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China’s moral and spiritual anarchy, Ning Hao’s Xianghuo (Incense, 2004),
in Shanxi Datong Mandarin, depicts a young Buddhist monk who tries
every means, including swindling, to collect money to repair a statue of
the Buddha in his rural temple, only to find that the temple is about to be
torn down to make way for a road. Promoted as the first Chinese lesbian
film, Li Yu’s Jinnian xiatian (Fish and elephant, 2001), in Mandarin with local
accents, eloquently depicts the pulse of lesbian life in Beijing by unfolding
an elephant keeper’s relationship with her (ex-)girlfriend, while her mother
desperately sets her up with prospective husbands. Against the backdrop
of metropolitan life as well, Cheng Yusu’s Women haipa (Shanghai panic,
2001), in Shanghai Wu dialect and adapted from Mian Mian’s novel of the
same title, exposes the decadence, self-indulgence, violence, and ennui of
the big city’s linglei (alternative) generation.
Although earlier films occasionally made extensive use of local
23
Films such as Zhang Yimou’s Qiuju
da guansi (The Story of Qiuju, 1992),
Zhou Xiaowen’s Ermo (1994), and Li
Shaohong’s Hong fen (Blush, 1996) have
been dealt with in Gunn (2005).
languages, 23 the recent profusion of underground and independent films
deviating from Putonghua Mandarin marks a turning point in film dialogue.
Film scholars Sheldon H. Lu and Emily Yueh-yu Yeh (2005: 7) even propose a
new category of “Chinese-dialect film” as a subgenre of Chinese-language
film. Consistent with Gunn’s findings in films of the 1990s, the rhetorical use
of local languages in recent Chinese underground and independent films is
largely associated with the aesthetic of the marginal and the unassimilated.
The protagonists—laid-off workers, migrant peasants, prostitutes, criminals,
homosexuals, illegal mineworkers, and monks—are marginalized from
mainstream society, where Putonghua Mandarin dominates. To borrow
Wang Xiaobo’s book title Chenmo de daduoshu (The silent majority), these
underprivileged people remain silent most of the time. When they do speak,
the dialogue is usually laconic. An extreme example occurs in Gan Xiao’er’s
second feature film, Ju zi chentu (Raised from dust, 2006), which explores
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Zhong is a Henan Mandarin word
meaning “okay” or “all right.”
Information is based on the film script
provided by the director.
religious beliefs in rural China. The female protagonist, Lin Sao, a stoic and
suffering Henan villager and a Christian, speaks so tersely that her speech
is mostly monosyllabic, one-word sentences such as zhong (okay). 24
190 • The Rhetoric of Local Languages
MCLC 18.2.indd 190
12/20/06 2:01:39 PM