The style section of our analysis has gone to great lengths to examine the manner in which Hou's direction departs from the codes of classical style (or other major paradigms of film style such as Hong Kong, for that matter). This section attempts to specify why the comparison to Hou and Ozu is dubious at best. While elsewhere we concentrate on aspects of style, it is important to note that there are both industrial and cultural bases for the comparison as well. The nexus for all these concerns seems to be the film critics, who provide a reading protocol that depends on Ozu to measure Hou's difference to the classical. Their desire to pin down Hou dovetails with larger ideological spheres, from neonationalism to orientalism depending upon the regional context.
By the late 1980s, Ozu's position as an "international auteur" and one of history's great film directors had been established through lengthy debates in film journals, books by Richie and Bordwell, and retrospectives throughout Europe, Asia and America. In Japan, Ozu was the New Wave filmmakers' emblem for everything wrong with Japanese cinema. However, in the 1980s his reputation was resurrected, and he swiftly became canonized one of their greatest directors. This was largely due to the articles, lectures, speeches and books of Hasumi Shigehiko, one of Japan's most powerful critics, not to mention the Ozu's newfound recognition abroad. Nearly every year sees new books on Ozu, and the works by Richie and Bordwell have even been translated into Japanese.
Hasumi was also one of the first writers to promote Taiwanese film in the early days of the Taiwan New Cinema. Hasumi was careful to avoid comparisons of Hou and Ozu, but other critics and audiences certainly were not. The connection helped pave the way for Hou's popularity, and by the time City of Sadness was released, all of Hou's previous films had been successfully distributed in Japan in theaters and on tape and disk. The theatrical releases included long runs in Tokyo's finest theaters, where one often found standing-room only crowds day and night. Hou was even hired by a corporation to make a television commercial for Japanese TV; the commercial used all of the iconography of Hou's films --- trains, train tracks, laundry, long shots and long takes --- and certainly helped promote the release of several of Hou's films in Tokyo. One can compare the mise-en-scene of his Japanese commercial and his feature films in the Dust in the Wind poster at the top of this page and the following still from the tv commercial:
The fact that Hou's popularity would culminate in the direction of a television commercial --- which would in turn be processed through a variety of media as news or promotion for his films --- is emblematic of a shift in the discursive space of Heisei Japan. Since the end of the 1980s, Japanese have turned their attention away from the West, and America in particular, and "rediscovered" Asia. Some critics have spoken of a shift from a "sen" (line) to a "men" (surface) mentality, which is to say an abandoning of bilateral dependence upon the US and a renewed consciousness of Japan's Asian-ness and the economic and cultural riches of its neighbors. While the former evokes the rhetoric of World War II, such as "seimeisen" (lifeline), the new "men"-tality holds more in common. This new pan-Asian consciousness coincides with massive postmodern consumption cycles, which exploit differences for all they're worth through swift commodification, consumption and expulsion. In fulfillment of vague calls to "internationalization" (kokusaika), Japanese business has collected objects from around the world (including films) and brought them to its center. Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro has argued that underlying this metropolitan veneer is a surging neo-nationalism that commodifies the foreign by erasing any disturbing otherness. We may see this very operation at work in the Japanese critics' comparison of Hou and Ozu. By equating the two, they appeal to the postmodern pan-Asianism in the air; some of the comparisons go so far as to point out Taiwan and Japan's historically close relationship, again erasing the more unpleasant aspects of this history in a vague neocolonial nostalgia.
Critics outside of Japan turn to Ozu for quite different reasons, however, in their attempt to explain away Hou's exceptional style they too turn to cultural explanations. For example, in a thoughtful commentary about how City of Sadness weighs upon his mind, Li Tuo (815) contrasts Hou to Zhang Yimou, and ponders what a truly Chinese film style might look like:
. . . I once again think of Raise the Red Lantern. It is evident that Zhang Yimou gave his all in making this film . . . But if we peer through the dazzling light created by the various elements of this film's design to view the internal drama, anyone familiar with the traditions of Hollywood can easily see that this film is an exquisite copy of a Hollywood film. To copy Hollywood, of course, is not unusual. film directors all over the world, motivated by all kinds of reasons, are doing just this. But if one puts a layer of artistic Oriental wrapping on the exterior of this copy and therefore believes one has created a Chinese film, then we can consult Hou Xiaoxian's film to raise a question: in whose eyes is Raise the Red Lantern a Chinese film?
He suggests that the loose narration of City of Sadness may provide a route to define what a Chinese film style might look like, but leaves the difficult task of specificity to future writing or other critics. Formulating the difference is relatively easy; explaining it is something else again. Some Western critics have not shied away. In her description of a visit to the City of Sadness set, Georgia Brown writes:
Sometimes a figure sits in the middle distance, internally absorbed, while in the rest of the frame, various others are in motion, carrying on some mundane business, creating a Taoist-Confucian dialectic between depth and surface, passive and active. The effect also suggests the mind's internal play, tiers of experience, worlds within worlds.
This brand of orientalist mystification is rare, however, one senses touches of it in most of the comparisons of Hou and Ozu. For Western critics, the two directors share some kind of Asian sensibility that translates into their films (by virtue of colonial legasy or vague tropes for Asian-ness). For Japanese, it is this and more; the popularity of both Hou and Ozu coincides with a resurgence of nationalism paired with intense postmodern consumption and appropriation of Japan's Asian others (thus, the fact that all his work is available in every kind of format --- including television commercials --- should not be surprising).
In any case, the link to Ozu has proven fruitful for promoting Hou's films. The prestige of Ozu as one of film history's great auteurs rubbed off on Hou. Combined with tropes of nationhood, Asian-ness, and Chinese- ness, Hou's difference is tenuously grasped, celebrated, commodified and consumed. Now is the time to move on to new perspectives.