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Let’s start with a comparison, between Hou’s films and Manoel de Oliveira‘s, that inexhaustible nonagenarian Portuguese. Superficially they’re similar, especially in their commitment to long, static takes, but in terms of film philosophy, the ways in which their works imply a specific view of the world, they’re more like light-years apart. Hou’s the phenomenological “realist,” an artist of interpretable surfaces without symbolic content: his only “revelations” are what the camera immediately sets out in front of you. But Oliveira’s the eternal symbolist, spinning out images from the depths of Plato’s cave: what his camera reveals is a cover for nonmaterial “essence,” that exists beyond appearances, beyond the literal/accessible surfaces of things.
For Hou though, these surfaces are everything, or maybe the only thing—there’s no “beyond” to connote, only a tangibility that the camera inevitably throws back in your face. The basic riddle in all this is what these “antisymbols” are up to—in other words, what exactly are we looking at (“is this a dagger that I see before me?”—that kind of material-inflected puzzle), and how do you actually read the images the camera dishes up?
