Also Like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien

An indispensable figure of Taiwan's national cinema and artistic culture, Hou Hsiao-hsien's contribution to the expressive range of contemporary, international cinema positions him as a decisive and timeless voice for the medium itself.  This incredible fact should not be taken for granted.  The national cinema culture from which Hou emerged, hedged in by foreign competition, scant resources and a resort to genre tropes, did not outwardly promise an auteur of such importance.  But Hou made a virtue of necessity, experimenting his way toward an economical and deeply expressive stylistic virtuosity that became a clarion voice of the New Taiwanese Cinema of the 1980s, defined by more personal, socially engaged and stylistically searching cinematic statements.  It may seem ironic that a filmmaker so intensely Taiwanese, engaging specific questions of national identity and destiny, might prove so resonant an artistic voice on the world stage.  Though attentive to Taiwan's ethnic tensions, its fraught and tangled histories of occupation, martial law and its dizzying economic development, his perspective nonetheless features a marvelously attenuated aesthetic distance, characterized most recognizably as a matter of long takes and improvisation.  But the stylist is also a philosopher, attentive to the margins and fringes of his own dramatic space, open to the possibility of human entropy, and sensitive to history's pall, which he evokes with a rueful and unblinking sadness.  It is with great pleasure that the Archive presents this retrospective and appreciation of his art.