Memory, Identity and Narrative

A new cinema for City of sadness

Abstract

Presented as a theme the relationship between memory, identity in narratives of certain cinematographic productions, this article seeks to understand and outline, within the context of contemporary Asian cinema, concepts of identity and memory and how they are, through a filmic analysis, applied to a narrative structure that compose them cinematically. Through a new cinema presented by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, we will address, among a vast body of work, films that sought to rescue an identity and memory that always seemed to be fragile in an underdeveloped and constantly colonized country, suffering external impositions and going through wars. City of Disenchantment (Bēiqíng chéngshì, 1989); The Puppet Master (Xi meng ren sheng, 1993); Good Man and Good Woman (Hao Nan Hao Nu, 1995) make up the director's trilogy, called by many critics as the “Taiwan Trilogy”. However, we will focus our analysis mainly on the first film: City of Disenchantment. For this study we will use a comparative film analysis. The trilogy that Hsiao-Hsien created is famous for showing major events in his country, from the perspective of ordinary families and individuals, placing the viewer as a real observer of the events that have always plagued the country, analyzing concepts, perspectives and events imposed on his country. of origin, also criticizing capitalism, wars and colonization. This comparative analysis is based on the hypothesis that in the film there is a common language being developed, which runs through the people's memory to understand the current identity, using a specific regime of images to compose this cinematic vision, exposing the devices that provided the construction of the film and its transiences, the historical context of New Taiwanese Cinema or The Taiwanese New Wave, the relationship with foreign and local references so that we can understand this new aesthetic and the perceptions of identity that it generates, thus understanding the processes of memory and filmic narrative.