Dear Fredrik,
Thank you for the
heart-warming first post! You were the first and only person that came to my
mind when I thought of doing an epistolary film blog, and I was very happy to
find your response the same enthusiastic. I am sure a lot of green tea would be
drunk and I am looking forward to seeing where our shared journey on the web
would take us.
Goodbye South, Goodbye
(1996) is an opportune choice, not only because I, to some extent, said goodbye
to the south. More interestingly, it can open up a discussion on “our favourite
Hou”. I don't think we actually talked much about Hou back in our St Andrews
years. While waiting to see if Hou's first martial art film, The Assassin (2014),
would actually become my favourite Hou, for the time being I am including the
Taiwan Trilogy (1989-1995), Flowers of Shanghai (1998) and Three
Times (2005) in my shortlist (maybe not that short after all). I do like Goodbye
South, Goodbye, but for me this film, along with Hou's other attempts on
capturing the Zeitgeist of my generation, like Daughter of the Nile
(1987) and Millennium Mambo
not as profound and timeless as his gaze towards the past. Without getting into
a discussion on Deleuzian Time-images, I find that Hou's depiction of memories
and historical trajectories is of a much broader scope and touches upon
helplessness of human existence to such a level that makes me deeply sad but
lucid during every single viewing. One does not need to be familiar with the
geopolitical context of the island in order to see the beauty of irrevocably
turbulent past shared by individuals who simply drift along. Yet I never quite
get the same sensation from Hou's view of the contemporary. One might think
that there is definitely something global in decadent young life under neon streets
lights, but I
somehow doubt that this is conveyed at all in Zhu Tianwen's script, as much as
I admire all her writings; I find that Hou's films about the present are often
characterised by repetitive and twisted dialogues, and actors' extradiegetic
public images often override their presence on screen. This chain of thoughts
also leads me to question how we deal with our own present artistically. How
remote do we have to be from ourselves in order to acquire certain lucidity? Is
that why we are so obsessed with cinematic rendering of different versions of
apocalypse, as we cannot look at ourselves straight into the eyes? Here are my initial
thoughts. Happy Easter holidays!
Yun-hua
