no film in taiwanese cinema history has received as
many accolades or as much criticism as A City of Sadness (henceforth
referred to as Sadness), directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, the firstTaiwanese
film ever to winVenice’s Golden Lion Award for Best Film.Immediately
after its release in 1989, the film and its director came under
scathing attack by critics from the entire range of Taiwan’s political
spectrum. A collection of essays entitled The Death of New Cinema,
whose main target of criticism was Hou and his film,1
was followed
by another wave of articles to counter the charges. Almost all the
latter, written in either Chinese or English, focus on specific aspects
of the film to refute the critiques in The Death of New Cinema. One
article even challenges Hou’s detractors to watch the film a few more
times so that they can appreciate his aesthetics.2
Some examine the
film’s technical aspects—Hou’s use of sound, intertext, and photography—and
others concentrate on issues raised in the film—questions
of multiculturalism,identity politics,the myth of the motherland (that
is, mainland China), representation of trauma, and so on.3
At the core of the criticism is the representation of history or,to be
more exact, of the 2/28 Incident, but it also entails larger issues that
have loomed over Taiwan’s political and cultural landscapes since the
lifting of martial law.That is, who owns this part of Taiwanese history,
who is legitimate to speak forTaiwan and recapture its past on screen,
and by what means? Implied in the critics’ objections to Hou’s film
is a hegemonic interpretation of the incident, for their critique of his
techniques is often indistinguishable from their criticism of the film’s
content.Here I give a brief account of the critics’complaints in regard
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to Hou’s failure to faithfully re-create the incident on the screen, not
to rehash the now largely discredited criticism, but to highlight the
difficulty of re-creating a forgotten historical event. I then shift my
attention to certain scenes from Sadness to investigate the politics of
filmic representation of atrocity. As a contrasting study of cinematic
re-creation of the 2/28 Incident, the second half of this chapter analyzes
Lin Cheng-sheng’s March of Happiness (1999), particularly Lin’s
use of melodrama and treatment of violence.With the story ending
on the eve of the 2/28 Incident, March of Happiness explores similar
issues regarding this period of Taiwan’s history, although it is noticeably
more ambitious by including the last days of the colonial period,
and its content and cinematic techniques follow a different approach.
A CITY OF SADNESS
Although many readers are familiar with A City of Sadness,a synopsis
is in order here.Sadness centers on the Lin family,especially the sons:
the eldest, Lin Wenxiong, is the owner of a nightclub called Little
Shanghai; the second son is absent throughout the film because his
whereabouts are unknown after having been drafted by the Japanese
army to fight in the Pacific War; Wenliang, the third son, has
returned as a traumatized war casualty from the mainland, where
he worked as an interpreter for the Japanese; and the youngest son,
Wenqing, is a deaf-mute photographer.The movie opens as Wenxiong’s
concubine is giving birth to a son during Emperor Hirohito’s
radio broadcast of Japan’s surrender.4
Wenliang later recovers from
his trauma and becomes involved in shady business deals with the
brother of Wenxiong’s concubine, which, in turn, embroil him in
disputes with a rival group, the Shanghai gang.The gang members
use their connections with the Nationalist government’s representative
in Taiwan to falsely accuse Wenliang of being a Communist
spy.Wenliang is arrested and jailed, forcing Wenxiong to seek help
from the Shanghai gang. Although Wenliang is eventually released,
he has been so traumatized by the brutality in prison that he loses
his sanity and never recovers.Wenqing, who operates a photo studio
away from home, is involved with radical friends who are dissatisfied
with the new government. One of his friends is Hiroe, whose
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sister, Hiromi,5
works as a nurse in a local clinic and later becomes
Wenqing’s wife.Wenxiong is killed while defending the brother of
his concubine. In the meantime, the 2/28 Incident and its aftermath
are spreading across the island.Wenqing and his friends are arrested,
but later he is released. Hiroe flees to the mountains to start a commune-like
work-study group, but the location is discovered and all
the members of the group are rounded up by Nationalist government
soldiers.Wenqing and Hiromi plan to flee with their child but
decide not to, and Wenqing is arrested again.The film ends with the
Lin family sharing a meal, but the contrast with the opening scene
is unmistakable, for the only members left are the aging patriarch,
women, children, and the mentally unstable Wenliang.
Re-creating Historical Events
Among the various venomous attacks on A City of Sadness and its
director is the film’s failure to properly represent history, as summarized
by Robert Chi: “It does not show what it ought to show.”6
Hou is accused of“vulgarizing historical interpretation,”owing to the
“director’s ignorance of historical facts.” Hou, it is said,“should have
worked harder and his think-tank should have been better equipped
to deal with these issues” of representation: “Historical events are
obscured, and not given in great enough detail, as the director has
mistakenly believed that the audience was well-informed.”7
To be sure,
these charges are to some extent personally motivated, but they nevertheless
draw our attention to such questions as whether a film audience
goes to the theater to learn about their own history or whether
cinema should be required to teach the “correct” history.Apparently,
implied in the criticism is the belief that an accurate version of historical
truth can somehow be obtained through a cinematic rendition.
Naive though these assumptions may appear to us now, when
contextualized inTaiwan’s history itself, the contention over the 2/28
Incident in Sadness is the very embodiment of government suppression
and the annihilation of people’s memory. That is, the oppressive
atmosphere of the White Terror created a mnemonic vacuum,
which people eagerly sought to fill with what they believed should be
retained. In a word, Sadness itself is a victim of the White Terror.
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The contention surrounding the original event and subsequent
interpretations calls to mind Oliver Stone’s JFK, which also has been
severely criticized:“Much of the hostility seems to have been generated
by his freehand mixing of documentary,feature,and pseudo-documentary
footage.”8
Stone’s cinematic techniques create an impression
of historical veracity, with JFK’s “‘desperate need’ to recuperate
a unified and fixed view of history so as to secure what is commonly
thought to be the only foundation for the formation of national identity
and community.”9
Although Stone’s conspiracy theory has been
attacked by film critics and historians as well as by former and current
government officials, as Robert Toplin argues, “Stone’s movie raised
legitimate questions about the history of the cold war that had been
the focus of attention by scholars and journalists for many years.”10
The movie’s credibility has long been debated but nevertheless rekindled
public interest in an important page in American history. Similarly,
Sadness, despite the controversy, remains a milestone in Taiwan’s
understanding of and search for the past, however fragmentary that
may be.Just as JFK may have served“as the beginning of a new understanding
of Kennedy’s assassination, not the end” and “offer[s] questions,
not answers,”11
Sadness functioned as a beginning for the Taiwanese,
and its timely appearance helped ushered in an alternative
approach to history.
