American film scholar James Uden once said that Hou Hsiao-hsien's works are "the most difficult films to please the world in the past three decades". We presuppose a postmodern compromise, that is, art films are kitsch for mass popularity in the name of pleasing a wider audience. And Hou Hsiao-hsien's films seem to resist such compromises by nature, always exploring the boundaries of film in their own way, exploring an oriental film language that opposes Western discourse, from "Childhood Memories" to "Flowers on the Sea", from "Flowers on the Sea" This is the case from "Sad City" to "Dream of Life", and then to "The Assassin Nie Yinniang", which is now an adaptation of Tang Legend.
Carrying the honor of Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival, "Assassin Nie Yinniang" became the first Hou Hsiao-hsien film to be shown in mainland theaters in more than 30 years. However, at the very beginning of its release, it was unacceptable, and a large number of audiences left the stage. The audience is incomprehensible. The same embarrassment also happened in "Sad City", which won the Venice Golden Lion in 1989, but it was difficult for ordinary Taiwanese audiences to accept. Taiwanese film scholar Li Tuo has argued why it is difficult to understand City of Sadness, whose "non-logical editing" deviates from the dominant Hollywood/Western narrative norms and challenges the latter's Western theatrical traditions With realism, it breaks through the viewing/cognitive habits of movie audiences.
Looking back at "Assassin Nie Yinniang", the audience will find that its storyline is much simpler than it seems: a cold-faced killer who was ordered to assassinate an old love, moved with compassion, and looked at each other since then. What creates obstacles for the audience to understand is Hou Hsiao-hsien's subtraction in the narrative. He turns what might lead to a direct narrative into a dense, disordered fabric, so that important content is often defaulted, disappearing into a multitude of "seductive" but irrelevant things, or broken omissions. This tests the curiosity and perception of the audience. They need to find clues in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s looming and delicate images, and connect those seemingly insignificant and irrelevant things (yujue, masks, grinding mirrors) presented in the film, Discover on your own some hidden and ambiguous relationships and laws.
This is very much like a long scroll painting in traditional Chinese painting, which has both a loose storyline and dense object details, both the connotation of literati painting and the meticulous brushwork of court painting. The most important thing is that the way of watching the long scroll paintings and Hou Hsiao-hsien's films has the historical attitude and artistic intuition of Chinese classical culture. Chinese ancients read long scroll paintings, unlike today when the entire painting is hung on the corridor, the picture is unobstructed, and the details can only be seen briefly. The pictures are viewed one by one, and the concept of the so-called "moving viewing" or "moving scene changing" is born from this. This way of viewing implies an Eastern way of thinking, combining and connecting the parts intentionally or unintentionally to deduce the whole (through meditation, meditation, etc.), that is, "foresee the leaves and then the forest"; When there is a forest, you will see the leaves” is the complete opposite. The latter has propositions first, then seeks corroboration, and uses logic (causality, falsifiability) to connect the global and the local. Eastern thinking retains the diversity of the overall situation. The so-called "blind man touches the elephant". Everyone can "perceive" and "understand" the various possibilities of the "elephant" through their own "feeling", while the Western thinking guarantees the uniqueness of the overall situation, which is rude The use of "the minority obeys the majority" and "the exclusivity of high probability" negates many other possibilities.
Hou Hsiao-hsien and "The Assassin Nie Yinniang" are obviously copying/exploring the ancient meaning of the long scroll paintings, using dozens of moving mid-level scenes to create a corner of China in the late Tang Dynasty. Sex clips, like multiple "visual scatters" in a long scroll, see through the classical China he can imagine. The audience's viewing pleasure is no longer the visual stimulus of "passive acceptance" of the director's values, but is replaced by a taste of "actively discovering and creating" the secrets of objective things, those mottled clouds, floating mists, and ridges on hillsides. The lines and scattered roof edges and corners (empty shots) just happened to provide the audience with an imaginary space and margin to sort out the storyline and extend their subjective intentions. Hou Hsiao-hsien reconstructed an Eastern-style montage, which is what French film scholar Fu Dong called "a film style that questioned the systems of Griffith and Eisenstein", with the ambition to reshape the Eastern art view.
In terms of form, "Assassin Nie Yinniang" may be Hou Hsiao-hsien's most distinctive film after "Flowers on the Sea", and in my opinion, it is undoubtedly a masterpiece in the Chinese film industry. The question is, in all these dazzling forms, what exactly is "Assassin Nie Yinniang" talking about, hiding such profound meaning, is "Assassin Nie Yinniang" also a masterpiece in terms of content? Is it the unity of form and spirit?
