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Here, subaltern theory may be helpful in exploring the common
feature of the silent protagonists and their sparse dialogue in the films
just mentioned. Ranajit Guha (1988: 35) explains that subalterns are
nonelite groups, the people of “inferior rank” in a society, “whether
this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any
other way.” Gayatri Spivak’s seminal article “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
asserts that in the context of (post)colonial production, the subaltern
cannot speak. The subaltern may make an attempt at self-representation
yet fail to achieve the dialogic level of utterance between speaker and
listener. She notes elsewhere that “subaltern consciousness is subject
to the cathexis of the elite, that it is never fully recoverable, that it is
always askew from its received signifiers, indeed that it is effaced even as
it is disclosed, that it is irreducibly discursive” (Spivak 1988a: 11). Taking
the notion of “subaltern” in a more empirical sense, Hershatter (1993)
argues instead that the subaltern can speak: the disenfranchised Chinese
underclass, or more specifically the prostitutes in early twentieth-century
Shanghai whom Hershatter studies, left discursive traces for a historian
to investigate, identify, and analyze. At the same time, Hershatter agrees
that Chinese intellectuals in semicolonial Shanghai employed prostitution
to articulate their own sense of subalternity. Insofar as the present study
is concerned, the otherwise-invisible underclass, in Hershatter’s sense of
“subaltern,” becomes publicly visible and thus seems empowered in these
quasi-documentary independent films. Yet the question posed here is
whether we can trace the intellectuals’ or elites’ voice in their seemingly
objective re-presentation of the subalterns’ lives. 25
To accept Hershatter’s view of the possibility of multiple, relational
degrees of subalternity, the previously mentioned independent filmmakers
could be regarded as “subalterns.” These movies were debut features for
most of their directors, who were amateurs lacking formal training in
directing films. Li Yang had been an actor, 26 Li Yu a TV hostess. Neither Jia
Zhangke, Wang Chao, Gan Xiao’er, nor Ning Hao majored in film directing
25
Spivak (1988b: 275) distinguishes two
“related but irreducibly discontinuous”
senses of representation: “representation
as ‘speaking for,’ as in politics, and
representation as ‘re-presentation,’ as
in art or philosophy.” The independent
filmmakers’ representation of the
subalterns is presumably closer to the
second sense of “re-presentation,” as
staging or signification.
26
Li Yang had been an actor for a long
time before he studied film directing in
Germany.
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 191
MCLC 18.2.indd 191
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