Based upon the story of his own family’s relocation from mainland China to Taiwan, Hou’s most openly autobiographical film is also his first to embrace the kind of formal rigor that will define his best known mature work. A Time to Live and a Time to Die makes clear Hou’s debt to Ozu in its use of the architectural space of the modest family home to define the stated rules and violated hierarchies that the young Hou rebelled against. At the same time the film’s use of counterpointal music and an abrupt voiceover, spoken by Hou himself, signals the detached narration which gives A Time to Live and a Time to Die an abstracted, sculptural quality deliberately at odds with the film’s understated performances and minor stories—offering a subtle statement about the strange ways history monumentalizes the past. Yet, despite the film’s seeming detached matter-of-factness about time, death and loss (stated so bluntly in the title and in a clinical close-up of a blood stained tatami mat), the distance described by Hou’s controlled camera and detached narration is an emotional and metaphysical distance—the space of memory and regret.