Film commentary often attempts to encapsulate the content of a film in thematic issues or symbolic manifestations. However, such approaches are insufficient without a concise analysis of the formal elements of each work, either individually or within broader contexts (for example, those sponsored by the politique des auteurs). Within that framework of formal evaluation, this essay proposes an approach to Hou Hsiao-Hsien's cinema and more specifically to Millennium Mambo (2001), a film that does not fully fit into the generic categorisations into which some of his works sometimes fall (e.g., that of the New Wave of Taiwanese cinema). Firstly, there will be an initial establishment of the potentially misleading nature of considering simplifying excerpts from interviews with the director as basis for an analysis; thereupon, this essay goes on to compare and differentiate these reductions of the content of the works with their counterpart, using examples from Robert Bresson and his attempt to synthetically verbalise the essential aspects of his cinema. The second part of the text focuses on a more strictly formal analysis of Hsiao-Hsien's mise-en-scène, again contrasted in a very schematic way with examples from Bresson's film in order to extrapolate the previous comparison to the filmic terrain.
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