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Inter-Asia Cultural Studies

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The eloquence of the taciturn: an essay on

Hou Hsiao‐Hsien
Shigehiko Hasumi
Published online: 17 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Shigehiko Hasumi (2008) The eloquence of the taciturn: an essay on Hou Hsiao‐Hsien,
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 9:2, 184-194, DOI: 10.1080/14649370801965562

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 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, 2008

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

Shigehiko HASUMI

Dust in the Wind, a color film set in the verdant mountains of Taiwan, includes two
Taylor and Francis Ltd

ABSTRACT
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 transpor-
tation 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
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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 grand-
mother 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.

KEYWORDS: Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s mise-en-scène, thematic roles of the means of transportation

in Taiwanese New Wave

The arrival of a train
From its very beginning, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s
Dust in the Wind (Lianlian fengchen, 1986)
draws the viewer into what might be called
the archeological rapture of film. The speed-
ing train passing through tunnels and
screeching around the many curves of the
tree-draped tracks cannot help but remind
one of the exhilarating sense of motion in the
film Passage Through a Railway Tunnel at the
Front of a Locomotive (Passage d’un tunnel en
chemin de fer pris de l’avant de la locomotive,
1898) taken by the Lumière brothers at the
end of the nineteenth century. Pressed right
up against the scenery taken by the camera
from the driver’s seat, the viewer can only be
impressed with how one characteristic of
film, hibernating since its earliest days, has
been reawakened in this shot in Hou’s film.
One of the oldest forward-moving shots in
the history of film, the short by the Lumières
is black-and-white, silent, and less than a
minute long. It consists of a single shot taken
from the camera at the head of the locomo-
tive as the train crosses a bridge, passes
through a tunnel, and glides along a gentle
curve up to the platform at the Gare de Saint-
Clair on the outskirts of Lyon. Although this
shot is disappointingly brief, the viewers’
eyes become one with the advancing camera,
and we experience a breathtaking continuity

ISSN 1464–9373 Print/ISSN 1469–8447 Online/08/020184–11 © 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14649370801965562

