WRITING:

Dialogism and Feminine Voice

The article "Women Cannot Enter History?" written by Mizo in The Death of the New Cinema centers around the negation of women in history and indicates the film's overall conservative ideology. Another article by the literary critic, Liao Binghui argues that the prominence of a feminine voice in the narration of the February 28 incident attributes a similar "femininized" attitude towards the Nationalist government's brutality. Instead of manifesting a direct and persuasive voice in writing the history of the incident, the film's indirection is equivalent to the traditional definitions of femininity imposed by patriarchy --- submissiveness, peacefulness, and forgiveness --- qualities the film reinscribes to sustain the passive position of the Taiwanese in political movement and immobilize dissent and oppositional readings of history.

Both arguments rightfully decode the ideological masking provided by the phallocentric inscription of traditional femininity. However, their decoding re-articulates the very patriarchal mechanisms they painstakingly attempt to deconstruct. Their arguments imply that the representation of traditional femininity can only be read as a result of patriarchal suppression rather than a possibility of resistance. This passive and "negative" assumption about femininity reinscribes phallocentric ideology (suggesting that femininity is able to signify by an anatomy of patriarchy only) and obliterates the potential resistance imbedded in the feminine voice and Hinomi's enunciation in this case. Certainly, one cannot deny the articulation of sexual difference as a fruitful approach in the examination of politics and gender discourse. However, the emphasis on the monolithic reading of Hinomi's enunciation is to repress the expressivity of women that can be read (or experienced) as positive, progressive resistance. Female voice, noise, and writing constitute the most crucial dialogism of the text.

I. The introduction of Hinomi and her meeting with Wen- ching. (A: 7:20-8:10)
Although City of Sadness is, in many ways, structured completely different from classical Hollywood cinema, Silverman's model is useful for elaborating the dialogical text embodied by female voice. The film introduces Hinomi and Wen-ching through the voice-over of her diary when she describes her arrival at the hospital where she will work as a nurse. Her voice-over is synchronized with the image track in which we do see her carried by a bamboo chair, accompanied by Wen-ching, marching in a mountain trail. In this scene, her narration serves as a diegetic imperative; it is not characterized by confinement. Her voice-over is the mastering diegetic sound through which the whole scene is enframed.
We can elaborate our argument further by considering Hinomi's writing more closely. Her narration serves as the site of enunciation for both private and public events, but these also represent two different kinds of textuality. The synchronization of female voice-over with its visual presentation only occurs when that narration has no indexical referent to the larger social context. These are scenes Hinomi directly experiences. However, when her voice-over describes public events, the visual presentation hardly synchronizes with the audio track. The image tracks in such cases are usually enunciated from a delayed quasi- omnipresent perspective that often begins with Hinomi's act of writing/voice-over and then almost imperceptibly shifts to a presentation of her description with all the presence of omniscient cinematic narration. The third-person, god-like point of view retroactively justifies and legitimizes her fragmented and personal documentation of the history.
Given our comparison of the relationship between sound and image at the diegetic level, it is quite right to point out that Hinomi's narration of the public event is always taken over by the more omniscient, macro-enunciative voice. However, those synchronized scenes in which her subjectivity is privileged in the diegesis must still be seen as interdependent with the macro-enunciative narration. Although her diary tends to appear trivial, private and insignificant compared to the larger social and political context, it is through reading along the borderline of these two textualities that irony is produced and dialogism emerges. (See B: 27:20-28:58; C: 26:40-29-15).

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