The subtitle of The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Culture, Style, Voice and Motion, by Christopher Lupke, suggests a multivalent argument about Hou's works. Given Lupke's background in literature, his strongest suit is “voice.” Weaknesses emerge when he describes “motion” due to a lack of historical grounding. Most disappointing, however, is “culture,” because this reviewer was hoping for more: Lupke claims to be breaking new ground when mostly he is reiterating what others have said before. Worse yet, he often mischaracterizes previous scholarship on Hou regarding this issue, including my own.

After an introductory overview of Hou's work, the second chapter primarily centres on “voice.” The focus is on Chu Tien-wen's momentous role and how her perspective shapes many of Hou's films. This is long overdue, and Lupke is to be commended for highlighting her contributions and dovetailing that with numerous insights from her own literature. Lupke's firm grounding in literature reemerges towards the end of the book when talking about The Assassin (2015), including how there is more than one Tang tale serving as source material. The next chapter comparing Hou and Ozu is also a pleasant surprise. Lupke avoids facile comparisons that have been made in the past, acknowledging how different the two directors are, but he also does an excellent job noting where they most converge, an issue of core concern for Lupke: “filiality.”

When it comes to “culture,” however, problems emerge, not so much with what Lupke argues, but what he assumes others have said. For example, Lupke accuses me of “purporting a specious claim, which is that Hou is somehow not ‘Chinese’ because he is Taiwanese.” That is indeed a specious claim, especially since it does not even remotely resemble what I have said. In a section focusing on the question of “Chineseness,” I concluded that “the problem with saying a film or a director's style is very “Chinese” is that it is not culturally specific enough: there are many Chinese cultures scattered across history, and there are no less than four distinct Chinese cultures today: mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Chinese diaspora communities” (No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Hong Kong University Press, 2009, p. 161). I suspect that Lupke would agree with this statement, since he is interested in the “culturally and linguistically contested terrain of Hou's Sinophone cinema” (p. 3). The chapter on City of Sadness focuses on the issue of “multiculturalism” in Taiwan where Lupke admits that Taiwan “can neither be subsumed as a comfortable political part of contemporary mainland China nor as a totally separate cultural identity” (p. 117). He even notes a negotiation scene with multiple dialects are used to prove that “even on the mainland, Chinese culture and language is by no means cohesive” (p. 136). The differences lie in emphasis: my interest lies primarily in how a culture changes due to historical and regional variations, especially Taiwan, which is an exceptional case; Lupke is interested more in the common cultural threads that persist, most all filiality. (Yet he admits both Hou and Ozu also represent the failure of filiality in the face of historical changes.) What Lupke is after is perfectly legitimate, even if in the end it does not present many surprises, or much new.

More surprising is how scattered and superficial much of the history in this book is. This should not pose a problem for those well-versed in Taiwan and China, or their cinemas, but for the uninitiated this could become an issue. At one point Lupke says it is “obvious” these films came from Taiwan as if there is nothing more to explain. (Every film is “obviously” from somewhere, but that does not excuse one from not trying to adequately explain the specifics.) There is almost no information in this book about the peculiar institutional or economic factors in Taiwan that led to the New Cinema, nor would someone not already in the know likely fully understand what led to Taiwan's unprecedented position in the world today. Same with film history. When Lupke talks about “motion” for example, he ultimately is talking about teleology in Hou's works, or the lack thereof. Surprisingly, he makes little effort (the few films he compares Hou with notwithstanding) to place Hou with a now vast global tradition of open-ended narratives as if this were peculiar to Hou, which it is most certainly is not.

In the end, The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien does provide some insights on certain issues regarding Hou Hsiao-hsien, not to mention the fact that it also provides excellent translations of interviews of Hou that were originally in Chinese. Yet relying mostly on textual interpretation and comparing them to the interpretations made by others (which are not always correctly summarized), this book is more dependent on previous Hou scholarship that it acknowledges, and less of a breakthrough than it pretends to be.