Hou Hsiao-hsien And The Shape Of What Remains

I went down a rabbit hole on an aimless Saturday—the kind of afternoon that slips through your fingers before you can accuse it of waste. While half-scrolling through Instagram, neither fully present nor fully absent, a set of stills stopped me cold: a woman on a scooter; a washed-out road; men suspended in that peculiar deadlock between hustle and drift. The frames were from Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996). I had not thought about Hou Hsiao-hsien in over 15 years.

I looked up his name and found the news I had somehow missed when it broke in 2023: Hou’s family had announced his retirement due to dementia. Reports at the time said he would no longer direct, bringing to a close one of the great careers in Taiwanese and world cinema. There was a sharp pang in my chest, and it had less to do with a fan’s grief than with a more private terror. My father has been disappearing by increments, memory loosening its bolts one by one, and the thought of Hou in that condition reached me through him. I found myself imagining the mind as one of those toy structures in stop-motion animations, dismantled brick by brick while you are forced to watch. I wondered, absurdly and painfully, whether Hou might forget the worlds he had made. Whether the man who gave cinema some of its most exquisite meditations on memory and time would lose his own grip on the shapes he had left behind. I wanted to return to the films that had once undone me most completely. I also wanted to know what was waiting there for me, all these years later.

The first time I encountered Hou, I was 22 and at Hyderabad Central University. One of the small luxuries of that life was the hostel’s unlimited LAN connection. It was not the first time I had fast internet, but it was the first time I had something more dangerous with it: time. After years of moving through classes like clockwork, I had entered a research degree and suddenly found myself with long, unstructured hours that were supposed to be spent reading, thinking, and becoming intellectual in some serious way.

It was in that atmosphere that I found Hou’s films. Or perhaps it is truer to say, I found them and did not quite know what to do with them. His films felt like the sort of art-house seriousness one suspects other people of pretending to understand. There were moments, on those first watches, when I wondered whether this was all a bit bogus, whether difficulty itself had become a mark of prestige in the worlds where people praised directors like him. But the men and women in his movies were gorgeous, the cinematography was superb, and something in the emotional temperature of the films lingered on after I had shut the laptop. So I watched it again. Each time, I noticed something I had missed before: a gesture in the corner of the frame, a transition, a hand on a table, the moral weather of a room. I got pulled in stitch by stitch. I remember being moved and shattered at once, as if someone had cut my heart out and laid its contours on the screen. 

Those questions from my Saturday afternoon internet search, sentimental and impossible as they were, sent me back to the historical trilogy that runs from A City of Sadness (1989) to The Puppetmaster (1993) to Good Men, Good Women (1995)—the three films that critics and retrospectives have long treated as a commanding sequence in Hou’s career, each taking a different formal route into Taiwan’s 20^th century history.

In A City of Sadness, history appears as a fracture within the Lin family.  It was the first Taiwanese film to win the Golden Lion at Venice and remains central to how Taiwanese cinema confronted the February 28 Incident and the White Terror. It shows how political catastrophe enters family life without ever becoming fully speakable. It reshapes what can be said aloud, leaving some people mute, others unreachable, others suspended inside grief and memory.

Hou never arranges the brothers into a neat political allegory. Wen-heung is practical, forceful, and embedded in local masculine worlds of power. Wen-leung returns from war already shattered—a man within whom history has passed through so brutally that he no longer seems fully present to himself. Wen-ching, the deaf photographer at the film’s emotional centre, could easily have been reduced to a symbol of voicelessness, but Hou refuses that. He is gentle and vulnerable without being sanctified. His deafness is never mere metaphor, and for that reason it is devastating: he moves through a world where speech circulates as rumour, threat and exclusion. Beside him is Hinomi, whose diaries and watchfulness become a tender counter-archive to public violence. She is not a heroine of testimony, only someone who loves, records, waits and survives. State terror here produces no monumental figures—only broken families, interrupted futures, and lives permanently altered. That is why the film still feels painfully contemporary.

If A City of Sadness shows history entering family life as fear and fracture, The Puppetmaster complicates the question further by refusing the fantasy that testimony gives us transparent access to the past. The film works through the life of the puppeteer Li Tien-lu, but it does so by mixing recollection, performance, narration and dramatisation, until memory itself starts to feel like a staged but necessary bridge to history.