as we are pulled endlessly through the
constantly changing composition. Viewers
of Dust in the Wind experience a similarly
suspenseful continuity, so much so that one
cannot help muttering, ‘It’s just like the
Lumière Cinématographe.’ And what causes
that muttering is the archeological rapture of
film that fills that opening shot.
This color film by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, set
in the verdant mountains of Taiwan, rever-
berates with the constant screeching of rail-
way wheels against the tracks, something
that was missing from the Lumières’ silent
short. When the train in Dust in the Wind
emerges from the tunnel into the light, the
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scene shifts to the train’s interior to show
a boy and girl of middle-school age – an
effective use of editing, another technique
unknown to the Lumière brothers. While, in
this respect, Hou’s film is technically much
more sophisticated than Passage Through a
Railway Tunnel, the director nevertheless
employs the unidirectionality of the camera
angle and intermittent shaking of the screen
to depict the motion of the train through the
mountains as a single unbroken continuous
event. It is that feeling of continuous motion
that draws together these two films made
nine decades apart.
The young couple in Dust in the Wind,
apparently on their way home from school,
stand in the aisle with their eyes on their
books as they swerve with the motion of the
train. Although the only slight distance
between the two adolescents shows their inti-
macy with each other, they exchange barely
a word. The girl (Hsin Chu-fen), wearing the
white blouse of her school uniform, says
something briefly that suggest she regrets
having failed a mathematics test. The boy
(Wang Ching-wen), in a khaki uniform like
that of the Boy Scouts, replies expression-
lessly that he had explained it to her. That
ends their conversation, and their eyes fall
again to their reading as they stand facing
each other some distance away from the other
passengers. Meanwhile, the train that carries
the boy and girl keeps moving ahead accom-
panied by the constant rhythm of the rails.
The boy and girl get off the train at a
small station and begin walking silently
The eloquence of the taciturn 185
along the track, stepping over the ties. The
only sound heard is their feet crunching on
the gravel. A woman from a shop along the
track asks them to deliver a heavy bag of
white rice to the girl’s mother. Without a
word, the boy heaves the bag onto his back,
and he and the girl continue walking home
together. By this point, the viewer has
begun to understand that this taciturnity,
this silence, that exists between the two
children shows the bonds of friendship and
love between them. Then the boy suddenly
stops, looks ahead, and mutters, ‘It’s a
movie.’ Hearing this, the girl turns her eyes
in the same direction. The shot changes,
and we see in the gathering outdoor dark-
ness a large cloth screen flapping in the
wind. The sound of the wind fluttering that
white rectangle fills the screen, and the
quiet strains of a guitar begin to be heard as
if in celebration of the relationship between
the boy and girl. With the words ‘It’s a
movie,’ the introduction to Dust in the Wind
comes to an end. The time has come to live
the real story.
Although no one could have anticipated
hearing those words from the taciturn boy,
they are deeply reassuring to the viewer.
Perhaps it is the nostalgia that would be
felt by anyone who remembers happening
upon such an outdoor movie screening in
a rural location in East Asia. Or perhaps it
is just the ability of any outstanding film
to transform, as if by magic, unexpected
shocks into naturalness. In any case, the
surprising eloquence of the taciturn boy is
what makes Hou Hsiao-Hsien an auteur
without parallel. Deeply moved by renewed
recognition, ruminating on the voice we
have just heard and the image of the white
screen fluttering in the dark, we are deeply
and miraculously struck by the unremark-
able fact that Dust in the Wind is simply and
unmistakably a film.
The introduction to Dust in the Wind is
not the only similarity between Hou Hsiao-
Hsien’s direction and the very earliest films.
His movie also includes a scene identical to
that legendary work by the Lumière broth-
ers, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (Arrivée d’un
train à La Ciotat, 1897). That scene appears
 186 Shigehiko Hasumi
when the boy goes to the station with his
grandfather (Li Tien-lu) to meet the boy’s
father, who was injured in a mining accident
and has been hospitalized in the city. The
director has not explained in advance that
this scene will show a long-awaited family
reunion. Instead, all we have seen is the
grandfather wordlessly cutting tree branches
in the garden with a hatchet, and all that
reached our ears was the sharp raspy sound
of the blade as it was skillfully used to chop
the wood. Only when we see the grandfather
in his broad white straw hat standing at the
station with the finished crutches do we
understand the situation. The camera is
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located on the platform some distance away
from the people waiting for the train. Beyond
them, the tracks stretch toward the top of the
screen. In Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, the
train is shown arriving at the platform diag-
onally across the screen from the right; in
Dust in the Wind, the arriving train moves
diagonally from the left. While the angle is
opposite, both scenes consist of fixed shots of
the train gradually losing speed and stop-
ping and passengers disembarking, and the
distance and immobility of the camera are
the same.
Here we must not overlook the fact that,
while we might expect the scene of the boy
meeting his father coming home from the
hospital to contain an emotional element,
the camera does not approach the reunited
family or cut into a series of sequential
shots. Instead, Hou directs the scene as one
continuous shot. The only significant detail
here is the grandfather silently handing over
the handmade crutches and the father
awkwardly using them as he begins walk-
ing along the platform. If the viewer misses
that gesture, which is filmed from afar, the
scene looks no different from any other day
at a train station.
This elimination of dramatic elements
through the use of distance, continuity, and
immobility is, of course, an essential and
distinctive element of Hou’s direction.
Perhaps his avoidance of involvement in
events testifies to the East Asian and Chinese
characteristics that form his cultural back-
ground. But it is also true that this distance,
continuity, and immobility – probably with-
out the director even being aware of it –
entice the viewer back to the time when the
medium of film was fresh and new. While it
would not be strange to understand his
distinctive frame composition as East Asian
or Chinese, it is also possible to identify his
originality in Dust in the Wind through the
way his camerawork parallels that of the
Lumière brothers at the dawn of film so
many years earlier. In any case, Hou is a more
legitimate successor to the Cinématographe
than are any contemporary French directors,
even though they are compatriots of the
Lumière brothers. For Hou, even before a
film is a story it is first something that stimu-
lates the viewer through its images and
sounds. As shown by the rectangular screen
and the boy’s ‘It’s a movie’ comment, those
images and sounds, rather than serving the
development of the story, cut off that devel-
opment and fill the work with a strength that
forms its own new context. Only after that
visual and sensual strength softens is the
story gently spun out.
The two shots that we have considered
from Dust in the Wind re-emphasize to the
viewer the importance of vehicles in the
works of Hou Hsiao-Hsien. It is vehicles
that bring distance and motion to the screen
in accordance with the local characteristics
of the work. They also make us understand
that most of the young people who are
passengers on those forms of transportation
are taciturn entities indeed. This does not
mean that they are forbidden from speaking
dialogue; rather, when they give voice-overs
they do so with eloquence. It is the older
people around them, like the boy’s grandfa-
ther, who are talkative, and the children’s
silence thus stands out even more. Here,
I would like to discuss Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s
works through a theme that seems to control
the dramatic elements of his films: railway
trains. This is not, of course, the only suit-
able approach to his works. It would also be
possible to examine the technical aspects of
his films, such as his refraining from the use
of reverse shots or emotional close-ups, thus
minimizing the personal referentiality of the
viewer to the persons and scenery shown in

