Important as it is, the city has surprisingly gained little attention in film studies. In an attempt to remedy the situation, the essays collected in this special issue offer a detailed and extensive look at the cinematic and traumatic cities. In this introduction, the editor analyzes the relationship between city and cinema. He sums up the main arguments of each essay and makes brief comments on several core issues raised by the contributors.

Eileen Chang did not get involved in cinema until 1947 and then only when she was driven to do so by political and financial necessities. In that year she wrote two scripts, but only one film, Taitai wansui, survives today. Between 1957 and 1964, struggling to get by in the U.S. without a regular income, she wrote a total of eight scripts for Hong Kong’s MP & GI Company. From these ten film texts, Taftai wansui, which was written in postwar Shanghai, has been recognized as giving the strongest expression to Chang’s familiar themes of domestic conflicts and human frailties. This essay will therefore focus on Taitai wansui to explore the ways in which Chang used a popular cultural medium to project her ideas regarding the domestic culture of Shanghai's middle-class women, focusing on the home, romance, marriage, sentiment, and family relations. By placing women’s stories at the center of film, and presenting them in comic form, she created a new genre in Chinese (and Hong Kong) cinema, which had been dominated since the 1920s by anti-imperialist nationalism and social didacticism.

Returning to Okakura, who fashioned his own sense of cultural possibility from extensive travel throughout Asia (especially India and China) and through a sense of “Asia” as a broader narrative field than Japan, contemporary Japanese artists are highly alert to Asian and no longer Western models and collaborations. In this paper, I consider Koreeida’s film, Maboroshi (1995), whose apparent stylistic indebtedness to Ozu is now mediated by the presence of Hou Hsiao-hsien (about whose work Koreeida had earlier made a documentary), and whose music is scored by the Taiwanese composer, Chen Ming-Chang. Familiar themes of loss (disappearance, suicide, madness), or of displacement (the city scene giving way to the pull of the “country”), are here dramatized as being survivable. But note that to tell this survivor's tale, a Japanese filmmaker required the active intervention of Asian, and not only Japanese, practices and traditions.

A City of Sadness [Beiqing chengshi, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989] marks a turning point in contemporary Taiwanese history. It was the target of various attacks based on the ambiguity of its political intentions. The politicized debates surrounding the film often interpret it too quickly in terms of nationalistic discourse. As a result, details of the film’s representational strategies are often overlooked, along with significant formal links to other literary and cinematic texts addressing similar themes. Specifically, the film itself problematizes temporality, narration, affect, and communication in ways that suggest a psychoanalytic theory of history-as-trauma. But the paradoxical status of contemporary trauma discourse itself further suggests that the very notion of a national history is a negative relation in the present rather than a positive content rooted in the past. In other words, the strategic “failure” of A City of Sadness to represent what it was expected to represent holds open an alternative space of public discourse, a space which selfconsciously questions both political resistance and communal affect. Therefore, the film occupies a crucial position in the genealogy of “Taiwanese identity.”

In this paper, I examine Hou’s film A City of Sadness, with concentration on the scene in which the muted protagonist, Wen-ching, confronts the mob on the train and suddenly voices his Taiwanese identity. In such a traumatic and cinematic moment in the film, Wen-ching (played by Tony Leung from Hong Kong), who has up to then remained passive and reticent in assuming the role of an outsider to the ethnic conflicts, is forced to abandon the project of passing and to articulate a few words in barely recognizable Taiwanese dialect. This gesture of passing and re-articulation is what the film tries to do in a sort of postcolonial mimicry: in deliberately evading the ambivalent subject of colonial and postcolonial histories, it actually renarrates what gets repressed or sidetracked. Indeed, with a great number of testimonial literatures emerging, the theme of disguise and narrative survival has increasingly become an emergent feature in contemporary public culture. Most recently, the life and work of Edith Stein, who was just canonized by the Vatican to the dismay of the Israelis, has gained quite a bit of attention. The controversial Carmelite nun was a perfect example of hybrid culture and discursive performativity. In spite of her Jewish origin, she proclaimed herself to be German and tried very hard to pass as one, though to no avail. In August of 1942, as her efforts to transfer to a Swiss cloister failed, she was arrested and was last seen on a train from Westerbork to Auschwitz. The philosophical work and private historical sketches she left behind, however, provide us with most unsettling, moving accounts of gender and identity as unstably mixed categories, of difficult and dangerous gestures of passing and bordercrossing. Though hardly commensurable to the Holocaust in scale, the February 28 Incident in 1947 Taiwan also forced a great number of women and men to undergo the complex process of disguise and identity re-formation. After a long period of silence and passing, victims of the tragedy are beginning to re-articulate the past. Here i use Yang Tsao-ti's oral narrative as a test case to discuss the impact of colonialism and modernity in Taiwan. At the other pole, Liu Chin-tang’s picture of three women, entitled Taiwan-yi-min-tu (1934), offers another empathic portraiture of a life-situation surrounding a Taiwanese artist who attempted to pass as Chinese, in order to culturally belong to the grand tradition. These successful or unsuccessful discursive struggles to re-negotiate the notion of oneself as another, or of the other as radically foreign who can or cannot be allowed to “pass,” should shed new light on the comparative study of ethnicity and identity in cinematic and traumatic cities.

Current interpretations of Leni Riefenstahl’s career in the Third Reich have glorified and condemned her talent both at the same time, indicative of a moral anxiety among the critics who cannot explain why “great” art was possible in Nazism. Seeking a dialectical solution to this issue, this paper sets out by arguing that simply calling Riefenstahl’s aestheticizing attempt nazi may explain away the autonomy in Fascism of certain non-fascist elements that exacerbate it. In this view, the political trauma inflicted by Nazism must have an aesthetic cause and must, for that reason, take into consideration the conception of art and techne in our modernity through which Nazism has become possible. Riefenstahl’s naiveté in her aestheticization must be supplemented by Susan Sontag’s concept of “fascist aesthetic” to assert that moral wickedness alone may not go far enough to account for the logic of Fascist ruthlessness.

This interview with Epifanio San Juan, Jr. is a part of the whole project coordinated by National Tsinghua University, called “The Human Sciences and Asian Experiences.” Its basic idea is to examine the possibility of having Asian perspectives in relation to the dominant Euro-American paradigms in the human sciences. The recontextualization in this global-local cultural dialectics is to investigate the ways in which a certain Western critical theory is transplanted, translated, and transformed in the interpretation of texts produced in Pacific Asia. Epifanio San Juan is not only an author of more than forty books and two hundred essays in various journals, but under the influence of Marxist tradition, a politcal activist, involving a series of antifascist demonstrations in the United States against Ferdinand Marcos’ regime in the Philippines and using Filipino, not English, for his creative and critical writing. From the 80s, his attention is veered towards Asian American Literature in point of fact that racial discrimination has been lurking under multiculturalism. In Racial Formation, he intends to bridge the gap in which orthodox Marxism fails to deal with racial and gender issues. He claims that postcolonial theories have failed to tackle the concrete lived experience of pain, denials and ordeals of servitude and thus, those postcolonial states like the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea and others in Africa and Latin America are still haunted by imperialism and neo-colonialism. On the other hand, the American schools of cultural studies have emphasized cultural analysis of popular media and trends too much rather than emphasizing ideological critique and social changes. Cultural studies should be keyed to the cultural practices of subaltern people of color that will articulate selected elements of the Western Enlightenment tradition with the needs and projects of hitherto silenced, marginalized, and invisible Others.