Remaking Ozu

Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Café lumière

Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh

pp. 97-118

in: Gary Bettinson, James Udden (eds), The poetics of Chinese cinema, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

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.