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Visible Absence: Cinematic experience with Empty shots, and the embodied visuality of Taiwanese Identity

Liao, Jo Hsun LU (2026) KOVM12 20261
Division of Art History and Visual Studies
Abstract
This thesis examines how absence in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness(1989) becomes an embodied viewing experience for a diasporic Taiwanese viewer. Rather than treating absence as a simple lack of visual or narrative information, the thesis understands it as a cinematic condition shaped by Taiwan’s historical trauma, unstable national identity, and geopolitical suspension. Through the analysis of long takes, aesthetic distance, off-screen sound, and empty shots, the study explores how the film does not directly dramatize the February 28 Incident and the White Terror, but allows history to emerge through restraint, silence, and indirectness. The thesis combines close visual analysis with a first-person phenomenological method. Drawing on... (More)
This thesis examines how absence in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness(1989) becomes an embodied viewing experience for a diasporic Taiwanese viewer. Rather than treating absence as a simple lack of visual or narrative information, the thesis understands it as a cinematic condition shaped by Taiwan’s historical trauma, unstable national identity, and geopolitical suspension. Through the analysis of long takes, aesthetic distance, off-screen sound, and empty shots, the study explores how the film does not directly dramatize the February 28 Incident and the White Terror, but allows history to emerge through restraint, silence, and indirectness. The thesis combines close visual analysis with a first-person phenomenological method. Drawing on Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology of film experience, Mark Hansen’s concept of affectivity, Henri Bergson’s understanding of memory and duration, and Laura U. Marks’ theories of intercultural cinema and haptic visuality, it proposes the concept of spectatorship labour. This concept refers to the viewer’s active participation in completing the cinematic experience through perception, affect, memory, and bodily response. By beginning from my own situated viewing experience as a Taiwanese viewer living abroad, this thesis argues that the empty shots in A City of Sadness open a space of drifting, in which historical absence and personal memory fold into one another. The film’s absence does not simply represent Taiwanese identity, but allows it to be felt as a suspended and unfinished condition. (Less)
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author
Liao, Jo Hsun LU
supervisor
organization
course
KOVM12 20261
year
type
H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
subject
keywords
A City of Sadness, absence, embodied spectatorship, Taiwanese identity, phenomenology
language
English
id
9247637
date added to LUP
2026-08-10 06:44:02
date last changed
2026-08-10 06:44:02
@misc{9247637,
  abstract     = {{This thesis examines how absence in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness(1989) becomes an embodied viewing experience for a diasporic Taiwanese viewer. Rather than treating absence as a simple lack of visual or narrative information, the thesis understands it as a cinematic condition shaped by Taiwan’s historical trauma, unstable national identity, and geopolitical suspension. Through the analysis of long takes, aesthetic distance, off-screen sound, and empty shots, the study explores how the film does not directly dramatize the February 28 Incident and the White Terror, but allows history to emerge through restraint, silence, and indirectness. The thesis combines close visual analysis with a first-person phenomenological method. Drawing on Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology of film experience, Mark Hansen’s concept of affectivity, Henri Bergson’s understanding of memory and duration, and Laura U. Marks’ theories of intercultural cinema and haptic visuality, it proposes the concept of spectatorship labour. This concept refers to the viewer’s active participation in completing the cinematic experience through perception, affect, memory, and bodily response. By beginning from my own situated viewing experience as a Taiwanese viewer living abroad, this thesis argues that the empty shots in A City of Sadness open a space of drifting, in which historical absence and personal memory fold into one another. The film’s absence does not simply represent Taiwanese identity, but allows it to be felt as a suspended and unfinished condition.}},
  author       = {{Liao, Jo Hsun}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{Visible Absence: Cinematic experience with Empty shots, and the embodied visuality of Taiwanese Identity}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}