艾騰‧伊格言與侯孝賢是加拿大與台灣近二十年極具代表性的國際知名導演，兩人的電影有不少共同的特色：同樣在八○年代嶄現頭角，兩人的影片均高度重視電影形式，而且關切國內重要的社會與文化議題。我們如果仔細檢視侯孝賢與伊格言兩人的電影詩學，可以發現在兩人截至目前為止的後期電影作品中越來越偏好一個共同的敘事手法：「套層密藏」(mise en abyme)。「套層密藏」作為敘事手法的概念最早是由法國文學家安得烈‧紀德(Andre Gide)在1893年的一篇日記中首次提及，但由於日記內容實在太簡短，加上他在提到幾個藝術與文學的實例時又對自己的想法提出質疑，因此導致後人對於這個概念提出的看法都不盡相同。「套層密藏」最重要的研究學者路西昂‧達倫巴(Lucien Dallenbach)在他的《文本裡的鏡子》一書中將「套層密藏」基本上定義為「鏡子」。本文分析伊格言的《意外的春天》與侯孝賢的《珈琲時光》(Cafe Lumiere, 2004)這兩部電影中的「套層密藏」手法，尤其是在電影中嵌入另一個故事相似的文學作品，指出其不僅是達倫巴對「套層密藏」的定義中的類似鏡子的「重複」，而是進一步凸顯兩個文本之間多層次的動態互動關係。本文認為這兩部電影在電影裡置入的文本不只是封閉式的內在映射，而是更複雜的「互文」，在兩個文本的相互映射中為電影輻射出更豐富的意義，同時也對引用的文本提出新的閱讀觀點。

Canadian director Atom Egoyan and Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien share many similarities. They both began to attract international attention in the early eighties with highly self-conscious films that are deeply concerned with domestic social and cultural issues. A close inspection of their films will reveal another similarity in their film poetics, that is, the adoption of the literary technique of mise en abyme in their film narratives. The term of Mise en abyme is proposed by Gide in 1893 to denote a narrative text that contains a similar segment in it. Due to the brevity of Gide's explanation and certain contradictions in the examples he provides, the term has not been developed into a full-fledged theory until Lucien Dallenbach defines it as a mirror in the text in his book. This article analyses the narrative structure of Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter (1995) and Hou Hsiao-hsien's Cafe Lumiere to argue that the practice of mise en abyme in both films involves aggressive strategies of intertextuality to generate complex film meanings.