urban subculture. This kind of lifestyle is conveyed by strongly evoking (through the film's pacing, tone, and overall presentation) three major aspects of it: that it is emotionally cyclical, isolated, and lived with little sense of perspective or foresight.

The cyclical emotional response the film engenders can be attributed to the way it shifts from optimistic moments of dreamy, propulsive elation (when Jack and his world are first introduced, when Vicky first goes to that snowy Japanese village, etc.) to slow, fairly depressive scenes of stagnation (much of her quotidian existence with both the abusive Hao-hao and the emotionally distant Jack) and back again. The sense of repetition in this cycle is enhanced by the nonlinear structure of the film, the first indication of this structure (her sudden and initially inexplicable return to Hao-hao roughly half-way through) being one of the film's most disarming and upsetting moments and developing a sense of fatalism and inevitability which I'll expand on later. This repetitive structure, being probably the most immediately recognizable and affecting characteristic of the film, also offers us a window into Vicky's psyche, showing how her reality bounces between the two extremes, and imparts a human through-line to the, at first glance, rather arcane narrative games of elision and fragmentation that Hou employs.

The lives of the main characters are also lived in great isolation. For Vicky, this is somewhat tragic, as it is strongly suggested that she craves some degree of connection with another person (and an optimistic reading of the ending, with which I would tend to subscribe, would indicate that she has finally found it with the two Japanese brothers). Of course this connection has eluded her in both of the relationships the film documents. Hao-hao seems to suffer from a kind of inferiority complex. He feels he and Vicky come "from different worlds" and that she "came down" to him. He was also apparently afraid that she would realize her superiority if she graduated high school, which is why he essentially latched onto her and dragged her down to his level by forcing her to miss her exams. He spends his days with her under the constant morbid fear of having her leave for somebody better, offering tenderness only in the form of (always unwanted) sex (and there are a few scenes of quiet but still extraordinarily harrowing coercion on his part of her to do his bidding - the palpable sense of her body being violated lend these scenes a visceral unpleasantness that I consider almost unmatched in the cinema I've been exposed to). It's no wonder she finds the relationship unfulfilling. But her life with Jack is also intolerable because, despite his benevolence, he has something of a distant paternalism that makes her still feel in want of connection. There's a very moving scene in which the theme that has been played during all of victory's greatest emotional highs so far is now applied to the image of her hopelessly drunk, until the camera loses interest in her and begins to follow Jack who, preoccupied with his own concerns, shows himself to be entirely capable of forgetting her. Moreover, he strikes me as a thoroughly impotent character, both in his emotional distance and his apparent inability to go through with whatever action necessitated his fleeing to Japan (killing one of his men?). To get back to the ending, she finally finds the fulfillment and connection she's been looking for only when she stops "being one of them," that is, once she stops trying to be protected by someone else, or to disappear into the crowd (as she had tried to do while alone in Japan).

Vicky also lives her life with little in the way of forethought, acting mostly impulsively and without much sense of a "big picture." The viewer is made most aware of this through the juxtaposition of narration and imagery. Often, the omniscient description of past or future events relayed to us as we watch imparts a degree of dramatic irony that lends an almost tragic quality to the proceedings, positioning our characters (especially Vicky) as something of a victim of fate (like I indicated before). An exceptionally poignant example of this occurs when we see Vicky (shortly after the film has reverted back from the endpoint to when she is with Hao-hao) enjoying herself with friends, seemingly without a care in the world, while the narration from the very beginning is repeated, explaining how, no matter how hard she tries, she always finds herself running back to Hao-hao. The implications of this scene regarding Vicky's tragic impulsiveness are twofold: firstly, as we are told, she ultimately cannot resist the temptation of returning to her old home life, even when it clearly makes her unhappy; and secondly, as we see, that she is too totally dedicated to living in the moment to even begin to realize how dire her predicament is. In this way, the film excels in the less-than-easy task of creating a thoroughly sympathetic and moving tragedy of a person who entirely fails to be self-aware, or to help themselves (indeed, fulfillment essentially falls into Vicky's lap at the end in the form of the two Japanese boys she meets by pure luck).

I'm very interested now in seeing what else Hou's filmography has in store. Similar treasures I imagine, going on the amount of praise piled on him here and elsewhere. And now you may return to your regularly scheduled anticipation of his new film (I'm getting rather excited myself :) ).

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#274 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sun Jul 26, 2015 3:56 pm

In a sense, Millennium Mambo is structurally the opposite of Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies (where we learn at the very outset that the main characters have died) . Here, one is (obliquely) assured that the Vicki of the future is not only alive but thriving, before showing us her travails.

I hope you get a chance to see Daughter of the Nile, which lots of people tend to dismiss. Not as good as MM, but an interesting companion piece.

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Re: Hou Hsiao-hsien

#275 Post by mizo » Sun Jul 26, 2015 5:37 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:In a sense, Millennium Mambo is structurally the opposite of Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies (where we learn at the very outset that the main characters have died) . Here, one is (obliquely) assured that the Vicki of the future is not only alive but thriving, before showing us her travails.
I've never seen Grave of the Fireflies, but I do know it by reputation, and that's a very interesting observation. One thing that never occurred to me until after the second viewing was that the narrator might actually by Vicky herself. Do you think this might be true? I'd always assumed that it was probably just some unnamed friend of Vicky who had been in fairly close contact with her during her most turbulent years (some of which the film portrays, others it alludes to) and was conveying, in an almost gossipy, if still mostly nonjudgmental fashion, her impression of the events. But then, while writing the above...capsule review or whatever :wink:, it struck me that she never really had a friend like that. Everyone she spends time with at the bars she frequents (before she meets the Japanese brothers) seems to be more interested in having fun than being actively involved in their friends' lives. Even Jack, like I said before, though he seems to have affection for Vicky, has other business that occupies him. So perhaps she's telling us her own story (albeit in the third person, for some reason).
Michael Kerpan wrote:I hope you get a chance to see Daughter of the Nile, which lots of people tend to dismiss. Not as good as MM, but an interesting companion piece.
And wouldn't you know that the first thing I read after looking it up was the film's "foreshadowing of the themes Hou would later use in Millennium Mambo." It's a shame it seems to be unavailable on home video in America, like so much of Hou's work. From what I can see, the only films of his in print and readily available are Three Times, Cafe Lumiere, and Flight of the Red Balloon. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the films that remain most elusive are the ones that are mostly considered his masterpieces (I have been able to find A City of Sadness, Goodbye, South, Goodbye, and Flowers of Shanghai online, but the transfers are less than ideal, and I get the impression that, especially in the case of the latter, poor quality would be extremely detrimental to the film).

(Also, thanks so much for being so ready and willing to share your knowledge with someone who's not much more than an enthusiastic neophyte when it comes to most Asian cinema. :D )

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