A Study On Hsiao-hsien Hou Movie Narrative

Hsiao-Hsien Hou is the banner in field of Taiwan’s New Film. He was deeply influenced by traditional culture. His objective attitude, which is giving the experience of living and death a cold shoulder in the film-making process, and the long-lens shooting style have affected lots of film makers in Taiwan and around the world. The ups and downs of Hou’s childhood experience and special creative process are key points to his winning award of film works. This paper will make an analysis of the narrative theory in Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s film from the four aspects.The first chapter profoundly analyzed the effect of polyphony theory on music, novel and movie from the polyphonic theory. Combining the narrative structure of Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s film, you could find his film had parallelled narrative space and vivid narrative time. In the narrative space, the polyphonic mark structure of Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s film was strong. Different independent consciousness developed paralleledly and crossingly under the guidance of the narrative strategies such as the parallel narrative method, comparison method and background characters rotation method. On narrative time, story, director, actor and audience interspersed in various different stories, forming jumps and shuttling of time. In the story jumps, the director used scene scheduling means like long shots, Qiyun clip to make the film’s time in the flexible state, causing spiritual dynamic feeling in time and paralleled feeling in space.In the second chapter, from the theme of Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s films, you could find his film focused on three aspects. One is the recollection films; the second is on the sigh of history; the third is related to urban life. The first aspect mainly includes three sides:memories of the childhood naive life, memories of adolescent wild life and beautiful love memories, and memories of the whole life at an old age. The second aspect mainly explained the historical dark and cruel by showing people’s miserable misery life in different history. These films formed "sadness Trilogy" of Hsiao-Hsien Hou which had a great reputation. They were " a city of sadness"," good man"," life". The urban films were mainly reflected in two aspects, which is the urban dream beyond the reality and a series of stories developed by the break of the urban dream.The third chapter profoundly analyzed its film color, sound and other aesthetic elements from Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s narrative words. The color of Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s movie was single and heavy, and had a preference for comfortable color like yellow. It was related with the theme of the movie. The warmness of memories movie, the darkness of historical movies or the falling of urban life, mostly affected the use of the main color used in the film. In the aspect of voice, the character’s language had diverse effect in order to highlight the characters of different levels. While the music was melodious, and lighter sound effects also appeared. In addition, the use of large subtitles and voice-overs in Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s movie was a major feature in its narrative language.The fourth chapter analyzed the positive and negative significance of film combining Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s film structure, theme and language. The effects of Hsiao-Hsien Hou film mainly included three aspects. First, the structure became an independent school, changing the single linear structure of the traditional film and adding exchanging space and aesthetic value to the film. Second, themes had great originality, reflecting the life of common people, closer to the masses, and expandind the audience range. Third, the use of narrative language, especially the methods like the long lens, Qiyun clip, subtitles and voice-overs, formed a style of one’s own image and aesthetic features. These three aspects highlighted Director’s narrative attitude and detached indifferent aesthetic attitude towards death, and formed a unique "Hou’s film", which had a far-reaching effect on the history of Taiwan, Chinese and the world movie. The drawbacks of Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s film mostly concentrated on two aspects. One is the desalt of theme consciousness. Most of the content tended to reflect the common people’s life, which made the content single, and couldn’t satisfy the audience’s diversified aesthetic demand. The prose narrative style, failed to make the film form tense plot, structure, language and spirit to earn the interest of the audience. It still had a distance from commercial movie mode. The other is the use of too long lens narration tactics. Due to the long lens fixing seat shot, the shot and the switching between the less became less, which made the story linking not close enough. Under the condition that the competition of commercial film becomes increasingly intense, audience are eager to watch film with close plots. But the loose plots of Hou’s film is difficult to attract the audience’s interest, resulting the disappointment in the box office.From the above analysis, on the basis of the summary of previous relative theories and studies, this paper attempts to make a systematic explanation of the unique narrative theory and narrative style in Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s film. This paper wishes to represent the historical sense of depth and academic value in paper writing in some extent, thus mapping the Chinese contemporary art film narrative methods with a new direction, new expectations, new spirit, which is also the forefront and innovation point of this paper.