Photography’s Absent Times
Photography’s Absent Times
This chapter focuses on another form of technological surplus that distinguishes the film's historiographic approach, a surplus articulated by reference to photography and the conjuncture of the still and moving image. Photography dominates the inter-mediated perspective of A City of Sadness. The medium's central place in the narrative is conveyed by another of the Lin brothers, Wen-ching, who is a photographer by vocation. Given its longstanding association with a private sphere of remembrance and affective meaning, photography constitutes another means by which the film explores the zone of contact between history and the everyday. A mechanism for the personal inscription of time's passage, analogous to the diary as a discourse of memory, it introduces an additional layer into the film's collage of documentation and transmission. Photography signifies both the film's pedagogical investment in memory's critical possibilities and its suspicion of memory as a ready substitute for history.
Keywords: A City of Sadness, Wen-ching, collective memory, photography, history
Hong Kong Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
