Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Ang Lee, these are the names that established contemporary Taiwan cinema. They are the generation known as Taiwan New Cinema directors. The cinematic movement not only influenced Taiwan cinema at the time, but also radiated and impacted the next generation of directors in Greater China. To fully understand the context, we need to have a good grasp of what had happened in Taiwan for the past 70 years.
After the defeat of the Chinese civil war, Kuomintang(KMT) retreated to Taiwan. The “Chineseness” of KMT inevitably clashed with the native culture. The fact that Taiwanese, the native language of most of the Taiwanese, had been eliminated in the public sphere is the prime example of how the state suppressed the local culture. The situation had been ameliorated since the late 70s. The political reform had led to the end of the notorious martial law in Taiwan. Since then, Taiwan’s writers and directors’ circles have become a lot more active. During the 1980s, a lot of topics that used to be forbidden or social taboo became not that much of a problem. The lift of censorship turned out to be the push of Taiwan New Cinema. The intellectual discourse within writers and directors ranged from the traditional Hoklo culture and the Taiwan-China relationship. They were looking for the values and cultures of Taiwan.
Just right before the 1980s, a lot of literature and films discussing Taiwan nativism caught mainstream attention. Those nativist novels, either in the form of visuals or texts, usually depict the struggles for existence and predicaments of the identity of the Taiwanese people with a humanistic tone. When Taiwan transformed from an agricultural society into a modern industrial economy and become one of the Four Asian Tigers, those intellectuals also witnessed the side-effects brought by the economic growth: the rural-urban disparity, pollution and the urban over-population. These social problems encouraged them to investigate their own cultural identities, as long as the past, the presence and the future of Taiwan. A City of Sadness, directed by the leading Taiwan New Cinema director Hou Hsiao-hsien, was created to probe the February 28 Incident in Taiwan, a carnage by Kuomintang troops under the Nationalist party’s governance in the late 1940s.
A Sanguinary Memory: February 28 Incident and A City of Sadness
On the evening of 27th February 1947, a Tobacco Monopoly Bureau enforcement team in Taipei tried to confiscate contraband cigarettes from an old lady. A skirmish happened and the team fired shot, killing one bystander. On 28th February, a lot of Taipei citizens marched in front of the government buildings. The Nationalist government, under Chen Yi, ordered to suppress the demonstration by force. More than 30 people among the crowd were shot dead. It further led to a nationwide protest and a more brutal crackdown. The total death toll of Taiwanese is estimated to be more than 10000. The massacre also marked the beginning of the ‘White Terror’ era of KMT’s governance in Taiwan.
The story of A City of Sadness revolves around the four brothers of Lim family in Keelung to portray the February 28 Incident as well as the conflict between mainlanders who newly came to Taiwan with KMT and the Taiwanese locals who had been living on the land of Formosa for centuries. The eldest brother Wen-heung was killed by a Shanghainese mafia. The second-eldest brother Wen-lung was conscripted into the Japanese army during wartime and died. The second youngest brother Wen-leung was called up to become an interpreter in Shanghai for the Wang Jingwei regime. He was then put into the jail of treason and gone insane. The youngest brother Wen-ching was an inborn deaf and mute. He was a photographer and embroiled with the February 28 protest. By the end of the film, he had been arrested by the authorities, leaving only his wife to tell the story of the tragedy of Lim’s family.
February 28 Incident had been a political taboo of Taiwan at the time. From 1947 to 1987, martial law had been enforced for a total of 40 years. During these years, no one was allowed to talk about what happened on 28th February 1947, the authorities decreed that the incident was a riot. Worse still, most of the young people knew nothing about this. It became the blind spot of Taiwanese history.
There are three types of Taiwanese from the historical perspective: Taiwanese aborigines, native Hoklo and Hakka who arrived in Taiwan in 16 or 17 centuries, and mainlanders who moved in since the Chinese civil war. Members of the Lim family in the movie were native Hoklo as they spoke Taiwanese as their mother language (except Wen-ching who don’t). When the elder brothers suffered heavily from the war, Wen-ching was dragged into the February 28 Incident. His physical challenges also imply the inferiority of the native Taiwanese facing the mainlanders represented by the KMT as the state apparatus. Wen-ching was arrested twice and the movie does not specify where he ended up. To the father of the Lim brothers, it was an utter sorrow to him when he had to witness his sons’ tragedies and victims of the war and KMT governance. This is also the tragedy of all native Taiwanese. Through the happenings of the Lim family, the movie visualized the scars of Taiwanese in their years of darkness and the not-so-glory side of Taiwan history.
The importance of A City of Sadness is more than the fact that it broke through the political censorship in Taiwan cinema. It pleaded with the audience to re-examine what had happened in Taiwan since 1949. The movie’s intentionally undramatic and objective narrative helps recreate the painful history of Formosa. A City of Sadness successfully transformed the personal memory of a fictional character into the collective memory of the Taiwanese. Through Hou’s signature long takes and exquisite yet powerful editing, the visuals represent the history as unprejudiced as possible. Its unique humanistic tone also drives the audience to sympathize with the characters and their experiences.
The Legacy of A City of Sadness and Taiwan New Cinema
A City of Sadness is widely regarded as one of the most prominent works of Taiwan New Cinema. Some would even go as far as calling it “Taiwan’s epic”. It was crowned the Golden Lion in 46th Venice Film Festival in 1989, a recognition of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s magnificent skill of storytelling and the ambition to visualize Taiwan’s cultural past. As a leading member of Taiwan New Cinema, he was also praised for the vivid portrayal of Taiwanese’ everyday life, which drives him apart from the directors of the previous generation. In fact, Hou’s creations are rooted in Taiwan nativism. He made friends with those writers and visualized their literature. His unique style of storytelling and his solicitude to Taiwan accomplish his masterpieces.
The directors of Taiwan New Cinema always attempt to fuse cinema and their cultural identity together. At the time, movies are made only to make money. Therefore, it is also an attempt to create more room for arthouse movies and creative storytelling. This also explains why it is called Taiwan New Cinema, which is named after the French New Wave. The themes of early Taiwanese movies were predominantly romance and Wuxia. They lack the element of realism and dissociate from Taiwan. Therefore, Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien created a number of movies in the 1980s that tell stories about Taiwan and the people living there. Those movies not only serve as a reflection on Taiwan’s history but also record society’s transformation from an agrarian society to modern urban society. Taipei Story, directed by Edward Yang and featured Hou Hsiao-hsien as the main actor, is the quintessential Taiwan New Cinema film that illustrates Taipei’s transformation and people’s struggle. The pursuit of realism and the aversion to Hollywood-style storytelling also make the movies during that period more diverse yet energetic. The rise of Taiwan New Cinema signifies Taiwan’s humanism and the intellectuals' concern of Taiwan. Although the period of Taiwan New Cinema technically ended two decades ago, its spirit and the use of cinema as a language are everlasting and will continue to inspire a new generation of filmmakers.
