Octubre 19th

1. Avoiding cut and paste, briefly describe in your own words what the February 28 Incident was.
After the new Nationalist government that was established in 1945 in Taiwan reared its ugly head as a corrupt bureaucracy that deprived the Taiwanese of basic human rights, the people started a rebellion in the streets of Taipei and all over Taiwan on February 28, 1947, after a woman was brutally beaten by policeman the day before. The rebellion was eventually quelled, after days of Martial Law being decalred and troops firing upon crowds. Even after the main rebellion ended the army still went around and executed anyone considered capable of revolting against the government. It was revealed forty five years later that between 18,000 and 28,000 native-born Tiawnese were killed in this incident.

2. Again, avoiding cut and paste, briefly explain in your own words the controversy around the treatment of the February 28 Incident in City of Sadness.
I did not see where it talked about that much controversy, just that the book Death of the New Cinema calls the movie out for its ambiguity in representing the February 28th Incident and other aspects of Taiwanese history. They essentially argue that the movie takes a more cosmpolitan standpoint in regards to the incident rather than evoke a political, "get your gun and rebel" vibe within the viewer.


Bordwell, “Hou, or Restraints”

3. Consider the following quote from p. 218: “By denying us a link to the previous scene through either character-based causality (goals, appointments, deadlines) or voice-over explanation, he lets the new locale register initially as a space, not a container or background for well defined narrative action. We simply watch what’s happening (or not happening) within the frame, taking in the vastness of a landscape or the details of an interior without yet knowing how it links to a larger story rhythm. Only at length—sometimes quite late in the scene—when characters broach their projects or the voice-over explains what has occurred since the last scene do we understand what is transpiring here. In the meantime we have been obliged to study the shot itself.” How does this description of Hou’s narration relate to your experience watching A Time to Live and a Time to Die?
In A Time to Live and a Time to Die, this quote pretty much demonstrates exactly what I was thinking throughout the entire movie, how each the shots do not blend together as they would in a typical narrative, they are each an entity of their own. Hou flips typical narrative conventions by giving you the shot first, then the context and by doing such, the viewer is forced to search the scene for visual and audio clues as to what is going on or where this is taking place in relation to previous shots. It is an interesting technique that, much like real life, forces the viewer to try to comprehend the portrayed reality without the help of omnipotent voice-overs or typical chronological continuity.