J. Hoberman despre Hou Hsiao-hsien -nybooks/blogs/nyrblog/2014/sep/19/taiwan-master-timekeeper-hou-hsiao-hsien/?insrc=wbll: Hou is a postscript to the cluster of European and Asian directors who defined international cinema during the 1950s and 1960s and whose movies were during the heyday of revival theaters frequently available. On the one hand, he is a great formalist, like Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Bresson; on the other, he brought a hitherto unknown national cinema to international attention, as did Andrzej Wajda with Poland , Akira Kurosawa with Japan, and Satyajit Ray with India. (The only figure who was both was the insufficiently appreciated Hungarian master Miklós Jancsó.) As Hou’s temporal constructions are as sophisticated as those of Alain Resnais or Chris Marker, there is also perhaps a bit of bewilderment in encountering modernist sensibility in an unexpected setting—or rather in discovering an unexpected, self-invented modernism. It was for The Puppetmaster that Hou first developed a startlingly advanced form of montage that has been compared to the movement of clouds drifting across the sky. Narrative coalesces and dissipates; dramas merge and comment on each other, not least from the perspective of fifty years later. At a certain point, every cut comes as a surprise, spanning perhaps a dozen years even as the voiceover loops over and around the scene to knot the story with an invisible thread. Is there another filmmaker who can so fluidly celebrate the moment as well as the epoch, and do so in the same shot?
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 21:21:20 +0000
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