FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON (2007)

Hou Hsiao-hsien and D.W. Winnicott

Liu, Catherine PhD

¹University of California, Irvine

Catherine Liu, University of California, Irvine, 2000 Humanities Gateway, Mail Code: 2435, Irvine, CA 92697 [email protected]

Psychoanalytic Psychology 28(3):p 446-456, July 2011. | DOI: 10.1037/a0024175

This paper is a discussion of Hou Hsiao-hsien's 2007 Flight of the Red Balloon in the context of a Winnicottian reading of Hou's use of improvisation and long takes to represent the dilemmas of contemporary motherhood. Thinking about a shot as a container for emotion rather than as a set-up for the gaze, I also try to introduce a psychoanalytic dimension to formal, political, and aesthetic readings of Hou's cinematic realism as it emerged from the politics and practices of the Taiwan New Cinema.