Li Tien-lu, playing himself, is never presented as a pure witness. He is a witness, performer, craftsman, survivor and narrator all at once. He recounts the Japanese colonial era with a composure that is almost disarming. Hou makes us aware that memory itself has form, that recollection is shaped by craft, by time, by survivorship, by what can be borne and what can be said. The younger Li in the dramatised passages is equally complex. He is neither a resistance icon nor a passive victim. He improvises, accommodates, manoeuvres and persists. Hou’s seriousness lies here—he is drawn to people who live by compromise, without being fully defined by it.

Then there is Good Men, Good Women, which remains the most devastating of the three because it turns historical memory into a problem of embodiment and inheritance. Hou crosscuts between the wartime story of Chiang Bi-yu and the contemporary life of the actress Liang Ching, who plays her, while also layering in diaries, faxes, recent grief, criminal drift and a damaged present.

On the surface, the film seems to braid two narratives: one follows a troubled contemporary actress being harassed after the killing of her gangster lover, while the other traces the life of the communist woman she is cast to play in a period biopic set across the 1940s and 1950s. But with Hou, narrative summary is almost beside the point. The film does not yield itself through plot, so much as through the temporal dislocation, and the uneasy traffic between past and present, which is why it can feel elusive on a first viewing and often on later ones too.

Chiang Bi-yu is not presented as a simple icon of revolutionary virtue. She is committed, brave and politically clear-eyed, but Hou does not mistake conviction for transparency. He shows her instead as a woman forced into choices that tear through intimate life—separation, danger, dislocation, the loss of her child, the execution of Hao-Tung, the private cost of living inside history rather than outside it.

Liang Ching, the actress who plays her, is no mere fallen modern counterpart. She is haunted, erratic, numb and exposed by turns, moving through a present made of debris: stolen diary pages, the unresolved death of Ah-wei, drugs, performance, fatigue and self-loss. She cannot fully inhabit Chiang’s history, but she cannot escape its pressure either. In that sense, she becomes a vessel for both personal and political histories returning to the present. Ah-wei, too, matters more than a background tragedy. Like many Hou men, he belongs to a world of drift and doomed masculinity. Through them, the film refuses any easy contrast between the heroic past and a degraded present.

This feels like one of the defining conditions of contemporary life. We live among exhausted inheritances. Older political languages survive as slogans and memorial gestures, but rarely as living moral horizons. In their place, we have drift and the pressure to perform certainty, while privately feeling none. Social media makes the present hypervisible and strangely unreal. Hou’s trilogy resists this, insisting that history is not consumed in fragments but carried through lived experience.

That is why the characters matter so much. Hou is interested less in heroes than in those caught in the spokes of history. Wen-ching and Hinomi, Li Tien-lu, Chiang Bi-yu, Liang Ching, Ah-wei—none of them is granted the dignity of simplification. They are not moral lessons, but people in whom history settles unevenly. They hesitate, endure, misrecognise, persist, compromise, love and lose. That is the scale at which politics becomes life and memory becomes something more burdened than remembrance.

This may be why my father returns here and Hou’s illness too. What sent me back to these films was not only historical curiosity, but a sharper question about how the past is carried at all: in a nation, in a body, in a mind—and what happens when that carrying begins to fail.

Watching the trilogy, I found myself thinking that Hou had always understood memory as unstable and compromised, not a sacred vault waiting to be opened but a form of afterlife that distorts even as it preserves. A nation can misremember itself and a movement can lose hold of its language. A person can live inside several incompatible versions of the past at once. Memory is never whole and identity is far more contingent than we like to imagine.

That may be why the films hit me so hard at 22, before I could possibly have said any of this. In those Hyderabad years, my life swung wildly between intoxicated hope and creeping collapse. One day the world seemed open, the next I felt hemmed in by structures that were harming me and calling it education. The solitude of that realisation was difficult to bear.

Returning to the trilogy now, with my father somewhere in my thoughts, I realised Hou’s films had done more than accompany a passing phase of my life. They had shaped the way I came to make sense of it. They taught me that life is often unreadable from within and that some of the deepest recognitions do not come from closeness at all, but from a distance that somehow still reaches us.

I do not know what remains available to Hou now, which of his own images still rise before him, which sounds, rooms, or faces still hold. But the films endure, carrying a kind of memory that exceeds the life of the person who made them.