his films; sequences such as the boy’s eyes,
when he mutters ‘It’s a movie,’ cutting to the
white screen at which he is looking are the
exception. Another interesting approach
would be to examine the meals that appear
in all of his films and to reveal the issues of
isolation and group behavior in his works
from the viewpoint of which people sit at
the table and how they do so. But discussing
all of these subjects would require more
space, so here I would like just to return to
the initial impact I felt when first seeing
Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films and to consider
their appeal through railways and other
forms of transportation.
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The passage of a train
I do not need to point out how often Hou
Hsiao-Hsien has pointed his camera at rail-
ways, from Green, Green Grass of Home (Zai
na hepan qingcao qing, 1982), which begins
with the arrival of a train and ends with a
train’s departure, to Café Lumière (Kohi Jikou,
2004), which concludes with the image of
train after train crossing over steel bridges.
The motion of the passing trains is taken
from many angles – sometimes the camera is
inside the train, sometimes it is next to the
tracks, sometimes it is on the platform – and
each image imparts a distinct rhythm to that
particular film. However, just as in the intro-
duction to Dust in the Wind and in the scene,
in A Summer at Grandpa’s (Dongdong de jiaqi,
1984), of the train carrying a brother and
sister to the village where their grandfather
lives, Hou does more than just insert the
images of moving vehicles into his films. He
also directs his lens at a wide range of rail-
way-related scenes, including the platforms
and ticket gates at the railway stations that
are the scenes for meetings and partings, the
distinctive round clocks of the stations,
the operation of signals as trains approach,
the rising and falling of crossing gates, and,
in the short The Sandwich Man (Erzi de
dawan’ou, 1983), the carefree play of children
in a railway switchyard. But these scenes do
not indicate a special personal attachment
by Hou to railways. In fact, he once told an
interviewer that he often got motion-sick
The eloquence of the taciturn 187
when traveling by train as a child, suggest-
ing that the vibration of trains holds
unpleasant associations for him. But because
of his commitment to spatial composition,
he nevertheless includes trains in many of
his works, and he realizes his directorial
intentions by bringing motion into the
image rather than moving the camera itself
around unnecessarily.
Hou’s films also include trains on which
none of the characters are riding. By rushing
past the film’s characters, those trains
sharpen the dramatic situation. Recall, for
instance, the splendid scene in A Time to
Live, A Time to Die (Tong nien wang shi, 1985)
performed by the boy protagonist and his
grandmother at the sweets stand next to the
train crossing. If Dust in the Wind reflects the
memories of screenwriter Wu Nien-jen, who
was born and raised in Taiwan, then A Time
to Live, A Time to Die tells the story of Hou
Hsiao-Hsien’s own childhood as a Taiwan
resident who was born on the mainland. The
elderly grandmother dotes on her grandson
A Ha, but she continues to wear her tradi-
tional black Chinese clothes, and she causes
problems for her family when she wanders
away from home time and again, declaring
that she is going to return to mainland
China. Once, the grandmother and grand-
son leave together. After a long shot of the
two walking along a main road beneath
huge trees with sagging branches, another
long shot is inserted showing a freight train
passing a crossing by a narrow street of
shops with a low rumble. The third shot
shows the boy and old woman sitting next
to each other at a shop by the train crossing,
sipping sweet ice from cups with spoons,
while behind them pass several more freight
cars. The breeze blows through the brightly
lit, nearly wall-less shop, and the feeling of
motion and the lively rumble of the passing
freight trains seem to shake that open space.
The grandmother utters the address of her
home in China and asks how to get there,
but none of the Taiwan-born women work-
ing in the shop understand the old woman’s
Hakka dialect. During this time, the boy
remains silent, and, as if to come to the
rescue of that awkward conversation, the
 188 Shigehiko Hasumi
