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A Summer at Grandpa's
A film by Hou Hsiao-hsien
1984 / Taiwan/ Col/
102 mins
9th June 2013;
5.45 pm
Perks Mini Theater
A
Summer at Grandpa's
(1984), follows events in the lives of the story's adult characters from a
child's limited point of view, demanding that the spectator alone make sense of
what's onscreen, just as the young protagonist does. The child's slow education
becomes an allegory for the process of gradual understanding in which the
viewer engages.
Shot
in a summer palette of greens and blues, and everywhere evoking the gentleness
of nostalgic pastoralism, Hou's film subtly demonstrates how the violence,
desire, and strife of living, thinly veiled by the conventions of adult
society, are nonetheless impressed on the protagonists.
In
A Summer at Grandpa's,
director Hou Hsiao-hsien uses the techniques he developed in his earlier work
with young actors to create an entire narrative following two child
protagonists as they learn about the complexities and problems of adulthood.
Based on the childhood experience of Hou's frequent collaborator, Chu
T'ien-wen, the film follows Tung-tung and his sister, Ting-ting, as they are
sent to the country home of their mother’s father while their mother lies ill
in hospital.
Tung-tung
is beginning to learn to communicate his feelings and interpretations in the
letters he writes to his parents, even if they sometimes overwhelm him. “So
many things happen each day that I can't keep track,” he tells them. “I'll tell
you later if they come back to my mind.” As spectators, we are often similarly
overwhelmed, but Hou's film places demands on our powers of observation,
insisting that we, like Tung-tung, attend to the minutiae, ironies, and deeper
meanings it offers us. (Source:Internet)
Hou Hsiao-hsien
Hou Hsiao Hsien , born
April 8, 1947) is a Taiwanese actor, singer, producer and director. He is a
leading figure of Taiwan's New Wave cinema movement. Director Hou Hsiao Hsien,
in a 1988 New York Film Festival World Critics Poll, was voted one of three
directors who would most likely shape cinema in the coming decades. He has
since become one of the most respected, influential directors working in cinema
today. In spite of his international renown, his films have focused exclusively
on his native Taiwan, offering finely textured human dramas that deal with the
subtleties of family relationships against the backdrop of the island's
turbulent, often bloody history.
All of his movies deal in some manner with
questions of personal and national identity, particularly, "What does it
mean to be Taiwanese?" In a country that has been colonized first by the
Japanese and then by Chiang Kai-Shek's repressive Nationalist Government, this
question is pregnant with political connotations.
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