Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Assassin
2015 · Hou Hsiao-hsien · The Assassin on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch characters appear and vanish behind moving silk curtains. (setting)
Interiors are staged behind layers of translucent gauze that billow in drafts, repeatedly veiling and revealing the people inside the room.
Payoff: Your view of every scene is as partial and interrupted as the assassin's own hidden watching.
Notice how rarely the camera moves or the scene cuts. (camera)
Mark Lee Ping-bing holds long, drifting or near-static takes that let natural light and weather become the real events of a shot.
Payoff: This is what the reading calls dead time, duration held for its own sake instead of rushed toward a plot point. In the reading: temps mort / dead time. Deleuze calls this dead time, a stretch that advances nothing but lets weather and light become the actual subject of the shot.
Listen for wind, insects, and silk instead of dialogue. (sound)
The soundtrack is overwhelmingly environmental, wind, birdsong, the rustle of fabric, with long stretches where nobody speaks at all.
Payoff: The natural world is given as much presence on the soundtrack as any character's voice.
Watch Yinniang's face for tiny changes instead of expression. (performance)
Shu Qi plays the assassin almost entirely through stillness and watchfulness, with strikingly little dialogue, so her power lives in what she withholds.
Payoff: This is what the reading calls a seer, someone who watches and endures rather than acts. In the reading: voyant / the seer. Deleuze calls a figure who can only watch and endure a seer, a voyant, someone the plot no longer converts into action.
Notice the boxy, almost square shape of the frame. (camera)
The film is shot in the archaic Academy ratio rather than widescreen, closer to a hanging scroll or a framed portrait than to a typical action movie.
Payoff: The shape of the image itself refuses the sweep genre spectacle usually demands.
Once you have seen it
Notice what Yinniang chooses not to do at the crucial moment. (structure)
She has every capability and every reason to complete her mission, and the film simply lets that action never happen.
Payoff: This is what the reading calls the crisis of the action-image: perceiving completely and still finding no act available. In the reading: crisis of the action-image. Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image, the moment a character can no longer react adequately to what she perceives.
Listen to the story of the bluebird told partway through. (sound)
A bird with no mate is said to dance itself to death in front of a mirror, a told story that stands in for feelings the film otherwise withholds.
Payoff: The parable does the emotional work no scene of dialogue in this film is ever allowed to do.
Watch how short and unglamorous the actual sword fights are. (staging)
Where most wuxia films build toward gravity-defying, extended combat, this one keeps its fights abrupt, frequently incomplete, and shot with documentary plainness.
Payoff: The genre's usual pleasure, the fight itself, is the one thing this film keeps refusing to give you.
Carry this in: Watch the spaces between the cuts, not just what's in them. That is where the film actually lives.