The reception of City of Sadness is an important issue that has been used as the counter argument against the film in many of the articles collected in Death of the New Cinema. These writers suggest that the ambiguous narrative space and time, detached and immobile camera position, and complex character relationships have contributed to the film's inaccessibility for most audiences. What actually upsets several writers in the book is the "untrue" depiction of the February 28 Incident. They point to two specific scenes in the film that directly refer to the violence of the massacre; these scenes, however, show the Taiwanese mob's excessive hatred of the mainland Chinese rather than the Nationalist Party's brutal machine-gun shooting of unarmed Taiwanese. (B: 29:36-30:35; B: 35:40-36:55)
These critics base their arguments on a conception of cinema that privileges a certain kind of legibility. If one slightly shifts one's attention from the search for the whole to the fragmentary, meanings unfold much more fluently. This shift in reading paradigm is evocatively described by Homi Bhabha's comparison between "pedagogical" (the linear, sufficient and complete master narrative), and "performative" (the supplementary and temporal). Bhabha basically begins with many of Benedict Anderson's observations about the alleged hoariness and actual novelty of the nation, only repackaging them in post- structuralist clothing to provide both theoretical depth and a site for resistance to take shape. A typical characteristic of the nation is its propensity for sinking its roots to the furthest reaches of history, to stake a claim for its origin in a past which it simultaneously erases. In this process the nation creates a master narrative offered for the identification and participation of its people, who not only "belong" to it: they "constitute" and "perform" the nation. It is this latter characteristic that Bhabha is most interested in because of its disruptive potential. In this sense, Bhabha's pedagogical and performative are analogous to a langue of the law and parole of the people (Bhabha's analysis of the nation possesses many resonances with Derrida's critiques of Saussure and Austin). By focusing on the liminality of people within the essentializing borders of the nation , he can reveal how they are both the objects of the nation's pedagogy and subjects of its performance. Because of its supplementary nature, this liminality holds the potential for other cultural identities and political solidarities to emerge. At this site, the totalizing borders of the nation state give way to the contentious space of minority discourse, revealing "heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities, and tense cultural locations."
In City of Sadness the pedagogical can be understood as the full and adequate representation of the 228 Incident at the narrative level in particular, and the comprehensive plot line and character relationships in a larger sense. This is the specious official history that has been sanctioned until very recently. The performative indicates the representation of personal memory and individual experience against the political backdrop diegeticized in three discursive texts: sound, writing, and photography. As mentioned in our discussion of the controversy this film sparked, the multiple claims for the legitimate authorship about the incident have created a polysemy in the reconstruction of Taiwan's history from 1945-1949. This knot of textual contention is particularly intense around the February 28 Incident. Therefore, these three discursive textualities provide an alternative approach to the history as well as an indirect, mediated, and troped contestation with the official writing of the history of Taiwan.
Sound/Writing/Photography