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languages provide unexpected, unpredictable information beyond the
redundancy of formal education in schools, the institutions where standard
Mandarin is generally acquired. 5 No single, national language can capture
the complexity, richness, and liveliness of China’s diverse and distinct local
cultures as embodied in their local languages. Local languages also assert
distinctions among and within the fields of cultural productions. Taking
the audience into consideration, Gunn argues that television aimed at local
audiences promotes the use of local languages to assert local identities and
to imagine local communities. However, in film and fiction in mainland
China, both of which target a national audience, he defines the rhetoric
of local languages as representing “the marginal and the unassimilated,” a
trend “away from depicting characters in nationalistic and socialist themes
as participants in a broad social mainstream” (Gunn 2005: 158).
This essay explores the rhetorical use of local languages to represent
“the marginal and the unassimilated” in the feature films of Jia Zhangke
and others, an approach not taken in previous studies of these films.
Following an overview of Jia’s use of local languages as an integral
part of the director’s documentary filmmaking style and his underlying
realist aesthetic, this study closely examines Jia’s Hometown Trilogy. In
my discussion of Xiao Wu, I explore the interactions between the two
spaces defined by the soundtrack—the relatively quiet, private, intimate
space where the eponymous protagonist dwells and the heteroglossic,
public space characteristic of a media-savvy society. In this framework of
private versus public spaces, the analysis also highlights the role in the film
narrative of nondiegetic popular music and its contrast with the diegetic
silence of the protagonist. In my discussion of Platform, I consider the
inauthenticity of Jia’s use of local languages, because none of the leading
actors and actresses speak Fenyang Mandarin, the local dialect spoken
in the community in which the film is set. The protagonists’ hybridized
and impure dialects indicate Jia’s intention not to assert a local Fenyang
identity. Instead, he may be manipulating a real local community to create
5
For a brief introduction to the model
of information-redundancy-noise in
Information Theory and its possible
application in defining styles in modern
Chinese prose, see Gunn 1991: 14–30.
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 165
MCLC 18.2.indd 165
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