Anna Billing (1849 - 1927)

Othmar Brioschi (1854 - 1912) 

Wright Barker (1864 - 1941) 

happy together (1997) and millennium mambo (2001) are similar stories about people locked in volatile relationships. we watch them wrestle in cycles over and over again until eventually suddenly they are free (represented on screen by literal travel, characters being cleansed in water and snow, respectively)

when i think of the way human beings process consciousness, it’s much more in line with the way i think wong tells that story. the movie’s not linear; it’s sort of almost circular. then when we think about the things we’re feeling, we often tie them not to what is happening to us right now, but to something either in the past, or to something we’re anticipating happening. i think that movie [in the mood for love] does an amazing job of translating what that feels like. –barry jenkins on wong kar-wai

i’m here at cannes at the moment, and a phrase i keep hearing is “beyond cinema.” hou hsiao-hsien is beyond cinema. i mean that not in the sense that his formalism is antiquated or de rigueur, but more to accentuate the synesthetic quality of his work. his craft is as evocative as any of the more brawny stylists we revere as auteurs, but the effect it arrives at is much more delicate, elusive by nature. –barry jenkins on hou hsiao-hsien

Goodbye South, Goodbye 南國再見,南國 (1996, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)

The literal title of the film in Chinese is “South Country Goodbye, South Country,” an inversion of the English title in more ways than one. Hou says this represents how Taiwan in the past always belonged to someone else, called China’s or Japan’s “South Country.” Only now does Taiwan have a modicum of independence. However, even now many in Taiwan cannot quite accept Taiwan’s situation. Thus they often aspire to leave, only to find they cannot, and are stuck in their own internal contradictions as a result. This commentary elucidates the final scene of the film: after being adrift the entire time, after failing at every turn to find their financial ticket to the “greener pastures” of China, they suddenly crash on a desolate field at the crack of dawn, somewhere in the middle of the “South Country.”

James Udden, No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien

A lot of my childhood friends ended up being murdered or turning into drug addicts. Earlier [Chu] T’ien-wen talked about her experience growing up and how after the breakup of her magazine, the contributors all went in different directions. Well, I’m talking about lower-class kids who had a completely different experience—they also came to a point where they went in different directions, but the paths open to them were all so narrow. There were really no opportunities. Besides me, there was only one other guy my age who went on to college after high school. The rest of them were lucky to get through high school; a lot of them only had an elementary school education. They had no choice but to follow the reality of their environment—in the end, so many of them fell victim to drug overdose or ended up being killed. Gradually their condition worsened as Taiwan’s reality changed. So this interest in so-called “gangster culture” is really nothing more than a crystallization of my own personal experience.

Another recurring theme in several of your films is “on the road” sequences. […] Are these purely visual devices or is there a larger allegorical meaning behind this incessant movement?

It is a longing for the world outside. Living in a small space like Zhongshan, where I grew up, you can’t help but long for what’s on the other side of the sky. When I was young, transportation wasn’t very well developed, so we would have to take the train to get out of Zhongshan. We would travel all around the island, from north to south, east to west. My feeling is that people are always longing for a different life that lies outside of what they are familiar with. This outward longing actually holds true not only for the individual but for Taiwan as well. Whether it be economics or what have you, Taiwan has always been forced to look outward because of its dense population and limited local resources. Living in a small, closed space, it is only natural to look to the outside in order to develop. This longing for the outside seems to have almost unconsciously worked its way into my films as these road sequences.