director Hou points his camera at the rear of
a freight train as it moves away into the
distance. This long shot is a piercingly literal
representation of the anxious solitude felt by
the old woman exiled from her homeland,
and the viewer cannot help but be moved.
A sublimely heartrending depiction of
the sense of powerlessness of characters
before a passing train is the scene of the
deserted seaside platform in A City of
Sadness (Beiqing chengshi, 1989). An empty
station suddenly appears on the screen
against a backdrop of a promontory stretch-
ing out to sea, and the whistle of a steam
locomotive is heard in the distance. In the
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next shot we see several passing train
carriages and, on the opposite platform,
gazing vacantly at the train which makes no
sign of stopping, the deaf-mute photogra-
pher (Tony Leung) – who has learned that
he will soon be arrested – and his wife (Hsin
Shu-fen) with their small child sitting on
their two suitcases. The young couple do
not look at each other, but just stand
motionless and gaze emptily after the train.
In the following scene, the unforgettable
shot of the family having its picture taken,
we learn from the wife’s voice-over they had
had no place to which to run. Like the shot
of the freight train going through the cross-
ing in A Time to Live, A Time to Die, this scene
of the passing train in A City of Sadness
emphasizes the powerlessness of people in
Taiwan when their small island fell into
turmoil. Like the old woman dreaming of
returning to mainland China, where she had
been born and raised, the photographer
hopes to find a place to hide together with
his family, but the train rushing by shows
clearly the bitter truth that they must aban-
don that hope. Although the train’s failure
to stop stirs up a sense of distance, it also
forces the characters to abandon their depar-
ture to a distant place and propels them into
powerlessness.
The shot of the seaside platform in A
City of Sadness is accompanied by the whistle
of a steam locomotive because the historical
setting is the year 1949, when trains in
Taiwan were still powered by steam. But
Hou Hsiao-Hsien shows this only through
the whistle’s sound. No actual steam trains
appear on the screen, presumably because,
when the scene was filmed in 1989, it would
have been both technically and financially
impractical to bring a steam locomotive of
1949 vintage to that station for a single shot.
The freight train passing the crossing in A
Time to Live, A Time to Die must also have
been pulled by a steam engine, but for the
same reason no such locomotive appears on
the screen. By skillfully editing his shots of
the trains, Hou is able to avoid anachronism.
Both in his autobiographical films, such as
A Time to Live, A Time to Die and Dust in the
Wind, and in his works – beginning with
A City of Sadness – that tell the history of
Taiwan in the twentieth century, Hou is
similarly careful to use sets and props that
suggest the proper era. That is why we often
see black-covered rickshaws in his films.
Such careful historical reconstruction
was unnecessary in Goodbye South, Goodbye
(Nanguo zaijan, nanguo, 1996), which tells the
story of a trip south by two petty gangsters
and their moll, for the setting is contempo-
rary. Like Dust in the Wind, this film also
begins with a train passing through a tunnel,
but the two openings differ in several ways,
of which the director is clearly aware. First of
all, the train’s direction of movement and the
position of the camera are completely oppo-
site. In Goodbye South, Goodbye, the sound of
the train is audible in the background even
when the white titles are still appearing on
the black screen, but the camera, which is
located inside the train car as it emerges from
the tunnel, faces backward and toward the
faces of the passengers, who are in forward-
facing seats. In the center is a gangster-
looking man in sunglasses (Jack Kao), and
standing behind him are his henchman (Lim
Giong) and his girlfriend (Annie Shizuka
Inoh). None of the taciturnity of the boy and
girl in Dust in the Wind is visible in these
outlaws’ faces. The man in sunglasses keeps
glancing to the sides, and he appears restless
as he barks orders into a mobile phone that
seems to have bad reception. Although both
films begin with trains in motion, obviously
their compositional designs are completely
different. The next shot in Goodbye South,

