Freer and Sackler Galleries Host First Major Film Retrospective of Hou Hsiao-hsien in More Than a Decade
“Also Like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien,” an internationally touring film retrospective of Taiwanese pioneer filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien (pronounced “Ho Sheow She-en”), one of the most influential filmmakers to emerge during the past three decades, will come to the Washington area Nov. 2‒Dec. 21. With screenings at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art, the series features 15 of Hou’s richly textured works, including such widely acclaimed films as Flowers of Shanghai (1998), A City of Sadness (1989), Dust in the Wind (1986) and Flight of the Red Balloon (2007).
“Hou Hsiao-hsien is without a doubt one of the world’s greatest directors,” said Tom Vick, curator of film at the Freer and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. “With the demise of 35 mm film projection, it has become much harder to see films of masters like Hou the way they were meant to be seen. This retrospective is a rare chance to watch an incredible career unfold over almost 30 years.”
Hou is considered the leader of Taiwanese New Wave Cinema, a group of directors who emerged in the 1980s creating socially conscious films about Taiwanese history and identity. His richly textured films are marked by elegantly staged long takes, a humanist touch and an elliptical approach to storytelling.
Hou’s importance to Taiwanese cinema is unparalleled, and his influence on contemporary filmmakers is wide-ranging; it can be seen in the films of Olivier Assayas, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Hou’s compatriot Tsai Ming-liang and Jim Jarmusch, among many others. Hou’s films reveal an innovative relationship between realism and modernism, and offer audiences a rare sense of optimism for the future of the medium of film itself.
“Also Like Life” was organized by Richard Suchenski, director of the Center for Moving Image Arts at Bard College, in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of China (Taiwan). The retrospective arrives in conjunction with the publication of the new monograph Hou Hsiao-hsien (2014, Austrian Museum of the Moving Image Filmmuseum and Columbia University Press), edited by Suchenski and featuring essays by scholars and filmmakers, including Olivier Assayas, Peggy Chiao, James Quandt, Jia Zhangke, Kent Jones, Hirokazu Kore-eda and Jean Ma. On Dec. 6 and 7, Suchenski will introduce screenings and sign books at the National Gallery of Art and the Freer Gallery, respectively.
About the Filmmaker
Hou’s 1989 film A City of Sadness was a watershed for both Hou’s career and for Taiwanese cinema: the first Taiwanese film to depict the volatile period of transition after Japanese colonial rule. Inspired in part by The Godfather, this intimate family saga follows the fortunes of three brothers—the eldest, a gangster; the middle son, a translator; the youngest, a photographer—as they navigate the shifting political tides. The film’s formal audacity—the flashbacks, the emphasis on the quotidian, long takes with in-depth staging, the evocative use of sound—was critically acclaimed; it was the first Chinese-language film to win the prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival, and it struck a chord at home where audiences flocked to see it, breaking box office records.
A City of Sadness, together with The Puppetmaster (1993), a hybrid film that looks at the life of performer Li Tien-lu (declared a “national treasure” in Taiwan and who frequently appeared in Hou’s films), and Good Men, Good Women (1995; presented in a new 35 mm print), formed Hou’s historical trilogy and established him as the foremost recorder of his nation’s troubled past. Rather than subscribing to a grand historical narrative, he favored the perspective of individuals and families as history unfolded around them. His friend and admirer Chinese director Zhangke called Hou “the genius narrator passing down the memories of a nation through films.”
Hou, born in 1947 in Guangdong, China, used his own life as the son of displaced mainland Chinese parents living in Taiwan as a ripe source of material for his films. Together with like-minded artists, including the filmmakers Edward and Wu Nien-jen and writer Chu Tien-wen (a longtime collaborator of Hou’s), this cohort formed the basis of the first wave of the New Taiwanese Cinema, which blossomed in the 1980s. Drawing from their own experiences, they examined the lives of regular people, often from rural places, as they adapted to a rapidly urbanizing Taiwan. The experience of coming-of-age for this generation is captured in Hou’s trilogy of A Summer at Grandpa’s (1984), A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985) and Dust in the Wind (1986).
The series also includes Hou’s earliest feature films. A trio of light, romantic tales starring the Hong Kong pop icon Kenny Bee: Cute Girl (1980), Cheerful Wind (1981)—both also featuring Taiwanese pop star Feng Fei-fei, when the two stars were at the height of their fame—and The Green, Green Grass of Home (1982). These films mark the emergence of Hou’s stylistic signature, especially his thematic focus on movements between rural and urban spaces. A more significant work, The Boys from Fengkuei (1983) follows three young men who leave their fishing village for the city as they await being called up for compulsory military service; one of his most emotionally direct works, it has been compared to Fellini’s I Vitelloni.
Another rarely shown film, Daughter of the Nile (1987), centering on a young fast-food worker who listens to pop music and reads Japanese manga, shares the cool detachment and focus on disaffected youth in cities that appear in Hou’s more recent films, such as Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996) and the techno-infused Millennium Mambo (2001) (his first to open theatrically in the United States). Three Times, released in 2005, tells three love stories, set in 1911, 1966 and 2005, each with the same actors, the luminous Shu Qi and the charismatic Chang Chen, playing the lovers. Hou’s celebrated Café Lumière (2003) is a Tokyo-set ode to Yasujiro Ozu, while his most recent film, Flight of the Red Balloon (2007), set in Paris and starring Juliette Binoche, is a tribute to Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 classic The Red Balloon.
Schedule
Sunday, Nov. 2; 1 p.m.
Meyer Auditorium, Freer Gallery of Art
The story of a country boy’s lost love is “a heartbreaking film of profound humanity, the high point of an enormously gifted director in mid-career” (Evans Chan).
