Veiled Listening: The Assassin as an Eavesdropper

Abstract

This paper situates Hou Hsiao-hsien’s award-winning feature The Assassin in a long history of cinematic voyeurism. The film supplies some of the best examples of how the film medium visualizes secretive listening. The female protagonist Nie Yinniang is seen perching high in the trees, hovering from indoor ceiling beams, and traversing through luscious vegetation and layers of fluttering draperies indoors, with her attentive ears tuning in to sounds of nature as well as private conversations of the inner chamber. The paper analyzes a few key scenes where listening and being listened to are meticulously staged and defines veiled listening as a key narrative device in Hou’s reconstruction of the sonic environment of a specific historical time and place. With a camera complicit with the eavesdropper, the film materializes a way of close listening that works to enliven a lost world with all its richness.