A Poetic Vision in the Flowing History. Hou Hsiao-hsien's Oriental Culture

In 1989, Hou Hsiao-hsien went to Europe with his new work "City of sadness” and surprisingly won the highest honor of Venice Film Festival that year. The film, which had a distinctive Taiwanese memory, made the director began to be recognized by audiences and critics from all over the world. At the same time, this film pushed Taiwan's new film movement to the best age.  As a director, what are the qualities of Hou Hsiao-hsien, and what are the reasons for the formation of these qualities, they are the fundamental questions of this study.   The article is divided into two chapters. The first chapter is divided into three parts. In the first part, the brief history of Taiwanese films is reframed. The thesis will start from the 40s to 80s before the Taiwanese New Film Movement. Because of the complexity and variability of Taiwan's history, politics and economy, film once became an instrument. In the early 1980s, as the government weakened its control over the culture, new filmmakers influenced by the Western "politique des auteurs" began to call for creation for true art. The creators began to seek their own expression with their feelings and memories of the time and space of this lonely island, so the new film movement started.   The second part of the first chapter, the focus will return to director Hou Hsiao-hsien himself, who is a late Taiwanese immigrant, which has a certain impact on his creation, so the article will sort out his growing experience. Finally, there will be a brief introduction to the several films mainly discussed in this thesis, as well as the current research status of the director in the East and the West.   The second chapter of the thesis goes back to the films. The first part mainly discusses Hou's skills as a director. He is good at using his own cinematographic language to recreate the time and space of history on the screen. The thesis will mainly talk about the preferred skills of the director, such as long takes, scene shots, the setting of out-of-lens space, the montage…And the director has determined his own style after many attempts.    In the second part, the focus of the thesis will come to the narrative. Hou Hsiao-hsien carefully designed the narrative angle, focus and structure. Compared with the contemporaneous mainland and Hong Kong directors, Hou paid less attention to dramatic and story, it’s a kind of deliberate downplaying. His stories always started from Insignificant roles, but revealing the whole picture of an age. At the same time, the thesis will also explore the director's own experience and how his own ideology affects the historical narrative of the film.   The third chapter of the thesis mainly focuses on aesthetics. In this thesis, Hou Hsiao-Hsien's film aesthetics is summed up as “orientality". First of all, the article will make a definition of this word, and use details from different films to explain what “orientality" is. Then the thesis turns the focus to Hou himself to explore what influenced the director and shaped his own orientality, and to find the origins from the perspective of literature, classical poetry, painting, and philosophy. The article will analyze how the director's favorite author Shen Congwen, and the structure of ancient poetry influenced the narrative of the film, how Chinese shanshui painting helped him compose the frames, and the influence of Confucianism and Taoism in the story.