Sadness has been accused of beautifying the image of the Japanese
and their culture,thus portraying theTaiwanese as slaves to the colonial
government. But Hou’s critics tend to focus on the content, on what
they regard as an incomplete, insufficient portrayal of the 2/28 Incident.Wu
Qiyan,for instance,laments that A City of Sadness“should be
an unprecedented breakthrough inTaiwanese film history, but what it
manages to accomplish is merely opening up a narrow crack in a history
covered up by time and political powers;[theTaiwanese people’s]
historical experience does not appear in its entirety.”12
In retrospect,we now
realize that Wu has overlooked the opportunity that the film offered
the audience, to confront the fact that no historical experience can
ever be completely recaptured on screen (or in writing). Moreover,
Wu’s insistence on the impossible task of representing historical events
in their entirety betrays his anxiety over the possibility that “history
as drama is shot through with fiction and invention from the smallest
details to largest events.”13
For him,obviously,the danger that fictional
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invention may obscure the real facts aboutTaiwan’s past can be eliminated
through an unadulterated,cinematic totality.We could label such
blind faith in verity as the fallacy of facts: “Facts are supposed to provide
the basis for arbitrating among the variety of different meanings
that different groups can assign to an event for different ideological or
political reasons. But the facts are a function of the meaning assigned
to events, not some primitive data that determine what meanings an
event can have.”14
Related to the attack on Sadness’s incomplete historical representation
is a concern about the lack of explanation; that is, in the critics’
view, the film ought to have presented a detailed and complete explanation
of how and why the 2/28 Incident happened.Wu Qiyan complains
that “the limited viewpoint cannot provide an internally consistent
explanation [for historical events].Therefore, in the movie, we
see suffering and oppression, but cannot see the causes of suffering or
the external forces of oppression.”15
Lu Kuang makes a similar charge:
“When the movie is over, we still don’t know what some of the characters
did to be arrested or what the 2/28 Incident was all about.”16
In
Chi Yanqi’s denunciation,“The dissidents in A City of Sadness are so
vacuous and ignorant that their romanticism becomes [an] unrealistic,
naive illusion and nauseating cliché.”17
Obviously,disregarding the fact
that cinema is not a tutorial on history, Chi and many like-minded
critics would like to have had more scenes devoted to the leftist intellectuals,
Hiroe and Wenqing, and perhaps more of their actual actions
against the persecution of the Taiwanese. Furthermore,Wenqing and
Hiromi’s romantic relationship only aggravates these critics’ displeasure
over the director’s intentional elision of history,which is reflected
in Liang Xinhua’s view:“Regrettably,the director and the scriptwriter
were completely incapable of conducting a dialogue with history to
develop a broad and profound historical view for their contemporaries;
instead they escape into an unchanging and romantic fantasy
world of aestheticism to displace their views and reflections on society
and history.”18
The most serious assault is directed against Hou Hsiao-hsien’s
political motivation and ideology. Although for Lu Kuang the film
does not express a clear-cut political ideology of a pro-Taiwanese and
antigovernment stance in re-creating the scenes of Taiwanese suffering,
Mi Zou criticizes the director’s view of history, claiming that it
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is similar to what was proposed by the then president, Lee Teng-hui,
who exhorted the Taiwanese to be forward looking and leave the
incident to historians.19
Adding to this scathing criticism, Chi Yanqi
believes that Sadness completely distorts the historical facts by following
the official explanation, that the incident was instigated by
Taiwanese Communists and Taiwanese mobs:
The so-called government corruption and social injustice are presented
only through the cynical narration of the characters, and
the suppression of the 2/28 Incident is represented in the style
of “re-counting.” . . . The movie does not seriously question, let
alone subvert and critique, the official assessment of the incident.
In contrast, the scene in which the Taiwanese beat up the mainlanders
uses “visually veritable” images as proof. Moreover, the
Taiwanese who carry out the beating are fierce looking,with their
hair, long, scraggly, like hooligans or an angry mob. No one in the
audience would believe that these people are rebelling because
they suffer oppression.20
We can surmise that taken as a whole, the critics’ dissatisfaction
with the depiction of the 2/28 Incident in Sadness derives from a false
belief that historical events can be faithfully represented and that there
is a proper way for historical representation in films (and other media
as well, of course). Specifically, and as far as this chapter is concerned,
the main contention concerns the power of visual dramatization versus
verbal narration. Moreover, even though most critics from both
camps question the possibility of fully representing historical events,
little is said about whether atrocious acts should even be enacted on
screen at all, for they seem to be more preoccupied with the accuracy
than with the legitimacy of representation.
Witnessing and Representing Atrocity
The long passage just quoted regarding the scene in which the Taiwanese
beat up mainlanders is often cited as the most glaring evidence
that Hou does not give a balanced, impartial depiction, since the Taiwanese
are cast in a negative light.Compounding this perceived biased
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representation is the lack of visual dramatization of the massacre of the
Taiwanese.That is,the image of theTaiwanese as victimizers is dramatized,but
the image of theTaiwanese as victims of government brutality
on a much larger scale is revealed only through narration.We recall
that those Taiwanese who were furious over the injustice inflicted by
the Nationalist government sought out mainlanders for revenge.The
governor-general, ChenYi, then retaliated by sending troops recently
transported from the mainland out to the streets, where they began
indiscriminately shooting everyone in sight.What bothers ChiYanqi
and others is the different ways in which these two violent incidents
are presented to the audience. For the first incident, we seeTaiwanese
carrying clubs and scythes; chasing passengers, presumed to be mainlanders,
off the train; and beating them.Then the camera cuts to the
stunned expression on Hiroe’s face, followed by a scene on the train
of a different group of Taiwanese interrogating Wenqing. Under the
pressure,Wenqing,who has been deaf since the age of eight,blurts out
that he is Taiwanese. His interrogator then switches to Japanese, and
when he gets no response, he is about to hit Wenqing, and if it were
not for Hiroe’s timely appearance,Wenqing would have suffered the
same fate as the mainlanders.
At first glance,it is not surprising that someTaiwanese critics would
consider this scene inflammatory and prejudicial. But the scene’s significance
changes drastically if we look at the entire sequence: after
the outbreak of the incident,Wenqing and Hiroe go toTaipei; injured
mainlanders are sent to Hiromi’s clinic;Wenqing returns and seeks out
Hiromi at the clinic, and as he writes to tell her what he witnessed, he
faints; Governor-General ChenYi gives a speech on the radio regarding
the well-intentioned measures taken by his administration;Hiromi
goes to the studio to see Wenqing, who then writes out what he saw,
which is followed by a reenactment of the “infamous” scenes on the
train; and finally, in a night scene, a seriously injured Hiroe appears
in Wenqing’s studio and tells Wenqing and Hiromi about the mass
arrests and killing ordered by ChenYi.Of particular importance is the
sequence of these scenes:a static shot of the village rooftops seemingly
enveloped by ChenYi’s heavily accented Mandarin broadcast,Wenqing’s
written account, and the dramatization of violence on the train,
followed by Hiroe’s account.These segments raise questions concerning
the witnessing and relating historical events.
