Movies are only 100 years old. They haven’t been around for that long, yet Milan Kundera has already declared, “Cinema is dead.” He doesn’t think movies should be a mere imitation of drama and theater. For me, cinema is still young; it still can’t function like written words, which have been around for far longer. When we see an image, we could only see the surface. It’s like in real life – it’s hard to go deeper, beyond what you see on the surface. It’s hard to get at just through looking, just through beholding an image. Words can do that. They can go deeper. But with images, we only see the surface. We need more time to develop the language of cinema, to explore its possibilities. It’s going to take a while before anything changes. But the Internet may be helpful in this respect: these days, people can easily shoot and put up their works online. But it will still take time. – Hou Hsiao-hsien

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