Thirty-ninth. A City of Sadness by Hou Hsiao-hsien (1989)

A City of Sadness (1989)
Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien
Award: Golden Lion Award at Venice Film Festival



A City of Sadness describes the kind of unrest, uncertainty and turmoil that happened in post-war Taiwan after the Japanese Occupation. The film is set to the fateful four years in Taiwan history, from the end of Japanese 50-year colonization of Taiwan in 1945, to the ascent of Communist power on the Mainland and the establishment of the Guomindang government-in-exile in Taipei by Chiang Kai-Shek in 1949. After the war, the Taiwanese longed for a peaceful life and the return of their rights to their homeland. However, it resulted in internal struggle and external threats and Taiwan became an extremely dangerous place to be in.

I felt that in the film, the identity of Taiwan is conflicted by the identities of Japanese (nationalist) and Mainland China (communist). It is very sad that a country is torn into two during that period of time. Everyone had different ideologies and were determined to eradicate people who betrayed the country. But then again, who could have betrayed the country when there was no concrete identity of Taiwan to be in? In the end, only the old, young and women who were the vulnerable ones, were not taken away. The use of typology in the film had great meaning and it fills up the empty spaces that the film leaves. We would not know what had happened to one of the characters until Wen-Ching wrote it in his note.



Even though the victim was executed, he knew that his identity as Taiwanese lay beneath and loves his country.

After reading the reviews, I realised that there were a lot of languages used in the film such as Hokkien, Cantonese, Shanghaiese, Mandarin and Japanese. This then reinforces that because of a multilingual society at that point of time, that there were suspicion everywhere. A Japanese could speak Hokkien or Cantonese for any matter and therefore before relied on their own intuition which maligned many innocent people and caused each other suffering. However, the deaf-muteness of Wen-Ching in the film symbolises that the lack of verbal communication, ironically, in fact can allow one to understand another more. In the film, Hou Hsiao-hsien took a lot of long takes of the normal family life such as having meals, washing clothes, feeding the young etc. To me, it felt like there was a surreal kind of peace. In each of the character's mind, they must be worrying or thinking about something. And everyone just eats peacefully and quietly in the dining room. Overall I felt that the film was not very fantastic in terms of melodrama or content. I also had a lot of confused moments while watching it. However, I felt that A City of Sadness was never meant to entertain, it was meant to educate.

[1] Reynaud, Bérénice. A City of Sadness (a monographic study of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's 1989 film in BFI's Modern Classic Series). London: BFI, 2002.
[2] Chi, Robert. "Getting It on Film: Representing and Understanding History in A City of Sadness." Tamkang Review 29, 4 (Summer 1999): 47-84.
[3] Abe Mark Nornes and Yeh Yueh-yu. "Narrating National Sadness: Cinematic Mapping and Hypertextual Dispersion." (a UC Berkerley-based hypertextual multimedia study of the film);
[4] Acquarello. "A City of Sadness" (Annotation of Hou Hsiao-hsien's 1989 film, published by Sense of Cinema)
[5] A City of Sadness (悲情城市 Beiqing chengshi 1989). Retrieved from http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/denton2/courses/c505/temp/city.html