Since Taiwan's Hou Hsiao-hsien (b. 1947) came on the scene in the early eighties, he has been moving film festival audiences and dazzling critics with a body of work that is at once strikingly modernist and rich in historical insights and humanity. Village Voice critic J. Hoberman went so far as to call Hou "the world's greatest working narrative filmmaker." Nevertheless, following their festival debuts his films are almost impossible to find in theaters. This picture is changing with "An Unfolding Horizon," a mid-career selection of Hou's films.Hou Hsiao-hsien's films may be quintessentially Chinese in a way we wouldn't learn about from the big Red ones (Sorghum, Lantern)-formally distanced, yet unapologetically sentimental, he is known for long still takes, deep-focus shots, and stunning punctuations, for the rich calm of his humor and compassion, the busy quiet of everydayness. Drawing on the framing of Chinese landscape painting and the chaos of Taiwanese history, a student of tradition but schooled in the mean streets of a global culture, his films are immersed in history and family, in medias res: "The growth of an individual, or of a whole nation, often occurs without our noticing," he said. This can be seen equally in an autobiographical film of childhood like A Time to Live and a Time to Die, and in the extraordinary historical trilogy City of Sadness, The Puppetmaster, and Good Men, Good Women.Prints for An Unfolding Horizon are provided by WinStar Cinema, special thanks to Wendy Lidell. 2000
