The Thinking Machine #91

In their series The Thinking Machine, critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin create a new video essay for Filmkrant every month.

The critic Alain Masson once described an action scene in a Scorsese film as a series of frenetic ‘turnarounds’ that divide cause from effect and “separate an action from its narrative accomplishment”. Far from the sound and fury of the American example sits Hou Hsiao-hsien in what now, sadly, counts as his final work, The Assassin (2015).

In this most unique of action movies, different types of gestures and movements seem to exist on different planes – even in different realities. The swords flash, the world turns … but what, at any given moment, has actually happened? Hou’s assembled vision of an event is extraordinary.