A city of sadness

Some years ago, Oxford University Press published a book on New Chinese Cinema that I had co-authored with Prof. Kwok-kan Tam of Hong Kong. In it, we discussed a number of outstanding film directors from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. One of the filmmakers that we had selected for closer analysis is the eminent Taiwanese film director Hou Hsiao-hsien, who is regarded as one of the great Asian film directors.

I first met Hou in the early 1980s at the Hawaii International film festival; since then I have met him at the Indian festival and other film festival venues. When I first met him, one of the questions that I asked him was whether he was influenced by the great Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu. In terms of style, representational strategies, visual registers there is much in common. In 2003 he made a film honouring the memory of Ozu titled Caf Lumiere. This was inspired by the centenary of Ozu’s birth and contains many visual passages reminiscent of Ozu’s splendid films.

Hou Hsiao-hsien is a thoughtful and innovative film director who has fashioned a distinctive cinematic style admirably suited to the experiences and themes that he wishes to transform into cinema. Jettisoning the tradition of slick comedies and films that secure their intended impact through dazzling special effects, as many Taiwanese filmmakers were committed to doing, Hou has made an attempt to bring to life a reflective and humanistic cinema that critically foregrounds the vectors of Taiwanese history and cultural memory. With the inordinate patience that marked Ozu’s films, Hou draws us into the lives and desires of his chosen characters in a way that expands our understanding of human motives and behaviour as well as deepening our appreciation of transformations taking place in Taiwanese society.

Although Hou had made a number of films before A Time to Live, A Time to Die, it is this film that won for him wide international acclaim that he richly deserved. It is largely an autobiographical film that covers a period of about two decades, chronicling the evolution of the protagonist from childhood to young adulthood against a backdrop of a changing society. In 1989, Hou made A City of Sadness, which was honoured with the prestigious Golden Lion award for the best film at the Venice film festival. It constitutes an expansive panorama of Taiwan family life during the tumultuous years from 1945-1949; A City of Sadness proved to be a box-office success as well.

This is the first of a trilogy, the other two being ‘The Puppet Master’ and ‘Good Men, Good Women’. ‘A City of Sadness’ explores the pulse of four vitally important years in the progress of the nation state of Taiwan from the end of Japanese colonization in 1945 to the rise of communist power in mainland China and the establishment of the Guomindang government by Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. This was indeed a fateful moment in Taiwanese history. It was, to be sure, a time of social turbulence and Hou Hsiao-hsien reconfigures cinematically these transformations through the fortunes of a single family, consisting of an elderly widower Ah-lu and his four sons.

After this trilogy, Hou went on to make a number of other widely-discussed films such as Flowers of Shanghai, Millennium Mambo. These films display Hou’s signature features long takes, judicious use of close ups, as well as the general aversion to conventional pans, tracking shots, zooms and tilts and violent visual punctuations that are favoured by many Asian filmmakers. The way he enframes his shots merit close analysis, and young Sri Lankan filmmakers can learn a great deal from him. Whether he is dealing with nineteenth century China, as in Flowers of Shanghai or twenty first century Taiwan and its youth sub-culture, and the relentless expansion of the tentacles of consumerism, as in Millennium Mambo, Hou’s distinctive visual style and cinematic preferences are abundantly clear.

The lengthening of each take and the restriction of the total number of shots are his preferred modes of operation. For example in the Puppet Master there are only one hundred shots averaging eighty five seconds each; in Flowers of Shanghai the number of shots is even less. His achieved density of signs and sensations serve to illuminate the sublime in the mundane; he challenges us to re-think the deceptive simplicities of everydayness.

Hou Hsiao-hsien is the author of a number of important and memorable films; among them, my favourite is A City of Sadness. It is a film that can offer much to the students of cinema in Sri Lanka as well as to aspiring filmmakers. In this film, Hou highlights an episode in Taiwanese history that has largely been swept under the carpet by official historians and policymakers, namely, the massacre on February 28th 1947 of supporters of the Taiwanese independence movement by the Guomindang troops. This is indeed a highly sensitive topic in Taiwan, and director Hou was deeply aware of the controversies and heated debates it would generate. As he himself remarked he made this film, “not for the sake of opening up old wounds, but because it’s vital that we face up to this incident if we are to understand where we come from and who we are as Taiwanese.”

‘A City of Sadness’ underlines the importance of interrogating the official stories that each nation tells itself, obliterating any counter-narratives.

It is not so much the terror of history as the official manipulations and erasures of history that ignited Hou’s deepest filmic interests. How national narratives are born in and from chaos is clearly delineated by him. We as students of cinema in Sri Lanka can learn a great deal from this film. I wish to emphasize five points. First it demonstrates the innovative ways in which contemporary history can be turned into wholesome cinema. Second, it points out how cinema can become a vital adjunct of the public sphere generating public opinion. Third this film testifies to the fact that the conjunction of the visual and auditory elements can give rise to a reality larger than the sum of its parts.

Fourth, it compels us to explore the idea of the content of form in this film. Fifth, at a time when the term humanism has become a smear-word in the hands of post-modernists, ‘A City of Sadness’ shows us how a critical humanism can be an enabling and constructive force.