The first full-fledged English critical study of Chinese cinema comes from the late Jay Leyda's book Dianying/Electric Shadows: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China, a work based upon his observations and informal research on the films made in the socialist state during his sojourn to 1960s China. It is important to note that Leyda's interest in Chinese cinema is more a concern with the relation between leftist politics and practice than, say, a pure orientalist curiosity. Had China not become a socialist regime, the first English book written about Chinese film would perhaps have had to wait until two decades later. The next substantial critical attention to Chinese film came in the early 1980s, as the cold war began to dissipate and China began to rebuild her relationship with the West. A program of film exchange was one of China's many on-going plans of "reconciliation" with the West. Many Western film scholars, most of them from the American academy, were invited to visit China. This wave of pilgrimages to post-Mao China, along with the emergence of the Chinese Fifth-Generation Cinema, have helped to increase the critical climate for studying Chinese cinema during the mid to late 1980s.
Unfortunately, the long-standing prejudice in (mainland) China area studies has also haunted this 1980s wave of PRC film fever. Given the institutional assumption that the PRC represents the political, geographical, as well as the cultural matrix of all Chinese people, it should not be surprising that the preference for mainland China studies over other Chinese areas (e. g., Taiwan and Hong Kong), has also been replicated in film studies. As a result, Chinese-language films from Taiwan and Hong Kong went relatively ignored under a specious definition of "Chinese" identical with the Peoples Republic of China. Therefore, the politics of choosing City of Sadness, a Taiwanese film made by the country's most celebrated filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien, can be seen as an intervention against the monolithic perspective dominating the definition of "Chinese" cinema in film studies. Furthermore, our intensive study of the film wishes to address questions of cross-cultural analysis, as well as the concept of national cinema.
City of Sadness (Beiqing Chengshi), the winner the Golden Lion Award at the 1989 Venice Film Festival, was made by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, one of the foremost filmmakers of the New Cinema of Taiwan that began to emerge in 1982-83. Hou, along with other young filmmakers like Edward Yang, belong to a new generation that came of age after 1949, a period of remarkable growth and change in Taiwan. With the exception of Hou, who worked his way through apprenticeships with veteran studio directors, the new, young directors received formal training in the West. They broke away from the martial arts flicks, melodramatic romances, and historical epics haunted by memories of the mainland, all of which dominated Taiwan's film industry. Hou's films deal with the changing reality of life in Taiwan, its generation gap, and the increasing divergence between rural and urban cultures. What further distinguishes Hou's films is his cinematic style through which he portrays changes in Taiwanese society. His films are strongly autobiographical, and in drawing upon his personal recollections of childhood and adolescence, his works become a metaphor for the changes in modern-day Taiwan in general and the reconstruction of the aesthetics and politics in Taiwanese cinema in particular.
City of Sadness is Hou's most ambitious feature film to date, and is the first Taiwanese film to achieve international critical celebration. While all his previous films were to some extent criticized for being too personal, City of Sadness ventures into history by bringing his highly developed cinematic style to what amounts to an epic of the birth of a nation. It is the first Taiwanese film to broach the subject of the most traumatic experience in the nation's history, the February 28 Incident. This was a 1947 massacre by the Nationalist Party (still today's ruling party in Taiwan) which resulted in 18,000 to 28,000 casualties. Using a family as a matrix through which to filter the historical events at the moment of the founding of the nation, Hou re- presents Taiwanese history in both micro and macro perspectives.
The film's plot is exceedingly complex, centering on the Lin family in Taiwan after the 1945 surrender of the Japanese. The family relations are so elaborate that several magazines have even published family trees to accompany articles on the film (above). Taiwan had been a Japanese colony for the previous 50 years until the Chinese Nationalist government began taking over the island after World War II. The oldest of four brothers in the Lin family turns his Japanese-style-bar into "Little Shanghai" to cash in on the postwar boom. The second Lin brother disappeared during the war in the Philippines. The third brother, having returned from Shanghai and recovered from a mental breakdown, associates with Shanghaiese drug smugglers. However, when the first brother finds out about this drug business, he confiscates a certain amount of drugs and forbid the third brother to continue his involvement with the Shanghaiese. This leads the Shanghaiese to use their military connections to frame the third brother, who is accused as a Japanese collaborator during the war and jailed. After the big brother reconciled with the Shanghaiese, the third brother is eventually released, but becomes a physical and mental wreck. The youngest brother, Lin Wen- ching, is a deaf-mute, and supports himself with a photo studio. Wen- ching and his circle of young friends are convinced that socialism will the be ultimate tool for the Taiwanese to repel outside colonial forces.
The violence of the February 28 Incident and the subsequent social climate change the family. Deaf-mute Wen-ching is arrested, along with many of his friends. Upon his release, his best friend Hinoe, having been involved in the anti-government movement, is forced to flee to the mountains to join the guerrillas. Wen-ching also wants to join the guerrillas, but is persuaded to stay behind and take care of Hinoe's sister, Hinomi.
Later, the older brother dies in a fight with rival gangs. Shortly after the older brother's funeral, Wen-ching marries Hinomi and they have a son. Then her brother's guerrilla commune is raided by the military and Wen- ching is arrested. The film ends with what is left of the deeply scarred Lin family, living through the wounds by struggling to maintain the mundane basis of their lives.
With postcolonialism a dominant discourse in Western academia since the seventies, the validity of inserting non-Western texts into Western critical-theoretical spaces has been challenged. Edward Said's work on orientalism has been taken as the paradigm for critiquing the careless Western(ized) critical gaze upon the "other." One of the effects of this critique has been the self-reflexivity of cross-cultural analysis in the work on Japanese and Chinese cinema. Since our analysis also engages with cross-cultural analysis, we think it is necessary to address our position in the debate.
