The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Culture, Style, Voice, and Motion by Christopher Lupke (review)

Hou Hsiao-hsien emerged in the early 1980s as one of the leading filmmakers of New Taiwan Cinema. Known for his distinctive meditative style of filmmaking and his nuanced portrayal of the Taiwanese experience, Hou has been widely recognized as one of the most important filmmakers alive. Christopher Lupke’s fascinating new book, The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Culture, Style, Voice, and Motion, is a thoughtful and intriguing study of Hou and his cinematic oeuvre that seeks to elucidate the complicated, multilayered, and discursive ways in which Hou’s films engage with issues of national identity, personal memories, and social-political history, as well as literary and cultural traditions.

Opening the book with an overview of Hou’s work, Lupke traces the various phases of Hou’s directorial “odyssey,” from his early experience in commercial film production, his plunge into cinematic high art through (auto)biographical films, and his political turn with the “Taiwan Historical Trilogy,” to his more recent efforts to expand the filmic world beyond Taiwan in space and time through linguistic experimentation or literary adaptation. Apart from the comprehensive and insightful discussions of Hou’s career trajectory, which will certainly be a useful guide for scholars and students alike, this opening chapter also rightly situates Hou in a “linguistically and culturally contested terrain” (3), arguing that Hou’s own “marginal historical situation” (6), his diverse linguistic background and interest in cinematic multilingualism, and ultimately his focused concern with national and cultural identity all contribute to the contested nature of his films. In order to fully explore the artistic and thematic sophistication of Hou’s films, as well as their linguistic and cultural complexity, Lupke uses four key words—culture, style, voice, and motion, as indicated in the subtitle of the book—as interpretive elements for his study. In the subsequent chapters, through critical engagement with existing scholarship and rigorous close readings of a wide range of Hou’s films, Lupke successfully achieves the goal set out at the beginning of the book, that is, to offer new insights into Hou’s cinematic work by investigating carefully and thoroughly “the issues of Hou’s cultural milieu, the style he has constructed over the decades, the way he uses voice, and his attention to and way of presenting motion” (3).

In Chapter 2, “Zhu Tianwen and the Sotto Voce of Gendered Expression in Summer at Grandpa’s,” Lupke carefully discusses the formative stage of Hou’s cinematic art and explores the ways in which the literary voices of Shen Congwen and Zhu Tianwen find expression in his films, adding a new dimension to the understanding of Hou as an auteur filmmaker. As Lupke demonstrates, the dispassionate voice Shen used in writing his autobiography and his constructed “interstitial identity” likely helped Hou establish his own observational style and develop his early interest in filming the vanishing pastoral life in the face of the rapidly modernizing urban space. Using Summer at Grandpa’s (1984) as the focus of his inquiry, Lupke further contends that while scholars have already discerned the “gendered” aspect of Hou’s films in terms of the representation of women on screen, it is of particular importance to see that the very act of artistic creation itself is also gendered. As the scriptwriter, Zhu is skilled at “moving back and forth not merely between male and female characters but between experiences and viewpoints that are gender specific” (70–71), so that the female voice, though only a muted presence in the film, is capable of disrupting the dominant male voice, just like the sotto voce in music, whose dramatic power lies precisely in its intentional lowering of the sound.

Critics and scholars have frequently compared Hou Hsiao-hsien to Ozu Yasujiro, one of the most renowned filmmakers in Japanese cinema. In contrast to the frequently used framework of comparison that places the emphasis primarily on style, which Lupke considers orientalist in its obsession...