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Hou Hsiao-hsien's renowned trilogy of films on modern Taiwanese history—A City of Sadness, The Puppetmaster, and Good Men, Good Women—all travel back in time through the subjective portals of dream and reverie, fantasy, story worlds, memory, and intoxication. The first film of this trilogy derives its formal logic from the uneven temporality of memory; the second, whose Chinese title translates literally as “drama, dream, life”, is described by the director as “dream-like, like a wonderland”; and the third has been aptly characterized by one critic as a thoroughly “nocturnal” film, with its main character passing constantly through states of sleep and awakening, daydreaming, and inebriation. The close analysis here begins from the premise that these works offer important insights on the conjunction of memory, media, violence, and nationhood in contemporary discussions of the posthistoire.

Examining Hou Xiaoxian's Dust in the Wind (1986) and City of Sadness (1989) as case studies, this chapter tells the story of how Jiufen, a once sleeping mining community in Northeastern Taiwan, transformed into Taiwan's first site of historical origins almost entirely re-imagined by the Taiwan New Cinema, making it a truly postmodern nativist landmark. This chapter demonstrates how Dust’s rural representations not only stem from the filmmakers' practices of location shooting as cultural remembrance, but also provide spectators with a visual framework for recollecting their own memories. Jiufen is imaged as a paradigmatic Taiwanese hometown, a space in which one has learned to accept one’s unfulfilled aspirations. City re-shapes this image of Jiufen into a metonym for the entire nation, a home where all – regardless of identity – must remember and accept personal loss as part of their collective history. Through City, Jiufen materializes into a paradigmatic site of Taiwan’s coming of age, a heterotopic microcosm of the nascent Taiwanese imagined community. Thrown into the national spotlight by the Taiwan New Cinema, Jiufen transforms off-screen into a socially contested space, attracting the diverse and competing attentions of local and international tourists, preservationists, advertisers, filmmakers, historians, developers, and politicians.

This chapter focuses on another form of technological surplus that distinguishes the film's historiographic approach, a surplus articulated by reference to photography and the conjuncture of the still and moving image. Photography dominates the inter-mediated perspective of A City of Sadness. The medium's central place in the narrative is conveyed by another of the Lin brothers, Wen-ching, who is a photographer by vocation. Given its longstanding association with a private sphere of remembrance and affective meaning, photography constitutes another means by which the film explores the zone of contact between history and the everyday. A mechanism for the personal inscription of time's passage, analogous to the diary as a discourse of memory, it introduces an additional layer into the film's collage of documentation and transmission. Photography signifies both the film's pedagogical investment in memory's critical possibilities and its suspicion of memory as a ready substitute for history.

This chapter closely traces the evolution of Hou Xiaoxian's contentious modes of place making while he shot on-location in China for the “Taiwan Trilogy," where Southern Chinese locales sometimes substituted for Taiwan’s historical settings. Location shooting in China for City of Sadness presented Hou with his first opportunity to perform a role as a cultural ambassador in an unprecedented period of cross-strait geopolitical thaw. After cross-strait relations became more normalized, Hou widely publicized his intentions of location shooting in Fujian for The Puppetmaster (1993). During this shoot, Hou articulated his theory of “authenticating life,” or the reenactment of lived experience. To authenticate the life of famed Taiwanese puppeteer Li Tianlu, whom he believed to be a living embodiment of Chinese-ness, Hou re-staged live budaixi shows in Fujian, hoping the environmental aura of present-day China would conjure for Li memories of colonial-era Taiwan. Assistant director Chen Huaien, however, counters that it was Taiwanese culture which required salvaging, not China’s. “Authenticating life,” Chen implied, relied on inauthentic means of reenactment to produce what only felt superficially authentic. The final section explores this contradiction as it is manifested in Good Men, Good Women (1995) – Hou’s first, and final film to feature present-day Chinese settings. I demonstrate that the filmmakers were unable to experience their production environments in Guangdong as anything more than through a “tourist gaze.” Hou finally experienced the constraints of “authenticating life,” and more broadly, the complexities of salvaging cultural Chinese heritage in an increasingly volatile period of cross-strait relations.