Languages of A City of Sadness.

I finally watched a movie I’d been wanting to see for years, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (悲情城市 Bēiqíng chéngshì). It’s famous as the first Taiwanese movie to deal openly with the Kuomintang government’s brutal takeover of Taiwan, in particular the February 28 Incident (about which I was told in whispers when I was teaching college in Taiwan in the ’70s), but that’s unimportant compared to the fact that it’s a great film — to my mind, up there with Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day at the peak of Taiwanese cinema. What brings it here, however, is something that struck me forcibly while watching it, the linguistic complexity. To quote Bérénice Reynaud’s A City of Sadness (British Film Institute Publishing, 2002; review):

From the beginning (Hirohito’s speech) to the end (Tachikawa’s music), A City is permeated through and through by Japanese sounds. Not only is the moody, emotional theme music heard at key moments, creating an aural scansion that contributed to the aesthetic success of the film, but a number of diegetic songs, in addition to Aka Tonbo, are Japanese. When Wen-ching is in jail, in a distant background, unseen prisoners break into a Japanese song, mourning the fate of young men going to war. That, at the moment of dying, victims of the Kuomintang repression turn to Japanese culture to express their feelings, is no accident. Like all film-makers forced by censorship to use subtle forms of expression, Hou resorts to discreet, apparently ‘non-political’ elements to make a point. The ‘official history’ the Nationalist Party sought to carve, in blood if necessary, onto the ‘recovered’ island was that Taiwan was an integral part of mainland China: the rupture in historical continuity created by 50 years of Japanese occupation had to be denied. Consequently, Japanese language and culture became the signifiers of the specificity of the Taiwanese experience. Which Kuomintang official could guess, by listening to an apparently innocuous nursery rhyme, that its hidden meaning was ‘We are Taiwanese, not mainlanders’?

Taiwanese from all walks of life were deeply marked by Japanese culture. The ‘Taiwanese dialect’ itself, as it is spoken by the ‘native’ characters in the film, is laced with Japanese words and phrases. Moreover, among intellectuals and politically active people – like the ones most likely to be in the same jail as Wen-ching – turning back to Japanese culture meant taking a certain stance in relation to their own agency. As expressed many times in the film, by Hinoe’s bookish friends as well as by the grass-roots ‘Big Brother’ Wen-heung, Taiwan kept being ‘handed over’ without being consulted, first by the Qing Dynasty to the Japanese and then by the Allies to the Nationalist Party. Kept in a state of submission by the Japanese, the Taiwanese had hopes of becoming full citizens once they were reunited with the motherland. Instead, mainlanders were behaving in Taiwan as if in occupied territory. Reverting to Japanese mores and culture, to the language of the previous occupying forces, now defeated, was an understated way of making a choice, of rejecting the present occupation, of defiantly asserting that the gap between Taiwan and the mainland was unbridgeable.
[…]

In addition to Japanese, four languages are spoken throughout the film: Taiwanese, Shanghaiese, Cantonese and Mandarin. The members of the Lin family speak Taiwanese, with a few Japanese words interjected – as do Hinoe and Wen-ching’s intellectual friends, except for a sympathetic mainland journalist, who expresses himself in Mandarin. Third Brother Wen-leung, who has learnt Shanghaiese during the war, switches back and forth between this dialect and Taiwanese. Big Brother’s mistress and her brother Ah-ga come from Guangdong province, so they speak Cantonese, also mixed with Taiwanese.

