Nie Yinniang and the Aesthetics of Resignation in Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Assassin

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film The Assassin 刺客聶隱娘 (2015), based in part on the classical Chinese chuanqi 傳奇 story, represents the great Taiwanese auteur’s long-awaited intervention into the martial arts film genre. Like all of Hou’s works, this film makes a unique and paradigm-shifting statement on the larger theme it engages. Several features distinguish The Assassin: its stunning visual beauty and understated but at times stirring soundtrack; its oblique representation of martial arts action that mainly occurs on the periphery of the film frame; and its dramatic rewriting of the Nie Yinniang tale, transforming it into a story of modern love, melancholy and trauma, and, ultimately, resignation. This presentation suggests that Hou’s martial arts classic depicting the female assassin interrogates the conventional composition of such characters from traditional Chinese fiction and cinematic adaptation. Arguing that the conception of the storyline owes a debt to works such as the huaben 話本 story “The Eternal Prisoner under Thunder Peak Pagoda” 白娘子永鎮雷峰塔, itself a rendition of the White Snake myth 白蛇傳, Eileen Chang’s chilling evisceration of patriarchal ideology in “The Golden Cangue” 金鎖記, and King Hu’s iconic film A Touch of Zen 俠女, this paper asserts that Hou’s film reflects the collective aesthetic of his own cinematic vision combined with the literary sensibilities of his long-time collaborator Zhu Tianwen and the historical sensitivities of their new collaborator, Xie Haimeng. Evidence from an extensive interview as well as the companion book written by Xie Haimeng, Record of the Flowing Clouds 行雲記, indicates that the resignation of female characters in the face of their personal tragedies has had a profound impact on Zhu and Xie and surfaces in the narrative elements of this film.