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.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the spaces between the cuts, not just what's in them. That is where the film actually lives.