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that the protagonists’ hybridized and inauthentic dialects in Jia’s films make
the local Fenyang community inauthentic and fictive. Generality can be
achieved only at the cost of erasing a real local community.
In Platform, a nonprofessional actor, who is in real life Jia Zhangke’s
cousin and a contracted coal miner, plays Cui Mingliang’s coal miner
cousin, Sanming. However, the actor’s genuinely miserable story is simply
dramatized and fictionalized, as the character Sanming speaking Shanxi
Fenyang Mandarin has conversations with his cousin, Cui Mingliang, who
speaks Henan Anyang Mandarin (fig. 8). Although Jia likes to call himself
“a director from the lower class” (laizi jiceng de daoyan), his vision as an
intellectual or artist may undermine a total identification with his lowerclass
protagonists. At the end of Xiao Wu, surrounded by a gathering crowd,
the handcuffed Xiao Wu first stands by the utility pole, then hangs his
head, and finally squats, burying his head between his legs. Han Min (2004)
argues that Xiao Wu is brought low by the curious and despised gaze of the
spectators and, more fundamentally, by Jia Zhangke, who, as an intellectual,
presumes a moral superiority over lower-class petty thieves such as Xiao
Wu. Moreover, as my discussion in the final section shows, although Jia’s
films concern the lower class, members of that class are hardly his intended
audience, and it is unlikely that his acclaimed humanistic films will change
their lives in any way. Many Sanmings are not only victims of the privately
owned coal mines where human life has so little value, but also the “victims”
of Jia’s films where their real-life experience is appropriated, fictionalized,
and relativized. 19 Just as the slippery nature of his brand of realism both
deploys and denies the documentary impulse, so the mimetic imperative
within the function of local language is “simultaneously the factor which
both supports and subverts the entire interpretive enterprise.” 20
Gendered Language Use in Unknown Pleasures
The inauthentic use of local language is carried forward in Jia’s third feature
film, Unknown Pleasures, in which the female lead, Zhao Tao, speaks her
19
The term “relativization” is borrowed
from Chion (1994: 178–183). Chion
refers to various techniques, including
“multilingualism and use of a foreign
language,” designed to offset the power
of the intelligible theatrical speech, as
“relativization.” Here, it seems that the
inauthentic language of Cui Mingliang
relativizes and offsets the authenticity of
Sanming and his real-life story.
20
See Grant Stirling 1995: 414. Stirling
elaborates on this point: “The mimetic
imperative supports the function of
language variance by grounding the
language of the literary text in a specific
culture. But the mimetic imperative
subverts that same function because of
the numerous critical problems which
inhabit any attempt to read literary texts
mimetically.”
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 181
MCLC 18.2.indd 181
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