The Zen Foundation Of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Film Aesthetics

Movies have social and cultural attributes.Culture is the deep driving force for the development of film art.Every nation has its own unique culture.Different cultural backgrounds have created different movie styles for each nation.It also has its historical and internal roots—the Chinese traditional culture of Zen.In the cultural atmosphere that Hou Hsiao-hsien has always been in,Buddhist Zen has always existed.After being instructed by his peers,Hou Hsiao-hsien immediately had an epiphany,and the attitude of looking at the world formed since childhood was awakened,and he immediately incorporated it into the creation of the film world.If 1983 is regarded as a watershed in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films,then the research text of this paper is the films directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien in 1983.As a leading figure in the "Taiwan New Film Movement",Hou Hsiao-hsien set foot in the film industry in1973,and when he created "The Man from the Wind Cabinet" in 1983,he reconsidered and understood film,and began to look for a form of image expression that matched his own thoughts.In this way,he shows his spiritual world,and gradually forms a unique "Hou’s aesthetics" style: daily narrative themes and non-dramatic narrative structures;long-range long shots,fixed long shots,empty shots,etc.This paper will start with the unique narrative theme,narrative structure and lens language of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films,and analyze the Zen foundation in his film aesthetics.First,Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films focus on the characters and scenes in daily life,which is exactly the same as "the ordinary mind is the Tao" advocated in Zen;Looking at the world from opposing viewpoints also has certain commonalities;finally,the audio-visual language as its label takes "realism","experience" and "intuition" as the core,and presents the Zen implication contained in the director’s thought in a visual form.And let the audience experience its thoughts in the video appreciation,so as to achieve the director’s ideal: to achieve the transcendence of self-mind.