We think a fundamental question regarding cross-cultural analysis would be the relationship between theory and text. Rey Chow eloquently argues that the denial of Western theory is the denial of the ambivalent colonialism that has been internalized in the text, and in order to confront the contradiction, Western theory --- especially post-structuralism --- seems not only inevitable but also fruitful. This is particularly complicated when the texts under consideration are cinematic. Film was, after all, imported to Asia as part of the imperialist parcel as we entered the 20th century.
As in other colonial contexts, cinema converted the technological superiority of the colonizers into spectacle, and proved a useful tool for attempts to impose the foreign culture as norm. In this manner the fascinating electric shadows and engagement with cinematic apparatuses became central vehicles for the journey towards Westernization. Yet such a monolithic model would be too simplistic to ignore that the development of Asian cinema has depended upon its ambivalence with Hollywood cinema, as well European art cinema.
Certainly, it would be quite wrong to claim the "universality" of theories vis a vis texts. Yet we are interested in considering what theory can particularly illuminate textual analysis, as well as contextual understanding. In other words, our deployment of theory is more strategic than essential. For example, while we direct intense scrutiny at the cinematic workings of Hou's style, we avoid the reductive schools of formalism. At the same time, when confronted with the polemics surrounding the film, we rely upon the Derridian concept of double writing and Kristeva's conception of woman's time to clarify some obvious problematic interpretations of gender representation and politics. These theories help us link filmic specificity with the cultural and discursive context within which the film was made, read, and the massive controversy it has generated.
The film's complex representation of history, combined with Hou's unique style in unraveling political taboo and his portrayal of family life, inspire us to closely analyze the film. Below we hope to provide a sense for the overall components of the analysis.
Because study of mainland China's history, politics and culture has overshadowed any consideration of Taiwan, we have provided several layers of contextualization for the reader and film viewer. City of Sadness is an extremely dense film, and deeply engaged in Taiwanese history (both past and present). These sections on context proceed with increasingly narrow focus, beginning with the history of Taiwan, examining the history of Taiwanese cinema, the 228 incident itself, and the controversy that the film sparked.
Hou's approach to narrative filmmaking is quite unique and rigorously systematic. The section on style will explore the contours of his filmmaking with great specificity, and other sections on violence and writing will attempt to connect these observations to representations of history. We will also consider the claims by many critics that Hou is Taiwan's Ozu, arguing that such an observation is likely rooted in two long-term misconceptions. One is generated by orientalist discourse which stereotypes films made by Asian filmmakers as having a certain common, mediating qualities belonging to the great legacy of Oriental culture, be it Japanese or Chinese. The other reason for such a generalized assumption derives from the simple lack of close analysis. Our close reading wishes to de-mystify the assumed similarity between the two filmmakers, as well as consider the industrial implications of the comparison.
Finally, the representation of Taiwan's history from 1945 to 1949 (especially the February 28 Incident) have provoked a critical debate among film critics and political historians in Taiwan. Critics writing from a leftist perspective criticize the film's highly mediated representation of history, which confuses the audience, rather than provoking political awareness. The established critics defend Hou with their conservative idioms, arguing that Hou's humanistic politics should not be dismissed by simplistic leftist politics. In order to bridge the gap that apparently misses the crucial discursive textuality of the film in relation to history, gender discourse, and politics, we narrow the analysis to three aspects of the text --- sound, writing, and photography --- to address these issues.
Other parts of the project include interviews with Hou, an Usenet bulletin board thread on the February 28 Incident, a hypermap overview of the project, and a bibliography. There is also a "distant" analysis of a single, 15-shot, 17-minute segment that includes consideration all the issues the project engages. All of these sections are supported by illustrations, figures, and anchors to other databases.
There is no order to the analysis; it is designed to work on varying levels and areas. We invite the reader to proceed by whim.
Regarding the romanization of Chinese words and names, we have mixed systems. In order to avoid confusing the reader/viewer, we followed the English subtitles of the video disk for characters' names. Otherwise, we use Pinyin (the PRC system widely used since the 1980s) for the credits and bibliography. At the same time, we have not converted names and places that are well-known to readers under different spellings, such as Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Hou Xiaoxian), Taipei (Taibei), Peking Opera (Beijing Opera), and the like.
We have kept quicktime clips to a minimum, as Hou's long takes pose practical problems for the technology available today. In an ideal world, Mosaic could drive a laser disk. Until this utopia arrives, we have offered the running times of scenes based on the laser disk produced in Taiwan. TO CONVERT THESE TO THE RUNNING TIMES FOR VIDEO TAPE, ADD __ MINUTES TO SIDE B AND __ MINUTES TO SIDE C. Unfortunately, this disk, which has English subtitles for everything but the intertitles, is currently out of print. However, it can be found in Chinese language video stores, as can video tapes. A video disk is available in Japan, but the subtitles are, of course, in Japanese. The source for purchasing the Chinese language VHS video tape is Wonderful Video Company, whose address is R 111-12 F, Er-Mei Street, Taipei, Taiwan; tel. 886 (country code)-2-314-0477. This video tape does not have English subtitles, however, English-subtitled bootlegs do appear in video stores in Chinese communities.
This project was originally designed for a class on multimedia close analysis at the University of Southern California School of Cinema- Television. In the past, this course had students study different modes of close analysis, using a single film on a flatbed for an entire semester. In the past few years, it has been transformed to explore the ways new media and computer technologies can facilitate close textual analysis. This particular semester, the class constructed their analyses on the beta version of Multimedia Scholar, a software under development at USC. We have adapted this text and its structure for Mosaic. We would also like to thank our professor, Michael Friend of the Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Archives, for his guidance and help.