Abstract
Compared with his early work, Hou Hsiao-hsien's films, including The Daughter of the Nile (1987), Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996) and Millennium Mambo (2001) have drawn little critical attention except for harsh criticism and negative responses. Even Hou acknowledges the generational gap between himself and the contemporanian youth and admits his inablility to explore contemporary culture and society in depth. Ironically, after travelling to Yubari in Japan, Hou senses a kind of temporality that has been lost in Taiwan. This article delineates the geneology of Hou's films set in contemporary Taiwan in terms of their apocalyptic imagination and temporalities. The Daughter of the Nile inherits the bystander's point of view from Hou's previous films through which the audience reflect and lament the ups and downs of a group of gangsters struggling in the city. As an atypical road film, Goodbye South, Goodbye interweaves the images of the country and the city, putting its main characters restlessly on the road. Altough always on the move, these characters find no way out as if trapped in the island of Taiwan. Millennium Mambo and ＂A Time for Youth＂ in Three Times both present a postmodern vignette in which the youth only live at the moment of the present as if there were neither the future nor the past. In contrast, Yubari in Japan provides a sense of time passage and revives Hou's lyricism that used to permeate his films set in the past and the countryside.