The Aural Turn

The chapter focuses on two non-Chinese-language films, Café‎ Lumiè‎re and Flight of the Red Balloon, made by Hou Hsiao-hsien in the twenty-first century. Both commissioned by foreign institutions, the two films demonstrate the soft power of Hou’s authorship, highlight the transnational dimension of filmmaking, and upend lingua-centric models of film historiography. More importantly, this chapter argues that these films signal Hou’s aural turn, registered as much by the use of non-Sinophone languages as by a privileging of aural over visual elements, which are inextricably bound to gendered voices in the films. Both films remind us that it might be the materiality of sounds rather than images that resonates in and with us, and that ultimately moves us in our film-watching—and film-listening—experience. In fact, soft power can operate through broadcasting gendered and material voices as something to be sensed rather than to make sense of. This chapter argues that Hou’s aural turn has given voice (in both literal and metaphorical senses) to languages (including the languages of music and puppetry) whose materiality has been at odds with the ideologies of different ruling regimes over Taiwan’s long twentieth century. Divorced from language and meaning, the materiality of gendered voices in Hou’s cinema has projected a soft power so loud it makes us turn our heads to listen more closely to aurality.