Remaking Ozu : Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Café Lumière
Document Type
Book chapter
Source Publication
The poetics of Chinese cinema
Publication Date
2016
First Page
97
Last Page
118
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract
Café Lumiere pairs the Ozu/Hou doublet with the Lumiere brothers, the legendary founding fathers of cinema. Café Lumiere, coffee shop under light, is more than a handy reference to a personal experience and an intercultural wordplay. It is also a historical conceit that offers a look back on historical phases. This chapter takes a direct approach (by way of segmentation) to note the textual correlatives, parallels, and inter-generational echoes, to reach an understanding of Hou's design in interweaving the life of a Tokyo woman with the history of cinema and Sino-Japanese cultural politics. By tracing the diegetic time of Café Lumiere, we find that Yoko's "uneventful" daily activities not only reveal epistemological clues of a young woman's desire in Tokyo, they also offer points of entry into Hou's revision of cinema and history.
DOI
10.1057/978-1-137-55309-6_6
Publisher Statement
Copyright © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
Access to external full text or publisher's version may require subscription.
Additional Information
ISBN of the source publication: 9781137566089
Full-text Version
Publisher’s Version
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Yeh, E. Y.-y. (2016). Remaking Ozu: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Café Lumière. In G. Bettinson & J. Udden (Eds.), The poetics of Chinese cinema (pp. 97-118). United States: Palgrave Macmillan.