As if seated in the back row of a theater, at the borderline of a phenomenon and the tangible concrete, one is bestowed the mobility to enter or leave; still, we remain, tempted by a channel that opens to the chatter from the last century, nearly within reach. The stage hazes over through the attentive gaze from afar, and hence, a new reality it comes to be.
Enveloped in the mists of a fatalistic fable from the East, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsian’s cinema is a reality and yet not a reality—more accurately, it is life’s rich tapestry, interlaced with the unsettlement of unknowing and the appeal to lean in but withdraw. These human experiences inhabit each of his panoramic frames, but with so much distance in between, how can the subtlety of condition be pinpointed? Without the rapid change of scenes, the captivating sound effects, or the hyperbolized close-ups and camera movements, Hou’s work—devoid of the intention to entertain through spectacle—reenacts the mundane and the ordinary, uncovering the oblivion and nostalgia that reside beneath the conscious.
Unlike a documentary that captures reality, Hou rebuilds a purified sense of reality, in which he neither shoots a story nor illustrates an idea, but films bodies that have trouble living, returning, reasoning, and communicating. The seeming contradiction in such language—the detached perspective on action evoking refined emotional responses—holds the key to the permanence of his work.
First emerging in The Boys from Fengkuei (1983), Hou’s trademarks of long-distance shots and reserved use of cinematic devices underpin his artistic expression. The story follows three laddish, coming-of-age boys from the small town of Fengkuei as they move to the city of Kaohsiung to seek opportunities for livelihood. The director grasps the precise poignancy of Taiwanese rural population transitioning into an urban space, unraveling their inability to adapt and position themselves amid the overturn of traditional values and Gemeinschaft.
In contrast to Hou’s early commercial work, The Boys from Fengkuei is orchestrated by the principle of restraint in cinematic motion and narrative obscurity, maintained through the mise-en-scène elements of long-distance shots and a lingering camera. Facilitated by these directorial devices, this essay thereby ponders on Hou’s narrative ambiguity and cinematic realism, in which individual free will fails to intervene in the momentum of life and the arrow of time.
Remarked by Adrian Martin, “In the films of Hou [...], we are constantly confronted, during our first viewing, with the question: ‘What’s happening?’”. This state of disorientation, experienced by both the characters and the spectators, permeates The Boys from Fengkuei, of which the sentiment is embodied by the lingering camera that preserves the entrance and exit of characters in a single take. The unabridged liminal movements restore the sense of realism and our shared perception of time. Exemplified in the sequence where the main character, Ah-ching, goes home for lunch, the camera remains static in space, framing the bodies moving in and out of one temporal location without immediate cuts or movements. Once an action has been completed—the character exits the frame—the lingering camera positions the audience in the same immobile and passive stance as the characters. Hou thematizes the difficulties of seeing, given that each of us is framed by our finite existence, signified by our inaccessibility to peek at the action off-screen, the beholder relives the actuality of life by enduring the same mundanity in the characters’ lives.
Said by Hou himself, “realism is not about reconstructing an event but reconstructing an experience from one’s own perception.” Therefore, the choice not to track the character, not to disclose the action by its entirety, creates a narrative silence, pointing up a world beyond the shot. The obscurity derived from the director’s withholding of information establishes Hou’s realism, for the camera does not extend its scope of coverage beyond the point of view, mimicking the realistic state of unknowing—the incapability to transcend the bounds of time and space.
This spatial finitude of perspective is constantly reminded in Fengkuei, shown in moments when Hsing-hui, whom Ah-ching secretly admires, closes her bedroom door and the audience, through the affectionate eyes of Ah-ching, is excluded from probing more; Hao-hao, Hsing-hui’s boyfriend, leaves through the gate just after Ah-ching said to him: “It’s dangerous outside; don’t go out,” yet the viewer is not granted the mobility to follow his departure and see what is dangerous while the camera lingers on.
Hence, the not-knowing and uncertainty of what might befall in the narrative prompts an act of waiting, waiting for the next action to unfold, for the characters to re-enter the frame. It leaves the audience with no choice but lingering in the same moment, thus aligning the temporality of the narrative with reality. The clock of the film is recalibrated, as pieces of human experience are stretched until the fabric of the narrative loosens under the weight of time. Verisimilitude comes to light in the created art, for time is reframed as a lived moment rather than a series of fragments.
