The power that grows in peace

I fell in love with Hou Hsiao-hsien's films later. The first contact with Taiwanese movies turned out to be from Tsai Ming-liang, a non-pure native Taiwanese director. At that time, I watched "Long Live Love", "River", "A Cloud in the Sky" and so on. In Cai Mingliang's films, there are always those fixed scenes in the noisy and cold city, the convenience store on the street corner, the long tunnel crossing the street, the night market with dazzling lights, and people always pass by by mistake, but there is a momentary Eyes made contact, those eyes were always in a trance and blurry, as if in a dream last night, there was a very strong loneliness of insomniacs going downstairs to the convenience store to buy cigarettes in the middle of the night. Thinking about it now, in Cai Mingliang's films, the characters have almost no history, they are flat silhouettes. No one was ever born, no one died, and no one. We can clearly know where they came from before. What they have experienced, being surrounded by huge loneliness in the city, this seems to be their limited destiny. This lack of historical sense may be the projection of the ideology of the industrial age. But in Hou Hsiao-hsien's films, we see birth, old age, sickness and death, succession and transformation, some people are born and some people die; there are those who die in youth, and there are those who are indifferent in old age. Everything happens naturally and disappears naturally. It is irreversible, but it is always changing. Like a tree in the wild growing up naturally, you will see its power condensed in peace. So after the "Nantes Film Festival" Hou Hsiao-hsien was holding that trophy - said to be in the shape of a pumpkin - and being jokingly called "the melon farmer" is truly worthy of the name. Because it is born from the ground, it is naturally intertwined, with the darkness of history and the entanglement of reality. And in the process of growing up, there are joys and sorrows, but the taste is bland but it is always too strong to be dissolved, like pure rice wine, it has enough stamina, but when I drank it, I felt it was okay, faint The sweetness can be eaten. There is great joy and great sorrow, but there is no constant joy and sorrow, no ending, everything is just like this, and there is no reason. In the words of the Buddhist scriptures, it means "as it is."

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