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We need to examine exactly what is conveyed by the scene of the
Taiwanese mob’s violence against the mainlanders andWenqing.Hou’s
detractors have castigated him for portraying the Taiwanese as hooligans
or an angry mob and“no one in the audience would believe that
these people are rebelling because they suffer oppression.”21
Indeed,
the Taiwanese are the victimizers in this scene, but its significance
changes dramatically when we consider perspective,the narrative point
of view.Virtually all the critics consider the dramatization to be part
ofWenqing’s recollection, and therefore the dramatization of violence
against the mainlanders serves to denigrate theTaiwanese.But because
Wenqing is a deaf-mute, this scene could not possibly be part of his
recollection.The camera angle and the place whereWenqing is sitting
on the train make it impossible for him to see what is happening off
the train, let alone see the stunned look on Hiroe’s face.After Wenqing
is rescued by Hiroe on the train, Hiroe goes on to explain angrily
thatWenqing cannot hear them:“He’s been deaf since the age of eight.
How could he hear what you’re saying to him?”Simply put,Wenqing,
who is looking out the window, could not have heard what Hiroe is
telling his assailants about his hearing problem and then recount that
to Hiroe’s sister,Hiromi.While some might dismiss this incongruity as
a directorial flaw, I propose that we look at the film as it is presented
and focus on the issue of perspective.SinceWenqing cannot have seen
or heard what is happening behind him, the train scene cannot possibly
be presented from his point of view. I believe that juxtaposed with
ChenYi’s broadcast about protecting the law-abiding citizens, which
is meant to deceive the Taiwanese, this scene dramatizes the official
version that the incident was largely the handiwork of Communists
and hooligans, thereby absolving the government of its responsibility
for having failed the Taiwanese.
Of particular interest is Wenqing’s recounting. Christopher Lupke
argues that “just as the deaf/mute cannot speak or hear, his imperfect
fulfillment of his duty as witness points us toward the broader question
of silencing dissent in Taiwan, both then and throughout the Chiang
Era.”22
Chen Ruxiu also observes that this scene illustrates the fate of
the Taiwanese as a devastating historical tragedy witnessed by a deafmute,which,in
turn,symbolizes the suppression of the incident.23
The
sense of tragedy is magnified when we consider that the Taiwanese,
symbolized by Wenqing, cannot talk about the incident, so that what
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is left is written words (quasi-history); but then even the person who
witnesses and records the event is “disappeared” at the end. Furthermore,
the scene also makes an implicit comment on how historical
knowledge is transmitted.That is, written words, including memoirs
and eyewitness accounts, are what we have to make sense of the incident.
But written records—whether objective or personal/subjective
history—always are selective.
Besides the question of whether historical events can be reproduced
in their entirety, one of the major issues regarding representation of
the 2/28 Incident in Sadness is the different modes of portraying violence
against the Taiwanese. Some critics contend that while the Taiwanese
assault on the mainlanders is dramatized for the audience, the
scenes in which nativeTaiwanese were massacred because they simply
were in the wrong place at the wrong time are narrated by the injured
Hiroe, not visually enacted. These critics, it seems, would prefer to
have an equal length of visualized violence against the Taiwanese to
demonstrate what Hiroe relates: “Chen Yi sent troops out, arresting
and killing people along the way.”The fact that Hiroe, the narrator
of the violence against the Taiwanese, is an eyewitness and a casualty
himself already “implies” that atrocious acts are being carried out. His
narration also makes an oblique comment on the lasting effect of
the incident.When the Nationalist government tried to erase records
of the incident by forbidding the people to talk about it, personal
accounts related in private, as in the scene at Wenqing’s studio, were
the only means of transmission.
The detractors’ preference obviously derives from the tendency to
privilege visuality over orality, without regard for the possibility that
not all violence can (or must) be dramatized on the screen in order
to convey the degree of suffering and tragedy. Perhaps Mirian Bratu
Hansen’s critique of Schindler’s List is applicable here, when she argues
that the film “does not seek to negate the representational, iconic
power of filmic images, but rather bank on this power.”24
Perhaps
what the critics from The Death of New Cinema group would prefer is
for Hou to exploit the iconic power of filmic images and hence sensationalize
the brutality against the Taiwanese.When dealing with the
re-creation of atrocious acts,we should not rely on familiar tropes and
common techniques to narrate an event that will likely never be fully
understood, so that we are not left with only scenes of violence that
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neither enrich nor augment our knowledge. Even the lofty notion
that“screen violence provides a viewer with the opportunity to purge
hostile feelings in the safe realm of art”25
rings hollow, for such an
ideologically and politically motivated proposition for screen violence
is, ultimately, gratuitous:“Movie violence must contain multitudinous
meanings if it hopes to avoid the prisons of ideology and cliché, if it
seeks to draw anything more than a distant, formalized response, if it
wants to outlast its moment.”26
This highly contested scene is emblematic of Hou’s directorial style,
for he “marshaled a variety of idiosyncratic techniques and production
decisions to sculpt for the spectator a rendering of the February
28th Incident that is willfully mutilated, establishing from the outset
and throughout the film that any attempt to apprehend the unvarnished
truth concerning the liquidation of dissent onTaiwan is practically
impossible.”27
Another example that shows the film’s intention to
avoid the common (Hollywood) technique of sensational dramatization
can be found in a largely ignored scene, in which the director
deals similarly with the fate of another intellectual, Lin Laoshi, or
Teacher Lin. Lin is a friend of Hiroe’s, whom Hiroe introduces to
Wenqing and other leftist intellectuals.When Wenqing returns from
Taipei, he recounts to Hiromi in writing that Lin has been going to
the meeting hall every day. Later, while they are tending to his injuries,
Hiroe tells Hiromi and Wenqing that Lin has disappeared and
that members of the settlement committee have been arrested. Not
only does Lin’s appearance foreshadow Wenqing’s and Hiroe’s arrests,
but it also makes yet another oblique comment on the government’s
persecution, without dramatizing his arrest and possible execution.
Visual dramatization may not necessarily be effective, for often the
unpresented can most eloquently convey the unspeakable.
