A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Tong nien wang shi)

A TIME TO LIVE AND A TIME TO DIE (Tong nien wang shi)          A          
Taiwan  (138 mi)  1985  d:  Hou Hsiao-hsien      co-directors:  Lao Jia-hua, Yang Lai-yin, Xu Xiao-ming

Hou’s autobiographical film bears a strong similarity to Edward Yang’s later masterwork A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (1991), almost as if it is a trial run of the same film, though seen from a different perspective.  Both directors were born in the exact same year (1947) in China with families that emigrated shortly afterwards to Taiwan, where in each film the Japanese style homes of the protagonists reflect the remnants of half a century of Japanese colonization, including the presence of samurai swords left behind, where so much was expected of the first generation of offspring, but the uncertainties of the parents, whose lives were uprooted, are passed onto their children, thinking initially the move to Taiwan would be short term before returning to the mainland.  Set against the backdrop of the island’s turbulent and often bloody history, the significance of education is similarly ignored by bored and disinterested kids, where even the depiction of gang fights is similar, using a static camera to capture a long shot of a street scene, where people move in and out of the picture, where the only depicted violence evolves out of a quick rush of gang members followed by threatening offscreen sounds of yelling and screaming.  These moments of instantaneous chaos erupt out of complete stillness.  The second installment of a coming-of-age trilogy featuring three different Taiwanese screenwriters, coming after A Summer at Grandpa's (Dong Dong De Jia Qi) (1984, inspired by the childhood memories of Chu Tien-wen), and before Dust in the Wind (Lian lian feng chen) (1986, inspired by Wu Nien-jen), the film chronicles the family’s attempt to acclimate to life in postwar Taiwan in the aftermath of the Chinese revolution when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist troops along with nearly 2 million Chinese were driven by the Communists off the mainland into exile on the tiny island of Taiwan, where the film can be seen as a longterm search to recapture their own identity.  Only the second of Hou’s films to reach the West (following the first segment of the trilogy), the film won the International Critic’s Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1986.

More than any other Hou Hsiao-hsien film, this quiet and contemplative film also bears a strong aesthetic resemblance to Ozu, particularly themes of transience and mortality, where the interior shots are framed by a fixed, ground level camera inside a home featuring Japanese architecture, where conventional narrative is abandoned and emphasis is placed on establishing a rhythm through the framing and pacing of observational shots, where the passing of time is reflected through the slowly evolving lives and experiences of a single family, where death plays a prominent part.  Narrated by the director offering “some memories from my youth,” the film covers three generations, a kindly grandmother (Tang Yu-Yuen), the parents, and children, including young Ah-ha (You Ashun), a stand-in for the director, where each develops a unique relationship between the present and the past.  The grandmother continues to believe she’s still on the mainland and keeps looking for a Mekong Bridge that isn’t there, but that doesn’t stop her from searching for it, while the parents, the dutiful mother (Mei Feng) and sickly, asthmatic father (Tien Feng), believe their stay is temporary in Taiwan and that soon life will return to the way it was in the past, while the children are oblivious to any connection to the past and lead rootless lives.  Unfolding in long, lingering shots by Mark Lee Ping Bin, the first in what has become a lifelong collaboration with this director, the film is given a flowing, naturalistic style where a collection of detail accumulates power over time, as the audience grows more invested with the family.  Mostly seen through the eyes of Ah-ha, where due to his father’s asthma, the family has to move from the urban city of Hsinchu further south to the backwater town of Fengshan, where a conflict between urban and rural values is a recurring theme in many of Hou’s films.  Adding authenticity to the story, the film is actually shot in the house where the director grew up as a youth, as do the other stories in the trilogy, as A Summer at Grandpa's (Dong Dong De Jia Qi) was actually shot at screenwriter Chu Tien-Wen's grandparents’ home in the countryside, and Dust in the Wind (Lian lian feng chen) in Wu Nien-Jen's home town.

