The film is not only a
journey into the past (the ninth. Century of China) but it is also
for me a kind of travelling back in time. In the late 1980s and the
1990s, Hou hsiao Hsien was among the living my favorite film
director. I remember the screening of Beiqing Chengshi (A City Of Sadness) 1990 at the Berlinale-Forum, the traumatic screening of
Hsimeng Rensheng (The Puppet master) 1993 at the Montreal World
Film festival with the most horrible audience you can imagine for a
film where some shots last up to 6 minutes which didn´t detain me
from giving the most hysteric applause I ever gave to a film during
a festival. I remember also a retrospective of Taiwanese cinema 1996
in a Berlin cinema called Filmkunst 66. The credits of Haonan,
Haonu (Good Men, Good Women) were just rolling and the owner of
the film theater switched the light on. Even though still with tears
in my eyes (because this is for me the most emotional film by Hou) I
shouted at him something like: “Let the light out you idiot!” The
last film by Hou I was enthusiastic about was Kohi Jikou (Cafe
Lumiere) this wonderful homage to Yasujiro Ozu. His Zui Hao de shi
guang (Three Times) left me cold even though the first two
episodes belong to the finest things Hou ever did and this film is an
excellent introduction to the films of Hou Hsiao Hsien. Le Voyage
de Ballon Rouge from 2007 was really the only film by Hou Hsiao
Hsien which disappointed me and it was for 8 years the last long
feature by Hou. Since 2006 my cinephile life turned from a Hou
dominated era to a Malick-dominated era and just recently I saw Nie
Yin Niang, a period film with Martial arts elements, Hou´s most
expensive film with a long and difficult time of production.
Interestingly Hou´s studies on Taiwanese history in his great
trilogy, his autobiographical masterpiece Tong Nien Wang shi
(A Time To Live and time to die) or in Hai Shang Hua (The
Flowers Of Shanghai) went always with a search for his own definition
of cinema and finally with the cultivation of his unique style.
A period film is in fact
nothing which should surprise us if it comes from Hou Hsiao Hsien,
because most of his finest films were period films even though much
less engrossed through time.
What Hsimeng Rensheng
(which begins almost with the the time when cinema was born) already
foreclosed especially with a remarkable lightning of interiors, what
he continued in the second episode of Zui Hao de shi guang, a
silent film leads finally to the lightning in Nie Yin Niang.
In the cinema of the West, we learned from Stanley Kubrick´s Barry
Lyndon and Terrence Malick´s The New World that the light
can be a key to approach a cinematic reconstruction of a far distant
epoch of history and it is astonishing that more than 25 years after
this daring and experiment with light John Ford did with She Wore
A Yellow Ribbon this brave approach was not continued before
Barry Lyndon.
Even though Nie Yin
Niang begins with sequences in Black and White (most of the film
is shot in a format very close to the Academy format excerpt one
single scene appears in the 1,85 Format), the film is first of all an
excellent colour film with Red, Yellow and Gold tones I haven´t seen
for quite a while.
One of the many currents
which can be seen in Hou´s work is the dynamic between people who
are suffering under history but who are also observing and
analyzing what history has made of them. The chronicler in Beiqing
Chengshi, Haonan, Haonu, Nilzohe Nuer (Daughter Of
The Nile) are women, the real puppetmaster Li Tien Lu in Hsimeng
Rensheng appears in documentary moments side by side with Hou´s
staged scenes from the pippeteer´s biography. Annie Shizuka-Inoh in
her double role in Haonan, Haonu plays Chiang Bi-yu, a
resistance fighter against the Japanese who invaded China but also an
actress from the present who prepares herself for playing in a
mysterious film this very Chiang Bi-yu.
