The Cry of A City of Sadness
“I hope that a renewed understanding of ‘Two-two-eight’ will help everyone to finally cast away its dark shadow and to go on living with energy and vitality.”
- Hou Hsiao-Hsien on his film A City of Sadness
“In prison, I swore to live, for the sake of friends who had died.”
- Wen-ching (played by Tony Leung, A City of Sadness)
Taiwan was already undergoing significant societal and political changes in the 1980s, but perhaps the most notable was the lifting of martial law in 1987, for it gave rise to the culturally transformative period, during which Taiwan finally had the opportunity to openly deal with the painful history leading up to and following the February 28 Incident that took place forty years earlier …show more content…
As successful as the film was, critics attacked the film as digressive in the way it dealt with the February 28 Incident, or even for ‘failing’ to deal with it at all. This seems to be fuelled by the expectations critics had for the film. Hoping perhaps to see an explicit debate on the February 28 Incident, A City of Sadness may have been popular domestically and successful abroad (where it premiered) as a political film, but as far as some critics were concerned, it did not …show more content…
Those types of shots make the characters more distant, since a barrier remains between them and the audience, but they also draw the audience in. The extreme long shots again keep parts of the storyline at a distance, but equally give the audience a sense that what appears on the screen is the unabridged version of the events. All of this constructs the reality of the life of the characters and makes it extremely believable, which is underlined by the fact that almost all of the sound in the film is diegetic. It does not necessarily, however, make the film a realistic depiction of its historical
“I hope that a renewed understanding of ‘Two-two-eight’ will help everyone to finally cast away its dark shadow and to go on living with energy and vitality.”
- Hou Hsiao-Hsien on his film A City of Sadness
“In prison, I swore to live, for the sake of friends who had died.”
- Wen-ching (played by Tony Leung, A City of Sadness)
Taiwan was already undergoing significant societal and political changes in the 1980s, but perhaps the most notable was the lifting of martial law in 1987, for it gave rise to the culturally transformative period, during which Taiwan finally had the opportunity to openly deal with the painful history leading up to and following the February 28 Incident that took place forty years earlier …show more content…
As successful as the film was, critics attacked the film as digressive in the way it dealt with the February 28 Incident, or even for ‘failing’ to deal with it at all. This seems to be fuelled by the expectations critics had for the film. Hoping perhaps to see an explicit debate on the February 28 Incident, A City of Sadness may have been popular domestically and successful abroad (where it premiered) as a political film, but as far as some critics were concerned, it did not …show more content…
Those types of shots make the characters more distant, since a barrier remains between them and the audience, but they also draw the audience in. The extreme long shots again keep parts of the storyline at a distance, but equally give the audience a sense that what appears on the screen is the unabridged version of the events. All of this constructs the reality of the life of the characters and makes it extremely believable, which is underlined by the fact that almost all of the sound in the film is diegetic. It does not necessarily, however, make the film a realistic depiction of its historical