Writing, Reading, and Recounting Atrocity
One of Hou’s critics has complained that “whenever issues of politics
are about to appear, the camera quickly turns away from real political
oppression and violent events to mountains, oceans and fishing boats,
which is an attempt to displace and misplace the actual problems with
the beauty of mountains and rivers and static scenery.”28
Although
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largely duplicating the criticism referred to in the previous section,
such a stricture itself appears to be misplaced when we examine the
scenes in which the Nationalist government action against theTaiwanese
is depicted:Wenqing’s arrest and time in prison (narrated through
a voice-over of Hiromi reading a letter from Axue,Wenxiong’s daughter);
the releasedWenqing taking a letter and the personal effects of an
executed cellmate to the latter’s family;Axue relating to Hiromi that
the restaurant Little Shanghai was shut down in March, when many
people were killed and Wenxiong’s friend was arrested; a night scene
in which a stranger delivers news of Hiroe’s arrest;and,finally,Nationalist
soldiers rounding up Hiroe and other dissidents.All these scenes
involve reading, writing, and recounting, which is Sadness’s signature
technique of indirect treatment of the incident.
June Yip has argued that Hou’s movies, especially Sadness, should
not be treated as historical but as historiographical films.29
That is,
Sadness is not so much about re-creating the 2/28 Incident on screen
as it is an exploration of ways in which historical events are represented.
I would take this idea further to concentrate on how Sadness
comments on writing (albeit in filmic language) about atrocity. As
denounced and praised by critics in both camps,Sadness not only uses
a deaf-mute photographer to witness and partially recount historical
event but also heavily relies on Hiromi’s diary and letter in the
form of a voice-over to narrate political and social situations during
the 2/28 Incident. The device of a woman narrating events is first
attacked by Mi Zou, who believes that the film implies that women
cannot be part of history: “Hiromi is simply recounting Wenqing’s
life; we rarely get a sense of her own view or value judgment.”30
Although appearing to praise Hiromi for her characterization of the
suffering wife of a victim of the 2/28 Incident, Liao Ping-hui regards
her role as a conventional strategy:
It is in fact a very traditional and passive approach to use a feminine
means to wrap and cover up history, so that people can continue
to endure and survive with the wound and continue to live.This is
perhaps why Chu T’ien-wen and Hou Hsiao-hsien chose Hiromi
to show how a person can be completely helpless in a political situation,
but they represent current conditions in a nostalgic, uncritical
attitude.31
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Predictably, this “failure” has been subsequently rehabilitated by
scholars and film critics. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh uses Hiromi’s diary to
show how the film subverts instructional, official history.32
JuneYip is
even more direct when she contends that “the effect of Hou’s insistence
on filtering all public historical events through language,as well
as through the subjectivities of individual characters, therefore, is to
remind us that all historical knowledge is mediated through human
acts of narration and to underscore the idea that the history is, after
all, storytelling.”33
As we can see, for the detractors, individual characters
like Hiromi, a character on the periphery of historical events,
cannot possibly convey the intensity of the detrimental effects on the
Taiwanese. However, if we can agree that Hou Hsiao-hsien neither
is interested in re-creating history nor intends to represent the 2/28
Incident via familiar tropes of dramatization, then Hiromi’s diary and
letter reading become an effective conduit for illustrating the effects
of the 2/28 Incident and the subsequent crackdown. Although we
still have questions about women’s agency in the torrents of history,
as mentioned in chapter 2, women become the primary transmitters
of historical memory in Taiwan precisely because most of the men
were “disappeared.”
Furthermore, Hiromi’s diary and letters (to and from Axue) serve
a metaphorical purpose in commenting on the means through which
cases of extrajudicial persecution are remembered in the oppressive
political climate of the White Terror.When the Taiwanese were forbidden
to openly discuss the incident and other abuses of civil liberties,
such private media as diaries and letters became the only means
of keeping the memory alive. When the memory is then conveyed
through Hiromi to us, it takes on a verbal form akin to oral transmission,
which was the only means left to theTaiwanese to even become
aware of the incident.34
The personal act of keeping a diary is not so
much a comment on Hiromi’s lack of agency as a manifestation of the
fear of the omnipresent censorial apparatus.This is best illustrated in
a scene in which Hiromi visits Wenqing’s family and Axue tells her
why they shut down the restaurant and that her father’s friend, a Mr.
Xu, also was arrested.At that moment, her aunt—possibly Wenliang’s
wife—effectively shuts her up by simply saying,“Axue!”The fear of
saying the wrong thing, which could invite further calamity, is palpable
in that single utterance of the girl’s name.
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Hou’s avoidance of dramatizing violence without flinching from
confronting the government’s suppression is best exemplified in a
night scene in which the news of Hiroe’s arrest is relayed to Hiromi
and Wenqing: a nearly pitch-black setting in which we can barely
make out a dark figure knocking on the door.Wenqing appears, turns
on the light,and opens the door;the man,a messenger,takes out a letter
and gives it to Wenqing; and Wenqing makes some gestures, obviously
inviting the man inside, but the man waves him off and quickly
disappears into the dark night.The dark night and the faceless messenger
conjure up a sense of secrecy with a tinge of danger heightened
by a dog barking.Except for the barking dog and the knocking on the
door,this scene is played in complete silence,with no verbal exchange,
and yet it is powerful enough to convey the oppressive atmosphere of
theWhiteTerror.35
We do not need to be told how risky it would have
been for the messenger to deliver the letter, for Wenqing already has
been arrested once and soon will be again.
The sense of omnipresent danger is best communicated to the audience
in another sequence of scenes,also without verbal exchanges.We
see a railroad track and hear the whistle and rumbling of a coming
train; between the spaces of the moving train cars we spot Wenqing,
Hiromi, and their infant son; and when the train passes, the family,
with their suitcases, is in plain view.We later learn from Hiromi’s letter
to Axue that they planned to flee after Hiroe’s arrest but decided
not to because they knew they had no place to hide. Just as Hiroe was
ferreted out from his hideout in the mountains,Wenqing and Hiromi
would never be able to escape the net cast by the Nationalist government
even if they did manage to find shelter.The aborted escape is
criticized for its obscurity, for “even the most imaginative audience
cannot possibly figure out that they are contemplating flight.”36
It is
unnecessary to point out that this critic missed Hiromi’s revelation to
Axue, but such a blunder is symptomatic of Hou’s detractors, for they
fail to understand that Sadness is more than the sum of its parts.The
critics ignore that“anything other than a virtual copy of the real event
must emphasize certain aspects of the events and neglect others”37
and search in vain for a faithful re-creation of the 2/28 Incident. Even
though they are keenly aware of the incident’s historical significance
to Taiwanese society, they forget that traumatic events—“events of
such magnitude or singularity that they can neither be completely
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forgotten nor adequately remembered—can only find their appropriately
tenuous representation in the‘de-realization’effected by . . .frag-
mentation.”38
With a fuller understanding of the fragmentary nature
of representation, perhaps a discursive battle no longer needs to be
waged over the ownership of this part of Taiwanese history and the
legitimate interpreting and representing authority of the events.
