In one of the most astounding scenes of City of Sadness, Wen-ching sits in prison. KMT guards open the door and brusquely take a few men away. As their footsteps echo down what sounds like a long hallway, the camera lingers on Wen-ching, who broods silently behind a barred window. The footsteps stop, followed by the report of gunfire. This execution --- visceral for its suddenness and invisibility --- doesn't register on Wen-ching's handicapped body; he watched them go, but could not hear them die. It makes the next scene all the more disturbing, for the same soldiers return and take Wen-ching into the troubling off-screen space. (B 46:00-48:35) This scene is the purest example of the (indirect) representation of violence in Hou's films.
The centrality of this issue of the representation of violence, particularly in relation to Hou's particular stylistic system and his narration of the nation, will concern this section of our analysis. This curiously reserved approach to violence informs all of Hou's films. It's radically different than the ballet-like stylization of Hong Kong films, the cultivated precision of Japanese cinematic swordplay, or American cinema's specularization and fetishization of violence through the use of close-ups and realistic make-up and special effects. Hou tends to pull away from the savage acts of his stories and show them from a distance.
This reserved approach to violence is taken to an extreme in City
of Sadness, where most of the acts of violence are pushed far away
from the camera --- often off-screen. When mobs of Taiwanese start beating
Chinese in the wake of 2.28, we see fights in the distance, which are then
shoved into the background in the shot of Hinoe watching in disbelief; then
the violence is pushed entirely off-screen in the following shot (B 34:40-36:01).
In another scene of retribution, Second Brother stands on a country lane,
cut off from the waist-down by the bottom edge of the frame
(we do not yet
realize that he's hiding something in the off- screen space). Carriages
arrive in the distance; when Second Brother runs toward them, the machete
he was holding off-screen comes into view. We watch he and his friends attack
the men from the carriage in extreme long-shot, moving on- and off-screen
as they run behind tall grass and buildings (B 2:32- 3:54).
This strategic placement of violence just beyond sight may be found in other Taiwanese films. Nornes has argued elsewhere that Edward Yang's delegation of violence to off-screen spaces serves as an organizing function. It should be remembered that Hou and Yang have worked closely in the profilmic spaces, both behind and before the camera. Indeed, Hou's unusual portrayal of violent acts in extreme long shots is somewhat reminiscent of the fight on the lonely road at the end of Edward Yang's Taipei Story (Ch'ing-mei chu- ma, 1985). Here Hou himself (acting in the main role) is attacked and receives a stab wound that causes his character's death (see photograph below).
At the same time, Hou also articulates this approach with other aspects
of his style, making the use of off-screen violence his own. For example,
in one of the first scenes of conflict, a knife fight breaks out in the
nightclub's hallway (A 56:34-58:07). Hou cuts in mid-fight to what appears
to be one of his poetic transitional shots, which
we have come to expect between scenes: a couple rickshaws pull up to a peaceful
town in extreme long shot. By this time we have learned that these pretty
land and cityscapes mark the ends of scenes and contain undecidable ellipses
in time. A man emerges from one of the rickshaws and enters a building,
while villagers mill around an open area gossiping. Thirty seconds into
this minute-long shot, the fight from the previous scene bursts into the
open area --- into on-screen space. Hou masterfully builds up our expectations
for a poetic transition shot introduced by a typically undecidable
ellipsis, only to reveal that there was no temporal gap between the
shots, that there was neither transition nor ellipsis.
Since the most violent act of the film, the 2/28 incident, occurs off- screen, it's crucial to examine more closely this relationship between violence and space. In this respect, Marsha Kinder's recent elaboration of the iterative in cinema is useful to understand how this approach to violence relates to the film's politics. The iterative refers to stating once that which happened multiple times. All films contain both iterative and singulative aspects. The classical style tends to emphasize its singulative characters, while relegating iterative aspects to mere background. On the other hand, a style like neorealism (or the early New Taiwan Cinema, for that matter) foregrounds the slippage between the two, because it is the typicality of its narrative which is important. The troubles of De Sica's singulative bicycle thief, for example, are meant to evoke the common experience of the entire nation's poor.