The mainland gangsters with whom Wen-leung and Ah-ga tragically associate speak Shanghaiese, which creates a most interesting linguistic situation, when Big Brother Wen-heung and Ah-ga try to secure Wen-leung’s release from the Kuomintang jails by negotiating with the gangsters who denounced him. Wen-heung’s Taiwanese speech is translated into Cantonese by Ah-ga; one of the gangsters translates it in turn into Shanghaiese for the ‘Big Bosses’, and the conversation thus goes back and forth, with the translator sometimes inserting his own comments. In the international version, the subtitlers opted to paraphrase the different lines of dialogue. Wen-heung says: ‘Our Wen-leung is in prison. I know you’re well connected with officials. I would like to ask for your help. See if Wen-leung can be freed before the new year.’ Ah-ga speaks in Cantonese: ‘Wen-leung has been arrested. You know people in the right places. What Big Brother means is, we’d like to see him freed before the new year.’ Finally, the Shanghaiese translation (done by a gangster sporting dark sunglasses) says: ‘They are talking about Wen-leung’s case. They hope he can be freed before the new year.’ Nonchalantly, the Shanghai boss, always seen wearing black silk robes, replies: ‘When was Wen-leung arrested? I didn’t know.’ The bilingual gangster translates into Cantonese: ‘They didn’t know Wen-leung was arrested. What can we do to help?’ This prompts a violent outburst (in Cantonese) on the part of Ah-ga: ‘Don’t fuck with me! I know you’re behind it!’ In turn, Wen-leung scolds him (in Taiwanese): ‘Stupid idiot! Why are you telling them this?’

It was the scene described in that last paragraph that convinced me I had to post about the movie. This later passage is also of interest:

From the outset, Hou orchestrates the different layers of the narration through two different instances of voice-over: a male voice (first Hirohito, then Governor Chen Yi), representative of an unseen authority imposed from the outside, and two female voices (Hinomi reading her diary and Ah-shue exchanging letters with Hinomi) that, by contrast, come from within the diegesis. Both are instances, albeit radically opposed ones, of what Michel Chion calls an acousmêtre – a voice-over, often endowed with authority, whose source is invisible. In the case of Hirohito’s voice, the radio that transmits it is hidden within the house of Wen-heung’s mistress. While Chion states that every voice speaking on the radio is acousmatic, it could be argued, however, that when a radio voice is used in cinema, the absence or presence of the receiver in the image endows this voice with a greater or lesser omnipotence and ubiquity. In the case of Hirohito, it matters little whether or not there is an actual radio in the room – his message carries huge consequences for the entire island, and everybody can hear it, or hear about it. Radio voices are often used in Hou’s cinema as a medium to carry authoritarian or official messages and to create a tension between the disembodied, mechanical quality of their source and – conversely – the domestic settings in which they are heard, the living bodies receiving them and whose steps, mundane gestures, breathing, moaning and small talk can be heard in counterpoint. In a significant scene in The Time to Live, the women in A Ha’s family – his sister, mother and grandmother – are doing domestic chores, while the radio talks about the heroic duty of the Taiwanese army to recover the mainland. The women talk and gossip among themselves without alluding to or commenting on the broadcast – reducing it to an insignificant background noise.

In A City, the use of radio voices creates another contrast – between the language of the broadcast and that of the listeners. The radio speaks in a foreign tongue, clearly imposed onto Taiwanese reality – giving a poignant meaning to the concept of voice-over. As noted before, Hirohito expresses himself in a rarefied, classical form of Japanese only used by the ruling class – and certainly not by his Taiwanese subjects. In the second instance when the radio plays a significant narrative role – the broadcasting of ‘security measures’ following the 28 February incident – Governor Chen Yi speaks a Shanghaiese-accented Mandarin, marking him as a hated mainlander, an invader.

Chen Yi was one of the vilest rulers in a time and place full of such men; ever since I learned about his career, first on the mainland and then on Taiwan, he’s been way up there on my list of historical villains. And Taiwan’s progress from poverty and authoritarian rule to prosperity and democracy has been one of the bright spots in the history of the last few decades. In any case, the movie is great, and I wish someone would put it out in the kind of Blu-ray edition it deserves, with commentary and extras. (I bought it from Prime Video, something I do only under duress, since electronic copies can disappear without warning, and who wants to make Amazon richer?)