SOUND:

Feminine Voice

The interior feminine voice is positioned at several points in the narrative to create irony that evokes a political awareness of the brutality of the Nationalist regime. The quiet ending of the film leaves us with a family deeply wounded by politics. With the emotional reactions restricted due to the imperatives of their patriarchal role in family and society, the range of the male characters' emotional reaction is limited. Thus, their frustration must be displaced onto illegitimate social (underworld) institutions such as gambling, prostitution, and fighting. This is the only outlet for relief. Women, on the other hand, prove more capable of coping with the changes since they are excluded from the center of the political arena. However, their marginal position does not prevent them from being affected by the bloody political transition. Although most female characters in the film are deprived of a public speaking voice, their reaction to atrocity is still channeled through their "feminine" voice: usually hysterical screaming or weeping, gender codes kept strictly off-limits to Hou's male characters.

Note: This section contains streaming audio, requiring the free RealPlayer plugin. Once installed, click each title and instantly listen to sound clips from the film.

 
I. The second daughter-in-law cries. (B: 10:23-11:06; B: 20:22-22:00)
Hou never discloses the name of the wife of the third son, Wen- liang. She expresses her frustration and traumatic feelings on two occasions when her life is damaged by the massive, outside forces of history. The first one occurs when the military police rush into the house, attempting to arrest Wen-liang. (B: 10:23-11:06) It seems that a beating takes place in the off-screen spaces, but the wife's hysterical screaming and its sound communicates the brutality with more visceral power than any on-screen violence could muster. Another example comes with Wen- liang's homecoming after being released from the prison. (B: 20:22-22:00) Upon arriving at the house, he passes out as a result of the cruelty he experienced during imprisonment. Seeing him in such a terrible condition, the wife wails, calling his name in order to waken him. At the time same she reacts hysterically to her husband's wounds, she expresses her the deep shock of her emotions.
 
II. "Father is innocent, you have to live with dignity." (B: 50:17-51:47)
Another example of the potential power of feminine voice occurs when Wen-ching, after being released from prison, visits the family of a friend who was secretly executed in prison. As with many victims who died during the uprising --- in and out of custody --- his execution was private and confidential. The victim's family was not even able to receive his dead body, let alone conduct a proper funeral or hear the final words of their beloved family member. In fact, it is up to Wen-ching to inform the wife and children of his death. The scene depicting Wen-ching's visit re-presents the private, unspoken sadness endured by countless families who were (are) victims of the 228 Incident.
This particular iteration of that sadness starts in a domestic setting, with Wen-ching sitting on the right side of the frame and three children standing in the middle, against an obscure backdrop. The dead man's wife enters the space, offering Wen-ching a cup of tea. Wen-ching then takes a tightly folded, strip-like cloth from a neck tie. He unfolds the piece of the cloth and hands it to the woman. The un-named, silent woman, reads her husband's last words and loses control, bursting into tears. As we have argued, Hou reserves reverse angles for privileged moments. Here he cuts to the woman's point of view of the cloth. Scrawled in blood by finger are the words, "Father is innocent. You have to live with dignity." This highly melodramatic moment is not manifested by verbal language, but by emotions that depend upon femininity as a means of expression. The terrors that have occurred out there in history have not been cinematically visualized. Rather, they have been made perceptible through the sound of women screaming. It is through women's feminine response to traumatic exigencies that the film's figurative "sadness" is experienced by the spectator.
 
III. The Voice / Speech of Chen Yi (the governor) vs. the Voice / Writing of Hinomi (the domestic woman). (B: 27:20-28:58)
On the day after February 28, governor Chen Yi's speech is broadcast across the nation's air waves. The sequence begins with Chen Yi's soothing voice saying "Compatriots of Taiwan, . . . " The speech continues into the next shot in the hospital office where the staff bends over the radio, concentrating on the broadcast. Chen Yi's speech denies the ferocity of the conflict, but in his benevolent tone he emphasizes the government's efficiency in consoling the victims. The scene is then cut to the hallway of the hospital where Hinomi meets her brother and Wen- ching. Although the soundtrack continues to carry the politician's broadcast, Hinomi's voice is soon superimposed on the top of the governor's speech. Quoting from what she has heard from people's discussion, she writes ". . . It is said that many people were killed in Taipei. . . everyone is afraid that one war is just over, how come another will soon begin?" Her writing is positioned to supersede and contradict Chen Yi's pedagogical statement.
Chen Yi's male speech is acoustically reinforced for presenting an exclusively authoritative mode. Without seeing his body, Chen Yi's authority is made "present" through his exterior, omnipresent speech. Through the device of radio, he and the State are aligned with the power of technology. The mise-en-scene is also structured to indicate the infiltration of his verbal enunciation of the incident into the narrative space as the entire hospital staff surround the radio from which his voice emanates; a doctor fiddles with a knob to clarify its transmission. However, by superimposing Hinomi's feminine, quiet, and private voice over his speech, a sonic irony emerges out of the contradiction of the two "grains" of voice, accompanied as well by two different versions of the incident. It is in the dialogical space formed by these contradictions that an alternative, resistant reading of the history of the nation may be found. This dialogism finds its sources in the terms of sexual difference in clarifying the two levels of voice. Therefore, to say that her diary is too private to be significant to politics is to repress her subjectivity, overlook a counter-narrative of the nation, and lose the dialectical potential of performative of the people, replacing one pedagogy with another.

Main Table of Contents

Sound/Writing/Photography