Hou Hsiao-Hsien's two dreams of light and shadows

摘要

In traditional Chinese culture, dreams are often more than a narrative ploy or an extension of the authors' imagination, but instruments for musings on life. This essay is an attempt to study Hou Hsiao-Hsien's aesthetics in The Puppetmaster and Flowers of Shanghai from the perspective of dreams. The former is like a lucid dream where the ageing puppet master is the person in the dream, while Hou the filmmaker is the passer-by who saunters into the dream and puts it down on record. The latter, on the other hand, is an inebriated dream where the plan-sequences are weaved together by black-ins and black-outs as in a dream from which no one wants to wake.