Nie Yinniang in Nie Yin
Niang is a full skilled assassin, exiled as a child and trained
by nuns as a martial arts fighter is one of these protagonists in
Hou´s work who suffer under history but who also begins to analyze
it and who finally makes decisions against the direction of her
so-called predestined fate. At the beginning we see her fulfilling
an order to kill a man. There is hardly any expression on the face of
Shu Qi, this actress who worked with Hou Hsiao Hsien since 2001. At
the beginning she appears in a black robe as the perfect killer
machine and there is no sign of any emotion on her face. Much later
when she learns from the nuns more about her history she cries. That
will be the only time when we see an emotional reaction from her.
What she finally thinks and feels, the film offers only very small
hints for that. It is a bit like a historian who knows a lot about
historical events but naturally very few about individual
biographies. Even though Hou prefers extremely long shots, his
narration became since Beiqing Chengshi more and more
fragmental. Often he isolates one scene from the other through slow
fading outs. He stresses the attention of the audience but finally
rewards them with a certain kind of beauty which made him to a
singularity in contemporary Chinese cinema. No reason to panic if you
feel a bit or even very disoriented at the beginning. Piece by piece
a comprehensive understanding will follow. The beauty of this film is
encrypted and you have to do a lot to find your orientation and
finally you realize that it was worth it. Yin
Niang gets a final order, to kill a man she once loved as a
young girl, the reason for this assassination is political and for
fulfilling this order she has to be this functional perfect killer.
First she observes her victim and we, the audience with her. There
are incredible long shots where we see the man she is supposed to
kill behind thin and almost transparent curtains in the diffuse light
of candles and oil lamps. A lot of the scenes, especially when we see
powerful people spin their intrigues take place in closed interiors.
The open air scenes always are like a release from these muggy
interiors.
Like always in Hou´s
films there is an exciting dynamic between movement and statics. The
few but very precise dosed martial art scenes, a well choreographed
dance in the palace or people who are walking through the landscape
and than sometimes extremely slow moments where almost nothing
moves, people who are almost frozen in their movements, landscapes
where you have to look twice to recognize the movement of the water.
Sometimes only the wind which goes through the trees is the only
evidence of movement.
To watch a film by Hou
Hsiao Hsien is very often like watching the elements of which cinema
consists are coming together. We can be sure that Hou like Kubrick
for Barry Lyndon studied a lot of paintings from or about the
epoch the film is dealing with. But it goes far beyond just
reproducing old paintings, it gives for moments the uncanny hint of
visual culture of a far distant time centuries before you could get
an image about nearly everything, if in cinema, television or
Internet. In these films like Nie Yin Niang, Barry Lyndon
and of course The New World, the cinematic apparatus is first
of all an artificial time machine. The time revealed in front of our
eyes might be strange and very engrossed but for some moments and
especially in this strangeness we have a key to an epoch lost in
time.
What we learn about the
protagonists and especially about this female assassin remains
fragmental. Moments of rising empathy will disappear at the end. We
get glimpses of things and people which do not exist anymore.
At the end, Yin Niang
finally decides not to kill the man she once loved and leaves for a
new chapter in her life, the perfect functioning killer who is
discovering her own humanity goes her own way.
As a matter of fact, some
of Hou´s final shots are in themselves pure cinematic masterpieces,
the ending scene of Beiqing Chengshi, Hsimeng Rensheng,
Haonan, Haonu and now in Nie Yin Niang. Hou has an
extraordinary sense how to leave a film, a sense for the transition
of the things he reveals in his films and our reality outside the
screening his films. In Nie Yin Niang we see a group of people
on their departure, including Ying Niang. We hear already a
mesmerizing music and the picture lasts for a small eternity until
the landscape is totally deserted by any person, than the first
credits and finally the and the black of the final credits. appears.
The last moments of a film by Hou Hsiao Hsien are probably some of
the most ceremonially moments cinema has to offer. These moments when
the fiction totally disappears, we are alone with the monstrous
beauty of this film and paradoxically and despite we often like to
categorize Hou as a minimalist these last moments have always an
uncanny impact on me. One thing for sure, Hou Hsiao Hsien is back
with his finest film since Kohi Jikou.
Rüdiger Tomczak