With its radical admixture of documentary and fiction The Puppetmaster announced an important new direction in Hou’s brilliant and career-long struggle to chronicle modern Taiwanese history through the distorting lenses of individual and collective memory. Towards this goal Hou cast famed octogenarian puppeteer Li Tien-lu (seen earlier as an actor in Dust in the Wind) as the star and narrator of his own story—with Hou’s film following and often gently contradicting Li’s meandering telling of life in Taiwan during the long period under Japanese colonial rule. Intercutting between sequence of Li the storyteller often looking directly at the camera, and Hou’s own restaging of Li’s story, The Puppetmaster beautifully meditates on the limits of cinema to capture the texture and voice of individual as opposed to official history.