Director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s filmmaking career has spanned over 30 years.In that period he has made 17 feature films, brought international attention to the Taiwan New Cinema film movement, and was deemed by the Village Voice Critics Poll as the most important filmmaker of the entire decade of the 1990s. 1 The global celebration of Hou’s films can be attributed to both the profundity of the stories he chooses to tell as well as the entirely unique way in which he commits these stories to the screen. Hou’s films can be immediately recognized as his through both their “stylistic signature” and “thematic motifs,” making him an inarguable auteur. 2 Hou’s methods of shooting, staging action, framing, and writing all serve to declare his authorship of them. The critical period during which he forged his own voice, however, can arguably be narrowed down to a series of just three of his early films: The Boys From Fengkuei, A Time to Live, a Time to Die, and Dust in the Wind. These films featured the first appearances of Hou’s Epicurean- celebrated, constantly re-emerging aesthetics, narrative subjects, and themes. It was in those three films—which Hou set on the path to directing after abandoning his role as a commissioned director—where his favorite visual techniques and storytelling methods were refined, reshaped, and employed in increasingly clever and confident ways, ways that still linger now 30 years into his directing career. Hou’s distinguishing visual touches are his reliance on long takes and his favoring of wide-angle lenses, as his films are designed to convey a sense of objectivity towards and distance from the events happening in the frame. These techniques really proved their worth in Hou’s first period as an auteur director—what we’ll call the ‘Coming of Age Period’—where he primarily made films about the real-life childhoods of himself and his 1 James Udden, No Man an island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press 2009), 3. 2 Brian Michael Goss, Global Auteurs, Politics in the Films of Almoldovar, von Trier, and Winterbottom (New York: Peter Lang Publishing 2009), 42. 1