On the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien and what slow cinema in the Taiwanese context achieves.

Hou Hsiao-hsien is among the most formally distinctive of all living filmmakers. His films — A City of Sadness, The Puppetmaster, Millennium Mambo, Café Lumière — use long takes, static cameras, and compositions that frequently obscure the human figures by placing them behind objects or at a great distance.

The effect is to situate the characters inside history rather than in front of it. A City of Sadness is about the 228 Massacre of 1947, in which the Kuomintang government killed thousands of Taiwanese civilians. Hou's method — the distance of the camera, the refusal to dramatize — creates a relationship between the personal and the historical that insists on both without reducing either to illustration of the other.

Hou's relationship to duration is different from Tarkovsky's. Where Tarkovsky's long takes are about the weight of individual moments, Hou's long takes are about the accumulation of time across lives: these are not moments, they are years.

Millennium Mambo is his most formally accessible film: a study of a young woman in contemporary Taipei that uses the city's neon and its clubs and its nighttime geography to create a visual world that is both specific to its moment and melancholy about the moment's inevitable passing.