The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Hou Hsiao-hsien · a film · 1989 · about 157 minutes · written by Wu Nien-jen and Chu Tien-wen · as Beiqing chengshi (悲情城市), in Taiwanese Hokkien, Mandarin, Japanese, Cantonese and Shanghainese
Mode
Family chronicle as national history; the observational drama of the Taiwanese New Cinema turned on a suppressed event
Mythos
The fallen house; the father who outlives his sons; the mute witness whose instrument is the camera
Phase
From the Japanese surrender in August 1945, through the uprising of 28 February 1947 and the terror after it, to the government’s move to Taipei in 1949
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 157 minutes, in five languages, its sound recorded on location; written exchanges shown as intertitles and a diary spoken over the image
Register
From a birth in a blackout and a brawl in a gambling den to names called in a prison; long fixed takes, lamplit rooms, mist on the hills
Scale
One household, four sons, an island handed between regimes
Governing Proposition
A household of four sons is thinned, one son at a time, as the island it stands for is handed from the departing Japanese to the arriving Nationalists, through the uprising of February 1947 and the terror after it. The wager of the film is that a history made elsewhere and done to a people is best shown where it lands, in a house watched from a fixed distance, with the great event kept outside the frame and its witness a man who cannot speak.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in the dark. The Japanese emperor’s broadcast of surrender is heard in August 1945 while, in a house without power, a child is born, and then the electric light comes back. Japanese rule ends as a sound from elsewhere, and the first event in the house is a birth. Before anyone has explained who rules the island or who will, the film has set its terms: history arrives from outside, and it is received at home.
The household is the Lin family’s. The father, Lin A-lu, is played by Li Tien-lu. There are four sons. Wen-heung, the eldest, played by Chen Sung-young, holds the family business. Wen-sen, the second, was sent to the Philippines and has not come back; he is never seen. Wen-leung, the third, played by Jack Kao, returns from Japanese service broken. Wen-ching, the youngest, played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai, is deaf and mute, and a photographer.
Chen Huai-en photographs the house in depth: figures in doorways and back rooms, lamps in low rooms, a table at which the family eats. The camera mostly does not move and does not come close. It lets people cross the frame, leave it and return, and it lets important things happen at its edges. The method is the Taiwanese New Cinema’s, which Hou had helped to make, and here it is turned from a childhood remembered to a nation’s recent past.
Movement II
The years after the surrender are told through the business of the house. The Nationalist administration arrives, and with it Shanghainese gangsters and their smuggling. Wen-heung’s trade brings him into their business. A brawl breaks out in a gambling den, loud and sudden, and it is seen in the depth of a shot rather than staged for the eye; its consequences come later. The quarrel with the Shanghainese is what kills him.
Wen-leung, back from the war, is arrested as a collaborator with the Japanese and comes home deranged. The film gives no scene of what was done to him. He went out one man and returns another, and the household takes him back in. The second son stays absent, a place the family keeps. One by one the brothers become the fates of a generation: lost abroad, killed in commerce, broken by the state.
Meanwhile the house speaks in many tongues. Japanese, Taiwanese Hokkien, Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghainese cross in its rooms, and who speaks which, and to whom, says who rules whom before any line does. The sound was recorded on location, and it is not decoration. It is the colonial order heard, and it changes as the rulers change.
Movement III
Wen-ching cannot speak, and the film gives him the form of an older cinema. His exchanges are written on paper and shown on the screen as intertitles, in the manner of silent film. The one person in the film who cannot speak is the one who records: he is a photographer, and he takes the pictures of others. He is the witness without a voice, and the film’s own position is in him.
Hinomi, played by Hsin Shu-fen, gives the film its second register. Her diary is spoken over the image, private words set against the hills and the mist above the sea. What public speech could not hold in those years, the diary holds, and it records what it cannot alter. Wu Yi-fang plays Hinoe. Around the table the intellectuals talk of their politics, and their talk carries the hope that 1947 will crush.
The film repeats itself in places. The gangster business is drawn at greater length than its job requires, and the talk at table makes its point more than once. Faces are hard to sort in the long shots, months pass between one shot and the next, and a viewer can lose who is related to whom. Some of this is the design, the distance that is the film’s knowledge. Some is cost, and the film pays it.
Movement IV
The uprising of 28 February 1947 falls near the middle of the film’s years, and the film never stages it in full. It is heard of, reported, and met in its consequences. The most terrifying scene of the film is on a train. Men move down the carriage asking the passengers whether they are Taiwanese. Wen-ching cannot answer, and forces out the words with a voice he scarcely has.
Then the terror. In the prison, cellmates are called out by name, one by one, and the shots that follow are heard off screen. Afterwards their belongings are carried to their families. The killing is never shown; what is shown is the waiting before it and the objects that remain. The state’s mechanism stays outside the frame, and only what it leaves behind enters the house.