Goodbye also contrasts with that in Dust in the
Wind, for the camera is placed at the end
of the train, capturing on film a flowing
backing shot of a passing train going in the
opposite direction through a station, and
the tracks passing through a narrow street
of shops like the tracks that the middle
school students had walked along in the
earlier film.
But it is more than the difference
between advancing and backing shots that
makes these two films different. Also impor-
tant is the pop-rock music in Goodbye South,
Goodbye that plays in the background,
together with the sound of the train. The
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music was composed by Lim Giong, who
plays one of the gangsters, and the low
melody that he himself is probably singing
brings a contemporary rhythm to the scene.
For viewers who do not recall ever having
heard such seemingly synthesized music in
the films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien before, this
music at the very start of the film creates an
exotic impression. But we soon understand
that this exoticism is inviting the viewers to
the ‘south.’ Like the music reverberating
with a puppet-show gong at the beginning
The Puppetmaster (Ximeng rensheng, 1993),
Hou uses sounds and images at the open-
ings of his films to set the mood decisively.
Goodbye South, Goodbye is not the first
Hou film to use pop music as a background
to images of trains. In Green, Green Grass of
Home, which begins with a blue train carry-
ing schoolchildren emerging from a tunnel,
the main characters Kenny Bee and Jiang
Ling are shown cheerfully singing a duet
about the ‘green, green grass’ from the very
first shot of verdant fields stretching out to
the foothills of distant mountains. Other than
a brief whistle, the sound of the train is nearly
absent. When he made Green, Green Grass of
Home, Hou had apparently not yet perfected
his method for integrating natural sounds
with background music. Nevertheless, that
film, with its episodic depictions of the unex-
pected behavior of boys and girls at an
elementary school, is quintessentially his.
With the insertion of its pop title song at three
points in the film – at the introduction, in the
middle, and again at the end – this film
The eloquence of the taciturn 189
clearly seems to have been designed partly as
a musical that would promote the popularity
of Kenny Bee as a singer, similar to Hou’s
debut film Cute Girls (Jiushi liuliu de ta, 1980),
which also starred the pop singer Feng Fei-
fei, and his second work, Cheerful Wind (Feng
er ti ta cai, 1981). As in almost all Taiwan
films of that period, the screen format was
CinemaScope, and Hou used many tracking
shots, pans, and even zoom transitions in
surprising contrast to his later compositional
techniques of distant, continuous, and immo-
bile shots, which became his signature style
around the time of The Boys from Fengkuei
(Fengkuei-lai-te jen, 1983), his first film with
Chu Tien-wen as screenwriter. But in terms
of how his camera looks at trains, Hou’s
stance in his first three films is consistent.
For example, Cheerful Wind, in which
Feng Fei-fei plays a photographer with a
film crew shooting a commercial, has a very
long shot of a train with blue-painted sides
passing by her feet as she stands atop a tall
house in a seaside town in order to take
pictures from an interesting angle. Although
this shot seems to be only a minor episode, it
contains a significant thematic repetition,
for a nearly identical situation can be seen in
Goodbye South, Goodbye. In the latter film, the
henchman played by Lim Giong is shown
eating rice from a bowl by himself on a roof
at the first place where the gangsters stay
during their trip south. The camera then
pans slightly to show a train, also blue,
stopped below; after loading passengers, the
train moves out of view. This thematic repe-
tition extending across two films makes a
profound impression on the viewer, and in
fact this scene of eating outdoors overlap-
ping, without transition, the scene of the
train is one of the most unforgettable shots
in Goodbye South, Goodbye. Whether Hou
Hsiao-Hsien’s use of the deep blue trains,
both here and in Green, Green Grass of Home,
is intentional on his part or just represents
the reality of trains in Taiwan is unclear, but
that deep blue of the train in Goodbye South,
Goodbye as it suddenly glides into the scene
as seen from the roof is especially conspicu-