In like manner, there is a constant, foregrounded slippage between the singulative family at the center of Hou's narrative and the collective experience of Taiwanese between the twin oppressions of the Japanese and the Nationalists. While a typical Hollywood film would focus on the family to the exclusion of larger political issues, City of Sadness centers on a single family to speak about every family, or the nation as family. The movement from the singular experience of the family to other levels often occurs in mise-en-scene. Kinder notes, "the interplay between singulative event and the paradigm it represents is frequently played out spatially in terms of foreground and background." (Kinder: 7) An example in City of Sadness would be the scene mentioned above with Hinoe at the railway station. After Hinoe watches the indiscriminate beatings in the distance, the sequence ends with Wen-ching becoming the focus of a mob's wrath.
Furthermore, Hou's style offers a further, more peculiar, spatial elaboration of the iterative. Here the iterative is played out in terms of on- and off-screen space. In prison Wen-ching watches two anonymous men walk into off-screen space to their deaths, and then shortly thereafter he follows them down the same hallway. Throughout the film, we hear the seemingly endless repetition of "So and so has been arrested. So and so has disappeared," over and over again. We see incidents of mob rule, police round-ups, and searches as they affect the singulative Lin family; at the same time, the sounds of these brands of violence performed against other families form a sonic backdrop as constant as the musical score. By initiating violence against the main characters on- screen, then relegating paradigmatic violence to the off-screen spaces, Hou cultivates the oppressive sense that this is happening across the entire island affecting hundreds of thousands of people.
We would also argue that extra-textual factors enter into the effect of the iterative. It must be remembered that every family in Taiwan has stories about how this turbulent time affected their own family. This personal history certainly constitutes a central reading code for the film; what happens to the Lin family is read through the experience of one's own family memories and, by extension, the nation as a whole.
Hou has repeated claimed he did not set out to make a "political" movie, yet the decision to make a film about this period has wide ranging political implications. Until City of Sadness was released, the subject of 2/28 was strictly taboo and repressed from public discourse. Hou ran the risk of censorship, and strategically showed it abroad before releasing it in Taiwan. After the Venice Film Festival coup, the government's threat of censorship quickly died. Upon its release, it generated a healthy, furious debate which Hou surely foresaw. He was doomed to satisfy no one, and he didn't. The immigrants from the mainland and their descendants felt the movie let the Japanese off free, while portraying the actions of the KMT unfairly. Taiwanese, on the other hand, are still reeling from the massacre of 2/28 and its bloody retributions. They point out that the 2/28 incident itself occurs off-screen, and that much of the violence shown is initiated by Taiwanese against mainlanders.
Hou both evades and addresses these issues through the use of the iterative and off-screen violence. Being the first media figure to broach the subject of the massacre, Hou was under enormous pressure in terms of how to represent the previously unrepresentable. Like other filmmakers working under conditions restricting their free expression (for example, Kamei Fumio in wartime Japan, John Huston in wartime America, Sergei Paradjanov in the Soviet Union) Hou chose to speak indirectly. Pushing the most sensitive violence to the off-screen spaces --- and multiplying the victims of that violence through invocation of the iterative --- allowed Hou to bring this repressed, formative moment in the history of the nation into the open for the people in Taiwan to reflect upon it meaning for today.
While this film was under production, the government of Taiwan was doing its own farmer bashing, crushing dissent despite the lifting of martial law. The film doesn't go for the jugular, but certainly represents a movement toward healthy dialogue and freedom of expression. Taiwanese cinema presents a situation we've seen in many countries emerging from long periods of censorship and repression, adopting an ambiguous stance in the face of the KMT's frightening, pedagogical clarity. It's into this ambiguous space that, through a quirk of ugly timing, the events of June 4, 1989 inserted themselves, perhaps extending the iterative across space and time, for it's impossible to watch Hou's film without thinking that Beijing is also a city of sadness.