The crystal of everyday life: the ethics of witness in Hou Hsiao-hsien's films
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Cai, Xiao
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Abstract
This dissertation explores the aesthetic and ethical ways in which history and daily life are filmically represented and witnessed in Taiwanese director, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s movies. From the era of the Japanese Occupation to the White Horror and then to the lifting of martial law, I show how Hou Hsiao-hsien uses visual media to evoke the rhythms of daily life through the emotional memory of the characters and communities he explores. In particular, I focus on the ways in which he seeks to reflect the strong dilemmas of identity and the traumatic emotions about the witness to history. To this end, this dissertation interrogates the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien to ask: “What means are available to a film director to both explore, and incorporate, historical events and observations into a film?”, “How does the camera work in the telling of such historical events?” “What is the role of film in illuminating the grounds of truth - telling at any moment the contemporary ethics of particular histories?” “How does film represent historical trauma and the personal memories that go with that trauma?”
To answer these questions, with respect to the work of the film-maker, Hou Hsia-hsien, I present some of the formal practices that he uses, in the way he questions and represents history and daily life, in his films, in order to demonstrate both historical responsibility, in general, and a reliable ‘ethics of witness’ in particular. I argue that in better understanding Hou’s films we need to move beyond an analysis which is dominated by a critical theory which prioritises simply imaginative vision, to a theoretical understanding of film which seeks to question how individual experience in feature films is related to history and collective memory. I argue that Hou’s films go beyond an imagination which uses history and memory as a backdrop, to being powerful interventions, deconstructing the power and authority of the “voice-over” of “official” history. As such, Hou’s films do not simply record past memories, they become part of the overall “ethics of witness” of history here and now. And they do so through Hou’s very distinctive development of a filmic poetics of time, space, memory and the ordinary in order to enable the rethinking and re-presenting of history within popular culture.
Key Words: Everyday Life, Representation, Memory, Time, Space, Trauma, History, Ethics of Witness, Poetics.