Some critics in Taiwan read this distance as evasion, and the argument began on release. The film’s answer is its form: it does not disclose the event by staging it but by showing where it lands, and the silence of its protagonist is part of what it discloses. Told as a conventional historical drama, with the massacre staged, the same knowledge would become spectacle. The cost is real, all the same: the family’s suffering is seen far more than the state that caused it.
Movement V
Before the end the household poses for a photograph. Wen-ching is a photographer, and the family is fixed in an image while it is still, for a moment, together. The film has been about what cannot be said, and it ends on what can only be shown. Wen-ching, who survives his brothers longest, is taken last of the four.
The last meal answers the first. The table that was full at the opening now holds the old man, a madman, and women and children. Four years have emptied it: one son lost abroad, one killed, one broken, one taken. A closing card records the government’s move to Taipei in 1949, the island made the last refuge of the regime that had done this to it. The great events are told after, in writing, as they have been all along.
The film was made two years after the lifting of martial law and was the first film from Taiwan to win the Golden Lion, at Venice in September 1989. What it opened was a history its own public had been forbidden to speak of for forty years. It opened it without staging the massacre, through a household watched from the doorway, with a deaf-mute photographer at its centre, and the distance that some found evasive is the knowledge it brought.
Act III · The Twelve
About 157 minutes, and the subtractive test bites less than the length suggests. The four brothers are each required: the eldest, who holds the family business and dies in the quarrel with the Shanghainese; the second, lost in the Philippines and never seen, an absence the house carries; the third, back broken from Japanese service, arrested as a collaborator and sent home deranged; the youngest, deaf and mute, taken last. Remove one and the arithmetic of a family thinned by successive regimes fails. What holds the axis among the lowest: the gangster and smuggling business is drawn at greater length than its job requires, the intellectuals’ talk at table repeats its point, and some ellipses cost the viewer the thread and give nothing back.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a people handed from one ruler to another has its history made elsewhere and done to it, and the household is where that history lands. The film opened in public the massacre of 1947 and the terror after it, which forty years of martial law had made unsayable: disclosure of an articulated social condition in the strictest sense. The languages disclose it twice over, since Japanese, Hokkien, Mandarin and Shanghainese crossing in one house say who rules whom before any line does. What holds it from the top: the event is kept at a distance that some Taiwanese critics read as evasion, and the film shows the family’s suffering far more than the state’s mechanism.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Elevation is recurrent and quiet. The opening holds the surrender broadcast heard in darkness while a child is born, and the electric light returning. The summit is the train during the uprising: men move down the carriage asking passengers whether they are Taiwanese, and the youngest brother, who cannot answer, forces out the words with a voice he scarcely has. The prison, cellmates called out one by one and shots heard off screen, is the second height. Hinomi’s written words over mist on the hills and the family photograph lift more gently. What holds it lower: the method distrusts rising, much of the length is kept deliberately level, and the returns of the landscape lift less than the first.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The archetype of the fallen house is built: the father who outlives his sons, and four brothers as the four fates of a generation, lost abroad, killed in commerce, broken by the state, silenced. The family is the island, and the film is shaped as the thinning of a household at its table. A second figure is built in the youngest son, the mute witness whose instrument is the camera, who records others and cannot tell. What holds the axis two tenths below the bar of the Epochal Gate: the national allegory lies close to the surface, and the house of four sons runs near the family-saga pattern the film inherits rather than past it, so that the construction is sound but not new.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is the Taiwanese New Cinema that Hou helped to make, in The Time to Live and the Time to Die (1985) and Dust in the Wind (1986), with its long fixed takes and personal memory; behind it Ozu’s domestic frame; and the state-sponsored cinema that told the island’s recent history only as the regime told it. The turn is from personal memory to national history, and from the regime’s account to the one it had suppressed. The stake was real: a taboo two years out of martial law, a production in five languages recorded on location, and a form that refused the payoffs a historical subject invites. It meets the bar of the Epochal Gate and no more, because the means were Hou’s already: the swerve is in subject and scale, not grammar.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that history reaches people from outside the frame, and that those it reaches cannot see or say it whole. The long fixed takes hold the household at a distance and let events happen at its edges; violence is mostly off screen or deep in a shot; the great events are told after, by letter, rumour or a closing card. The youngest brother’s exchanges are written on paper and shown as intertitles in the manner of silent film, and Hinomi’s diary gives a private register for what public speech could not hold. Who speaks which language is the colonial order heard. What holds it from the top: in places the ellipsis exceeds what it buys, and distance becomes mere opacity.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Thirty-seven years of return are evidence. The film has been argued continuously: whether the deaf-mute is a figure of the voiceless island or a way of not speaking; whether withholding the massacre is tact or evasion, an argument that began in Taiwan on release; how the languages map power; how it sits with Hou’s The Puppetmaster (1993) and Good Men, Good Women (1995), with which it has come to be read as a trilogy of Taiwanese history. The framings of doors and rooms rhyme across the household and repay return. What holds it lower: much of what a second viewing yields is comprehension of what the first obscured, the relations among the characters and the order of events, which is a lesser depth than an inexhaustible question.