Cinema and National Memory – Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness

A more recent piece about Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1989 masterpiece, City of Sadness written for the "bulletin" published by my research centre. To call it my "favourite" film seems inappropriate. It is, almost literally, a monument, a cinematic work of overwhelming weight and power. City of Sadness achieves as much politically and culturally as any film could ever hope to do.

Like many cinema traditions outside of Hollywood and Europe, Taiwan has produced films with a self-conscious project to articulate and create a national experience. Hou Hsiao-hsien's City of Sadness is one of the most remarkable such films, for its artistry, its subject matter, and the period in modern Taiwanese history in which it was made.

The film deals with the event which has defined the development of Taiwan’s social and political life to the present: the 2-28 Incident, the failed uprising against the Chinese Nationalists which began on February 28 1947 and in which twenty thousand Taiwanese civilians were killed during its brutal suppression. The film traces the life of an extended family living through the Incident, beginning with Retrocession in 1945, when Taiwan was returned to mainland Chinese rule under the Nationalists after fifty years as a Japanese colony. It shows the descent into corruption, violence and economic collapse which led to the uprising and its aftermath.

The film was released in 1989, only two years after the lifting of the state of martial law which had been in place since the 2-28 Incident. Over that forty year period, Retrocession had been celebrated by Taiwan’s authoritarian government as a return to the "motherland", while 2-28 had been erased from Taiwan’s official history. In this context, City of Sadness was a part of a national catharsis in which the bitterness of past events was being slowly and painfully expunged by the political processes of democratization.

The director, Hou Hsiao-hsien, already a well-known figure in the Taiwanese film industry, has recognized his artistic project as being the self-conscious practice of discovery, recovery, and remembrance. In an interview in 1995, he said:

"I have lived in Taiwan for over forty years but it was only when I made A City of Sadness that I began to learn about Taiwan's history. In preparation for the film, I read a lot of books on Taiwan's history. It was only then that I consciously wanted to delve further into this area. Making a movie is a process of learning about history, people and life itself."1

June Yip has read City of Sadness as moment of the recovery of social memory. She notes the film’s contribution to the “reclamation of a Taiwanese position as subject – rather than mere object – of history”2 and Hou’s comments indicate that the film was intentionally so. She also describes the film as a “‘history from below’, deliberately rejecting the vantage point of the rulers in favour of the perspective of the common people”3, an observation which locates City of Sadness in the nativist cultural movement which flourished in the 1970s.

For Yip, City of Sadness presents an open-ended and pluralistic interpretation of Taiwanese history.4 The nature of film, with its narrative conventions, stylistic devices and emotiveness, makes for a “text” which allows for a presentation of historical events that emphasise the personal and dramatic, contrasting with the conventions of historical scholarship and journalism, which achieves legitimacy through a claim on objective truth and generalizations. Indeed, one of the features of City of Sadness is its deliberately oblique evocation of the actual events of the 2-28 Incident itself. Rather than anything as direct as a recreation of the violence of uprising and its aftermath, the event is evoked by a static scene of chaos in a hospital dealing with the injured.5

As a cultural representation of the remembrance of a silenced history, City of Sadness expresses the equivocal and contested process of history writing which took place during the enormous political changes occurring in Taiwan in the late 1980s and early 1990s during the transition to democracy. A received interpretation of the 22-8 Incident had not been securely established at that time and City of Sadness suits this moment, when the possibility of reading 2-28 in an authoritative way remained difficult because of the uncertainty of Taiwan’s political future.

The central character in City of Sadness, played by Hong Kong actor Tony Leung, is a deaf-mute, and his inability to speak symbolizes the Taiwanese as silenced by their oppression. Critical of the film, Ping-hui Liao reads this muteness as expressing Hou Hsiao-hsien’s ambivalence towards his own history. For Liao, Hou is unwilling to fully embrace a specifically Taiwanese history, with the necessary claims on authenticity and authority over it, but rather uses a silenced subject to convey a distanced perspective:

"by using a deaf and mute character, the filmmaker can maintain an ambivalence that allows him to at once say nothing or anything about the character (and the Incident) who can neither hear nor speak for himself. Instead of facing human violence and cruelty, Hou consistently – and redundantly – turns his gaze away and focuses on the landscape that, in its permanent silence, seems to witness the loss of human lives and nevertheless survives."6

However, Liao’s strongly political interpretation of the film plays down the moral dimension of that landscape. Rather than simply looking away, the film evokes a sense of place in Taiwan's environment, and it is this sense which functions as a witness to violence and suffering. In a sense of place is the remembrance of history, and with it the capacity to judge and also to forgive.

The film evokes an aesthetic of Taiwanese life as a lived experience with a particular detail and attentiveness. His exteriors are the mountains north of Taipei, covered in bamboo and grasses and misty with Taiwan's subtropical humidity. His interiors are cluttered and claustrophobic, with small rooms with noisy wooden floors, dim lighting and filled with furniture. Outside the colours are cool and humid greens with the sounds of insects, and inside are rich reds and blacks, and the sounds of children, cooking and the Taiwanese dialect. Rapidly disappearing under the pressures of modern industrial development, the mountains and old houses become idealized sensory impressions of Taiwan. Hou’s cinematic technique eschews the use of close-ups, and he frames his interiors with doorways and windows and shoots exteriors from high angles.

In this way, the film invokes place as a witness to history, and this gives the film a moral strength. The film appeals to the Taiwanese audience to recognise themselves in their own memories, and to act as a witnesses to their own history. As a result, despite its tragic subject, City of Sadness retains an optimism. By placing the bitter events away from the viewer, the film is able to acknowledge them without being consumed by them. City of Sadness evokes a Taiwanese experience, but is not trapped by it. It says that the past is real and cannot by undone, but it is nonetheless the past. The Taiwanese people in accepting their history but still being able to create a vibrant democracy and civil culture out of four decades of authoritarian rule shows a conjunction between artistic expression and national sentiment that makes City of Sadness on of the great examples of a national cinema.

1. Peggy Chiao, “Great changes in a vast ocean: neither tragedy nor joy (interview with Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien),” Performing Arts Journal No.50-51 (May-Sept 1995): 43.

2. June Yip, “Constructing a nation: Taiwanese history and the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien,” in Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, Sheldon Hsiao-ping Lu (ed.) (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997), 142.

3. ibid., 142.

4. ibid., 146.

5. The evocation of 2-28 in City of Sadness starts with the hospital staff listening to radio broadcasts from the governor Chen Yi. It alternates static shots of the hills, street and interiors where the family live, and uses the sounds of shouts and cries to indicate the start of the rioting, as well as silence to indicate the passing of the hours and days of the events. The key scene is the hospital in which injured people are brought in for treatment.

6. Ping-hui Liao, “Rewriting Taiwanese National History: The February 28 Incident as Spectacle,” Public Culture Vol.5 (1993): 294.