50 George Square
Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9JU
UK
Hou Hsiao-hsien is the most important Taiwanese filmmaker and his sensuous, richly nuanced work is at the heart of everything that is vigorous and genuine in contemporary film culture. An heir to the great modernist legacy – with its use of elegantly staged long takes, the performance of many non-actors, and a radically, even vertiginously, elliptical mode of storytelling – Hou’s cinema does place unusual demands on the viewer, but its sophistication is understated and its formal innovations are irreducibly bound up with the sympathetic observation of everyday experience. This presentation will explore Hou’s stylistic development, his treatment of point-of-view, and his unique approach to space and time.
Richard I. Suchenski is the Founder and Director of the Center for Moving Image Arts and Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College. His work focuses on the development of cinematic modernism internationally and on the relationship between film and the other arts. He is the author of Projections of Memory: Romanticism, Modernism, and the Aesthetics of Film (Oxford University Press, 2016), the editor of Hou Hsiao-hsien (Austrian Filmmuseum/Columbia University Press, 2014), and the organizer of the internationally touring retrospective “Also like Life: the Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien.”