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 1980s. The force is a demonstration that a national trauma could be told without spectacle, by the fixed observation of a family, with the event withheld and the languages carrying the politics: a real reorganisation of how cinema can hold history, set against both the epic and the docudrama. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the first Golden Lion for a film from Taiwan; a domestic success for an art film, which opened public discussion of 1947 on the island; and a long-take historiography that passed into the work of later Chinese-language directors and the international art cinema of the 1990s. That last line is diffuse rather than named, and it holds the axis at the bar of the Epochal Gate, not above it.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Survival is weighed over thirty-seven years, on form, presence and then fabric. The form is whole: the film survives in the one version in which it was released, and nothing of it is lost or replaced. Presence is continuous in Taiwan and in film culture, where it is studied and screened, and Jiufen, its principal location, has become a place of pilgrimage, which is noted and not weighed. The fabric does not date: the film is set from 1945 to 1949 and dressed as memory, and nothing in it belongs to 1989 except its moment of daring, which has become history rather than surface. Thirty-seven years have shown survival without proving it long, and the axis meets the bar of the Epochal Gate exactly.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Chen Huai-en’s photography sets interiors in depth, figures in doorways and back rooms, low light from lamps, and the hills and sea at Jiufen and Keelung in weather. Liao Ching-sung’s cutting leaps months between shots and refuses the reaction shot. The sound, recorded on location in five languages, is load-bearing. Tony Leung’s performance is made of eyes, hands and stillness, and older players, Li Tien-lu as the father among them, hold long takes without strain. What holds the axis is legibility. Faces and relations are hard to sort in the long shots, the time of events is often unclear, and a viewer can lose who is related to whom; some of that is design, and some is a making that does not carry its matter clearly.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the brawl in the gambling den, loud and sudden, and Hinomi’s diary over the mountain mists. One law governs both: lives are seen from a fixed distance, and what decides them comes from outside the frame. The brawl happens in the depth of a shot and its consequences come later; the diary records what it cannot alter. The train, the prison, the photograph and the meals obey the same law, and the sound in five languages is the law heard. The range is wide, from gangster business and a hospital to ancestral rite, prison and marriage. The strain holds the figure: the gangster plot’s feud, revenge and shot in the dark sit close to genre, and the ellipses sometimes make the law look like opacity.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 157 minutes holds. The family over three generations; the state in three forms, the departing Japanese empire, the arriving Nationalist administration, and its army and prisons; history from the surrender to the retreat of 1949; languages and the colonial order they carry; commerce and smuggling, a hospital, a school in the mountains; crime; the intellectuals and their politics; marriage, birth and death; the sacred in ancestral rites and funerals; the hills and the sea. They are integrated through one household, not listed: the state enters the house through the arrest of one son and the silence of another. What holds it lowest: the state’s mechanism and the uprising are seen only at the edge, held as consequence rather than as structure.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment and The Living Form at 8.7. A film that opened in public a massacre forty years of martial law had made unsayable, and showed it where it landed, in a household; and a form of fixed distance, off-screen violence, written intertitles and five languages in which history reaches people from outside the frame.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.1: the family, the state in three forms, history, language, commerce, crime, politics and the sacred are held through one household, but the state’s mechanism and the uprising are seen only at the edge. Above it, The Inevitable, The Sublime and The Archetypal Deep at 8.3: a gangster plot and table talk drawn longer than their jobs, a method that keeps much of its length level, and a fallen house that runs near the family saga it inherits.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Unconcealment at 8.7 clears the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable meet it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 falls two tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.1. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.4 from a sum of 101.3, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of A City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi, 悲情城市) as released: the one cut, about 157 minutes, in colour, from the surrender broadcast to the closing card. Reference sources give running times from 157 to 159 minutes; these are differences of count and frame rate, not of version, and no other cut is known. Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien for Era International; written by Wu Nien-jen and Chu Tien-wen; photographed by Chen Huai-en; edited by Liao Ching-sung; with Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Hsin Shu-fen, Chen Sung-young, Jack Kao, Wu Yi-fang and Li Tien-lu. Premiered in competition at Venice in September 1989, where it won the Golden Lion, and released in Taiwan that autumn. Every axis is judged on the original film in its five languages; subtitles are a reader’s aid, and nothing here is charged to them. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted, and no dialogue is quoted. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the composer of the score, the producer, the month on the closing card, the name given to the child born at the opening, the reason the lead role was made mute, the claims that the film was the first from Taiwan with synchronised location sound and the first to treat the events of 1947, the history of its rights and restoration outside Taiwan, and the number and length of its shots.