ous in the southern light, and it livens up
the film with a sense of motion very similar
 190 Shigehiko Hasumi
to the opening of Dust in the Wind. When
this shot ends, the screen suddenly goes
dark and the sound of the moving train is
heard. The train soon emerges from the
tunnel into the light, and the scene shifts to a
shot from the driver’s seat as it advances
along gentle curves through the deep green
natural setting of the southern lands. What
is interesting now is that the three gangsters,
as they continue their journey south, use
one means of transportation after another.
First they ride motorbikes along unpaved
roads that wind beneath leafy green trees,
and their riding is captured with a long
moving shot that creates a splendid sense of
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motion. But the situation suddenly becomes
more serious when they switch to a car.
The misfortune of automobiles
One is reminded now of the weak presence
of automobiles in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films.
When his camera is pointed at moving cars,
they bring none of the vigor to the screen
that is provided by trains; in most cases, they
are negative elements that contribute noth-
ing to the development of the story. While
cars appear frequently in his first three films,
they become less prominent beginning with
The Boys from Fengkuei, which was Hou’s first
film taken with formalist directorial inten-
tions, and none appear at all until Daughter of
the Nile (Niluohe nuer, 1987), his first film set
in contemporary Taipei. During that same
period, Hou himself starred in Edward
Yang’s Taipei Story (Qingmei zhuma, 1985)
and was shown driving a car through the
streets of Taipei, so the absence of automo-
biles from his own films raises intriguing
questions.
His avoidance of automobiles for nearly
five years made Hou Hsiao-Hsien quite
unusual among the generation of directors
that rose to prominence in the 1980s. We
cannot know why he continued to avoid cars
for nearly another decade, from Daughter of
the Nile to Goodbye South, Goodbye. Perhaps
the confined space inside cars is inappropri-
ate for the distant shots that form the basis
for his compositional design. Another possi-
ble reason is that few of his stories are set in
contemporary cities. His autobiographical
films set in rural Taiwan and his films about
the history of modern Taiwan do frequently
show rickshaws, which are more suitable
vehicles for the elderly than are cars, and, for
his younger characters from the country
struggling to live in the city, the only avail-
able means of transportation is the motor-
bike. Let’s remember who has driven the
cars in Hou’s films so far. In his first three
works, the drivers are all young women,
while in Daughter of the Nile and his later
films about life in the big city, the drivers are
rough-natured men. In each case, the roles
performed by the cars are negative, neither
celebrating the love between a man and a
woman nor offering physical protection
from attack.
In the opening of his debut film, Cute
Girls, the heroine (Feng Fei-fei) is shown
gallantly driving a flashy yellow luxury car
through the lively areas of Taipei and catch-
ing the eye of a young man on a small
motorbike (Kenny Bee). But the car requires
superior skill to drive; her inability to park it
draws a derisive smile from the man, and
she stalks off indignantly. Here, the luxury
car seems to symbolize the rich and the
motorbike the common people, but we later
learn that the situation is not so simple.
While she is the daughter of a wealthy man
and is shown to be a modern woman skill-
fully managing her father’s company and
entertaining overseas visitors, she shies
away from the marriage that her parents
have arranged for her with the scion of a
rich family. She leaves the city, moves in
with an aunt in the countryside, and starts
working as a substitute teacher. After vari-
ous complications, she gets together with
the young man with the motorbike who had
seemed to be her adversary. This plot twist
is reminiscent of the 1930s Hollywood
romantic comedies analyzed by Elizabeth
Kendall in The Runaway Bride (Kendall
1990). But in a typical Hou Hsiao-Hsien
touch, Feng Fei-fei’s expression as she is
rocked leisurely along to her aunt’s home in
a farmer’s cultivator is completely free of
the care and tension she had shown when
driving her fancy car around the city, and

