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living in small towns. Integral to this vérité style, long takes are used to
convey an objective and detached perspective. Synchronized recording
without ambient noise filtering is adopted to achieve a naturalistic and
primitive sound effect. Jia uses nonprofessional actors to minimize the
artificiality of dramatic and formalistic acting styles. Improvisation rather
than recitation of lines is encouraged to create a sense of spontaneity and
individuality. In many senses, these film techniques are reminiscent of Italian
neorealism of the 1940s. As Laurie Jane Anderson (1977: 41) argues, the
neorealists’ desire for a faithful reproduction of events led to a wholesale
adoption of everyday language and dialects, such as the Sicilian dialect
spoken by the village fishermen in Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema (Earth
trembles, 1948).
In his 58-minute Xiao Shan Huijia (Xiao Shan going home, 1995), about
a migrant worker in Beijing who plans to return to his rural hometown
in Henan for the Chinese New Year, Jia began consciously to employ
nonprofessional actors who speak Henan Mandarin. By speaking their
local dialect throughout the film, Xiao Shan and his fellow townsmen are
portrayed as closed off from the Beijing Mandarin–dominant community;
their estrangement conveys the sense of alienation experienced by the
hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants who have migrated to the big
cities in search of employment. Jia Zhangke has remarked that Wang
Hongwei, the Anyang (Henan) native who plays Xiao Shan, gives a natural
and spontaneous performance and that his body type and peculiar gait
are rare among professional actors (Wu 2000: 194) (fig. 1). Gu Zheng
(2003: 31), who collaborated with Jia in shooting the film, found that the
actors could not understand each other well because they spoke different
variants of Henan Mandarin; even so, allowing the actors to speak their
own dialects helps them identify with their characters and thus exhibit
personal traits more fully.
Note that the actors are allowed to speak their native dialects, which
are not necessarily the dialects their characters would have spoken. On
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