The film is a flow of recurring memories, seeing his father sit at his desk, or his mother and elder sister working in the kitchen, while he and his brothers play around the house or outside on the street, or we’ll see the entire family sitting around chewing sugarcane while a parent reads a letter received from a relative back home, as the audience is regularly invited into the family home through the director’s perspective.  While the parents are stricken with emotion, realizing the fading connection to their pasts, the kids are more interested in adding the envelope’s stamp to their growing collection, seen peeling the stamp off the paper in steaming hot water, then placing the stamps on a windowpane to dry.  Early on there are images of soldiers arriving in town on horseback, or one can hear the sound of tanks rumbling through the village in the middle of the night.  While these military references are clear, including belligerent radio reports of various military activities, there is no follow up discussion about it by the family, as they all but ignore it.  In contrast, there are also random power outages where families in the darkness must rely upon candlelight, or a recurring image of sounds of the rain pattering against the windowpanes with Ah-ha looking out, often associated with illness or loss, sounds and images of loneliness and isolation.  One of the more poignant scenes comes the night before elder sister’s wedding, where her mother reminisces about the past with her daughter, describing how she lost the second daughter under dire circumstances, a quiet moment where the daughter sits in silence and only the rain outside can be heard, a poetic use of silence and emptiness, where the sound of the rain emphasizes the spreading atmosphere of sorrow, all told in a single shot where the camera never moves, where in only a few sentences we sense how the experiences of a lifetime are being distilled and transmitted to the next generation.  In a single shot, the time jumps ahead ten years with no other accompanying explanation, but a new set of actors play the children.  The shifts in daily routine are accurately recorded, where the balance of childhood is beautifully contrasted against a devastating portrait of growing old.  The death sequences have a jolting power, not that they’re unexpected, but the haunting impact they have on the family can be overwhelming.  Of interest, Hou uses recurrent theme music from Wu Chu-chu that adds a lyric grace note to this exquisite Proustian meditation that may as well be called In Search of Lost Time.

HHH – A Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hsien

HHH – A PORTRAIT OF HOU HSIAO-HSIEN – made for TV     B    
aka:  Cinéma, de Notre Temps – TV series

France  Taiwan  (91 mi)  1997  d:  Olivier Assayas

France is known for its Cinéma de Notre Temps television interview series of famous directors, where for decades they’ve been following various filmmakers, including the groundbreaking Jacques Rivette interview with legendary French director Jean Renoir, while one of the best ever American interviews is with a young John Cassavetes as he’s filming Faces (1968), an interview that’s included in the Criterion Collection edition of his 5-films.  What’s unique here is that the interviewer is French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, who is obviously as fascinated by what Hou Hsiao-hsien contributed to the Taiwanese New Wave in the 80’s and 90’s, which are still in full swing at the time this film is being made, along with Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, Chen Kuo-fu, and screenwriters Wu Nien-jen, and novelist Chu Tien-wen, where Chu, often interviewed alongside the director, collaborated on all of Hou’s screenplays for over twenty years.  Filmed in the late 1990’s, this serves as a time capsule into the still young life of the Taiwanese director.  At 50 years of age, he’s in fine form throughout, often seen chewing gum and recalling what a recalcitrant child he was, often getting himself into trouble by hanging out with the street gangs, but he matured after entering the army and performing his military service, where he decided he was interested in film, something he attributes to his childhood vantage point spending time in trees, which both stimulated and altered his spatial conception.   After directing a couple of successful comedies starring pop stars, he collaborated with two other directors on THE SANDWICH MAN (1983), generally regarded as the first film of the Taiwanese New Wave, where the intent was to alter the uninspired direction of the nation’s old-fashioned cinema, making it connect more with real life people and their situations.  But it was Hou’s THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI (1983), the only film of Hou to use Western classical music, a remarkable story of the director’s own awkwardly troubled adolescence, where he is searching for a distinctly Chinese way of telling the story, the first to display what has become the traditional Hou style, minimalist dramas with extended long takes and a fixed-camera angle that heightens the sense of real time. 