Before answering this question, I would like to talk about the concept of "literati sentiment". It is still debated when the literati's feelings came into being, but most agree that it originated in the era when Confucianism had not yet become a national ideology (before the Northern Song Dynasty, and the era of "Assassin Nie Yinniang" happened at a critical time node in the late Tang Dynasty), usually It refers to the existence of a fashion among the educated and bureaucratic elites - "spontaneous and leisurely idealism", which carries the Taoist ideological foundation of rule by inaction. The literati paintings produced during the Wei and Jin Dynasties are one of the symbols that reflect the feelings of the literati. The ink and wash landscape paintings he is good at often depict the born hermit, a scene of Taoist paradise. However, such people were a minority after all. Their strength was insignificant at the time, and they often had an insurmountable gap with the mainstream world.
Hou Hsiao-hsien values "Nie Yinniang", precisely because of her "literati feelings" in her bones. The age of Nie Yinniang was in the late Tang Dynasty, her hermit status was destined to be a minority, she was out of step with the mainstream world, she seemed insignificant, like a chess piece that was easily manipulated (Aunt Jia Tao raised her and taught her to fish. ), but at the same time she has a heart of compassion and a sense of justice; she possesses unique skills, and could have gained orthodox recognition (joining the WTO) by assassinating her old love Tian Ji'an, but she chose not to kill because of the "benevolence" in her heart, and has since disarmed herself and returned to the field. Reclusive Jianghu (born). Such a contradictory Nie Yinniang is very much like Hou Hsiao-hsien in reality, and "literary sentiments" are exactly the temperament and coordinates that Hou Hsiao-hsien pursued throughout his life. "Childhood Memories", "Love in the Wind and Dust", "The People from the Wind Cabinet", "Sad City", "Dream of Life", "Goodbye to the South, the South", "Flowers on the Sea", "The Best Time", almost Hou Hsiao-hsien All of his works are related to "literati feelings". In "Assassin Nie Yinniang", Hou Hsiao-hsien used the allusions in Fan Tai's "Luan Bird Poems" in the Southern Dynasties, which is also a metaphor of "literati's feelings". The "self" is not the same kind after all. (Imagine how many people compare Hou Hsiao-hsien to film masters such as Ozu Yasujiro, Mizoguchi Kenji, Yang Dechang, Jia Zhangke, etc. Hou Hsiao-hsien himself is silent about this, and I personally think that Hou's film language is different from all other film directors.)
In my opinion, "Qingluan Dancing Mirror" is the literary eye of the whole film, expressing Hou Hsiao-hsien's "literary feelings". There are two analogies in the film, Princess Jiacheng is to Princess Jiaxin, and Nie Yinniang is to Tian Yuanshi. Princess Jiacheng is like a bird, and her twin sister, Taoist nun Jiaxin, is her mirror image, and Jiaxin seems to have the same "shape" as Jiacheng, but her behavior is opposite everywhere. , while her sister Jiaxin maintained the dominance of the court by "assassinating" dissidents; Nie Yinniang followed in Jiacheng's footsteps, and she was also the bird, and her mirror image was Tian Yuan. After the union of the clans, the position of the Tian Yuan clan was originally supposed to belong to Nie Yinniang, so Nie Yinniang and Tian Yuan clan also had the same "shape" (same "position"). In the film, Hou Hsiao-hsien specially arranged Jingjinger as the incarnation of Tian Yuanshi, the two were combined into one, Nie Yinniang maintained Wei Bo's temporary peace with "not killing" ("ren"), while Tian Yuanshi/Jingjinger However, he pursued his own affairs by "assassination" (seizing the kingship and killing Hu Ji). The decisive battle between Nie Yinniang and Jing Jing'er was really the key for Yin Niang to see the true face of her mirror image. When the mask fell off, Yin Niang finally saw "self", so she chose to go into seclusion and send the mirror-grinding boy back.
The same luan bird, wailing at the same time. This again forms a kind of intertext with Hou Hsiao-hsien and his "Assassin Nie Yinniang": Hou Hsiao-hsien is an anomaly of this era, and he created a film form that confronts this era; Nie Yinniang is an anomaly of that era, and her retreat, It was her confrontation with that era. In every era, someone repeats the sigh that "Luanbirds have no peers after all".
Suddenly I saw Pu Shu's lyrics for "Assassin Nie Yinniang". "Coming back with the old man, being a naive boy". A moment of sadness and joy.
"Hainan Daily"
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