While lingering shots gesture at the narrative core of the liminality of human existence, the employment of wide shots further captures a state of oblivion, aimlessness, and unknowing of the individual against the immortal eyes of history on the arrow of time.
Here, the mise-en-scène element of long-distance shots evinces the narrative silence, where “Hou discloses a surprisingly wide range of feelings in what might seem a detached perspective on the action [...].” Thus, it is not true that Hou de-dramatizes through the distance; rather, it is the distance that extends humanity to its fullest, in which emotion is not erased but purified.”
Presented by the fight sequence after Ah-rong’s dishonest gamble, for example, when drama arises, Hou does not expand on it; but through his nonjudgemental gaze, he uses wide shots to document the physical violence and the ridicule of the fracas. By positioning the camera at the other end of the alley, the constraint of dramatization places the audience to a semi-objective position, where the interspace between the viewer and the viewed diminishes the adrenaline of a brawl, and it furthers the spectator to embody the passers-by in the background of the scene, where the audience’s gaze coincides with the glimpses from the crowd. As off-screen space extends, the ambiguity of events thus provokes an instability in the viewer, for one can only infer the action off screen from the diegetic sounds, deprived of the access to be entertained and participate. A reality of our unknowing, fixed by our perspective relative to the space and time, is enacted via the material boundary of the camera and the periphery of our optics. It then completes a shared human landscape of the ordinary life, meanwhile indicating the absurdity of dramatization itself.
By stepping back, the sentiment in the frame remains unshaped by the narrative, allowing the witness to feel authentically, as they would in real-life circumstances. Without any manipulation of sensation, Hou displays life in its rawness. As much as the audience experiences disorientation, the characters, without the metaphysical framing of the camera within its narrative, are challenged by the same level of aimlessness and instability.
This authorial treatment on drama in the narrative is epitomized by the flashback of Ah-ching’s father’s injury, which is implied to be a profound trauma of the protagonist. In Ah-ching’s memory of the episode, the father collapses to the ground in anguish, the camera, embodying Ah-ching’s point of view, records the incident behind the crude net on the field, horizontal to the human eye level but refusing to approach the scene. The physical block in frame that separates the father and the witness suggests an inner dissonance, for the intensity of emotion ebbs away as time passes and the past crystallizes. The net, as a symbol of the border, perfectly parallels with the medium of art—in this context, the screen, the Fourth Wall of film. Therefore, this episodic memory of Ah-ching is invoked by his viewing of a film, which validates the duality of actuality and the subconscious.
A deeper dual interrelation, uncloaked by the barrier of the net, ties back to the inaccessibility of the truth and the human failure to attain our past in its wholeness. So, the detachment from the immediacy of drama incorporates the uncanny qualities of human memories, where time manifests itself as the past. Given the distance of the camera, faces are barely discernible, and there are only bodies existing in frame. Referred to as centrifugal, Hou’s practice greatly opposes the centering of action and spectacle,8 destabilizing the image and underlining the futility of human attempt at omniscience by recollecting the past as a materialization of the immortal time. Hence, when Ah-ching repeats the karma by injuring a man’s forehead in the brawl, and the man, again, turns away from the camera that frames him at the same horizon and approximate distance apart like in the framing of the scene of the father’s injury, time unfolds itself in the overlap of the past and the present, suggesting the futility of mankind to discern time for transcendence and resolve the narrative silence that exists in between our reality and subconscious.
The artistic choice of long-distance shot does not intend to detach and neutralize the complexity of humanity, yet it means to externalize the presentation of time that is not subordinate to action and not fully assimilable within rational coordinates of time and space. Without varnishing the narrative, an alignment of emotion for the event on screen and in reality is reached. Though an existential vanity follows, for the audience’s desire to sympathize as a way to transcend the confines of time and space proves futile, because the unreachable, irreconcilable distance between the subject and the object renders emotional resonance misplaced. One is saddened, not by the surface event itself, but by the inability to intervene and the absence of an outlet to perform feelings as an exalted token of humanity. From then on, emotions are not induced by the drama; they become truly spontaneous, as we live through our own reality via the characters and grieve over the shared human condition that exceeds the spectacle.
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