Reading Response 7

Reading response 7
Questions for Monday, October 19
1. Avoiding cut and paste, briefly describe in your own words what the February 28 Incident was.
The Feb incident was a reaction from people when the police beat a woman up the day before for selling smuggled cigarettes. February 28, martial law was declared in the street of Taipei, troops shot out the crowd, some people were executed and others were missing.
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.
The controversy around the treatment of the February 28 incident was the rewriting of what happened that day. The government backed their actions of the riot claiming it was the fight against communism. There were many contradictions depending on who wrote the report on what happened that day.
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?
This description relates to my own, I agree with you don’t really understand what is going on until the next scene, or it is explained to you. Sometimes you are watching, and just wondering what is actually happening then it is explained to you, you just have to sit and enjoy the ride.