His next series of films, his coming-of age trilogy, each written by a different screenwriter reflecting an autobiographical segment based upon their own lives, was highly successful, especially the one written by Hou, A TIME TO LIVE, A TIME TO DIE (1985), which Wu Nien-jen is heard calling the greatest Taiwanese film ever made, the story of his family’s move from mainland China to Taiwan, thinking it would only be temporary before they moved back, as his elderly grandmother thought the mainland was just around the corner, where they often went searching for the (non-existent) dead ancestor’s graves.  While a critic at Cahiers du Cinéma, Assayas was one of the first to recognize Hou’s profound talent, meeting him for a Cahiers article in 1984, having a marked influence on his own work, so in this film he follows Hou around various locations in Taiwan, meeting in Taipei before returning to the provincial town of Fengshan where Hou grew up under the nickname Aha, recognizing a few old friends, reminiscing about how they used to be street punks and raise hell on these same streets, causing quite a commotion when he arrives with a French filmmaker’s camera following his every move, becoming something of a cause célèbre.  Assayas remains behind the camera for the most part, though occasionally we see an interpreter in his ear, but the television interview format is to observe and listen to the filmmaker, as Hou shows us the modest teahouse where he writes his screenplays, while also showing  various set locations that he used, including an old abandoned gold mine where the accompanying structures remain largely intact, preserving its original look.  For Hou, who filmed historical dramas, he was looking for sites that maintained their original look, where in outlying rural areas, people still live and dress much the same way as they did 50 years ago.  In something of a surprise, especially considering how lyrical and gently flowing his films are, Hou has something of a swagger to him, where in his youth he wanted to be a pop star before becoming a filmmaker, but developed stage fright onstage, and he also felt he was too short. 

One of the more interesting interviews was with Chen-Kuo-fu, director of THE PERSONALS (1998), but he originally worked as a film critic, and he gives an excellent appraisal of the untapped inspiration and furious energy on display at the dawn of the Taiwanese New Wave era, where everyone often met to share ideas, recalling how they’d all gather at Edward Yang’s home, an old Japanese structure, where they fed off each others rampant enthusiasm, where they all loved what they were doing.  It’s quite apparent he misses those days, that they were the best years of his life, which wonderfully comments upon an era that spawned a rebirth in Taiwanese cinema.  While Assayas doesn’t get into it, Hou remains something of an enigma.  While his films are acclaimed abroad, he has not received an enthusiastic reception at home, where theaters continue to screen primarily American films.  While Hou had a hand in actually shaping the history of his country, coming after the lifting of restrictions in 1987 imposed by martial law, which had remained in effect since 1947, making what are arguably his greatest films, a history trilogy beginning with A City of Sadness (Bei qing cheng shi) (1989), a powerful film that traces Taiwan’s history from the Japanese defeat in World War II through the retreat of the Kuomintang to Taiwan in 1949.  The film had a major impact in Taiwan, as certain previously forbidden subjects were touched upon, very carefully Hou explains, and objectively, not criticizing anyone, followed by The Puppetmaster (Xi meng ren sheng) (1993), that examines life under the Japanese occupation covering the years 1909 to 1945, while the third, Good Men, Good Women (Hao nan hao nu) (1995), covering the period of 1949 to the present, tells the story of a small band of communist intellectuals that travel to mainland China to help fight the Japanese, only to see their leader executed later by his own countrymen.  What was never discussed was the relationship between the mainland Chinese filmmakers and the Taiwanese Chinese, once the doors opened, as these are collectively some of the best and brightest directors working anywhere in the world today, where one is curious how they felt about each other.     

Assayas describes Hou’s personality, “His manner of slipping from grown-up rationality to childish laughter is intact, as is his way of moving between intellectuals and small-time Mafiosi’s in a sort of studied uncertainty, hazy with grass, alcohol, or bin-lan (a plant-based kind of speed).  But here where only instinct matters, theory and philosophy assume a growing importance; and it isn’t simply a matter of a notion about perception—generally interesting only to filmmakers—but also the classical Chinese tradition, with the gravity and intensity peculiar to autodidacts.”  We see some of that personality emerge as he questions a local teahouse proprietor whether the watermelon seeds used for tea are fresh, then proceeds to display a ritualistic method of preparing tea, first pouring it into tiny teacups, then one by one pouring that tea over the teapot, creating a pool of tea underneath that continually gets recycled in this manner.  When Hou lets loose with a few friends in a karaoke house, he’s not kidding, as he takes this endeavor quite seriously, where he happily wails away singing old popular ballads that have a way of unleashing his soul.