". . . the temporal dimension in the inscription of these political entities. . . serves to displace the historicism that has dominated discussions of the nation as a cultural force. The focus on temporality resists the transparent linear equivalence of event and idea that historicism proposes. . ."
It seems strategically unwise and awkward to cite these two quotes to conclude our project on City of Sadness. Higson's reconceptualization of national cinema is in debt to the idea proposed by Thomas Elsaesser in his work on New German Cinema, in which he suggests that we ought to acknowledge that popular culture is an important and legitimate narrative form of national life. This leads us to rethink City of Sadness in the context of Taiwan and Taiwanese cinema, given the fact that the film has been criticized by the domestic audience for its high art approach to representation.
We, however, do not intend to engage the high art/low culture debate here. Rather, we think that although popular cinema is a crucial register in discussing national cinema in more general terms, it is also equally important not to exclude important films that creatively deal with the complex concept of nation, and which also happen to be interested in exploring the specificity of the film medium.
It is true that we emphasize the aesthetics of Hou Hsiao-hsien's filmmaking and how his style mediates the representation of politics (to the extent that it alienates many in the audience). However, we suggest that the discontent expressed by the audience and the political critics precisely reveals the problematics of the filmic totality. If we look at the domestic box office of Hou's previous films, we find none has grossed enough capital to cover the cost of production. On the contrary, the profits were gained from the international market in Europe and Japan, primarily through selling the copyright for television broadcasts. So what drove the Taiwanese to fill theaters for City of Sadness? It even outgrossed the simultaneously released Mr. Canton and Lady Rose, Jackie Chan's major 1989 production. It is likely that the Taiwanese' craving for images and narrations of the February 28 Incident contributed to Hou's commercial triumph over Golden Harvest's major action-adventure film, the first time that a New Cinema filmmaker has ever outshined the Asian kungfu megastar, Jackie Chan. But it is the denial of that desire --- the scopophilia of massacre --- that upsets viewers.
Hou's thoughtful restraint in representing violence seems to indicate his ambivalence to the filmic image. Yet it is this ambivalence that lends the narration of Taiwan dynamic complexity. Here it is helpful to return to Homi Bhabha's comments in the second epigraph. Bhabha uses deconstructionist vocabulary such as temporality to expand the concept of nation in order to include diasporic narration, subaltern writing, minority discourse and any form of articulation based upon deconstructionist rhetoric. While perhaps Hou is not historically correct in depicting Taiwan's society --- as has been pointed out by many historians --- and his disjunctive form of representation arguably discredits his politics, the film provides an excellent stage to discuss a nation that has historically developed a culture of hybridity, a state of multiple ethnicities and languages.
Had Hou provided those dissatisfied spectators direct images of the massacre in a style purged of ambiguity --- the manner in which a purely popular film would treat this history --- his film would likely have held none of its power. He probably would have produced a film analogous to the frightening clarity of the KMT, replacing one pedagogical monologism with another. However, by narrating the nation through its charged spaces and double writing, the film re-presents history with all its multiplicities. Whether it enlightened its audience will be endlessly debated and this is ultimately inconsequential. The film finally helped bring the February 28 Incident into public discourse and sparked discussions about the character of the nation precisely through its multiple entry points. The health of a nation --- and a national cinema --- depends upon being open to this complexity.