Traces

“Our lives are full of fragmentary memories. We can’t give them names, we can’t

classify them and they have no great significance.

But they lodge in the mind, somehow unshakeable. For example, I used to love to

play billiards when I was young, and I have a memory fragment of the song Smoke

Gets in Your Eyes always playing in the pool-hall. Now I’m pushing sixty, and

these things have been hanging around for so long it seems like they’re part of me.

Maybe the only way I can discharge my debt to them is to film them.

I think of them as the best of times. “The best” not because we can’t forget them,

nor because they’re things that have now been lost. The reason they’re the best is

that they exist only in our memories. I have the feeling that this is not the last film

I’ll make in this vein.”

-Hou Hsiao-Hsien