CONTEXT IV: The City of Sadness Controversy

The rapid political and social restructuring of the late 1980s and the rescinding of martial law in 1987 have given the public an opportunity to pressure the government to disclose files of the February 28 Incident. The dialogism surrounding the re-writing of the February 28 Incident has become a major discursive battlefield in many political debates. In 1992, in response to the increasing demand on this issue, an official report was published in which the government has admitted that its army killed an estimated 18,000 to 28,000 native-born Taiwanese in the 1947 massacre. This document not only acknowledged that corruption and misrule were fundamental causes for the riot but also overwrites the original official report published in 1947, "The 228 Incident Investigation Report," which insists that the riot was instigated by the Chinese Communist party and therefore justified the violent suppression as an unavoidable chapter in the continuing struggle against Communism.

However, political scholars and historians from the opposition have indicated that despite its figures, the 400,000-word 1992 document is still written in the logic of historical determination that refuses to acknowledge that the contradictions and strong arm of colonialism should be held responsible for the "unavoidable" conflict.

Outside of the Official Canon

In addition to the government's report in 1992, other efforts in recollecting the memory and history of the incident have emerged. For example, a 686-page collection of eyewitness accounts and supporting documents was compiled by the Taiwan Provincial Historical Commission in November 1991. (Information about relevant publications is documented in our Bibliography under the subject term of the February 28 Incident.) The multiple discourses competing for the legitimate authorship of documenting the February 28 Incident seem to imply the problematic of a total history and, consequently, the concomitant problematic of a total filmic representation of the February 28 Incident.

Death of the New Cinema

Death of the New Cinema, a book published in Chinese in 1991, provides an example of a counter-analysis of City of Sadness influenced by the exigencies of political debates. Given the success of City of Sadness and Hou's status as the most renowned filmmaker in Taiwan, Death of the New Cinema was written by a marginalized group of film critics as an alternative voice to the unified critical discourse surrounding City of Sadness. They argued against City of Sadness for its ambiguous representation of Taiwan's history from 1945 to 1949, and its depiction of the February 28 Incident in particular. The book indicates that, rather than directly confronting the brutality of the Nationalist regime, the film displaces politics with individual romance, family saga, and a life-death cycle that seem to contribute to universality rather than provoke political consciousness.

Considering the specific historical, political, and critical contexts that have mobilized farmers, workers, students, and intellectuals to engage with social movements concerning issues of ecology, labor unions, education, and politics in the late 1980s, it is not surprising to see a polemical counter-analysis like this emerging in film criticism. Although several articles in the book totally misread the film and end up stalled in a vulgar ideological cul-de-sac, the book's overall attempt to de-stabilize the "legitimate" discourse of the New Cinema must be considered as an important register in formulating dialectical analysis about the new cinema in particular, and the political and social reform in Taiwan at large.

Critical Inquiry: Dialogism

Hou's distinct style and narrative structure in City of Sadness are not significant merely for their aesthetically breathtaking qualities. Imbricated in this style are discursive textualities such as photography, sound, writing, and female voice-over which are privileged in the formulation of a dialogism responding to the polysemy of this historical period's recent reconstruction. The political context in late 1940s Taiwan leaves no space for militant resistance; the crackdown of the Hinoe's commune in the narrative can be taken as a diegetic representation of historical fact. However, it is the nature of this representation of history, which its multiple levels of textuality --- from mise-en-scene to sound to intertitles --- that make City of Sadness an exceedingly complicated narration of the nation Taiwan. Rather than directly competing with the pedagogical narration of the Nationalist regime in resisting their political hegemony, these discursive textualities formulate a double writing, as well as a challenge to the grand narrative of history.

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