This article comes from the WeChat public account: Film Information Office (ID: dianyingqingbaochu) , author: Martin, title figure from: IC photo
April 8th is Hou Xiaoxian ’s 73rd birthday.
Hou Xiaoxian couldn’t get around the whole Chinese movie. In the best Chinese film director voting competition held by Hupu a few days ago, the phenomenon that Hou Xiaoxian lags behind his opponent Ning Hao has also caused considerable controversy among the fan community. Of course, each director has its own meaning and status in the history of film, and it is difficult to compete.
As a representative of Taiwan ’s New Wave, Hou Hsiao-hsin ’s lens language is plain and subtle, but he has vigorously tore a hole in Taiwanese films and promoted the arrival of the new film era . But just as he relied on his rebellious childhood experience in interviews, he did not show a deep love for movies during his youth.
So that he even laughed at himself: If I did n’t do the movie, it must be a hooligan, but not a hooligan in the true sense, but a knight who is quite chivalrous and chivalrous like in martial arts novels. It can be seen that even as an ordinary person, Hou Xiaoxian will still maintain his own romantic nature. The transformation from “rogue” to the master of the movie highlights his legendary life.
“Childhood Past” stills
Later, Hou Hsiao-hsien put his childhood family experience on the screen, shot the classic “Childhood Past”, and also filmed “Winter and Winter Holidays” and “Love in the Wind” and other works, and also in Yang Dechang’s “The Plum Blossoms and Horses” starred in the actor. What really made Hou Xiaoxian famous and was given the title of “Master” was the “City of Sadness” filmed in 1989.
The film is based on the sensational “Twenty-eighth Incident” in Taiwan in 1947, and it describes the encounters and lives of the four Lin family brothers. It can be found that that year was also the year Hou Xiaoxian was born and came to Taiwan. In fact, the Taiwan authorities have been sensitive to the incident all the time, but Hou Hsiao-hsien boldly launched it, using ordinary merchant families to reproduce the cruelty and tragedy of the year.
Since its release, “The City of Sorrow” has caused a huge stir in society, winning the Golden Lion Award at the Venice International Film Festival, the Best Director and Best Actor in the Taiwan Golden Horse Awards and other awards. Since then, he has successively filmed two films “Dream of Life” and “Good Boys and Women”, which together with “The City of Sadness” are known as the “Trilogy of Sadness”. Master status of Chinese film history.
Still Life of the City of Sadness
In 2015, Hou Xiaoxian changed his focus on the local perspective and shot the first martial arts movie “Assassin Nie Yinniang”. Of course, this is not difficult to understand. After all, in his youth, in addition to watching movies, martial arts novels were also his good intentions. At that time, he read almost all the novels on the roadside stalls.
The relationship with “Nie Yinniang” was in college, and the martial arts sentiment has always impressed him. Later, Hou Hsiao-hsien won the Cannes International Film Festival, the Taiwan Film Golden Horse Award, and the Asian Film Awards with this film.’S best director, and also won the best drama film at the Golden Horse Awards. It is worth mentioning that this movie is also Hou Xiaoxian’s first film released in the Mainland.
“Assassin Nie Yinniang” stills
But overall, Taiwanese local movies are still the main subject of Hou Xiaoxian’s creation. From a visual angle, a very realistic life presentation, a plain and deep meaning style, plus a variety of iconic preferences such as empty lenses, long shots, voice-overs, and subtitles, constructs his own “Hou style”.
Industry ups and downs, help the “new wave”
From the initially inconspicuous “street boy” to today’s film master, Hou Xiaoxian’s contribution to the film industry is not only in the film creation itself, but also in the significance of his promotion of the entire Taiwan film history.
Hou Xiaoxian’s initial entry into the industry in the 1970s was a turbulent moment in Taiwan.
Because of difficulties in domestic and foreign affairs, Taiwan ’s filming goodbye to the golden age of the 1960s also began to fall. Looking back on the entire 1970s, kung fu martial arts movies were very popular, and the love movies represented by “Qiong Yao Films” also became mainstream in the market. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s early commercial trilogy-“It’s She Who Was”, “Feng’er Kicks and Stomps”, “Green Grass on the Riverside” has many shadows of “Qiong Yaofeng”
Into the eighties,