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3
The standard national language
is known as Putonghua Mandarin
(common speech Mandarin) in mainland
China, and regional languages are
often called dialects (fangyan, “regional
speech”). Because the controversy
over the relationship between dialect
and language is a global and often
politicized problem, this study follows
Gunn’s (2005) usage and mainly uses
“local languages” for the Chinese
term fangyan. For a historical study
of standard languages and dialects
in the context of nation building,
see Hobsbawm 1992: 51–63. For the
terminological dilemma faced in the
Chinese linguistic context, see DeFrancis
1984: 55–57.
4
The use of local languages in
mainstream studio films and telenovelas
has been discussed in Gunn 2005: 108–
156, 194–203.
as in the early works by Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, this younger
generation of filmmakers shows a keen concern for marginal figures in
contemporary China. Yet this “underground” cinema is difficult to define,
not only because the filmmakers differ from each other in significant ways,
but also because they change styles with the times.
Tony Rayns (2003) contends that the dominant current in underground
filmmaking arrived with the appearance of Jia Zhangke’s films in the
late 1990s. Although Jia continues to use the underground production
mode and a documentary filmmaking style, interviews with and reports
about him attest to his conscious effort to distinguish his films from those
of his predecessors, both the Fifth Generation filmmakers and earlier
independent filmmakers. As Jia often argues, China has no sustained
documentary tradition apart from state-sponsored propaganda films and
technical or educational films. His contention is that although China is
undergoing tremendous change, contemporary Chinese movies seem to
avoid grappling with “the here and now” (dangxia) (Zhang Y. 2000: 126);
“there is a responsibility to film [the present],” he says, “so that in the
future we will be able to see how it really was” (Barden 1999). Hence, his
Hometown Trilogy—Xiao Wu (Xiao Wu, 1997), Zhantai (Platform, 2000),
and Ren Xiaoyao (Unknown pleasures, 2002)—offered Chinese cinema
a “supplementary history,” a documentary-based representation of a
contemporary Chinese underclass, particularly those people living in small
towns who are marginalized by sweeping societal developments.
One of the distinctive characteristics of Jia’s films is his consistent and
pervasive use of local languages, or fangyan, 3 a striking deviation from the
Putonghua Mandarin-dominant soundtrack in all but a handful of studio
films. 4 This assertive linguistic stance, a stylistic hallmark of Jia’s films, ushered
in a wave of underground and independent films in local languages. In his
book Rendering the Regional: Local Language in Contemporary Chinese
Media, Edward Gunn (2005) finds that local languages play a prominent
role in cultural production in contemporary China. Simply put, local
164 • The Rhetoric of Local Languages
MCLC 18.2.indd 164
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