MARCH OF HAPPINESS
As if to respond to some of the issues regarding the interpretation and
representation of the 2/28 Incident in A City of Sadness,ten years later,
in 1999, Lin Cheng-sheng’s March of Happiness (henceforth referred
to as Happiness) revisited the site of the incident, the Tianma Café
(Tianma chafang, also the Chinese title of the film). Perhaps owing
to changes in Taiwanese politics, culture, and society over the preceding
decade, Happiness attracted little critical attention in Taiwan, even
though its approach to the incident is more pointed than that of Sadness.The
film was invited to all the major film festivals (Cannes,Nantes,
Toronto,Pushan) and was selected to representTaiwan to compete for
Best Foreign Film of 2000 at the Academy Awards.As I have written
elsewhere, international film festivals and awards are not always the
best indicators of a film’s achievement.39
But the government’s attitude
toward Happiness, in contrast with Sadness’s initial concern over
censorship,provides a yardstick for us to measure the creative freedom
that directors (and writers) now enjoy in approaching the formerly
taboo topic of the 2/28 Incident.Therefore, I will examine how Happiness
tackles the portrayal of this event, which will contribute to our
understanding of the complicated cinematic re-creations of the individual
in a violent historical event.
The differences between these two films are neither superficial nor
insignificant; we need only read a prominent film critic’s comment to
realize the complexity:“It is certainly audacious of Lin Cheng-sheng
to try to follow in the footsteps of [A] City of Sadness, Hou Hsiaohsien’s
account of the same period of Taiwanese history. Instead of
confronting history directly, as Hou did in his own film, Lin tries to
mix it with allegory.”40
For Hou’s detractors, whose criticism of Sadness
I cited earlier, it is disputable whether Hou did indeed confront
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history directly, but the persistent reference to confronting history
directly has become an albatross around both directors’ necks. The
contrasting reception of these two films, made ten years apart, seems
to have become its own theater of the absurd:the earlier movie—Sadness—was
accused of eliding and failing to confront history but was
praised ten years later for confronting history and used to disparage the
second movie—Happiness—for failing to confront history.The strange
twists and turns of these two films demand that they be examined
together, not to prove that one is better than the other, but to show
how historical events such as the 2/28 Incident can be represented
differently,as evidenced in the contrasting words in the titles:“sadness”
and “happiness.”41
In this section, I analyze Happiness from three different
aspects: Lin Cheng-sheng’s use of melodrama, the portrayal of
violence, and the focus on the individual.
March of Happiness begins in the last days of Japanese colonial rule
and ends during the outbreak of the 2/28 Incident, with its main plot
revolving around Ayu, the daughter of a successful fish-ball wholesaler,and
Ajin,an intellectual who has traveled toTokyo and Shanghai.
They meet at the Tianma Café, where Ayu and other young artists
plan their stage plays in the back room. When Allied fighter planes
begin bombingTaipei,the theater group is disbanded and its members
return to their respective hometowns.Ayu and Ajin correspond with
each other and fall in love.When the Japanese surrender, the members
regroup at the café but are prohibited by the Nationalist officials
from staging their old play, just as the Japanese had done earlier.After
the owner of the café, Zhan Tianma, intercedes on the artists’ behalf,
they are allowed to resume production but only to put on patriotic
Chinese plays.A mainland soldier, Xiaobao, is particularly upset with
the play’s heavy Japanese flavor as well as anything else associated with
Japan. One day, when the soldier is meeting with an uncle at the café,
a former Japanese official comes to bid farewell to ZhanTianma.After
the Japanese leaves, Xiaobao follows him out and shoots and kills him.
In the meantime,Ayu’s father wants her to marry Xie Renchang, the
son of a doctor in town and, without regard for her objections, completes
the engagement. Left with no choice, Ayu and Ajin decide to
elope, and they choose the fateful date of February 27, 1947.
Earlier that day, the soldiers accompanying government agents of
the Alcohol and Tobacco Monopoly Bureau had seriously injured a
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woman cigarette vendor and matchmaker for Ayu and Renchang,and
also killed a bystander.A group of soldiers storm onto the stage at the
theater, and one of them, gun in hand, orders the actors and actresses
to stop.Ajin, who was on his way to the pier for his rendezvous with
Ayu, stops to look for his guitar upstairs at the theater.When he walks
out from behind a curtain to leave, his suitcase bumps into an object.
The noise draws the attention of the gun-wielding soldier, who fires
and kills Ajin. Meanwhile,Ayu has arrived at the pier, where she waits
patiently for Ajin, unaware that he will never come. The film ends
with a scene of Taiwanese throwing objects out of a building (presumably
the Monopoly Bureau office) and intertext about the March
massacre and the subsequent forty years of martial law.
On theVerge of Melodrama
In the review cited earlier,Shelly Kraicer refers to an article by Jacques
Mandelbaum, in which “Mandelbaum believes that Lin is convincing
at melodrama, and picks out a strand of political engagement in all of
Lin’s films (the problematic of a divided China, which he [Mandelbaum]
sees mapped out in a particular tension between the individual
and the community in each film) that is directly confronted in the
present work.”42
Mandelbaum is astute in detecting traces of melodrama
in Happiness, for the film does exhibit striking characteristics of
the genre, which, according to Thomas Elsaesser, derives its “dramatic
force from the conflict between an extreme and highly individualized
form of moral idealism in the heroes . . . and a thoroughly corrupt
yet seemingly omnipotent class.The melodramatic elements are
clearly visible in the plots, which revolve around family relationships,
star-crossed lovers and forced marriage.”43
Owing to theoretical issues,
however, I argue that Happiness falls short of a full-blown melodrama;
yet it is precisely this position of being on the verge of melodrama that
a profound sense of tragedy of the 2/28 Incident can emerge without
resorting to gory, overly sentimental, or sensationalized depictions.
