Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:00 

November 2, 2014. The Harvard Film Archive screened Flowers of Shanghai. This is the introduction by HFA programmer David Pendleton and scholar June Yip.

David Pendleton  0:14 

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this afternoon's screening of Flowers of Shanghai by Hou Hsiao-hsien. I'm David Pendleton of the Harvard Film Archive. And it's a pleasure to welcome all of you on this chilly afternoon to this beautiful film introduced by a special guest. Just a couple of announcements. As always, we ask that you please turn off any device that you have on your person that might make any noise or shed any light. If you need to send a text, or check your texts in the middle, the lobby's right nearby.

This is, sadly, the last screening in our Hou Hsiao-hsien retrospective. We have one screening tomorrow night that's sort of a pendant to the program, if you will. It's a film from mainland China from a few years ago, Springtime in a Small Town, by Tian Zhuangzhuang, a remake of a classic Chinese melodrama. And we had hoped to have the cinematographer of that film, Mark Lee Ping Bin, present, since he's shot most of Hou Hsiao-hsien's recent work, including the film you're about to see. Unfortunately, he won't be with us. We will be showing the film, however. Flowers of Shanghai dates from 1998. It inaugurates what we might call a sort of a transnational period in Hou's work, coming after the aptly named Goodbye South, Goodbye from a couple of years earlier. After which, the five subsequent films that Hou has completed to date, they've all been set either entirely or partially abroad. And so tonight's is the first of those. Here to say a few words of introduction about the film itself, we're very pleased to welcome scholar and writer June Yip. June has written a book called Envisioning Taiwan that I think is really the most helpful book that I found in English, and the most insightful, on talking about the Taiwanese New Wave, and particularly Hou Hsaio-hsien's early and mid-period work, and putting them in the relationship of the rapid economic developments in Taiwan during this period, political changes in the 1970s and 80s, as well as what was going on with Taiwanese literature at the time, which was very important for the Taiwanese New Wave filmmakers. It was years ago, we were teaching assistants for a class together at UCLA when I saw Dust in the Wind, which was the first Hou Hsaio-hsien film that I had ever seen. And it certainly opened up a new world for me. And fortunately, I had, I had June to help, to help me put the film in a certain context, even back then. Now you can share her insights through the book. And here to talk a little bit about Flowers of Shanghai, please welcome June Yip!

3:08 

[APPLAUSE]

June Yip  3:15 

Thanks so much. It's a special treat to be here, because it was 30 years ago, I was a senior here in the college. And it's in this very building that I took my first film class, and was inspired to take up cinema studies for my graduate work. So I feel really happy to be back here, and to be able to talk about what I love, which is cinema. So as David mentioned, when this film was released in 1998, it marked for Hou Hsaio-hsien a significant departure from his previous work, because by then he had already established his reputation as a chronicler of Taiwanese history and of ordinary Taiwanese life. So this was his first historical costume drama, and the first film to be set entirely outside of Taiwan. So the film, as you will see, is set in the high-class brothels of the late Qing Dynasty in Shanghai. And it focuses on the romantic intrigues and the daily interactions between primarily four of these flower girls, their Madams, and also the wealthy gentleman callers, who while away their hours there drinking, gambling, and smoking opium. Hou Hsiao-hsien actually based the movie on a novel by a late Qing novelist who, whose work was actually translated into Mandarin by Zhang Ailing, Eileen Chang.

So he said that, he said that he was particularly impressed by this novel because the author had spent his entire life in these brothels and he was able to capture the atmosphere of life as it was lived in these brothels. And that is what he tried to achieve in his movie; is to give the audience a sense of the atmosphere of life in a brothel in the late Qing Dynasty. And I think when you watch the film, you'll see that the gorgeous visuals, and the detailed sets, and the languid pace of the movie really captures that kind of atmosphere.

June Yip  5:18

Now, when the film was released, the critical reception was pretty mixed, because it was an unexpected departure for Hou. And among Chinese critics, the primary question that arose was whether this film was an example of self-orientalizing, which means, basically, the creation and marketing of exotic Chinese imagery that pandered to a Western audience, and was looking for praise from Western critics and success on the international film circuit. It's the kind of accusation that's been leveled at people like Zhang Yimou. And I'm thinking specifically of Raise the Red Lantern, because, you know, it's sort of the same kind of story. And of course, this is a, that's a really complicated question, and not one that we can really deal with easily. But I think it's something that you might want to think about, as you watch the film today.

As far as in America, it was, again, also a really divided opinion. There were some people who lavished the film with rapturous praise, saying that it was sublimely beautiful. It had the--there’s something I particularly liked--”as radiant as Vermeer," which I thought was a really apt description of this particular film. But on the other hand, you had people that said it was just a soap opera with a very thin social overlay, or that it was borderline comatose. That was probably the worst [LAUGHS], the harshest criticism. And I think that is really excessively harsh. It is a very languid film, but I think that's intentional. And I think there's no question, if you've been to Hou Hsaio-hsien's films, you know what the hallmarks of his style are. They're very long takes. They tend to be static shots. There's almost no narrative. There's no shot/countershot. And very little extradiegetic music to kind of guide your emotional response. I would say that this film probably pushes that oblique aesthetic to somewhat of an extreme. There are only 39 shots in the entire film. Each is a single long take, and they are all divided by fade in and fade out to black. So it gives it this feeling of an episodic chamber drama. The camera sits basically in the dimly lit rooms of these brothels. Sometimes you can't tell whose room it is. And it pans and it tilts very slowly, and kind of just wanders the room. The dialogue, for those of you who are Chinese speakers, I think basically goes back and forth between Shanghainese and Cantonese, very difficult to follow. So the film is definitely a challenge. It's going to require deep wells of patience. And you have to be willing to actively engage with the film, and enter his world and explore it. So in short, I would say it's going to be challenging, but you should surrender yourself to its beauty, and enjoy it! Thanks very much.

8:25 

[APPLAUSE]

© Harvard Film Archive

Set in the chic brothels of turn-of-the-19th-century Qing Dynasty, Flowers of Shanghai revolves around a bold Brechtian formal gimmick: every shot equals one scene, and every scene ends with a molasses-like dip to black—calling attention to the viewer’s temporal and cultural distance from the events. A Mizoguchian melodrama in which the malaise of geishadom is a given rather than an end result, the film—which takes place entirely in the kerosene-lit interiors of the flower houses—scrupulously observes daily dramas between clients, courtesans and their managers in a viscous succession of scene fragments, each shot a moving oil painting willed to life out of darkness. At the center is Tony Leung’s Shakespearean anti-hero whose tragic narrative of lovesick self-absorption and opium ingestion crawls along lugubriously to Yoshihiro Hanno and Du-Che Tu’s dirge-like score. Atmospherically palpable even as it emanates a spectral glow, Hou’s vision of the past reflects back obliquely on the qualities that define his contemporary work: people hopelessly detached from a larger context while engaging in meaningless games of chance and quibbling endlessly over monetary exchanges.