she appears completely at home in that
setting. The slow-moving cultivator is also
her vehicle when she leaves the village. Hou
seems to like its leisurely motion, and he
seems to believe that driving a car could
never help to unite a man and a woman
romantically.
The protagonist of Hou’s next film,
Cheerful Wind, is a blind youth from the
countryside waiting for a cornea operation,
so the car driver is the female photographer
(Feng Fei-fei). The director almost seems to
have chosen this situation in order to avoid
having his male lead drive a car as part of
the story. The woman borrows a car from a
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colleague and begins to capture on film the
life of the blind young man in the city, but
during the shooting the car is towed away
by the police for illegal parking. As a result,
she is late to meet her father at a train
station, and all the car has done is throw her
life into turmoil. This misfortune brought
about by an automobile is even more
pronounced in Hou’s third film, Green,
Green Grass of Home. A young man who has
been assigned as a substitute teacher in a
rural area (Kenny Bee) is suddenly visited
by his girlfriend, who tries to convince him
to return to Taipei immediately. But he has
been seen riding bicycles around with a
female fellow teacher (Jiang Ling), and one
can only worry about his girlfriend’s unex-
pected arrival. The girlfriend, gaudily
dressed in city style with a bright red blouse
and blue slacks, ignores the widespread
concern and succeeds in abducting the
substitute teacher from his outdoor class.
But in the car on the way to the capital, she
realizes that his feelings for her have weak-
ened, so she drops him off in the middle of
the deserted rainy mountains and returns to
Taipei by herself. This scene shows clearly
once again that, for Hou, an automobile
cannot become a setting for love. The only
place for the substitute teacher and his
young colleague to confirm their love for
each other is the train that they both board
at the end of the film.
In Daughter of the Nile, the automobile
appears as an ominous, life-threatening
form of transportation. This is the first film
The eloquence of the taciturn 191
in which Hou Hsiao-Hsien directs his
camera at nighttime scenes of innumerable
headlights moving about through the dark
in a modern metropolis. Like the young
man from the country in Dust in the Wind,
the Taipei-residing heroine of Daughter of the
Nile (Yang Lin) travels by motorbike as she
goes between her part-time job at a fast food
restaurant and her evening high school. Her
mother has just died of an illness, and she
constantly quarrels with her father and
older brother, who seem to have become
involved in some shady business. The
motorbike she rides thus symbolizes not
only the financial pressure felt by her
unhappy family but also the freedom that
she craves. When she goes picnicking at the
shore with a friend of her brother’s whom
she secretly likes, she goes by motorbike as
usual, riding alongside the friend’s car.
When another young man and woman are
shown riding in an open front-wheel-drive
car, they seem to be celebrating a feeling of
transient liberation. This apparent change in
the role of transportation inserted by Hou
Hsiao-Hsien, this facile depiction of youth-
ful frolicking, is of course surprising. But
immediately after they return to Taipei, the
car is attacked by an opposing group, its
front window is broken, and a friend who
tries to intervene is shot. The automobile
thus fulfills its role as an inauspicious means
of transportation. Having fallen into a
forbidden love with his friend’s sister, the
young man can no longer say in Taipei. He
asks the heroine for money and tries to
escape by automobile, but he, too, is shot
just after he gets out of the car. Again it
becomes clear that automobiles offer no
protection to men trying to escape.
This background must be considered
when analyzing the significance of the vari-
ous forms of transportation that appear in
Goodbye South, Goodbye, which, like Dust in
the Wind, begins with a moving train. The
long moving shot of the two gangsters and
their moll zigzagging along a curvy southern
road after switching from train to motorbikes
brings an exhilarating sense of motion previ-
ously unseen in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s works. It
appears to the viewer of this scene that the
 192 Shigehiko Hasumi
southern landscape, awash in dazzling light
and color, is welcoming them warmly. But
when they get in a car and start driving
around the town at night to enact some
trifling revenge, they get caught by the
police, their last remaining desperate chance
for getting money slips out of their hands,
and they lose the chance to escape. Despite
the farewell to the south suggested by the
film’s title, driving the car prevents these
young people from escaping from the south,
and they are captured. The final image in
Goodbye South, Goodbye a long shot of the car
stuck in a green field – is a vivid visualization
of the thematic negativity that automobiles
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possess for Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
Millennium Mambo (Quanxi manbo,
2001) begins in contemporary Taipei, and
its story assumes the misfortune of automo-
biles as already depicted in Daughter of the
Nile and Goodbye South, Goodbye. With its
theme of sexual mores in a large city,
Millennium Mambo is an ambitious work
that, through the setting of a modern urban
nightclub that is a den for gangsters, tells
the same story as Hou’s previous film,
Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua, 1998),
which depicted the conflicts of men and
women in a Shanghai red-light district at
the end of the Qing Dynasty. In the earlier
film, a high-ranking civil servant who is a
regular customer at a high-class brothel in
Shanghai is suddenly transferred away,
while in the later one the Proustian disap-
pearance is of an honorable man who has
accepted the gangster’s code of honor. A
young woman who has been tossed about
by fate (Hsu Chi), unable to bear the selfish-
ness of the man she lives with, runs away
and becomes a hostess at the club. She falls
for a gangster customer (Jack Kao) in whose
presence she feels amazingly calm. In its
transcendence of sex, her relationship with
the man, who invites the emaciated woman
to his home and cooks noodles for her,
resembles that between the heroine of
Daughter of the Nile and her older brother,
who gives her a, presumably stolen, Walk-
man. These relations between men and
women that Hou Hsiao-Hsien chose to
depict around the turn of the millennium
show a new aspect of the theme of the
eloquence of the taciturn. Two people, who
neither embrace nor caress each other nor
speak any sexual words, recognize how
valuable they are to each other, and it
becomes difficult for them to part. The
woman’s innocent pleasure at being rocked
around in the car as the man drives is
shown twice by Hou in backing shots taken
outdoors. But the misfortune of the auto-
mobile as a means of transportation is
unchanged, and their second drive seems
like a parting ceremony for the two, for
soon the gangster disappears from the
woman’s life. The situation is remarkably
similar to that in Daughter of the Nile, in
which the heroine learns of her vanished
brother’s death from a newspaper article.
When, in Millennium Mambo, Hsu Chi
arrives at the man’s room in a small Tokyo
hotel where there is only a slight clue to the
man’s whereabouts, all that is visible is a
constant stream of trains passing back and
forth outside the window by which she
stands. Nothing tells her where he has gone.
All she can grasp for in this foreign city is
the absent shadow of his treasured pres-
ence, but it has vanished into the distance.
Like the photographer and his family stand-
ing on the seaside train platform in A City of
Sadness, like the old woman and her grand-
son sipping sweet ice at the stand next to
the train crossing, the woman is left behind
by the passing trains and can only reach in
vain across the widening, unfathomable
gulf between her and the man. Then
suddenly the forward motion of an automo-
bile driving straight along a snow-covered
road brings the abandoned woman to
Yubari in central Hokkaido. The time rela-
tionship of this episode to the rest of the
film is unclear, but this is where Millennium
Mambo draws to a close, with shots of
snowy scenes and the heroine’s voice-over
recalling the valuable person she has lost
forever. According to the dynamics of trans-
portation in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films, the
woman had already lost that man when she
rode in his car in Taipei and when trains
passed her by soon after she arrived in
Tokyo.