In discussing Henry James in his pioneering work, The Melodramatic
Imagination, literary scholar Peter Brooks lists some of the basic
elements of melodrama:“the confronted power of evil and goodness,
the sense of hazard and clash, the intensification and heightening of
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experience corresponding to dream and desire.”44
These ideas are relevant
to my analysis of Happiness, even though the subject of Brooks’s
study is literary melodrama and he places the origin of melodrama
in the French Revolution. Later scholars in literary and cinematic
fields have revised and augmented some of Brooks’s arguments.Christine
Gledhill’s edited collection of essays, for instance, includes studies
of historical, domestic, material, and psychological melodramas, thus
broadening the scope of the approach of melodrama to film studies.45
But questions still remain as to whether the theory of melodrama can
be applied to non-Western films, since the subject matter of all these
essays is Western films. In summarizing Brooks’s connection between
the emergence of melodrama and the rise of postrevolutionary bourgeois
consciousness, Linda Williams cites Brooks’s argument that “late
eighteenth and nineteenth-century melodrama arose to fill the vacuum
of a post-revolutionary world where traditional imperatives of
truth and ethics had been violently questioned and yet in which there
was still a need for truth and ethics.”46
Given this culturally and historically specific context, it is understandable
that some might challenge the applicability of the concepts
of melodrama to a Taiwanese film or to any non-Western film, for
that matter. William Rothman effectively critiques Brooks’s cultural
and historical premises while essentially arguing that various forms
of melodrama might emerge in different parts of the world.47
E.Ann
Kaplan also interrogates the relevance ofWestern melodrama theories
to Chinese cinema. Even though she reiterates Brooks’s claim of the
origin ofWestern melodrama and how it came out of the bourgeoisie’s
desire to be distinguished from the working class and the aristocrats,48
Kaplan acknowledges the presence of the characteristics of melodrama
and their subversive power in recent Chinese cinema.I will not discuss
here the origins of melodrama,but I will borrow some of Brooks’s and
others’ ideas to demonstrate how melodrama and its characteristics
can be useful in analyzing Lin Cheng-sheng’s approach to represent
the tragedy of the 2/28 Incident, for melodrama has “long served as a
crucial social barometer during times of ideological crisis,making it as
a genre a valuable object of study for political analysis.”49
One of the prominent features of melodrama is its use of the Manichaean
polarity of good versus evil; consequently, there are victims
and villains who play out the struggle between virtue and vice, in
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which the former triumphs over the latter. Understandably, in such a
scheme, a happy ending is in order.50
For the greater part of the film,
Happiness follows a similar scheme but pulls back at the last moment
when the good are not vindicated and a happy ending is aborted.
In order to achieve the sense of tragedy,51
Happiness complicates the
Manichaean polarity by doubling the binary opposition with a parallel
between the nation and the family, thereby mingling domestic melodrama
with historical melodrama. In the domestic milieu, as shown
in Elsaesser’s description quoted at the beginning of this section,Ayu
and Ajin, the star-crossed lovers, face her tyrannical father’s objections
to their romantic relationship. Moreover, Ayu is being forced
to marry the doctor’s son, whom her father clearly believes is a more
suitable match for the daughter of a successful businessman. Profit is
his principal concern,52
and he has a mind for efficiency, for he constantly
exhorts his employees to work faster and has his daughter help
out at the shop.Although we would be hard-pressed to call her father
evil in the conventional sense of the word, there is nevertheless a
polarity between patriarchal order and individual freedom to choose,
common in domestic melodrama.Tyranny, particularly the patriarchal
kind, must be defied, so Ayu and Ajin decide to elope.53
Polarity also exists in the national/historical realm in Happiness,
but in a more complex configuration. In the early part of the movie,
the Taiwanese theater group skirts the Japanese colonial censorship
by having two different plays ready.Two lookouts are posted outside
the theater, and when they spot Japanese colonial officials, one of
them notifies the actors to change costumes and switch to a Japanese
play while the other delays the officials’ entrance by offering them
cigarettes.The oppressive domination of colonial authority controls
every aspect of Taiwanese life, but this kind of tyranny can be resisted
only through circuitous devices, not challenged, and needs the full
cooperation of an understanding audience.Hence theTaiwanese,represented
by the audience and the cast as innocent colonial subjects,
are confronted with the indomitable power of the colonial censorial
apparatus. Later, when the Nationalists arrive with a similarly oppressive
mechanism of control, the group is forced to stop indefinitely, as
the official reason for halting the performance is malaria. No one is
given any clear indication as to whether or not this is true and, if it
is, when malaria will be eradicated so the performance can resume.
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Again, the political tyranny of the Nationalist government cannot
be challenged directly. But this time, the old ruse of double play is
replaced by rendering the cast instead as hooligans in order for the
performance to continue. ZhanTianma,54
speaking through an interpreter,
lays out the situation for the Nationalist official: hooligans
need something to occupy their time and energy so they will not
cause trouble; therefore, it is to the government’s advantage to allow
the theater group to continue. In other words, the Taiwanese Zhan
has to debase his own compatriots by referring to them as hooligans
in exchange for artistic freedom.55
The Nationalist government, represented by Xiaobao, is clearly the
villain, the agent of terror. Although the director attempted to psychologize
and rationalize the first instance of violence, the shooting
death of the Japanese colonial officer by Xiaobao (a mainland soldier
who fought the Japanese before coming to Taiwan), Xiaobao is
portrayed as someone full of hatred for the Japanese and, to a lesser
degree, for the Taiwanese. Before killing the Japanese, he complains
to his uncle that the war with Japan has ruined his chance of getting
married and having a family.After threatening everyone in the coffee
shop with his gun, he runs out and lies in wait for the Japanese.The
shooting and killing of Ajin appears to be an accident, but the officer
is distrustful and permanently on edge.The lack of any repercussion
from the senseless killing of two men implies the government’s complicity,
which intensifies the polarity between the innocentTaiwanese
and the nefarious Nationalist government.
When we compare these two binary oppositions—patriarchal tyranny
versus individual freedom, and corrupt government versus helpless
Taiwanese—the sense of tragedy and the sheer weight of indomitable
historical forces come through clearly. On the one hand, in
the personal realm, patriarchy is defied, but in the national arena, the
tyrannical government cannot be challenged. On the other hand, the
attempt to defy the patriarchal oppression accidentally brings forth
an irreparable outcome of government suppression: the death of Ajin.
The two strands of melodrama—domestic and historical—develop
separately at first and then gradually merge and culminate in the
elopement and the death of Ajin. Peter Brooks’s characterization of
melodrama best illustrates what Happiness accomplishes by bordering
on the edge of melodrama: “The polarization of good and evil
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works toward revealing their presence and operation as real forces in
the world.Their conflict suggests the need to recognize and confront
evil, to combat and expel it, to purge the social order.”56
While in the
domestic setting, we can safely argue that the young lovers triumph
over the father,but both the film andTaiwan’s historical reality inform
us that a totalitarian government demands the complete obliteration
of personal freedom and civil liberties.
Violence and Historical Accuracy
In the first part of this chapter, I raised the issue of the legitimacy of
representing violence on the screen. Hou Hsiao-hsien and his Sadness
were censured for visually dramatizingTaiwanese attacking mainlanders
but having Hiroe narrate the massacre of Taiwanese verbally and
thus obliquely.For some critics,this complaint derives from an anxiety
over the accuracy of representation; for others, from their respective
political stances. Sympathizers and proponents of Hou’s film cited the
nascent relaxation of censorship in the early days after martial law was
lifted (1989) as evidence of his cautious approach to the 2/28 Incident
in the film. To be sure, after forty years of government suppression
of dissent, the Taiwanese were accustomed to censoring themselves,
but I would argue that film directors like Hou were keenly aware of
these sensitive issues of representing violence.A closer look at the recreation
of violence on screen in Lin’s film (1999) will be helpful in
expanding our conception of the dramatization of violence.
