The puppeteer Li Tien-lu (1909-1998) was one of Taiwan's official national treasures, and one of the perennial treasures of Hou Hsiao-hsien, who discovered and exploited the old man's acting talents in such films as Dust in the Wind, where he plays the incendiary Grandpa. In The Puppetmaster Hou achieves a masterpiece of storytelling in recreating Li Tien-lu's life, a life set against such tumultuous times as to make art both impossible and essential. Born into the fifty-year occupation by Japan, Li honed the subtleties of his classical puppet craft against the politics of censorship, just as he developed and strengthened as an artist against the everyday pressures of family and poverty that push art into the background. Li as intermittent narrator recounts the kind of personal anecdotes from which Hou naturally builds his films, sumptuous with visual detail and, here, punctuated by stunning sequences of puppet performances. This is history filmed, to quote the moniker of Li's puppet troop, "Also Like Life." (JB)