Memória, identidade e narrativa: o novo cinema contemporâneo de Hou Hsiao-Hsien.

Abstract

Presented with the theme of the relationship between memory and identity in the narratives of certain cinematic productions, this dissertation seeks to understand and outline, within the context of contemporary Asian cinema, the concepts of identity and memory and how they are, through film analysis, applied to a narrative structure that cinematically composes them. Through the new cinema presented by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, we will address, among a vast body of work, films that sought to reclaim an identity and memory that always seemed fragile in an underdeveloped and constantly colonized country, subjected to external impositions and enduring wars. City of Sadness (Bēiqíng chéngshì, 1989); The Puppetmaster (Xi meng ren sheng, 1993); and Good Men, Good Women (Hao Nan Hao Nu, 1995) make up the director's trilogy, referred to by many critics as the "Taiwan Trilogy." These works find the intersection between the period of Japanese occupation in Taiwan at the end of World War II and the rise of the Chinese Nationalist Party on the island. For this study, we will use a comparative film analysis. The trilogy created by Hou is renowned for portraying significant events in his country through the lens of ordinary families and individuals, placing the viewer as a real observer of the events that have long plagued the nation, analyzing concepts, perspectives, and events imposed on their homeland, while also critiquing capitalism, wars, and colonization. This comparative analysis is based on the hypothesis that there is a common language being developed in the films, which traverses the memory of the people to understand the current identity, using a specific regime of images to compose this cinematic vision. It exposes the devices that facilitated the construction of each film and their transitory nature, the historical context of the New Taiwanese Cinema or The Taiwanese New Wave, and the relationship with foreign and local references to comprehend this new aesthetic and the perceptions of identity it generates. Thus, it seeks to understand the processes of memory and filmic narrative.