The first violent scene in Happiness, the shooting death of the former
Japanese colonial official, comes as a surprise, although we have
been given hints that Xiaobao is agitated at the theater, where mainland
officials are invited to watch the new play that theTaiwanese put
on to celebrate the end of the war and the departure of the Japanese.
Later he also complains about the war with Japan and with the Communists
on the mainland and points his gun wildly at everyone in the
café when he orders the Japanese to leave.As he ambushes the Japanese
in the alley,we sense that something violent is about to happen;nevertheless,when
he fires two shots at the fleeing man,we still are shocked,
partly because the story thus far is largely centered on the romance
between Ayu and Ajin. Although some critics may contend that the
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ruthless shooting death of a fleeing Japanese portrays the mainland
soldier in a negative light,the audience never actually sees the Japanese
going down, a conclusion that we infer only from the circumstances
and the gunshots. Moreover, we should consider this scene as more
symbolic,that these shots are the warning signs of a different era,serving
as an effective and symbolic ending of the Japanese colonial rule
and the dawn of an even more violent (albeit implied) time.
The shooting scene is used to comment on the political situation
inTaiwan.We see the camera cut back and forth between the scene in
the alley and the scene at a barbershop;ZhanTianma,the owner of the
café, is having his face shaved while talking with someone (presumably
the barber).The latter is concerned that all “these people from
the Motherland”carry firearms and that a trivial altercation could end
in serious gunplay. Zhan then offers his own opinion that only those
who are afraid would try to scare others. Just as he utters this fatally
accurate comment,gunshots are heard in the distance.The first violent
scene, therefore, is more likely the director’s interpretation of historical
events, a comment in hindsight.
The second violent incident, the cigarette-confiscating scene, is
understandably the film’s most controversial aspect. Shelly Kraicer
complains that “it seems awfully nervy, if not downright heavyhanded,
for Lin to include as a main character the famous cigarette
vendor who was attacked by Kuomintang [Guomindang] troops.”57
The cigarette vendor indeed plays an important role, for she also is
the matchmaker, a symbolic force that ends the lovers’ future, just as
the real-life Lin Jiang Mai was the accidental catalyst that set the tragedy
in motion.Yet it is questionable whether the vendor in the film,
played by Grace Chen, is meant to represent the real-life Lin Jiang
Mai. For one thing, her name is never used in the film except when
she is beaten and Ayu’s father runs over to check on her. Even in that
scene, the Grace Chen character is referred to only as “Ah-mai.”We
may infer that “Ah-mai” is Lin Jiang Mai, since a typical Taiwanese
way of nicknaming someone is to add “Ah-” to the last character of
the person’s name. Even so, an audience with passing knowledge of
the incident, unlike those of Sadness ten years earlier, knows that the
scene is historically inaccurate.The real-life Lin Jiang Mai was accompanied
by her young children, a daughter and a son, when her money
was snatched away and she was beaten. She is often portrayed in his-
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torical accounts as a poor, even dirty-looking, woman struggling to
raise her children. In Happiness, the Grace Chen character is radically
different from the iconic woman,58
whose personal tragedy is forever
implicated in the national trauma of the 2/28 Incident, whereas the
historical event caused irreparable damage to her family.59
It is difficult not to wonder whether the Grace Chen character
really is a filmic duplicate of the real-life Lin Jiang Mai and, if so,
how we should interpret such a cinematic addition. It also is easy
to fault Lin Cheng-sheng for letting his political ideology override
artistic considerations. It may have been ill advised for Lin to add
such an iconic, historical figure and a historical setting—the Tianma
Café—to a fictional work. Conversely, all of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s characters
in Sadness are fabricated.60
I do believe, however, that it is not
important whether or not the Grace Chen character is the real-life
Lin Jiang Mai, for one of the film’s central themes is a feeling of the
inevitable force of history in the sense that “the future will come, no
matter what.”61
Shelly Kraicer put it most lucidly by saying that “this
stratagem [of adding the woman cigarette vendor] telegraphs, like the
elopement date itself,exactly what is going to happen in the film long
before it actually transpires.”62
Just as Ayu and Ajin are swept away in
the torrent of historical events, the cigarette vendor, whether or not
it is Lin Jiang Mai, can only succumb to a force more powerful than
an individual.
The shooting death of Ajin constitutes the last scene of violence in
the film, one in which the film’s central theme emerges most clearly.
Unlike the first scene, in which Xiaobao shoots and kills the Japanese
colonial officer,Ajin’s death is an accident. He is ready to leave for the
pier but is delayed by the search for his cherished guitar, which he
had used to compose the song of hope, “March of Happiness.” Ajin
and Ayu would have been safely on the boat if the Nationalist soldiers
had not chosen that moment to burst onto the stage, if Ajin had not
emerged at that exact moment, and if he had not knocked something
over.These “ifs” correspond to Bill Nichols’s term of the conditional
mood, “devoted to matters of suppositions.”63
Nichols also proposes
another linguistic term, the subjunctive mood, which is particularly
relevant to and illuminating in approaching Happiness, for the mood
is “a set of verb forms that represents an attitude toward or concern
with a denoted act or state not as fact but as something entertained in
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thought as contingent or possible.”64
Framed in the subjunctive mood,
the shooting death of Ajin can be regarded as a directorial meditation
on what could have been and what should have been. Ajin and Ayu
should have been able to elope, just as the beating of Lin Jiang Mai
could have been avoided, and the massacre should not have happened.
In short,Taiwan could have and should have been a much better place,
and that, I would venture, is the central message of March of Happiness.