Sunday, Nov. 2; 3:30 p.m.
The Green, Green Grass of Home
Meyer Auditorium, Freer Gallery of Art
Hong Kong crooner Kenny Bee plays an idealistic teacher assigned to a rural village in this film, a romantic comedy that defies expectations of the genre.
Sunday, Nov. 9; 1 p.m.
Meyer Auditorium, Freer Gallery of Art
Three bored teenagers find trouble and women when they move from the small island of Fengkuei to bustling Kaohsiung.
Sunday, Nov. 9; 3:30 p.m.
Meyer Auditorium, Freer Gallery of Art
Two city kids spend a summer in the countryside while their mother is hospitalized in the film that marked Hou’s arrival on the world-cinema stage.
Saturday, Nov. 15; 12:15 p.m.
Thursday, Nov. 20; 6:45 p.m.
A Time to Live and A Time to Die
AFI Silver Theatre
Out of his own childhood, Hou weaves a picture of a moment in time. “A spectacular triumph without anything of the ‘spectacular’ about it” (Derek Malcolm).
Sunday, Nov. 16; 2 p.m.
Meyer Auditorium, Freer Gallery of Art
A young woman and her brother float along the periphery of the Taipei underworld in this intriguing blend of gangster tale and introspective drama. Preceded by the documentary Hou Hsiao-hsien: About Myself.
Friday, Nov. 21; 7 p.m.
Meyer Auditorium, Freer Gallery of Art
Three eras, two lead roles, and one eternal love: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s romantic work moves across the history of Taiwan—and the arc of his career.
Saturday, Nov. 22; 11:45 a.m.
Monday, Nov. 24; 9 p.m.
AFI Silver Theatre
Hou pays tribute to Yasujiro Ozu in this meditative look at life and love in contemporary Tokyo, starring Tadanobu Asano. “The plot is spare, but the sounds, images, and ambience are indelible” (Jonathan Rosenbaum).
Sunday, Nov. 23; 11:45 a.m.
Tuesday, Nov. 25; 9:30 p.m.
AFI Silver Theatre
Hou experimental remake of the French children’s classic. Starring Juliette Binoche and the City of Light.
Thursday, Dec. 4; 6:30 p.m.
Goethe-Institut
A family lives through Taiwan’s independence from Japan, and later political crackdown. Hong Kong superstar Tony Leung stars in “one of the supreme masterworks of contemporary cinema” (Jonathan Rosenbaum).
Saturday, Dec. 6; 2 p.m.
Cute Girl followed by Cheerful Wind
Goethe-Institut
In person: Introduction by Richard Suchenski, director of the Center for Moving Image Arts at Bard College and editor of Hou Hsiao-hsien.
Hong Kong singer Kenny Bee and Taiwanese pop diva Feng Fei-fei star in these two rarely seen early Hou films.
Sunday, Dec. 7; 2 p.m.
Meyer Auditorium, Freer Gallery of Art
In person: Introduction and book-signing by Suchenski.
Hou masterfully recreates the life of puppeteer Li Tien-lu (1909–1998), one of Taiwan’s official national treasures.
Friday, Dec. 12; 7 p.m.
Meyer Auditorium, Freer Gallery of Art
Kao, his protégé Flathead, and their girlfriends try to get rich quick, but they are too confused—or too human—to be proper “gangsters.”
Saturday, Dec. 13; 2 p.m.
Goethe-Institut
Hou views Cold War repression in Taiwan through a present-day scrim. “A rigorous work of art whose mysteries are worth unraveling” (Caryn James).
Sunday, Dec. 14; 2 p.m.
Meyer Auditorium, Freer Gallery of Art
Tony Leung stars in Hou’s quietly sumptuous tale of brothel life in 19th-century Shanghai. New 35 mm print courtesy Center for Moving Image Arts.
Sunday, Dec. 21; 2 p.m.
Meyer Auditorium, Freer Gallery of Art
The glamorous Shu Qi pouts her way through neon nightclubs in this hypnotic look at Taipei’s youth.
About Film at the Freer and Sackler Galleries
For more than 15 years, the Freer Gallery’s film program has provided Washington, D.C., audiences with a broad selection of the most critically acclaimed films from Asia. In addition to annual events such as the Iranian and Hong Kong Film Festivals, the museums present retrospectives of particularly noteworthy actors and directors, and series focusing on the cinemas of various Asian nations and regions.
The program is helmed by Tom Vick, an expert in Asian cinema and curator of film at the Freer and Sackler. Vick holds a bachelor’s degree in literature from Purchase College in Purchase, N.Y., and a master’s degree in film/video from California Institute of the Arts. Before coming to the Smithsonian, Vick was the coordinator of film programs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He is a consultant for the International Film Festival Rotterdam and has served on the juries of the Korean Film Festival in Los Angeles, the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal and Filmfest DC. Vick has contributed essays to World Cinema Directory: Japan, Film Festival Yearbook, Asian Geographic and other publications. His book, Asian Cinema: A Field Guide (2008), provides an insightful overview of the dynamic world of Asian cinema, and he is currently working on a book about Japanese filmmaker Seijun Suzuki.
The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, located at 1050 Independence Avenue S.W., and the adjacent Freer Gallery of Art, located at 12th Street and Independence Avenue S.W., are on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. every day (closed Dec. 25), and admission is free. The galleries are located near the Smithsonian Metrorail station on the Blue and Orange lines. For more information about the Freer and Sackler galleries and their exhibitions, programs and other public events, visit asia.si.edu or follow twitter.com/freersackler or facebook.com/freersackler. For general Smithsonian information, call (202) 633-1000.
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