The eloquence of the taciturn: an essay on Hou Hsiao‐Hsien

Abstract

Dust in the Wind, a color film set in the verdant mountains of Taiwan, includes two scenes almost identical to the black‐and‐white and silent films by the Lumières, shot at the end of the nineteenth century: Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat and Passage Through a Railway Tunnel. As Hou’s mise‐en‐scène consists of the fixed camera angle with its long takes, it is the means of transportation that brings motion to the film, controlling dramatic elements of each work. The luxury cars, which appear in his first three romantic comedies, symbolize the rich and the motorbike the common people. The drivers are all young women, but an automobile cannot be a setting for love. In Daughter of the Nile and Goodbye South, Goodbye, the cars offer no protection to men trying to escape. Compared with the thematic negativity that the automobile possess in Hou’s universe, the motion of the passing trains, taken from many angles, offers rich and profound significations. When the camera is inside the train, the protagonists are taciturn, such as the two adolescents in Dust in the Wind who show their intimacy with each other without saying words. When the camera is next to the tracks or on the platform, the situation changes. In A Time to Live, A Time to Die, Hou depicts the grandmother sitting next to her grandson at a shop by the train and sipping sweet ice while behind them passes a freight train that emphasizes the anxious solitude of the old woman exiled from her homeland. A sublime depiction of the sense of powerlessness of both the deaf‐mute photographer and his family before a passing train is the scene on the deserted platform in A City of Sadness. In Café Lumière, the young woman and her friend in the passing train recognize how valuable they are to each other without saying words. This taciturnity suggests a certain kind of love that needs no sexual language.