At finally we arrive at the Hou Hsiao-
Hsien of Café Lumière and its depiction of the
railway networks that crisscross Japan’s
capital city. The Tokyo of this film, Hou’s
first foreign work, includes none of the
bustle of government and business in
the downtown areas, none of the city’s
skyscrapers, and none of the neon signs of
the entertainment districts. Hou’s view of
the city is characterized rather by the fact
that his camera ignores completely the
expressways that have been the image
of cities of the future ever since Andrei
Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). Whenever he can,
he avoids putting his young characters in
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automobiles, filling the screen instead with
the motion of trains, something he refrained
from showing on film after his earlier auto-
biographical works. With the background of
trains crossing each other on multiple lines,
he introduces a taciturn couple who recog-
nize the value of each other’s presence.
Here, taciturnity suggests a love that needs
no sexual language. While the man and
woman are older than the middle-school
students in Dust in the Wind, they speak just
as little to each other. This taciturnity is
connected to the unusual hobby of the
young used-bookseller (Tadanobu Asano)
who supports the heroine (Yo Hitoto) in
various ways – he likes to go around record-
ing on-site the sounds of moving trains. Just
as the deaf-mute photographer in A City of
Sadness does not talk with his wife, so too
does this young bookseller never converse
with the woman as long as they are on a
train, for he is always wearing earphones
and holding a recorder in his hand. The
heroine is pregnant with another man’s
child and intends to give birth to the baby
even if she must become an unmarried
mother. She feels calm just to ride trains next
to the bookseller, without speaking, as he
records the train sounds. She stands on plat-
forms with him, sometimes passes him by,
sometimes watches trains together with
him, and sometimes lets herself fall asleep to
the uneven rocking of the trains. The rela-
tionship between this man and woman
clearly repeats the one in Millennium Mambo,
but fortunately there are train tracks
The eloquence of the taciturn 193
running all around the woman and trains
appear wherever the camera points, so she
never has to get into a car with him.
Here, we must not overlook the fact that
none of the trains crossing the screen in Café
Lumière resembles the trains of the Lumière
brothers. No compositions remind us of
their Arrival of a Train, for the train cars that
Hou Hsiao-Hsien captures on film rush by
in no particular direction. The distance,
continuity, and immobility of the camera in
Dust in the Wind have been effortlessly aban-
doned, and the constantly passing trains
seem to have been transformed into some-
thing other than a mode of transportation.
And what about Hou Hsiao-Hsien himself?
Has he changed with Café Lumière? Or is he
still the same? Is he perhaps in the midst of a
decisive transformation? If he has already
changed, does that mean that he has
matured as a director?
All we can say for certain is that the
thematic relationship between man and
woman described in Millennium Mambo
appears more intimately in Café Lumière.
While we must not forget the silence
between the boy and girl as they let them-
selves be rocked back and forth by the train
in the opening of Dust in the Wind, we
should expect from Hou Hsiao-Hsien new
depictions of another dimension of love, one
that transcends sex, in the form of the
eloquence of the taciturn. I suspect that this
director will show us very soon more
couples who establish deeper relations
beyond the medium of sex, but I am unable
to know whether those new stories, too, will
reverberate with the sound of passing
trains.
References
Kendall, Elizabeth (1990) The Runaway Bride: Holly-
wood Romantic Comedy of the 1930s, New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. Borzoi Book.
Author’s biography
Shigehiko HASUMI is Professor Emeritus of the
University of Tokyo, of which he acted as President
(1997–2001). After graduating from the UT in 1958,
 194 Shigehiko Hasumi
he received a Doctorate degree from the University
of Paris in 1965. As a scholar in Film Studies, he has
supervised many outstanding students: Kiyoshi
Kurosawa (Kairo), Shinji Aoyama (Eureka), Makoto
Shinozaki (Unforgotten), Kunitoshi Manda (Unloved)
and Hideo Nakata (Ring). His book-length publica-
tions include Yasujiro Ozu (1983, French translation,
1997), Seijun Suzuki – The Desert under the
Cherry Blossoms (Film Festival Rotterdam, 1991), Il
Cinema di Kato Tai (co-editor, Sadao Yamane,
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Festival Internazionale Cinema Giovani, 1997) and
Mikio Naruse (co-editor, Sadao Yamane, Festival
Internacional de cine San Sebastian, 1998). Some of
his articles are available in English (on Pedro Costa,
John Ford and Howard Hawks), in French (on Ford,
Hawks, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Jean Renoir), in
Italian (on Takeshi Kitano and Clint Eastwood).
Contact address: 1-29-17 Hanegi, Setagaya, Tokyo
156-0042, Japan.