In City of Sadness, the photograph is a non-verbal access point to both history and memory. Critics have attacked the construction of the film's main character, the deaf-mute Wen-ching, as a passive, handicapped photographer who cannot actively react against the ruling power. By way of contrast, minor characters offer far more powerful models of resistance, such as Hinomi's brother, Hinoe, who escapes to the mountains and organizes a socialist commune after the massacre. If we are to take Hou's explanation for this character as face value, we would recognize a simple, practical reason for Wen-ching's handicaps: the Hong Kong actor selected to play the role, Tony Liang, could speak neither Mandarin nor Taiwanese Amoy fluently, however, muteness solves that problem. Yet sometimes such technical eclecticism generates more interesting and provocative results. Since Wen-ching loses the primary faculty of speech for articulating his relationship with history he must rely on other means of communication, such as his photography. Still photography becomes an alternative mode of representation for history and memory.
It is through his supplementary photographic images that history is written and memory is recollected. Photography becomes a mediated arrest of the past. By superimposing individual experience against the political context, photography becomes not only a sign granting access to the past but also a comment on history. Thus the photos' relationship with history is highly coded. Each photo signifies different phase of historical development embodied by a double play of arrival and departure, both literally and metaphorically. The following close analysis of three photographs will demonstrate this codification temporality.