Focus on Individuals
When A City of Sadness was first shown inTaipei,many who expected
to see a cinematic re-creation of the 2/28 Incident were disappointed;
some, including critics of The Death of New Cinema, castigated the
misrepresentation of the film as a movie about the 2/28 Incident for
foreign audiences.They were dissatisfied that the plot revolved around
the Lin family, particularly the romantic relationship between Hiromi
and Wenqing, as well as the gangsters’ infighting.Their denunciation
originated from a monolithic view of the representation of historical
events, which JuneYip countered when she wrote,
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films can be seen as attempts to write such a
“history from below,” deliberately rejecting the vantage point of
the rulers in favor of the perspective of the common people. Milestones
of public political history are pushed away from the centers
of his films, allowing the everyday experiences of ordinaryTaiwanese
families to come to the fore . . . the film gives names and voices
to . . . the ordinary citizens whose personal stories together make
up Taiwanese “popular memory.” 65
In addition to the salient characteristic of focusing on the people
in Hou’s films, we also can interrogate the ways in which Hou’s film
approaches the 2/28 Incident by once again bringing in Lin Chengsheng’s
March of Happiness. Lin’s film devotes even less filmic space
to politics, except for the ruses to which the theater group resorts in
order to circumvent the colonial and Nationalist governments’ control
over artistic freedom. Moreover, whereas in Hou’s Sadness Wenqing
and Hiroe are left-leaning intellectuals, Lin’s characters do not
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engage in any overtly antigovernment activities. Happiness ends on
the eve of the 2/28 uprising, with only the final intertext informing
the audience of the aftermath of the incident. Instead, Lin focuses on
several characters to explore the individual’s fate at such a tumultuous
moment. Like Hiromi and Wenqing, Ayu and Ajin suffer because of
the incident, no matter whether one is a leftist like Wenqing or a less
political musician like Ajin. In short, tragedy played out in a domestic,
private setting can be as powerful as a grand epic of national history.
Understandably, the sense of tragedy largely emanates from the last
scenes, in which Ayu waits for the man who will never be able to
carry out his promise of a happy life together.We can certainly read
this scene allegorically by comparing Ayu’s dashed hopes with the
Taiwanese people’s unrealized anticipation of peace and prosperity
when ChenYi took over.The scene of unbearable sadness is conveyed
by the notion of pathos, which,“unlike pity, is a cognitive as well as
affective construct. The audience is involved on a character’s behalf
and yet can exercise pity only reading and evaluating signs inaccessible
to the dramatis personae.”66
That is, the audience is privy to the
information that Ajin has been killed and therefore is able to evaluate
the situation: “Such archetypal melodramatic situations activate very
strongly an audience’s participation, for there is a desire to make up
for the emotional deficiency, to impart the different awareness.”67
It is
precisely through this participation from the audience that the tragedy
and its absurdity are realized on screen.
The three main characters—Ayu, Ajin, and Xie Renchang—
deserve further examination. Ayu is a young, headstrong Taiwanese
woman who enjoys singing and acting.Ajin, a talented musician and
intellectual, studied in Tokyo, where he fell in love with a Japanese
girl, and later traveled with her and her father to Shanghai, where
the father and daughter worked as spies for the Japanese. Renchang is
perhaps the most intriguing character of the trio.His father is a doctor,
an amiable, polite, and refined man. Dr. Xie does not flinch or express
displeasure when Ayu shows up for the matchmaking meeting with
makeup on for the play that makes her face look as if she were wearing
a Japanese flag on each cheek.Renchang,however,comes across as
a simpleton.When we first see him, he is sitting in the audience with
an enchanted look,watching Ayu on stage.The same scene is repeated
one more time when she is rehearsing for the new play after the end
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of the war. Although everyone is aware of the romantic relationship
between Ayu and Ajin, Renchang does not complain except to plead
with her to continue walking with him, when all she wants is for him
to leave so she can read a letter from Ajin.It is much later that he realizes
that Ayu and Ajin are involved in a romantic relationship, but he
takes no action.Instead,he relies on the paternal power of Ayu’s father
to secure a marriage agreement.
If we viewed their backgrounds metaphorically, Renchang would
represent the local, the Taiwanese whom Ayu, another Taiwanese, is
supposed to marry. Ajin is a product of colonial legacy (Taiwanese
and Japanese), further complicated by his experience on the mainland.
On the narrative level, Ayu’s feelings for him are the driving
force behind the plot development and an indispensable feature of
domestic melodrama. On a symbolic level, Ajin represents for her
the exotic, a longing for the hybridity of Taiwanese cultural heritage,
which encompasses Taiwan, Japan, and mainland China.68
His death
signals the impossibility of multiculturalism, which is viewed by some
as a subplot of Sadness.69
As Ayu sits by the pier waiting,“the future,
no matter whether it is good or bad, will continue to come,” but it
will no longer be a future of a happy union. Her facing the darkness
parallels the symbolic darkness that shrouded theTaiwanese psyche for
the next four decades.
It would be pedantic and pointless to say that Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A
City of Sadness and Lin Cheng-sheng’s March of Happiness are two
completely different films, and yet focusing on their differences can
be fruitful in approaching cinematic renditions of the 2/28 Incident.
In addition to the obvious differences in terms of story line and mode
of representation, most striking is what the two films strive to accomplish.As
the discussion in the first half of this chapter shows, the controversy
surrounding Hou’s Sadness proves the notion that“documentary
historical knowledge is impossible,” a point that the film tries
to convey:“Film as a medium is poorly suited to the transmission of
factual information if it is to remain true to its own aesthetic imperatives.Yet
this kind of pedantic criticism—making factual accuracy (or
inaccuracy) the chief criterion for judging the merits of a historical
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film—has been around a long time.”70
Hou is less interested in a realistic,
faithful re-creation of a traumatic event that has had an everlasting
impact on Taiwan than in exploring how historical events can be recreated
on the screen. In short, as mentioned earlier, A City of Sadness
is less a historical film than a historiographical work.
Lin Cheng-sheng’s March of Happiness,with its strong melodramatic
characteristics, is not, strictly speaking, a historical film. Even though
the story takes place at the historical site of Tianma Café with the
iconic cigarette vendor, Happiness imparts interpretive knowledge
rather than historical information. In this regard, Lin’s film, like Hou’s,
is less concerned with transmitting accurate historical facts; instead,
Happiness provides an interpretation of how and why the incident
happened, by means of melodrama and a subjunctive mood of miseen-scène.
In particular, the scenes of violence attempt to analyze the
cause of the incident.With the shooting death of the Japanese colonial
officer,we are given a connection between the overabundance of firearms
and the subsequent accidental killing of a bystander.When Ajin
emerges from the upstairs of the theater and the edgy mainland officer
fires at him wildly, the audience can conclude how senseless and yet
repercussive his death is, like the shooting death of Chen Wenxi, the
bystander shot on February 27, 1947. The consequences of Chen’s
death could have been contained, and the incident would not have
happened. But the reality is that what should have been done was not,
and what should not have happened did happen.Taiwan, like Ayu at
the dark pier, was to be deprived of happiness for decades but, as the
English title implies, must keep marching toward the future.
Ten years after the appearance of the controversial A City of Sadness,
Lin Cheng-sheng made his March of Happiness, when there were
both more records and more artistic freedom. His film can be seen as
an answer to Hou’s film and the criticism leveled against the director.
It is crucial that we notice how Lin also skirts a direct portrayal
of violence and opts for a melodramatic mode. Atrocious incidents,
these two films seem to suggest, can never be effectively re-created on
screen, and alternative modes need to be explored.
Screening Atrocity 153
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