Research On Hou Xiaoxian 's Film Sound

As one of the leaders of “Taiwan’s New Film Movement” in the eighties of the last century, Hou Hsiao-hsien has been among the world-class master of cinema in the last thirty years with “The Boys from Fengkuei”(1983), “City of Sadness”(1989),“The Puppetmaster”(1993),“The Assassin”(2015) and some other films. And as a typical Film author, Hou Hsiao-hsien has created one kind of unique image style by using long shoot, depth of field lens, fixed seats and other documentary shooting techniques, which not only reveals a shooting tradition of the western realistic films, but also raises a special oriental poetic temperament with a strong performance in Taiwan local awareness and national cultural heritage in the content of his films. In addition to highly stylized images, the sound creation in Hou’s films also has a number of unique artistic ideas, such as: the language selections among Hakka, Hokkien, Mandarin, Shanghai dialect, Cantonese, the Suzhou dialect and even Japanese; the artistic processing of the “voice-over”;the valuation of the environmental sound and the grasp of certain sound elements(such as natural sound, the sound of traffic and media sound, etc.); the persistence of using simultaneous recording technology; the selections of the traditional dramas and pop music, and the formalization of music editing, etc. His film sound art is mainly characterized by two aesthetic tendencies, the senses of “reality” and“poetry”.It can be said that the sound in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films also plays an indelible role for the formation of its overall image style the same as the director’s film language.The study objects of this article includes Hou Hsiao-hsien’s fifteen films,ranging from “The Boys from Fengkuei”(1983) to “The Assassin”(2015). There are mainly five parts discussing the sound of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films: the first part of this article outlines the background, significance, literature analysis, content and study methods of this research; the second part aims to summarize the sound elements and their specific content in Hou’s films by using the concept of human voice, sound effect and music; the third part explores the aesthetic tendency ofHou Hsiao-hsien’s film sound; the fourth attempts to analyze the internal and external factors that influences the artistic creation of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film sound; the last part is trying to make a horizontal comparison between Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film sound and the sound of the other directors’ film which has a similar artistic taste with Hou’s films, and to display the value and fascination of the artistic creation of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film sound.