Read this paper

27
As in the interview with Wu
Wenguang (2000: 187–189), Jia admits
that he chose this major not out of
personal interest but as a strategy,
because it gave him a better chance of
getting enrolled.
at the Beijing Film Academy (BFA), the most orthodox of Chinese film
institutions to produce directors. In the Chinese film world, then, these
newcomers are relegated to the margins, in comparison with the established
Fifth Generation directors and recognized independent filmmakers such
as Zhang Yuan. Having become a German citizen, Li Yang, for example,
faced questions about whether his film should be classified as a German
or a Chinese production. He was aware of being “on the margins as a
Chinese filmmaker working illegally in China and basing himself outside the
country” (Teo 2003). Jia Zhangke had a different experience of marginality.
Having twice failed college entrance exams, Jia was not officially enrolled
by BFA in 1993 and was permitted only to audit paid courses, without
guarantee of a graduate diploma four years later. His major was not film
directing but film theory in the department of literature—a marginalized
field. 27 In many senses, Jia felt himself to be (and was seen to be) profoundly
subaltern with respect to his filmmaker peers. While shooting Xiao Shan
Going Home, he developed an increasingly strong sense of himself as a
“migrant worker type of filmmaker” (dianying mingong) (Hao 2005: 133).
Jia’s representation of the migrant peasants such as Xiao Shan becomes
something of a self-representation, or a re-representation. In the words of
Hershatter (1993: 111–112), “their sense of their own subordination shaped
the rhetorical uses that intellectuals made of subaltern groups,” and they
use an “even more subordinated group as a metaphor through which to
articulate their own subordination.”
In this light, Jia’s passionate advocacy of amateurism can be viewed as
asserting a higher position for directors who lack symbolic capital in the
field. He declares that shooting movies should not be the privilege of those
with BFA degrees, especially those who majored in directing; everyone has
the right to make films. Jia’s influential article “The Age of Amateur Cinema
Will Return” (1998) passionately defends the importance of amateurism at
the dawn of the DV era: it is a call for an individualistic, creative, sincere
filmmaking spirit to stand against the rigid, repetitive, soulless conformity
192 • The Rhetoric of Local Languages
MCLC 18.2.indd 192
12/20/06 2:01:39 PM