Melodramatic Memories in A City of Sadness and Peppermint Candy
Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
Research Area : Interdisciplinary Research
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This paper explores the representations of popular memories of traumatic national history in A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan, 1989) and Peppermint Candy (Lee Chang-dong, South Korea, 2000). The two filmic narratives revolve around two different historical times and locations, but entail similar national traumas - the government killing its own citizens. By using melodramatic codes, the two films produce narratives of collective suffering to emphasize the pain of trauma, and in the end, these films create a homogeneous victimized community which erases critical differences between the popular memory and the national history. I hope to contribute to the discussion of A City of Sadness and Peppermint Candy by reading these films as melodramas, a method which effectively exposes the two films' gendered politics in their dramatization of popular memory. This paper also offers a critical reading of melodramatic memory in relations to gendered representations of suffering with the question, "What is Asian Cinema?" My critical reading of the two films' gendered politics is a theoretical practice that imagines "Asia as a critical method."
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